The Age of Plunder

By Ping Chen

The book is about the 2008 Economics Crisis, its pathogeny, its long-term reverberations and its implications for China’s future. The author indicates this great crisis hasn’t fully subsided and it’s an irredeemable crisis of the “one-legged capitalist” social apparatus.

The author predicted and called for a new civilization (following the industrialized civilization) to overcome the prolonged, painful era of decline. A new emancipation movement is needed to break through the vested interests and mainstream values, to foster new cultures, new ways of living and to build a more fair and equitable democratic society with sustainable economic growth.

In China’s perspective, the author proposed that China’s party-controlled development model in the past 20 years is in a historical turning point. China has to rebuild a new republic and democratic state with new system, culture and value to achieve sustainable development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iSunAffairs Limited
• Release date: Sep 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9789881656353

Book preview

The Age of Plunder

The Age of Plunder: The 2008 Economic Crisis as a Turning Point in Chinese History and World Civilization

By Chen Ping

Translated by Stacy Mosher

Edited by Ming Xia

Editor’s Introduction

Ming Xia

Why should you read The Age of Plunder? As the editor, it is my duty to answer this question.

First of all, who is Chen Ping? In Chen Ping’s own words: Chen Ping is one of many individuals with the same name. This Chen Ping is a Han Chinese, a Hong Kong resident, entrepreneur, scholar, and CEO of Sun TV. He is also a gravelly-voiced and tone-deaf talk-show host and commentator. Born in Shanghai to a prominent military family, he was sent as an infant to Wuhu, a small town on the banks of the Yangtze River in Anhui Province, where he was raised by his grandparents.

Now, with the non-stop growth of his business, Chen Ping’s list of titles has grown longer, but not his hair, which now shows signs of balding as well. But his passion for books, freedom, human rights, democracy, culinary delights, thinking, talking, and bearing justice and responsibility on his shoulder remains unchanged, as does his devotion to truth.

His good friend, the well-known economist Luo Xiaopeng,[1] describes him this way: He is broad-minded and magnanimous. Having forthright temperament, he is indeed a dependable friend and a shrewd businessman. He has an in-depth and insider’s understanding of China’s political power games, but has never had any desire to become an official or seek personal gain in that area. Although he has sharp observation and deep understanding of human greed and the fickleness of human relations, he retains an intense hope for political and social progress, and is confident that he can contribute something to this end. Another of his good friends, the prominent journalist Lu Yuegang,[2] sees him as a contradictory combination of pessimist and genuine revolutionary. In trying to define Chen Ping as a Liang Qichao[3] or a Chinese Rupert Murdoch, Lu Yuegang points out that the Liang Qichao had only one mouth, while Murdoch has under his banner countless Liang Qichaos and countless mouths. The disparate observations and comments of these two friends give a general idea of Chen Ping’s character and the social role he attempts to play. My own view is that Chen Ping aspires to be a synthesis of Liang Qichao and Murdoch.

Chen Ping has a natural talent for speaking like a master essayist. This book is compiled from some 70 commentaries and interviews he published from 2008 to 2011 following the 2008 financial crisis. As an independent entrepreneur and investor, Chen was positioned in the eye of the hurricane. While heading the Sun TV media group. He also put him at the crest of the tidal wave. As a former member of a government think-tank, he has many close personal connections in Beijing who keep him in touch with what is going on within Zhongnanhai. Meanwhile, he reads countless books, travels far and wide, has been involved in many activities to make friends. The experience has given him many unique perspectives, creative thoughts, and novel viewpoints and opinions. More important, he puts his money where his mouth is by investing his vast financial resources to endorse his social, political, cultural, and economic advocacy.

