Ep 7: China's Railway System w/ Dr. Ben Kletzer

Joining us this week is Dr. Ben Kletzer as he discusses the railway system development in China under Mao Zedong's leadership and his own personal interest in railroads and the trains that travel across them.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the History Over Coffee Podcast brought to you by Marshall University and Norse by God. I'm your host, Tyler Leonard, and I am a graduate student in the history program here at Marshall. Today we are joined by Dr. Ben Kletzer, a professor here at Marshall. Why don't you introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Yeah, my name is Dr. Ben Kletzer, as Tyler so uh eloquently put, I am an assistant professor of history here at Marshall University. My focus is on East Asia. Um, my specific research is on modern China, although I teach courses on China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union, um, and broadly world history.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Awesome. So, what will you be discussing today?

SPEAKER_00 1:00

So, today I'm discussing my research and experiences doing research in China. Um, my research topic is on the development of railways and the political economy of Mao era China. So that is China under the leadership of Mao Zedong from 1949 to 1976.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Awesome. I know you have a focus on trains and railway systems as well. Uh, and I was curious how did that interest come about and what did the railway system development look like in China?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Yeah, so that's a good big question. Um my interest, actually, I have to admit, I've been interested in railroads ever since I was a child, and that interest really developed into a deep historical interest, but also a photographic interest. I'm a um published railroad photographer, uh, and I traveled around the world photographing uh steam railroads, railroads that still use steam locomotives in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and um elsewhere. My interest in railroads actually led me to China originally. I in high school I worked for a railroad actually as a steam railroad fireman. And in that job, I was saving up money so that I could travel to China because China was the last country in the world at that point that still used steam trains for regular revenue service. As in steam trains hauling freight and passengers for money, whereas in America, steam trains are very much an old technology that has been replaced by internal combustion and electric locomotives and are really only in museums. So in China you could see steam trains running in the real environment, and that's what I always wanted to experience because that had disappeared, for example, here in Huntington, that disappeared in 1958. And I traveled to China and immediately found a country that I was just overwhelmed with and totally immersed in and enjoyed fundamentally. And not only was I fascinated by the railway system, but I was fascinated by the culture, the history, the language, the cuisine. People were so welcoming and friendly. And this was China in 2008. China was just opening to the outside world, really with the Olympics of 2000, the Beijing Olympics of 2008, was the first time you could go to China and not have very strict visa restrictions. And I wanted to go back. And so I returned. When I returned to the United States, I was about to enter undergrad at University of California, Santa Barbara. And I entered undergrad and immediately crashed and joined a Chinese language course. So I could go back to China. And I moved back to China a few years later as a study abroad student, studying in in Shanghai. And my interest in China just deepened from that point. And since then, I've lived in China for over five years, spread across many trips. I've traveled to China, um, I think total now at this point is 27 times. Most of that travel is either has either been for railroad photography or research. And when I entered graduate school, I entered graduate school after at University of California, San Diego, after living in China for these five years. And I entered graduate school with a network of connections inside the railway system, because these were all people who I'd met through my travels in China. And it quickly became clear that in order to do research in China, that network would be essential. And I discovered while I was in graduate school that there was no history of railroads in China, specifically no history of railroads in the Mao era. And so while I was looking for a dissertation topic, my advisor, Micah Moscellino, proposed that I do the railroads because this is this huge blank spot in Chinese history. And that was my focus. And I want to emphasize here for historians listening, this blank spot is really extraordinary in Chinese history because we have histories of railroads are so integral in understanding the histories of the United States, of West Virginia, of the world, of developing nations like India, of developed nations like Japan and Europe. And China's this giant blank spot in that world history. And I endeavored to fill that blank spot, right? And so my research focuses on the development of railways in Mao's era China, under China under communism, building on this work by the only other author who's written an academic history of railroads in China, does a uh a history that's much more focused before communism. That's one of my advisors and uh good friend uh Dr. Elizabeth Cole of Notre Dame. And uh she is at Notre Dame University in Indiana, and her work has detailed the development of railways as a business institution. I focus then on the development of railways in under communism in the Mao era.

SPEAKER_02 7:43

So to interject to one broad question and then one specific question. How extensive, maybe when you were visiting or even today, how extensive are the railways in China and with the process during Mao's leadership, how did building the railway um come about? Was was it like effective, or were there a lot of problems they ran into?

