Jenny Clegg | Why China's Billionaires Can't Control the Government

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Author and China scholar Jenny Clegg joins Ileana Chan on episode 66 of Global Majority for Peace to discuss her new book "Storming the Heavens: Peasants and Revolution in China, 1925-1949", and why China's revolutionary history matters more than ever. Jenny brings a lifetime of experience to this conversation, daughter of communist anti-imperialists, she studied Marxism with Rose Dugdale, visited China during the Cultural Revolution, worked in factories, organized on council estates, and eventually wrote the definitive Marxist account of China's agrarian transformation. She dismantles the two dominant Western myths about China's revolution: that the Communist Party imposed ideology on peasants who just wanted land, or that Mao was merely a populist. She shows how Marx's methods were adapted to Chinese conditions, and why that's precisely why the revolution succeeded in 1949.

Jenny explains why China's private entrepreneurs "can't organize as a class" and must follow the government's lead, because "they had a revolution and power was in the hands of the people." She unpacks the mass line as genuine democratic practice, contrasts it with the instability of Western electoralism, and draws lessons for today's movements in the imperial core.

Jenny Clegg is a China specialist, scholar of international political economy, and long‑time anti‑imperialist researcher whose work bridges Marxist theory, global development, and contemporary geopolitics. A former senior lecturer in Asia Pacific Studies, she has written extensively on China’s revolutionary history, agrarian transformation, and the evolution of the country’s socialist project from Mao to the present. Jenny is the author of China’s Global Strategy: Towards a Multipolar World and the new book Storming the Heavens.

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