The shamelessness and hypocrisy of many politicians and writers are displayed in the discrepancy between what they feel and what they say, and between what they say and what they do.  Chen Ping observes: The flaw in Chinese culture is that people do not cry until they see the coffin. If it hadn’t experienced all kinds of evil before and after the Great Cultural Revolution committed by Mao Zedong Reform and Opening up would never have happened. Now it is clear that ecological, economic, and social disasters will proliferate in the future. But I do not think anything will change – the officials’ mentality of both being slaves and masters of the CCP’s system tend to see human lives as playthings.  But where do those officials and ruling Party members come from? They are bred in the soil of our people, and the soil of our people is nurtured by our culture. It is the fault of everyone, and of no one. Of course, this ugliness is probably not unique to the Chinese.

Even the best Gospel can only be shared with those who seek it, and unfortunately, those seekers are few. But if you are one of those who have become suspicious of all kinds of authorities, I urge you to turn to Chen Ping. Neither a nihilist nor a relativist, he espouses a pessimism and skepticism that can serve as the starting point for seeking truth passionately, arguing fearlessly, and constructing a democratic system courageously. His independent thinking and critical skepticism when evaluating the Chinese society and the world have proved prescient. As issues develop and erupt, we will have further opportunity to verify his theoretical and observational powers. If he is wrong, his own investments will suffer, not to mention his reputation, which is a high price to pay for a billionaire entrepreneur. The fact that he so boldly faces these risks is good reason for us to give serious consideration to Chen Ping’s diagnoses and predictions.

As China’s economy has taken off amidst endless proclamations of China’s rise and the China Dream, research into China’s politics and economy has become a growth industry in global academic circles. An immense number of books have been published on this topic in Chinese and in foreign languages.  While they include many inferior works, Chen Ping’s thinking shines out even though he has been shut out and cold-shouldered by the Beijing regime. In explaining why, I need to evaluate Chen Ping in a comparative framework.

American scholars such as Barry Naughton, Nicolas Lardy and Eswar Prasad have carried out a similar in-depth analysis of China’s politics and economy. In terms of style and arguments, the closest to Chen Ping is the independent writer James Gorrie in his book The China Crisis: How China’s Economic Collapse Will Lead to a Global Depression, published in 2013. The problem is that Western scholars are excessively objective in their study of China’s various crises, while only a tiny minority of Chinese writers can directly access the English-speaking world. Consequently, these works seldom step outside of the academic ivory tower or intellectual elite circles, and their influence on the broader reading public is limited.

Worst of all is the emergence in the Western world of a group of friends of the Chinese people. They carry out pilgrimages to the Celestial Empire and return with vessel full of loot, paving their road to success by their lavish praise of the China Model and China’s rise to great nation status. The international banks and financial groups, in particular Goldman Sachs, were early cheerleaders for China’s rise. By the time that Chinese people discover the transience of their China Dream, these old friends of China would have moved on to a greater country of better future. The Wall Street businessman Robert Lawrence Kuhn wrote a book called The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin, while Henry Kissinger’s book On China suggests that Chinese are only suited to living in the present. Former US Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, who has visited China at least 100 times, energetically endorses China’s past 20 years in his book Dealing with China. The famous futurologist John Naisbitt was even quicker to the mark, taking his wife Doris to China to pitch his tent and offer up their book China Megatrends, which declares Chinese democracy superior to American democracy. Under the progressive slogan of respecting diversity, Westerners often regard CCP leaders as the true representatives of the Chinese people or even as stand-ins for the Chinese people as a totality, and forego any criticism of China’s system and government policies.

Fortunately, many overseas Chinese scholars continue to focus on China, and have conscientiously offered their wisdom for the benefit of the people of China and the world. Chen Zhiwu’s The Logic of Finance (in Chinese), Yasheng Huang’s Selling China and other works, Minxin Pei’s China’s Trapped Transition, Frank Tian Xie’s The Dragon’s Vault: Chinese Economy Behind the Curtain (in Chinese), Victor Shih’s Factions and Finance in China and He Qinglian’s writings are representative of this group. Compared with the afore-mentioned Western authors, these writers and Chen Ping have an obvious native Chineseness and global vision grounded on China’s future, but what distinguishes Chen Ping from these others is that Chen Ping is an entrepreneur, businessman, and investor. He has personal experience with the ruthless competition of the globalized economy and China’s economic marketplace, which gives his analysis and suggestions a technical, operative, and down-to-earth quality.

