The Southern Tour Podcast

In this final episode of the Southern Tour podcast, I discuss the reform of the 1980s and early 1990s with Lawrence C. Reardon, author of a new book titled 'A Third Way: The Origins of China’s Current Economic Development Strategy'. Having travelled around the stops of Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour of 1992, this last episode bookends the series with an overview of the era, with some fascinating personal anecdotes from Professor Reardon, who was on the ground in China for much of the 1980s. 

From the blurb: 

From 1949 to 1978, communist elites held clashing visions of China’s economic development. Mao Zedong advocated the “first way” of semi-autarchy characteristic of revolutionary Stalinism (1929–34), while Zhou Enlai adapted bureaucratic Stalinism (1934–53) to promote the “second way” of import substitution industrialization. A Third Way tells the story of Deng Xiaoping’s experimentation with export-led development inspired by Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the economic reforms of Eastern Europe and Asia.

About the author:

Professor Reardon was a Committee for Scholarly Communications with the People’s Republic of China fellow at Peking University from 1984-88, a special researcher at Jinan University (Guangzhou, China) and a foreign expert teaching economics at Shenzhen University (Shenzhen SEZ, China) from 1986-88.  Currently he is an associate professor of political science, coordinator of Asian studies at the University of New Hampshire, as well as an associate in research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

He has published several monographs on Chinese foreign economic policy, including A Third Way and The Reluctant Dragon: The impact of crisis cycles on Chinese foreign economic policy (University of Washington, 2002).  He also writes on religion and China, and co-edited The Vatican and the Nation-State in Comparative Perspective (Georgetown, 2006).

For episode seven, I'm joined from Shanghai by Patrick Cranley to dig a little deeper into Shanghai’s past. Patrick is managing director of China-based public relations company AsiaMedia and is president of Historic Shanghai, a group of city residents dedicated to the study of the city’s social, economic and architectural history.  A frequent speaker on China business and historical topics, Patrick has written for dozens of publications worldwide. Patrick is also a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and served for many years on the board of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.

https://www.historic-shanghai.com/

Having spent four days in Shenzhen, Deng took a boat across the flat grey waters of the Pearl River. The hydrofoil he travelled by – a remarkably futuristic looking craft in 1990s China – passed a Qing dynasty custom house as it crossed the broad mouth of the river. Here, in the days before the end of the empire in 1912, passing ships were required to stop to pay taxes due on the goods they carried. Upon seeing it, Deng commented that the era when China could be humiliated by foreign powers was now over.

Stretching along the southern coast, Zhuhai is Shenzhen’s smaller sibling, and another of the Special Economic Zones established in 1980. As Shenzhen borders Hong Kong, so Zhuhai borders the old Portuguese port of Macau, which returned to Chinese control in 1999. It is today connected to Hong Kong and Macau via a bridge and tunnel which cost nearly twenty billion dollars to build, and is the longest sea crossing on earth.

Just outside Zhuhai is Luo Sanmei mountain: a verdant, low-rising eminence, zig-zagged with concrete steps. In 1984, on an earlier visit to the south, Deng had climbed Luo Sanmei. Halfway up the climb, he turned around and declared to those accompanying him: ‘We will not turn back’. The phrase was both a commentary on the journey, and on reform and opening.

Deng arrived in Zhuhai on January 23rd. He spent almost a week inspecting progress there, and visiting factories and meeting workers, shaking hundreds of hands in the process. As in Shenzhen, Deng visited a revolving restaurant atop its trade center, 29 stories up, and watched the construction of the city. After his stay in Zhuhai, he travelled by car around the western edge of the Pearl River Delta to Guangzhou, where, after an hour-long meeting with local officials, he was reunited once more with his private train. On his journey north to Shanghai, the train stopped briefly at the small city of Yingtan. It was from this town, Deng’s daughter reminded him, that nineteen years previously he and his family had boarded a train to take them back to Beijing, after the long, painful years of exile during the Cultural Revolution.