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Good question. So China Railways is one of the largest is now the busiest railway network in the world and the second longest railway network in the world after the United States. There are a hundred and sixty thousand kilometers of railroads in China nowadays, which is almost a hundred thousand miles. So almost a hundred thousand miles worth of uh of railways in the country, including in that that in addition to that, there are nearly 40,000 kilometers or about 30,000, a little less than about 28,000 miles of high-speed railways, in addition to that. Um, so railways are very extensive and very embedded in China. China is not a country like the United States where most people travel by interstate highway. Most people travel by railroad, and especially high-speed railroad nowadays. And so the railroads are not just a present part of culture in people's individual lives, but they're essential to the economy in a similar way to the United States, right? And it really is a railway nation, a nation which has bound together, unified, and functions due to that railroad. But that is really a really recent creation. When the Chinese government, when the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, there was only about 20,000 kilometers of railroads in the country. But all of those railroads, or nearly all of those railroads, with the exception of about a thousand kilometers, were owned by foreign companies or foreign governments. The Chinese people owned almost none of it, and almost all of that railroad system had been destroyed by 15 years of war between China and Japan in Manchuria and then in mainland China. And so my question coming into the dissertation was how did the People's Republic of China go from this railway system that was really disconnected, really small, really ineffective, decrepit, destroyed by war? And how did that transform into the system we know today, which is the second biggest railroad system in the world and the busiest railroad system in the world? And what I've what I conclude in my dissertation is this was actually not a smooth process at all. It was a very tumultuous process. And that tumultuous process really exposes many of the um campaigns and histories and stories of communist China. But that process was facilitated by the work of one group of people who I term the railroad technical intelligentsia. And those are literally the managers and engineers who make decisions on the railroads. Those are the railroad technocrats. They're the experts who design locomotives, design trains, plan where the railroad is getting built, they then operate the trains. They're the people who actually make the railroads function. Now, what's interesting about this, and this is why it really exposes a good amount of Chinese history, is that on the railways, the railway experts are powerful and influential throughout the Mao era. In every other sector of the economy that anyone has looked at to date, decision making is politicized, and experts were pushed aside and replaced by political hacks. Maoist cadres who prioritized politics over economic rationality. And so I argue that in the railroads, the leadership of these experts, the one technical expert cohort in the country, leads to a much smoother development process, contrasting the railroads with agriculture, which agriculture was plagued by famines, with or military production, where while China designed weapons, mil weapons production was plagued by numerous problems. But the railroads lack all of that, right? There were problems, but they end up developing, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:40

And that's because of these experts.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

Why do you think the railway experts were allowed to maintain that position without any complications?

SPEAKER_00 13:56

So that's one of one of the things I've discovered in documents is that was actually very intentional by the Chinese Communist Party to maintain these experts. And it is that the railroads are such a critical part of achieving all of the Communist Party's other goals. The railways provide as physical infrastructure, politically integrate all of the regions of China into the People's Republic. Economically, the railroads connect industries and resources, connect cities and countryside. Ideologically, the railways connect and allow the transmission of communist ideas. And militarily, the railroads allow the communist regime to move party and military forces to control the country. But all of that hinged on having people who knew how to operate the railways. And the railroads are interesting because railroads are not just like other industries. You can't just teach someone one day how to operate it. It is a very delicate balance of economics, accounting, and technology to operate this that requires a lot of training and a lot of skill. And that skill oftentimes is learned through experience. So it requires veteran workers. It's not necessary that everyone has a PhD, but it's that everyone has to have experience with the railroads in order to make it function. And the Communist Party relied, discovers this in 1945 when they start fighting the Chinese Civil War again after World War II, and they realize that actually the railroads aren't just useful to sabotage, which they've been doing for decades, but instead using the railroads to move troops allows the Communist Party to advance rapidly and to ultimately help winning the Chinese Civil War. And upon realizing this, the communist regime enters power seeing the railroads as critical for achieving their goals. And they come into this seeing that the professional railway experts who aided this victory in the war are critical in achieving those goals. And that realization leads them to privilege these experts starting in 1949. The differences in two instances, in the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to 1961, and during the the hardline years of the Culture Revolution, generally said from 1966 to 1976, really 1974, with the railway experts, um the railway experts are purged and replaced by political agents, agents of the regime, agents of the state who prioritize political values. And each time this happens, the railway system falls apart. And when the railway system falls apart, the whole country suffers. Famously, the last time they try to remove railway expertise in 1976, the railroads move most of the phosphate and most of the coal in China. When the railways gum up, literally railway transportation stops because it's operated by people who don't know how to run the trains, they can't transport this coal and phosphate. And what that leads to is it leads to having to suspend harvest for a third of China because they can't get phosphate fertilizer. And so they literally don't have food because the railways aren't operating. Similarly, they have to suspend electricity and steel production in two major areas because they don't get coal, because the trains aren't moving coal. Again, suspending steel and suspending electricity, ending electricity means there are no factories running in Shanghai specifically. And so in these two instances, right, the Communist Party sees how critical having those experts are, and they realize that while they are really uncomfortable with the experts because they're not party elite, they're outside the regime, they are traditional intellectuals who follow their own professional guidelines, not Maoist political ideology. They have to accommodate with them because that will allow the Communist Party to achieve every single other goal. And that accommodation is only needed on the railways because the railways interlink so many parts of the system, right? The Communist Party is not forced to accommodate experts in other fields where when a field falls apart or slows or production is stymied, the entire country still keeps operating, albeit substantially less efficiently than it should.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

So before the experts were replaced and after they were brought back by these political kind of actors, were they afforded luxuries and did they want to work with the government with the railway systems?