Chen Ping’s unique thinking and profound views also have an intense focus. Frank and outspoken, Chen does not play games or gloss things over, and his focus and critical thinking are clearly displayed in his debates with Party hacks and critically-minded New Leftists. Chen has been unambiguous in his criticism of fawning shills such as Zhang Weiwei[4] and the sentimental nativist thinking of China’s angry youth. On the other hand, he has much in common with the New Left, particularly regarding social justice, environmental protection, and economic democracy, so their debate is carried out in an atmosphere of mutual respect and an intense humanitarian concern for ordinary Chinese people.

It is this focused, critical, pragmatic, technical, thoughtful, down-to-earth, skeptical and global perspective and humanitarian concern that gives Chen Ping’s thinking such value; it is a practical wisdom that combines knowledge with practice. Because many of his observations are policy-related and predictive, we can easily test them with fact after six or seven years. For example, when Chen Ping debated with a government expert on the subjects such as bubbles of the real property industry, the state’s advance and private sector’s retreat in China’s economy, and the excessive issuing of currency, those official panelists believed that all of the problems were being dealt with great confidence by the government that in five years, the situation will definitely be much better than now. Another official panelist disputed Chen Ping’s unconstructive criticism of current problems and policies as indicative of problems that have emerged in the entire system. Five years later, it has become abundantly clear whether the Chinese situation has become better or worse, and whether the systematic problems has emerged.

I write these words shortly after July 1, 2015, the 94th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, which also approached to the 239th anniversary of the founding of the United States. With the Chinese stock index dropping nearly 30% from 5174.2 to 3696.91 in the two weeks from June 15 to July 3, 2015. After that, the official media and monitoring organs still predicted a bull market that would raise the index to 6000. Meanwhile, some famous professors came out with a proposal to save the stock market with an equalization fund, while the propaganda apparatus and angry youth netizens were howling against an international conspiracy to bad-mouth the Chinese economy into failing, and were calling for a defense of the 4000 mark, which they believe would determine the success or failure of the China Dream and the rise or fall of the China Century.

Reading against this background, Chen Ping’s book shows its timeliness and freshness. The experience of reading Chen Ping’s book while observing what is going on in China is like taking a sightseeing tour on a luxury roller-coaster with on-site commentary. If you have fastened your safety belt, this experience will bring you unforgettable enjoyment and endless excitement.

Spanning a time period from 2008 to 2013, the book’s dynamic timeframe gives it a playing it by ear quality. Added to that, the content was originally spoken, resulting in a degree of repetition and occasional conflicting details. Rather than patch over these flaws, I have combined Chen Ping’s viewpoints into logical arguments, and have allowed him to make the same point more than once in different contexts. I was also careful not to insert my viewpoints into Chen Ping’s narrative and thinking, while also doing my best not to omit any of his ideas or viewpoints.

At last, my knowledge structure resulting from decades of researches and studies on history, humanity, international politics, economics, and my special interest in China affairs, draws me into Chen Ping’s discussion. As someone who began his college education in 1981, I had the good fortune to experience ideological liberation, Reform and Opening up, and political reform. Therefore, my mindset and theoretical background match Chen Ping’s. My ten years of studying, teaching, and establishing myself as a scholar at Shanghai’s Fudan University gave me the ability to understand Chen Ping’s Wu dialect, and this allowed me to eliminate many errors in the original transcript. Having just passed my 50th birthday and having spent half of my life in China and half in the US, I understand a great deal about the collision, exchange, and fusion of Chinese or Eastern and Western cultures.

