Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008) by Yasheng Huang

China’s two-digit annual economic growth since 1980 has been seen as a modern economic miracle. But the China story does not seem to conform to standard academic theories of economic development, which emphasize the importance of secure property rights, free market, and economic and political institutions. A widely accepted explanation is that China’s takeoff relies on its specific context, which incorporates an immature market economy, state control, and rampant corruption. All these factors together lead to efficient economic outcomes under apparently inefficient policies and institutions. As a result, China has often been treated as an outlier in development economics studies.

In Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Yasheng Huang challenges this conventional view by offering a detailed account of the policy reversal in the 1980s and the 1990s. He argues that private entrepreneurship, facilitated by access to capital and microeconomic flexibility, was at the center of China’s takeoff in the 1980s. However, in the 1990s the Chinese state reversed many of its previous policies. Capitalism in China changed from a market-driven, rural-based, entrepreneurial system to an urban-biased, state-led capitalist system that is anti-poor and anti-private capitalists. This change was not reflected in GDP numbers, but it showed up in the welfare implications for the Chinese population. Since the 1990s, as Huang notes, household income lagged behind the growth of economy and the labor share of GDP also fell.

Huang starts with a detailed analysis of the ownership structure of China’s township and village enterprises (TVEs), which were thought to spearhead the rapid growth of the Chinese economy from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. Many Western and Chinese scholars believe that TVEs, as their name indicates, were owned and run mainly by the local government, which means they were under collective or public ownership. By digging deep into bank documents unexamined before, Huang finds that the Chinese definition of TVEs only refers to their location, not their ownership status. TVEs were located in the countryside, but most of them were completely private. Huang reveals that in the 1980s China saw an explosion of indigenous private entrepreneurship in rural areas. These private businesses were mainly engaged in the industry and the service sector. So, he claims that a rapid rise of rural entrepreneurship characterized the economic development of China in the 1980s, which established the actual, but often neglected, foundation of the China miracle. Huang calls it “the Entrepreneurial Decade.”

Huang then presents a detailed analysis of the policy reversal in the 1990s. As is well known, 1989 was a year of political turmoil in China as well as in other former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the era from 1989 onward, there was a significant policy reversal, which was first and foremost manifest in rural finance. Credit for rural entrepreneurs contracted and loans for rural private industrial enterprises were tightened. Other policy changes included centralizing the administrative and fiscal affairs of rural governance and repressing private informal loans. TVEs also started to decline in the deteriorating national policy environment no longer friendly to rural private entrepreneurship. Huang says that in the 1990s China continued to march toward capitalism but toward one different from the capitalism in the 1980s. Before 1989, China was developing a market-driven, small-scale, and welfare-improving rural entrepreneurial capitalism. However, since 1990, it was state-led capitalism, featured by substantial urban bias, heavy investments in state-owned enterprises and infrastructures, favoring FDI over indigenous private capitalists, and subsidizing the urban boom by taxing the rural population. Huang looks specifically at the case of Shanghai, the best example of urban Chinese, state-led capitalism. Contrary to the economic growth driven by entrepreneurial activities, Huang argues that, the state-led GDP growth as evidenced in Shanghai is neither sustainable nor welfare-improving. He further points out that in Shanghai model, GDP grows rapidly, but private entrepreneurial activities are repressed and personal income lags.

Most economists and China observers claim that economic reforms continued and even expanded in the 1990s and 2000s, because China’s GDP kept growing rapidly. Huang counters this view by evaluating the Chinese economy based on its benefit to human welfare. His evidence shows that the policy reversal in the 1990s resulted in the adverse welfare impacts: the illiterate population rose again in the 1990s and the growth of personal incomes lagged behind the rapid GDP growth. In comparison, personal incomes grew faster than GDP in the 1980s. He argues that economic growth under the entrepreneurial capitalism in the 1980s was broad-based and thus benefited the vast majority of the population, while the rapid growth under of state-led capitalism in the 1990s did not.

In the end, Huang cautions that the policies of the 1990s directed China onto the wrong path and he calls for fundamental institutional reforms so as to sustain high speed economic growth as well as to resolve mounting social problems. Overall, Huang offers a nuanced analysis of China’s economic growth. His explanation departs from the prevailing gradualist perspective of the China miracle, revealing the decisive policy change between the 1980s and the 1990s and its crucial impacts on Chinese people’s welfare.