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yes, so it's it's there's what I trace is these cycles of cooperation and conflict and cohesion between the experts and the government. And most often the experts and the government have similar views on how to run the railways, but they also cooperate because the experts want all of the things the government provides, which are privileges in the form of apartments, steady salary, steady work, educational opportunities for their children. The railway system runs its own system of in China, runs its own system of schools and universities. These are top-level schools and universities. And so these experts get access to that for their their children, they've had access to food, they get access to all of kind of not that we would consider luxuries in the United States, but that are considered luxuries in the communist part the communist China under map. But they're also forced to do it, right? There it's not a free market. There is no other options for these experts, right? If they want to have these benefits, they also have to cooperate with the communist party, right? There's no there's nowhere else they can go, there's nowhere else they can work, right? And so while it's never stated by the communists that they have to do this, right, it is there is this implication that, of course, and there are purges on the railways, right? Railroaders who stand up to the communist party and who are outspoken against the communist party are imprisoned. And so there is a degree of cohesion, there's a vast amount of cooperation, but there also is a degree of coercion getting these people to work for the railroads.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

As far as kind of the the work and labor aspect, how was the construction of the railways meticulous, or did the government just kind of throw all the manpower they could and replace it if it fell through? And then secondly, with the experts, were these people who worked on the railway and then furthered their education, or was it people who were just in general interested in how railways operated?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Yeah, good question. So first during the Mao era, railway construction was often handled by the army, not by the railways. And so this creates an interesting dichotomy because since the army controls construction, but it's given to the railways to run the railway, the army often used just massive amounts of people to build these railways by hand. And they were often very problematic and very sloppily built and had to be fixed several times before they could actually be functional railroads. And that process always happens with that handover. So the I just have stacks of documents of these experts complaining that the army built this railroad sloppily and haphazardly and they have to fix it again. And that is one of these conflicts in the Mao era, which is Mao in the Maoist ideology saw man over machine. That was a phrase that they used, which is that human enthusiasm, human labor, human voluntary exertion of muscle power could outdo machine work. And that oftentimes isn't really the case when it comes to building a modern functional railway system. And so the experts would come in and say, like, hey, we need to rebuild this using these machines. And oftentimes that happened so that the railroad would open, but that was after a burst of extreme human labor intensive practices. Um, and so it's both, right? There is this methodical construction that leads to operation, but there's also this, like literal, you know, millions and millions of people building these railways, some of whom are paid, some of which is unfree labor, and tens of thousands of people. At this point, we know at least 20,000 people died building these railways in Mao era China just in the 1960s. The railroad experts themselves are kind of a mixed bag of people, some of whom are railroad laborers who advance up in the railroad uh the workplace hierarchy and then get educated and return to the railways as experts. Some of them are children of railway laborers who take advantage of that education system that I previously mentioned and get educated because their parents are railway workers and they become railway experts because they gain that higher level of education available to railroad workers' children. Some of the experts are graduates of universities who go to universities and get engineering degrees and go to work for the railways because it's a good job. So people come from a variety of backgrounds, but that in itself looks very much like the United States. Right? Families in the United States, oftentimes you have railway families where people, where parents will work one position in the railroads and their children will move up in the railway hierarchy to be managers or engineers further on than their parents have, because they they take advantage of the upward mobility possible in the railways. And so, in this, it is a much more blended group. It's not easy to describe the railway experts as an upper class, right? They really are an intermixed managerial group rather than an elite uh class rank.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

So before we wrap up, do you have any final comments or additions?

SPEAKER_00 28:31

I would say if anyone's interested in anything that I spoke on today, I would be eager to talk to you Marshall in my office hours. I also want to promote next year, um, on fall 2026, I am teaching a World History of Railroads class at Marshall that will be on Tuesday, Thursday. That is on the student schedule that has now gone live. That class will feature, um, and we're starting to promote it. That class is part of our new area of emphasis into public history, and that class will feature career building opportunities as well as field trips in the local Huntington area, and that will be a mix of local Huntington history and global history of railroads. So if anyone's interested in world history or local West Virginia history, I would highly encourage you to check out this class.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Awesome. Before we sign off, if you say there was a functional railroad in whichever country you choose, what country would you want to visit and travel via railroad and photograph? Any country?

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Any country. So would this be a country that I haven't been to?

SPEAKER_02 29:55

Um if there if there's one that you feel so in love with that you have been to, that's totally a viable answer as well.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

Um I'm currently, I I I have to say, I've been there once, but I haven't explored very much. I'm currently fascinated with the railways of India. Um, India is another one of these countries like China that's very much a railway nation where everyone travels by train, and the popular culture is totally revolve around trains. Um, but it's also a fantastic, diverse, fascinating country that I've just been to once and that I'm really trying to immerse myself more in in the future. Um, and Indian railway history is certainly something that I'd be interested in. I have published a little bit on Indian railways in terms of photography. My photographs are are out there on my first trip to India, and it's something that I intend to go to again and travel extensively on the railroads and photograph extensively for future projects.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Kletzer, and thank you everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, you can listen to our other podcast. You can find us on NorsebyGod.com. That's also a Facebook and Instagram account, as well as the Marshall History Department Facebook and Instagram. Thank you all for listening, and we will see you next week.