In short, Chen Ping’s profound thinking, penetrating viewpoints, and sagely advice have long reverberated in my brain. I believe that readers who embark on this literary journey will not return disappointedly, and will be glad for the invitation that Chen Ping and I have extended to them. Chen Ping’s words below express the shared expectation of both author and editor:

Many people, including many well-meaning friends, have advised me not to talk about these issues. But I feel society needs to wake up and people need to wake up! I do not have the answers to the problems. Yet, I hope that everyone will join in the efforts to try to find a solution, and will act with a sense of conscience and urgency to rescue our future.

Author’s bio:

Ming Xia is a Professor of Political Science at the College of Staten Island and a doctoral faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center. He previously taught at Fudan University (1988-1991) and served as a residential research fellow at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University (2003) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2004).  He has also worked as research fellow at the East Asian Institute and Asian Research Institute under the National University of Singapore. Professor Xia’s research interest includes political governance and transition in China, organized crime, international political economy, globalization, Asian women in politics, and a comparison of China and India.

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[1] Translator’s Note (TN): Luo Xiaopeng was a founding member of China’s first autonomous reform think tank which contributed to major policies reform in the 1980s. Luo holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota. He was recipient of a Luce Scholarship at Harvard University and was a visiting scholar at Oxford University. After working for an international NGO involved in poverty reduction in South Asia, as guest professor at Zhejiang University and as consultant to international organizations such as the World Bank, Luo joined Chen Ping’s Hong Kong-based electronic magazine, iSunAffairs, as contributing editor.

[2] TN: Lu was senior editor of China Youth Daily‘s weekly supplement Freezing Point until January 2006, when he was fired along with chief editor Li Datong, for publishing an essay by historian Yuan Weishi that took issue with nationalism in Chinese school textbooks. Lu is also author of several influential works of literary journalism documenting the struggles of China’s working class and highlighting the immense social challenges accompanying China’s emergence as a global economic powerhouse.

[3] TN: Liang Qichao (1873-1929) was a Chinese scholar, journalist, philosopher and reformist who lived during the late Qing dynasty and early Republic.

[4] TN: Zhang Weiwei is a professor of international relations at Fudan University, and a senior research fellow at the Chunqiu Institute. He has written extensively in English and Chinese on China's economic and political reform and China's development model.

Foreword

David J. Firestein

Chen Ping’s The Age of Plunder is an original and provocative analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and its long-term implications for China and the world – a valuable contribution to the literature on this important topic and a timely reminder that the impact of the Great Recession has not yet fully subsided.

Chen Ping’s treatment of the Marxist critique of capitalism has renewed, even surprising, relevance today and will no doubt resonate not only in the land of socialism with Chinese characteristics, but also in the United States, where, in 2016, a strong major-party candidate for president is arguing, with some early electoral success, that the U.S. economy and political system are rigged and run by millionaires and billionaires for their own benefit; and it will resonate in many other countries that, like both China and the United States, continue to grapple, often unsuccessfully, with the phenomenon of sharp and often growing income and wealth inequality.

Chen’s argument about the crucial importance of pervasive, equal access to information in the 21st century economy is profound and compelling – an important contribution to the discourse on Google capitalism(or perhaps Facebook capitalism), in which information has effectively become the new means of production.

Chen’s extensive and thoughtful discussion of China’s choice and the future of Chinese economic development – and governance – will certainly get attention, and generate some heated debate, in China and within the China studies community worldwide. Though, of course, there will be some disagreement with a number of his premises, conclusions and recommendations, The Age of Plunder puts Chen Ping right in the thick of public discourse on an enormously consequential topic for China and the world: what actions will Chinese leaders need to take in order to sustain China as a viable economy and polity in the coming years and decades?

For those interested in the 2008 financial crisis, its long-term reverberations and its implications for China’s future, and for those interested in the trajectory of China’s economic and political development, I highly recommend this significant, rich and engrossing work.