More on Asian economies on Not Even Past:

Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan

Episode 52: The Precolumbian Civilizations of Mesoamerica

It’s become more and more widely known that, before first contact with Europe, the Americas were populated by advanced civilizations with complex systems of writing, government, and technological innovation. A number of these civilizations were clustered in the area known as Mesoamerica, which presented geographic difficulties for its inhabitants due to its harsh climate and environment, and yielding few natural resources. So, how did Mesoamerican civilizations thrive?

Guest Ann Twinam from UT’s Department of History discusses three of the major Mesoamerican civilizations: the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec (Mexica), and their once-forgotten contributions to human civilization.

Episode 51: Islam’s Enigmatic Origins

The story of Islam’s beginnings have been told and retold countless times. The traditional narrative says that the Prophet Muhammad, an illiterate orphan from the town of Mecca, became a prophet of God and founded a community that conquered much of the known world in little more than a century after his death. But what do we really know about Muhammad and the time in which he lived, based on historical evidence? How has this led some to reinterpret the origins of Islam?

Our guest, Fred M. Donner from the University of Chicago, has spent much of his career studying the earliest history of Islam. He offers his hypothesis on what the early Islamic community may have looked like, and describes an exciting new find that may shed new light on an old puzzle.

Censorship in Surprising Places: Uncovering the Letters of Wilfred Owen

By Jean Cannon
Research Associate, Harry Ransom Center

Among the first and most acute observers of the First World War and its impact on individuals were the British trench poets. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and others half-mockingly referred to themselves as “Recording Angels.”

Wilfred Owen

As one of the curators of The World at War, 1914-1918, I conducted extensive research in the Ransom Center archives of British trench poets including Owen, Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon, among others. One of my most jarring discoveries was that official wartime censorship—carried out by the military, the War Office, and the press—coincided with the self-censorship that psychiatrists of the time identified as a major contributor to shell-shock and to the disillusionment expressed by combat veterans. The archival record captures the military’s desire to mask the locations of troops. When writing letters home, for example, soldiers were encouraged to obscure their whereabouts with the now well-known phrase “Somewhere in France.” But the archives also testify to soldiers’ ingenious efforts to subvert such measures. While researching in the Wilfred Owen and Edmund Blunden archives, for example, we found out that Owen had embedded secret codes in his letters in an attempt to communicate his position to his worried family. When Owen used the word “mistletoe,” the second letters of each word in the following lines would spell out his position. We found one letter in Owen’s archive that ominously spells out “S-O-M-M-E.”

Royal_Irish_Rifles_ration_party_Somme_July_1916

The Royal Irish Rifles in a communications trench on the first day on the Somme, July 1, 1916 (Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps the most heartbreaking evidence of censorship we uncovered dates from the post-war years. Before agreeing to publish the letters of his brother Wilfred in 1967, Harold Owen took India ink to the collection of correspondence that he had received in the years leading up to Wilfred Owen’s death on the Sambre-Oise canal barely a week before the cease-fire. The Owen archive therefore houses more than a dozen heavily redacted letters, which appeared in the Collected Letters with misleading placeholders such as “one page illegible,” masking the fact that Harold, rather than water damage, or mud, or bad penmanship, was responsible for making some sections unreadable. Wilfred Owen, who desired so badly to communicate with his family during wartime that he resorted to cipher, was later silenced by the friendly fired of his brother’s heavy redaction.

Why did Harold Owen censor his brother’s letters? In his autobiography, Journey from Obscurity, Harold indicates that he redacted the letters in order to protect the privacy of family and friends who were mentioned in the letters. But can we trust that this is true, or the only reason Harold Owen had to censor his brother’s letters? In 1917, Wilfred Owen was diagnosed with shell-shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he met fellow poet and mentor Siegfried Sassoon, and wrote some of his most affecting poems. Very often during the First World War soldiers who “broke down” during or after combat were simply considered to be suffering from cowardice, rather than what we know as post-traumatic stress, and were accused of being “scrimshankers” who malingered in psychiatric hospitals rather than returning to the fight. Was Harold Owen, protecting his brother’s reputation, hiding evidence of Wilfred Owen’s neurasthenia from public view? Like Sassoon, Wilfred Owen also had had homosexual relationships that—though it is doubtful he wrote frankly about them to his brother—might have brought his posthumous reputation under scrutiny.