Shanghai was the final stop on Deng's journey, and he passed Chinese New Year here, visiting new development zones and construction sites. On February 18th, the day of China’s Lantern Festival, Deng arrived at Shanghai’s famous shopping street, Nanjing Road, and visited Shanghai’s ‘No. 1 Department Store’ to buy pencils and erasers for his grandson. As his daughter remembers, ‘One time he tried to go shopping in Shanghai, but when he got to the store he was surrounded by people applauding him and taking pictures. Later we asked him, "What did you see on your shopping trip?" He replied, “Nothing, just the people.”’ On the top floor of the department store today, a permanent exhibition tells the story of Deng’s legendary trip to buy stationery.

During a visit earlier in the 1990s, Deng had acknowledged that Shanghai had been held back in its development, for fear of it once again becoming a foreign trading enclave, whilst the establishment of Special Economic Zones in the south had driven remarkable urban transformation in places such as Shenzhen. His declaration in 1990 that ‘Shanghai is China’s trump card’ accelerated the economic revitalisation of the city and, in particular, the development of the area across the river from Shanghai's famous art-deco Bund: Pudong, now home to China's most iconic skyline. In 1992, Deng would witness first-hand the beginnings of this transformation.

To talk about Shanghai’s transformation, I’m joined today by Dr Jenny Lin. Jenny Lin is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design. She is author of Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture and the fashioning of global Shanghai published by Manchester University Press in 2019. 

In this episode, Jonathan talks to Adrien Gombeaud about his book Dans les pas du Petit Timonier (In the Footsteps of the Little Helmsman).

Adrien Gombeaud is a journalist and film critic. He holds degrees in Chinese and Korean language and civilization and has written for Les Échos, Le Figaro Magazine, and Vanity Fair.  He is the author of a number of books, including The Man from Tiananmen Square, A Blonde in Manhattan and 30 Seconds in Arizona. His book, Dans les pas du Petit Timonier (In the Footsteps of the Little Helmsman) recounts a journey following the route of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 2012.

Where the Pearl River Estuary narrows, a series of towns, now merged into one indistinguishable city, spread themselves from the edge of the eastern bank. This is Dongguan, sitting between the cities of Shenzhen to the south, and the provincial capital of Guangdong, Guangzhou, to the north. Deng did not visit Dongguan on his southern tour of 1992, but the city was a key part of Guangdong’s remarkable economic success in the reform and opening period. It became known as the factory of the world, making cheap clothes, shoes and toys, its white-tiled factories staffed by migrant workers who made up as much as two-thirds of the city’s population.

Today, we take a trip there with Dexter Roberts (@dtiffroberts), author of recent book The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World. Dexter was China bureau chief and Asia News Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, based in Beijing for more than two decades. He is currently nonresident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council's Asia Security Initiative, a Fellow at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, and an adjunct instructor in political science at the University of Montana. 

It took another night rumbling through the countryside for Deng Xiaoping to arrive at the first proper destination on his Southern Tour of winter 1992. Wuhan – the ‘thoroughfare of nine provinces’, as it is known in China, and where Deng had stopped briefly the day before – is deep in the country’s centre. Between Wuhan and Deng’s next destination, Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, the flat flood plain gives way to wave after wave of mountains, before the land eases once more into the gentler topography of the Pearl River Delta, around which were arrayed the main stops of Deng’s tour.

Deng’s train arrived at Shenzhen at 9am on January 19th. Waiting at the station were, once more, an array of party officials. As he stepped to the platform, one stepped forward. ‘We have missed you!’ he told Deng. Another added, "The people of Shenzhen look forward to seeing you, and have been looking forward to it for eight years!".

Eight years previously, on January 24, 1984, during his winter “vacation,” Deng had arrived in Guangdong on his special train. He spent more than two weeks visiting the province and next-door Fujian, including stops at three of the four SEZs—Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Xiamen. That was the first time Deng had visited Shenzhen; 1992 marked the second. He would spend six days in the city before departing for Zhuhai, across the Pearl River.

The myth of Shenzhen is that it transformed from ‘fishing village to megacity’, but the reality is more complex. The area that became Shenzhen was not the sparsely populated countryside that the Chinese Communist Party like to claim, but a vibrant border region with a number of thriving market towns with a population of three hundred thousand.