Author’s bio:

David J. Firestein is vice president and Perot Fellow at the EastWest Institute, a U.S.-based foreign policy think tank. In this capacity, Firestein oversees the Institute’s work on U.S.-China relations, East Asian security, and U.S.-Russia relations, as well as its emerging work in the area of U.S.-Iran trust-building. A career U.S. diplomat from 1992 to 2010, Firestein is a published expert on China, Russia, public diplomacy, U.S. politics and American country music. In his Foreign Service career, Firestein served at the U.S. embassies in Beijing and Moscow for a total of nine years; domestically, he worked in the State Department’s China affairs and East Asia economic policy offices, as well as in a senior capacity at the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. He speaks near-native Chinese and fluent Russian. Firestein is the author or co-author of three books on China, including two China-published best-sellers, a number of influential policy reports, and about 150 articles published mostly in China, Russia and the United States. Among his professional honors and distinctions are the 2006 Secretary of State’s Award for Public Outreach, selection in 1997 as one of Peking University’s 50 Most Distinguished Alumni, and numerous keynote invitations; he was also the first foreign citizen to have a column in a P.R.C. newspaper and the first sitting U.S. diplomat to have a teaching position at Russia’s top international affairs university, MGIMO. Firestein has degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Texas.

Foreword

Jay Ogilvy

This is an important book. Its value lies as much in what it does not say as in what it does say. Its author speaks with the authority of success. He has accomplished much in several different industries. So you might expect the authoritarian voice of the know-it-all who will tell the rest of us how we must live. But this is not Mr. Chen’s style. Instead, he is a visionary who leads us right up to the brink of a better future . . . but he does not claim to have all of the answers. He does not paint some utopia in precise and alluring detail. Instead, he shows us where we’ve come from, how we got here, and some of the problems we must solve if we are ever going to achieve a sustainable future.

As the book’s subtitle declares, Mr. Chen sees, The 2008 Economic Crisis as a Turning Point in Chinese History and World Civilization, not as one more recession or one more turn in the economic cycle. Instead, 2008 put a full stop at the end of 500 years of industrial civilization. After centuries of exploiting nature in a way we are now coming to see as unsustainable, the 2008 crisis creates an opportunity for enacting a fundamental paradigm shift to be facilitated by new technologies that change the structure of demand and consumption from a greedy acquisitiveness for material things to a savoring appreciation for the immaterial.

Precisely how this paradigm shift will take place, and exactly what life will look like on the other side . . . it’s just as well that Mr. Chen does not claim to have a crystal ball that would allow him to predict the future. But he calls upon each of us to address the current crisis with new eyes and new ideas, not old ideologies. Maoism had its day. In a manner that harks back to Hegel’s sense of the reality of the rational and the rationality of the real, Mr. Chen sees how the imposition of centralized authoritarianism was necessary in order for China to grab a large slice of the globalization pie. But he believes that what was rational then is no longer rational now. Political freedom and democracy are rational now, and need to be made more real.

As a result of China’s economic miracle following Deng’s famous declaration that, To get rich is glorious, hundreds of millions climbed out of poverty, and a few got very rich indeed. Statistics show that 0.4% of China’s households possess 70% of its wealth. The concentration of wealth in China is increasing at double the worldwide average. Such a high degree of economic inequality is offensive to Mr. Chen, who sees in today’s China, an unprecedented defeat of morality and ethics.

So what is to be done? Mr. Chen calls for political reform: the only way to survive the economic crisis and to prevent China’s decline is through political reform and returning power and wealth to the people. But as a man of the world, Mr. Chen is a pragmatist. Many suggest that China’s political reform should begin with democratic elections. I feel this will be difficult because it involves some officials and perhaps even the entire party losing power. So I feel the first breakthrough point is freedom of the press. Step by step toward a better future, not some politically perilous giant leap.

In the course of his argument, Mr. Chen makes an intriguing comparison: If Russia has fallen captive to its natural resources, China has fallen captive to real estate. China has turned the real estate chain into nearly half of the national economy. Reform of the economy, according to Mr. Chen, will require less dependence on real estate as the principal repository of value, and more emphasis on reducing unemployment in order to stimulate what he prefers to call civilian demand rather than consumer demand. The latter phrase connotes consumerist materialism while the former calls forth the virtues of a maturing civil society.