No scholar has been able to read the letters of Wilfred Owen in full, as they were redacted before being made accessible to the public once they were acquired by the Ransom Center in 1969. But now, while working on The World at War, 1914-1918, we have been collaborating with University of Utah’s computer programming expert Hal Ericson, whose retroReveal software has allowed us to recover sections of the letters previously rendered unreadable. Ericson’s web-based image processing system works to uncover hidden text from obscurity, and it is our hope that one day we will be able to read all of the redacted passages of the letters that Owen composed during wartime. Visitors may see the humble beginnings of our project in a section of the gallery dedicated to explaining the various forms of censorship in place during the Great War. In a letter written to his mother from the front, Owen claimed that he “came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can, indirectly by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them.” Through our retroReveal project, we hope to help Owen finally achieve his wish in full.

Drawing from the Harry Ransom Center’s rich archives of diaries, literary manuscripts, letters, artwork, photographs, and propaganda posters, The World at War, 1914-1918 highlights the geopolitical significance of the war and its legacy, while also providing insight into how the conflict affected the individual lives of those who witnessed through the years 1914-1918. The artifacts on display illuminate an event that changed forever human beings’ relationships with violence, grief, history, faith, and one another.

The classic work on the trench poets and their memories of World War I is The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

For more reading on World War 1, visit our Featured Reads page.

Pages from Wilfred Owen’s letters reproduced with the permission of the Harry Ransom Center.

Episode 50: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance

During the explosion of African American cultural and political activity that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, a number of white women played significant roles. Their involvement with blacks as authors, patrons, supporters and participants challenged ideas about race and gender and proper behavior for both blacks and whites at the time.

Guest Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, joins us to talk about the ways white women crossed both racial and gender lines during this period of black affirmation and political and cultural assertion.

Passover 1934: An American Jewish Family Story

As historians, most of the time we tell stories about strangers. But I come from a family of story-tellers and, in our family, Passover was a special occasion for telling family stories. So, today I’m writing a story about a beloved family photograph.

This photograph is famous in our family. It shows the Passover seder that took place when the Rittenberg family met at my great-grandfather Louis Rittenberg’s apartment at 525 West End Ave in 1934. A professional photographer was hired for the occasion (judging by the light along the upper right wall). We think that Louis’ daughter, Bea, bought the gray Hagadahs that we used for many years afterwards for the seder this evening.

Louis (at the far end of the table on the right) was born in Lithuania in 1861 (or 62) and emigrated to Massachusetts as a teenager with his father Wolf in 1878. They supported themselves peddling brooms and novelties. Wolf was described as “refined” but not “practical,” (I imagine him a dreamy, scholarly rabbi’s son, happier reading than selling brooms). He returned to Lithuania, leaving his wife, “Mutter,” and son Louis, who made enough money peddling to open a store that sold dry goods and peddling supplies in Springfield in 1887. Louis married Lillie Marks in 1884 and, when children began to arrive, they moved, first to a two-family house and later to their own house, described very proudly years later by his oldest son, (and our first family historian), my great-uncle, Newman Rittenberg.

1. Log of the SS LouiLill June 22 1924 — Lillie and Louis in 1924.

Louis founded a synagogue in Springfield, became President of the “Sons of Benjamin,” and joined the Masons. As his business grew, he helped bring over, support, and educate family members from Lithuania and other Jews struggling to get started in and around Springfield. On Sunday mornings, Jews from all over came to Louis’ “open house” for advice. His first store failed but Louis was remarkably ambitious and benefited from the growing regional textile industry. One day, when he was looking around a storehouse in nearby Holyoke, he learned that he could buy the cloth left over from making suits in New England and sell it to manufacturers making caps in New York. It would take a while, but this discovery, and the middle-man “jobbing” business it generated, would make him rich. In 1908 Louis moved the family to the Bronx and went to work on Canal St in Manhattan where his brother Ike had a similar business. Louis continued to buy and sell cloth, prospering and suffering with the ups and downs of the economy. In the 1910s, the business took off for good and the Rittenberg brothers were soon supplying many of the largest clothing manufacturers in the country with cloth they purchased from New England mills. In around 1912, the family moved to Central Park West and then, after Lillie died (far too young), they moved to the apartment on West End Ave. Louis’ distrust of the stock market meant that they survived the 1929 crash far better than most.

