Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free online public lecture on Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution.

The event organized by the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) will take place on Friday, 24 September, at 8am Bangkok time.

The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books about different aspects of China and consumerism.

Consumerism is a social and economic approach that encourages people to buy more and more goods and services.

The speaker will be Professor Karl Gerth, who teaches history at the University of California, San Diego, the United States of America.

Professor Gerth writes on the history and contemporary implications of Chinese consumerism.

Students may register at this link.

For further information or with any questions, kindly write to Ms. Terrie Ip at this email address:

whip@hku.hk

The TU Library owns a book by Professor Gerth and through the Cambridge Core database available at the TU Library, students may download Professor Gerth’s Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution for free.

Here is the abstract for the presentation:

What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. In Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China’s Communist Revolution, Karl Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949–1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire – wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges – Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people’s lives.

Professor Gerth’s argument is that the Communist Chinese government placed more importance of quick industrialization than on building socialism.

This approach opposed the socialist ideals it supposedly represented.

So China’s economy during the dictatorship of Chairman Mao Zedong was a type of government capitalism.

Professor Gerth writes:

With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. Three decades later, however, capitalism appeared to have survived the Communist Revolution and even to have triumphed over communism as the driving force in China’s economy and society. This book, the first history of consumerism during the initial decades after the Chinese Communist Revolution, offers a new explanation for the seeming failure of communism in China. As it demonstrates, the three central processes of consumerism – the mass production of consumer products, the proliferation of a discourse about these products in popular media, and the use of such products to create and communicate identities – were not only already underway in China by the time of the revolution but actually expanded through Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies. Beyond integrating consumerism into the history of the early People’s Republic of China (PRC), this book argues that the party’s self-defined socialist state represented not an antithesis to capitalism but rather a moving point on a spectrum of state-to-private control of industrial capitalism. As a result, the policies of the party continually negated the goals of its own revolution.

This attempt to integrate consumerism into the history of the Mao era, here defined as 1949–76, completes my earlier efforts to explore the history of consumerism in twentieth-century China. In my first book, China Made (2003), I examined the emergence of nationalism in early twentieth-century China and the early spread of mass-produced products and the consumer culture that developed around them. Later, in As China Goes, So Goes the World (2010), I explored the history of consumerism since the end of the Mao era, during which the impact of consumerism was widely evident in China, as indicated by the creation of the largest market in the world for cars, the spread of global and national brands through advertising and mass retailing, and the resurgence of markets for everything from stolen babies to endangered species to second wives. These accounts of the birth of Chinese consumerism before 1949 and its resurgence since the late 1970s led me to formulate the central question addressed in this book – what happened to consumerism during the intervening Mao era? – and my central argument about China’s supposed movement toward communism during that period.

The history of consumerism during the Mao era has remained a mystery because few scholars thought there was any consumerism to study in a poor socialist country.3 Based on earlier research, I initially expected to find that many aspects of consumerism that had developed before the founding of the People’s Republic – including advertising, branding, fashion, and social differentiation through the consumption of mass-produced products – had not disappeared but in fact had quietly persisted. And, indeed, as I continued my research, I uncovered ample evidence that “Communist China,” despite its anti-consumerism rhetoric, had developed what it called its own socialist versions of consumer fashions, commerce, product branding and advertising, and all other aspects of consumerism that are familiar in market capitalist countries. As these attributes of consumerism spread, growing numbers of people in China began to create new identities around the desire for and acquisition of mass-produced goods such as bicycles, sewing machines, and wristwatches. The abundant evidence and examples of consumerism included in the following chapters reveals a history that is very different from that of popular perceptions of this era, which tend to be dominated by Red Guard rallies, economic experiments, policy disasters, mass famines, and, above all, the power of one person, Mao Zedong.

Initially, I followed both the CCP’s own terminology for its policies and scholarly conventions by appending the label “socialism” to my findings. Because the consumerism I had discovered was occurring in a socialist country, I deemed it “socialist consumerism.” But as I amassed more examples, I began to wonder what it meant to find so much consumerism existing under the control of a Communist Party whose stated goal was to “build socialism” by eliminating the attributes of capitalism, including their consumerist expressions.4 As the number of exceptions to the party’s professed intention to transform China into a more equitable socialist state, a working people’s republic, became so abundant, it began to seem that those very efforts, first, had created not less but more consumerism and, second, this consumerism was in fact a structural consequence of the state’s social and economic policies.5 Whereas the party predicted that manifestations of capitalism would fade away over time as it “built socialism,” what I saw developing was a form of industrial capitalism on a state-to-private spectrum that China’s leaders, with varying levels of sincerity and success, attempted to justify, or to make more acceptable, through the use of socialist language and implementation of socialistic policies.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)