On the subject of demand, one of the more intriguing strains running throughout the book is Mr. Chen’s pivot from the usual preoccupation with productivity on the supply side of the economy to a concern with the values that drive consumption on the demand side. Demand is the core of this crisis, but the conclusion we reach from careful and detailed analysis is that revitalizing old demand will not get us anywhere; we must create new demand, and it must be sustainable. Again, not a lot of details about just how this demand will look or how it will be satisfied, but in a way that is both humble and tantalizing, he writes, we haven’t yet found demand that is genuinely specific to Asian culture. He then adds a passage that captures the depth and breadth of his vision: Now history has entered a new era, and economic crisis was a sign of this new era. We can’t hope to surmount the crisis by stimulating domestic demand without cultural revival; even if we reform the political system and stimulate civilian demand, we still don’t know what civilian demand is, because from a wider perspective, even Europe and America don’t know what they need, so we can’t use them as prototypes. While considering this revival, my first question was under what conditions it could occur, and then what kind of human culture would result from it. My conclusion was that China’s tradition of man as an integral part of nature will serve as an important cultural resource in the birth of a future new civilization, just as the polis of Ancient Greece and the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato did for the European Renaissance. Chinese civilization can serve as a gene of rejuvenation.

While Mr. Chen sees value in Chinese culture and civilization, his gaze is trained mainly on the future, not the past. Toward the very end of this text, we read, The next necessary breakthrough is to discard the values of the 2,000-year-old Confucian status system and to establish the concept of all people being created equal. And earlier: The intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement were right: The West’s defeat of China was in fact the victory of democracy and science over Confucian autocracy and ignorance.

Here as elsewhere we find a willingness to embrace what is best and abandon what is worst in both Chinese and Western traditions in order to create something genuinely new. If the outlines of that new civilization shimmer somewhat indistinctly from the distant future, this much we do know: the transition from the present to that future has to be truly systemic, affecting every part of humanity’s civilization, culture, politics, economics and everyday life.

In a popular hymn from the Christian tradition, there is a stanza:

"Earth might be fair, and all men glad and wise.

Age after age their tragic empires rise,

Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep:

Would man but wake from out his haunted sleep,

Earth might be fair, and all men glad and wise."

Mr. Chen cares about what is fair, both in the sense of what is equitable, and in the sense also suggested in this verse, what is beautiful. Reading his book will wake us from our haunted sleep and send us on our way toward that fairer future.

Author’s bio:

Jay Ogilvy is the cofounder of the Global Business Network, a research and consulting company serving over 100 of the Fortune 500 with strategic planning based on alternative scenarios and intelligence. Trained in philosophy (Yale PhD in 1968), Ogilvy began his career as a professor at Yale University, Williams College, and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Then he transitioned into contract research and consulting at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) from 1979 to 1986. He was the former Dean and Chief Academic Officer at Presidio School of Management. Ogilvy is the author of Many Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self, Society and the Sacred (Oxford, 1977; Harper& Row, 1980); Creating Better Futures (Oxford, 2000); China’s Futures with Peter Schwartz (Jossey- Bass, 2001); Living Without a Goal (Doubleday, 1996). He is also the editor of Re-Visioning Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1991) which is an anthology based on a series of invitational conferences at Esalen Institute and Cambridge University. Currently, he is a frequent facilitator of invitational conferences for Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research, and chairs Esalen’s Global Potentials Program.

Preface

When the translation of the book was completed, I sent the draft of the book to native English speakers, among whom friends, scholars, and thinkers for their review. Before long, I was swarmed with questions on the current situation and future development of modern China. I believe that to understand China’s present and future, one has to look into its past. Hence I wrote this preface to explain my interpretation on this issue.

The People’s