Conversing with China

The People’s Republic of China announced its first Five-Year Plan in 1953 as a central tool to plan and coordinate the county’s economic and social development. Since the reform and opening-up process began in the late 1970s, China has moved away from a Soviet-style command economy and towards a hybrid system of market competition in which the public sector nevertheless continues to play a crucial role. During this time, Five-Year Plans have remained a key benchmark for the Communist Party and the government to measure and coordinate development. In this interview, Yan Yilong of the Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management discusses the history of economic planning in China and how the Five-Year Plan continues to play a pivotal role in China’s path to becoming a modern socialist country.

Opinions on the nature of China’s state and economy vary widely, with debates in the West particularly prone to negative, one-sided ascriptions. Especially in the years following the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, many commentators began to regard China as a capitalist country, or at least on the road to it. Yet in reality, the Communist Party remained in charge, and in recent years has begun to reassert its authority over the private sector, guiding development and ensuring that capital does not gain the upper hand. In this interview, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation sat down with Meng Jie, a professor of economics at Fudan University in Shanghai, to learn more about the relationship between state, party, and economy in the People’s Republic of China.

During the last four decades of unprecedented economic growth, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have been taken out of poverty and achieved a middle-class standard of living. Yet the toll on the environment has been immense, as it was in Western countries during their industrialization. China is now pioneering a number of pilot projects on the local and regional levels in an attempt to harmonize social, economic, and ecological development, one of which is the concept of the “ecological bank”. In this interview, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Sun Wei speaks with Cui Li, a professor at the School of Tourism Science at the Beijing International Studies University, about the concept and China’s broader attempt to reconcile economic growth with the preservation and even enhancement of the ecosystem as a whole.

In recent years, China has seen the rise of “socialist ecological civilization” as a guiding concept of state policy. Emerging from academic debates partially inspired by concepts imported from Western Marxism, Chinese intellectuals and officials have sought to synthesize the concepts of socialist ecology with Chinese thinking and work towards a better integration of economic development, social prosperity, and ecological sustainability. In this interview, we speak with Haun Qingzhi, a professor at Peking University’s School of Marxism, to gain a better understanding of the role of ecological planning in China’s socialist construction.

Founded in 2008, the Beijing Cultural Review is one of China’s leading journals of politics, economics, and social theory. In this interview, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation sits down with founder and editor-in-chief Yang Ping to learn more about the journal’s history, its place in China’s intellectual landscape, and what the journal’s mission of “cultural reconstruction” means in the context of modern China.

Since the war in Gaza broke out, the People’s Republic of China has exerted a moderating influence, brokering a unity statement between 14 Palestinian factions and consistently pushing for a ceasefire. In this interview, Beijing Cultural Review editor Yang Ping breaks down how China’s stance on Israel–Palestine has evolved over the decades and draws links between China’s revolutionary heritage and the current government’s foreign policy approach.