Zhou Enlai, born on this day in 1898, was a communist revolutionary, statesman, and military officer who served as the 1st Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. "All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means."
Zhou was educated in a missionary college in Tianjin before studying at a Japanese university. In Tianjin, he met his future wife, Deng Yingchao while participating in a radical political group known as the "Awakening Society". In 1920, Zhou moved to France, where he helped form the overseas branch of the Communist Party of China. He also lived in Britain and Germany before returning to China in 1924.
While working in the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, Zhou was also made the secretary of the Communist Party of Guangdong-Guangxi, and served as the CPC representative with the rank of major-general.
After the Chinese Civil War broke out in 1927, Zhou served in the communist forces, helping establish and oversee a network of underground cells of communist resistance. Zhou played a leading role in the Long March of 1934-35, an arduous military retreat of communist forces over 8,000 miles.
Following the Zunyi Conference in 1935, Mao Zedong became Zhou's assistant. After the conclusion of the Long March, Mao officially took over Zhou Enlai's leading position in the CPC, while Zhou took a secondary position as vice-chairman. Both would hold their leadership positions until their deaths in 1976.
Zhou was a prominent participant in the 1955 AsianβAfrican Conference, held in Indonesia. The conference produced a declaration in strongly in favor of peace, the abolition of nuclear arms, general arms reduction, and the principle of universal representation at the United Nations. Zhou was critical of American imperial aggression and stated "the population of Asia will never forget that the first atom bomb was exploded on Asian soil."
Zhou passed away from bladder cancer on January 8th, 1976, just nine months before Mao Zedong's death in September that year.
"Today the first unification of the Chinese people has emerged. The people themselves have become the masters of Chinese soil, and the rule of the reactionaries in China has been irrevocably overthrown."
Zhou Enlai, from "Chinese People Will not Tolerate Aggression" (October 1950)
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What's the theory behind how printing money causes inflation? Do market actors directly experience the increased money supply by price hikes being more viable? Is it possible that the message that "the government is printing money" contributes more to inflation than any direct market effects? It seems like near-zero interest rates don't cause hyperinflation, even though that should also contribute to the money supply, unless money loaned is somehow distinct from money printed in how it affects inflation.
The near-zero interest rates actually were causing massive inflation - in the housing and stock markets, where all the money was being funnelled into. 'Quantitative easing' printed hundreds of billions of dollars to allow the banking sector to keep buying and selling each other financial assets at hugely inflated prices, to maintain their control of the economy and ability to collect rent and interest payments and make capital gains. This isn't counted as inflation, because doing so would make the scam obvious - under neoliberal economic dogma, inflation can only be caused by workers having too much money to buy goods.
The idea of "too many dollars chasing too few goods" is half-right, in that, increased money in circulation can allow vendors to increase their prices knowing someone will have enough money to buy their goods. "Money" is a special type of commodity, with the characteristic features of (i) being exchangable in the market for any other commodity (ii) being legal tender for paying taxes and (iii) having its creation monopolized by a single actor (the government, but again, under neoliberal dogma the fact that currency originates from governments - and thus governments create markets in the first place - is forbidden knowledge).
If the supply of the 'money commodity' in the market increases, then the amount of other commodities you can buy for a given amount of money should decrease: basic supply and demand. However, this ignores the fact that through targeted investment that increases economic activity (e.g. building infrastructure, funding research and development, providing free education) the government can increase the demand for money at the same time it increases supply. If the amount of money increased, but the amount of other commodities in the market also increased, then money maintains its price.
So per neoliberalism, printing money to give directly to financial institutions is fine (because... it just is, okay??), but printing money to allow the government to pay for things is disastrous folly. Governments should try to run budget surpluses, only paying for things by increasing taxes - or even better, reducing taxes and privatizing services until they're nothing but a police force and an army, but this is a purely political stance that flies in the face even of earlier capitalist theorists. Like, Adam Smith would've called for everyone on Wall Street to be hanged.
Thanks very kindly for the comprehensive answer!
Stock price inflation is something I'd never considered. Are there even downsides to stoking that fire? I guess it might increase the scope of the inevitable crash?
This is exactly the problem, and part of what caused the 2008 crisis. Michael Hudson talks about all of this in his book Killing the Host, but essentially all this effectively free money allowed various banks and investment funds to keep writing enormous, low interest loans for real estate, secure in the knowledge that they were making money off 2% interest on money they borrowed for 1% AND that eventually someone else would write an even bigger loan to buy it off them again (because that second party in turn thinks they'll sell it to a third party for even more).
Thus the size of the loans - and more importantly, the monthly interest payments - grew hugely out of proportion to what the actual real people buying houses could afford to pay. These loans that could definitely never be repaid, so-called "sub-prime" mortgages, were then packaged up (obfuscated) as various 'financial instruments', given high security ratings by the privately owned, for-profit assessment companies, and bought up by various financial speculators who expected to be able to sell them on for even higher prices.
When it finally came out that these sub-prime mortgages were, in fact, worth FAR less than their wildly inflated market price, the government was faced with a choice - it could either demand the loans be written down to levels that could actually be afforded by the people who had taken them out, forcing the banks and funds to 'take a haircut' and lose money on their investment (like, the downside of risking your capital that supposedly gives capitalists their rightful place in society) OR it could pump out huge amounts of money straight into the banks to replace the lost value of the financial assets, while enforcing evictions and foreclosures on all the people unable to afford the mortgage payments. For obvious reasons, it chose the latter.