The city’s progress was marked by landmark building projects: in the 1980s, the International Trade Centre, thrown up at a rate of one floor every three days, become China’s tallest building, and an emblem of Shenzhen’s status as the country’s new model city. On his tour in 1992, Deng ate at the revolving restaurant at the top of the sixty-three storey tower and endorsed the rate of progress he saw stretching to the horizon around him. He visited a factory making laser discs, and China’s first theme park: ‘Splendid China’, a park housing miniature versions of all China’s great sights: the Great Wall; the sacred mountain of Tai Shan; the Forbidden City; the Potala Palace in Lhasa. A photograph shows Deng, in a sober overcoat, surrounded by his smiling, colourfully attired, children and grandchildren, with the vertiginous stairways and white walls of the Tibetan landmark rising behind them.

His visit would be celebrated in the famous song ‘The Story of Spring’:

The Year of 1992

That was yet another spring

There was a great man

Writing a magnificent poem in Shenzhen

Spreading splendor all over China like a spring breeze Moistening beautiful flowers like springtime rain Shenzhen! Shenzhen!

China’s pioneer ship sailing across the sea

This is the third episode of a series exploring the legacy of Deng Xiaoping’s journey in 1992, following his route stop by stop, and interviewing those with insight into the history of this period and the places Deng visited. In this episode, I'm joined by Juan Du (Twitter: @JuanDu_DuJuan). Juan Du is an award-winning architect and urban planner. She is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong and was formerly on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She leads IDU_Architecture, a research and design office based in Hong Kong. Du is also the founding academic director of the Shenzhen Center for Design and is actively involved in the ongoing development and planning of the city. She is also the author of ‘The Shenzhen Experiment’, which was published this year by Harvard University Press.

On the 17th January 1992, a typically cold Beijing morning, Deng Xiaoping’s private train sets off southward from Platform Number One of the capital’s main Railway Station. Over the course of an overnight, one-thousand two hundred kilometre journey, the diesel train rumbles across the North China Plain and the provinces of Hebei and Henan. It crosses the Yellow River on a line originally built in the very early twentieth century by foreign investors, the ruling Qing dynasty then being too short on money to pay for it themselves. It does not stop on its way.

Finally, at 10.31am on the 18th January 1992, Deng’s train crosses the broad Yangtze River and pulls into Platform Number One of Wuchang train station in the city of Wuhan.

For today’s episode we welcome Chris Courtney to talk about the city of Wuhan and its role in China’s modern history. Chris is a social and environmental historian of modern China. His research focusses upon the city of Wuhan and its rural hinterland, a region where he lived and conducted research for over five years. His monograph, entitled The Nature of Disaster in China, was the first major study of the 1931 Central China Flood, a largely forgotten catastrophe that killed in excess of two million people. His current research focusses on the problem of heat in modern Chinese cities, exploring how emergent technologies such as ice factories, electric fans, and air conditioning transformed the cultural and social landscape of Wuhan. 

@CJCourtneyWuhan

In January 1992, Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who had overseen a decade of remarkable economic growth and social change during the 1980s, set off on a tour of China’s south. Having retired in 1989, and worried that his successors were failing to continue his project of encouraging ever-faster economic growth, he spent a month travelling from city to city on board his private train, telling the officials that he met - telling everyone he met – that China must not turn back on expanding and reforming its economy. He characterised any ambitions that failed to develop the country and improve people’s lives as the ‘road to ruin’. The leadership in Beijing, given little choice by this act of political theatre, were forced to change course and began once more to encourage economic ambition: the Southern Tour would mark the beginning of the so-called ‘Roaring Nineties’. Deng’s journey was a seminal moment in China’s modern history, and has become part of the complex mythology of the 1980s. This podcast will follow the stops of Deng’s 3000 mile journey, exploring its history and legacy, and interviewing writers and scholars with insight into the story of this remarkable journey.

For this first episode, we’re joined by Julian Gewirtz (@JulianGewirtz) to discuss the decade leading up to the Southern Tour of 1992, and some of the myths that swirl around the period known as Reform and Opening.

Julian is Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a research scholar at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program and a lecturer in history at Columbia University. Dr. Gewirtz is the author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Harvard University Press, 2017), and a new book on the tumult, legacies, and historical manipulation of the 1980s in China (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2021).

The Southern Tour Podcast is hosted by Dr Jonathan Chatwin, author of 'Long Peace Street: A walk in modern China'. 

Twitter: @jmchatwin