The family histories that recorded these stories leave out the social and political context that made it possible for a young, determined, white man from eastern Europe to succeed here, but Louis and Lillie were universally described as generous and principled and cultured and funny. Louis was famous for saying things like “Kind words never hurt anybody.” And: “There are 112 million people in this country and they all have to wear clothes.”

Uncle Newman reports that the extended family gathered every Friday night and, of course, every year on Passover. Newman described Louis’ religious sensibility this way: “He was very learned in Hebrew but departed from the very strict rituals, as he felt that the modern times should alter the strictness of the old customs. He approached his religion most seriously but with a knowledge of the American condition…”

At the far end of the table in the Passover photograph, you can see the top of the silver wine cup stand (poking up between Louis and my grandfather, Willie). The children in the picture include my mother, Lillian (named after Lillie), her sister Ann and their first cousins, Joan, Peggy, and Lynn Gross, and Bob and Ann Bry. When I was growing up, we used the same wine cups and and same Hagadahs every year when Joan’s and Lynn’s families came to our house for seder. My sister Lois and I polished the antique silver wine cups each year and set the table with the same hagadahs, rituals we always enjoyed. Now the silver cups live with us in Austin. I wish we knew more about their history, but you can see them in action here when our own kids were still living at home.

The family photograph itself often provided an occasion for my mother, who seemed to know something about everyone in every generation of the family, to tell us stories about growing up in New York surrounded by our interesting relatives. But mostly we liked looking at it for that uncanny sensation of the past in the present — seeing everyone in our parents’ generation as children.

Lillian “Mickey” Rittenberg Neuberger, around 1947

This week, Joan, Peggy, and Lynn gathered for seder with their families at Lynn’s house in Mamaroneck, NY. Lynn’s son Phil Straus, a wonderful photographer, recreated the photograph with their own children and grandchildren and even a few great grandchildren.

Photos and stories connect us with people, whether we knew them or not.
From generation to generation….

For more stories from my family archive: Braided History and Fathers and Sons.

“It is a Wide Road that Leads to War”

By Joan Neuberger

On January 1, 1900, an editorial in the New York World predicted that the twentieth century would “meet and overcome all perils and prove to be the best that this steadily improving planet has ever seen.” The war that broke out just a few years later in 1914 showed that the twentieth century would become something entirely different.

By 1900, most European countries had constitutions, elected representative governments, and limits on monarchical power. Increasing control over nature with industrial machines and modern capitalism offered many Europeans and Americans an unprecedented degree of material comfort and prosperity. With that came a growing sense of their individual achievement, as well as the technology and prosperity to assert their national power in new ways over other people at home and in colonies abroad. But the Europeans’ use of modern power to dominate, educate, classify, and economically exploit others created new conflicts over culture, identity, sovereignty, security, even over different ideas about the basic components of human nature. These conflicts, beginning with colonial liberation struggles and especially the First World War would call into question the very foundations of European power and Europeans’ faith in progress and in the genuine achievements of the entire previous century.

There was considerable enthusiasm for a war in the summer of 1914. Serious disagreements beset every country in Europe: conflicts over political rights, human rights, economic developments, and colonial and other policies. Many people believed that a short war would somehow “wipe the slate clean,” and allow material progress and prosperity to continue. And everywhere people believed that the deep cultural and economic connections among European nations would prevent war from continuing for more than a few months. Nineteenth-century wars in Europe had been of limited scope and duration due to visionary international agreements made in Vienna in 1814-15 after the defeat of Napoleon. Europeans thought they had become too “civilized” to fight a drawn-out, destructive conflict.

The_Outbreak_of_the_First_World_War,_1914_Q81832 — Crowds outside Buckingham Palace cheer King George, Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales (who can just be seen on the balcony) following the Declaration of War in August 1914. (Wikimedia Commons)

The declaration of the war brought crowds of people to the streets of every capital city in Europe to celebrate. Friedrich Meinecke, later a major German historian, described the outbreak of the war as “one of the great moments of my life, which suddenly filled my soul with the deepest confidence in our people and the profoundest joy.” In many countries, even workers, who had been locked in battle with their governments, hastened to join the middle-and upper-classes in the support of the war.

There were, however, other voices. Peasants, who would make up the bulk of the war’s cannon fodder, were indifferent to the political conflicts that divided European nations and resented the draft. And a few prescient diplomats recognized the folly their leaders were embarking upon. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia, wrote in his diary: “So the die is cast . . . The part played by reason in the government of peoples is so small that it has taken merely a week to let loose universal madness.”

westwardho — “Westward Ho,” a satirical poster by Eric Gill

It would take only a few weeks for the truth of the Russian peasant saying to be apparent to all: “It is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.”

The documents, posters, letters, and photographs currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center illustrate the way ordinary people on the home front and the battlefront experienced the narrowing of that road.

More events, sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center

Please join us for a symposium on World War 1 sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin:
Remembering World War 1 on its Centennial,” April 16, 2014. 3:30-5:30. GAR 4.100. Free & open to the public.

Episode 49: The Harlem Renaissance

In the early 20th century, an unprecedented cultural and political movement brought African-American culture and history to the forefront of the US. Named the Harlem Renaissance after the borough where it first gained traction, the movement spanned class, gender, and even race to become one of the most important cultural and political movements of the interwar era. Guest Frank Guridy joins us to discuss the multifaceted, multilayered movement that inspired a new generation of African-Americans—and other Americans—and demonstrated the importance of Black culture and its contributions to the West.

World War I: Teaching at the Museum

From the Editor: At universities, not all teaching takes place in the classroom. The University of Texas at Austin has a number of archives, libraries, and museums with public exhibition spaces for teaching students and the general public about topics covered by their collections. This month Not Even Past features a discussion with the curators of The World at War, 1914-1918, the show currently on display at UT’s renowned Harry Ransom Center. Elizabeth Garver and Jean Cannon spent months culling through the HRC’s rich collections of posters, letters, photograph albums and other materials to find just the right balance of objects to convey the experience of the war that was supposed to “end all wars” as it was lived in numerous countries in Europe.

This April we will be rolling out the story of the teaching exhibit differently than in the past. Today we present some of the propaganda materials from the exhibit as well as some that are available through the HRC’s online digital collections. Next week we will post comments from the curators about constructing the exhibit and then we will post a video interview, in which they discuss the selection of materials to teach viewers about World War I as well as some of their favorite, most moving documents.

Propaganda Posters

Propaganda was invented during World War I. Although the declaration of war was greeted enthusiastically all over Europe, support quickly waned. Governments of Britain, France, the US, Germany, Italy and Russia all printed posters to lift morale and encourage support for the war effort. These posters come from the HRC’s digitalized collection (more of the collection can be found here).

Many posters demonized the enemy, often by showing the enemy threatening women and children.

Others simply encouraged men to enlist…

…sometimes recruiting women and children to encourage them.

This French poster celebrates the soldiers recruited from their colonies in Africa.

Women, meanwhile, were and taking up active roles, entering the workforce to replace men sent into battle, for example.

Even in the era of technologically enhanced, mechanized killing machines, horses played a large role in the war effort of all the combatants. And they needed to be supported too.

Dogs too were trained for specific roles. The HRC blog tells us that they could enter No Man’s Land and identify wounded men.

World War I went on much longer than expected and it was expensive. Governments sold bonds to raise money to continue to fight and the circulated posters calling for public financial support.

Individual groups used posters to raise money for specific support projects like ambulances and other kinds of medical care.

Food was in short supply everywhere. These French posters encourage people to save bread by eating potatoes and eat fish to save meat.

Another post on the HRC blog shows the ways Russian posters made food seem unpalatable. This one shows how the Devil gardens–transforming vegetables in German enemies.

And this one, which represents each of the combatants as food types, makes them all look pretty yucky.