Real western chauvinism hours
Socialism with billionaires is indeed curious
40 years ago China had the statistics of sub suharan Africa
China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a generation
From being illiterate, backward farmers still binding the feet of women and a million other backward characteristics to a space faring nation
Without exploiting a single colony as the imperialists did
Now im not a communist that believes China is socialist right now (though I am sympathetic to the arguements made) however China under CPC leadership has moved mountains on Earth
And the Chinese Communist Party acknowledges the many contradictions within Chinese society
So im all for a comradely debate on China…Only when Westerners acknowledge CPCs achievements
You can recognize all of the above and have them not be socialist, it really isn’t complicated. There’s not much materially different between how Singapore runs their country than what China does.
The interlocking of state and economy with limited judicial oversight is an incredibly effective way to uplift an entire country.
There are a number reasons for the western left to view China favorably, but they don’t really have much to do with them being socialist.
Hell, ask political leaders in China what they are and they’ll tell you that they view themselves as a social democracy that arrived to that point but in the opposite direction.
hmmm, how curious…
That is a very thick blue line. It was released in August of 2020 amid a purge of police officials.
It is notably similar to the Fire and Rescue Service flag created in 2018, and various Flags of the PLA.
Pictures from the flag award ceremonies for Fire and Rescue and Police force show the shade of blue is identical; also the same as in the old badges of the now disbanded Fire Services of the Ministry of Public Security (via zh.wikipedia).
I doubt that any resemblance to the various Thin Blue Line flags was intentional.
That’s I think the reason western leftists are skeptical more than anything.
There is a lot more than just that. From the outside everything about it looks insanely sketchy. I know how most of it is justified but I’m very skeptical still. I don’t think I’d stop being skeptical until the promised transition from capitalism begins. I really hope it works out.
As a newer socialist I don’t entirely understand whats going on in china but that part does confuse me. I heard it was a transition phase but I still don’t think I entirely understand what that entails.
China is a social democracy with a more centralized power structure. They’re like Singapore, an authoritarian country ran by technocrats with meaningful links between state and economy.
It’s just they reached the point of social democracy by moving society to the right rather than moving society to the left as was done in western europe.
There are other reasons to support China as a western leftist that are unique to them that pertain to geopolitics.
They are still capitalist, but their government is structured in such a way that capitalists are subservient to the government and not the other way around, and they are insanely strict about ensuring it stays that way. It’s also illegal to criticize certain core tenants of their version of socialism, and they are quite strict about enforcing that.
That’s essentially true in Singapore too, and singapore doesn’t consider itself to be communist in the slightest.
Ok and that’s so they can transtion to socialism once they have built up enough industry?
they were one of the poorest countries in the world back then (around $156 per capita gdp when the reforms were enacted), and the party decided they needed to allow the return of capital to develop their productive forces before having the appropriate conditions for socialism
bear in mind that allowing the return of capital (that is, the existence of capital and market forces within your country) is not the same as allowing the return of capitalism (which is a system like ours where capitalists wield actual decision-making power, something i’m sure even the critics of the CPC would agree is definitely not the case in china)
this is not a brand new take either, the basis of the whole thing is very similar to lenin’s NEP and i don’t see anyone here being skeptical about lenin’s motives
it’s also so weird to see people arguing whether china is a socialist or a capitalist country when it’s basically neither and they even admit it themselves - “socialism with chinese characteristics” is just their way of saying “we’re not a capitalist country, because capital isn’t making any key decisions on how the country works; but we haven’t reached the ideal point to transition into actual socialism either”, that’s what the “chinese characteristics” part is supposed to mean
(edit for a typo)
Now I’ll preface this by saying I haven’t actually studied any Dengist theory.
But from what I understand Dengism is effectively a synthesis of Marxist-Leninism and the orthodox Marxism of the original Social Democratic Party of Germany or Mensheviks. It would definitely be considered a right-deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, probably the closest to a “Bukharinist” position I think you could see.
Original SPD, the Mensheviks, and other orthodox Marxists in the early 20th century dogmatically believed that in order to achieve communism a country MUST experience a period of bourgeois liberal capitalist development. Hence why SPD and the Mensheviks turned against the more radical left-wing parties like the Spartacists/KPD and the Bolsheviks, respectively. But a problem that has consistently plagued countries where actually existing communism has successfully taken hold, such as the USSR and the PRC, is a severe shortage of indigenous capital. The answer Stalin arrived at to solve this problem in the USSR was effectively to force march industrialization and modernization through a complex economic model that skimmed profit off agricultural revenue combined with economic planning and brutal coercion. But this model can only be so successful - it is likely to stagnate a la an S-Curve and requires an immense amount of resource self-sufficiency (for example, Cuba and the DPRK have great difficulty maintaining this economic model).
So the PRC, facing economic problems in the 1970s and being increasingly recognized internationally as part of the United States’ Cold War strategy to exploit the Sino-Soviet split, decided reform was necessary after Mao’s death. So Deng and his successors decided to liberalize the economy, but to maintain the Communist Party’s ironclad monopoly on political power. They are effectively doing capitalism in order to develop the country and raise their population out of poverty a la the archaic Marxist orthodoxy, but while maintaining the Leninist Dictatorship of the Proletariat. I must insistently point out that the Chinese model is NOT neoliberal (IIRC David Harvey has revised his once-hostile position regarding China in the 15 years since A Brief History of Neoliberalism was published). It is arguably more accurate to say that the Chinese are doing Keynesianism. Their economic growth is heavily based on state-directed investment; they still practice comprehensive economic planning; most key industries are state-owned; and the Communist Party does indeed ensure that the gains of their incredible economic growth fall in part to the working class (As in, you know that stat neoliberals like to bandy about regarding “declining global poverty”? That’s almost entirely because of China. If you erase them from the statistics, the trend reverses) . This has, however, been allowed to happen because of the brutal rise in exploitation of the labor of the Chinese working class, despite their material gains - to attract Western investment, one of the things the Party had to do was shutter a lot of stable, heavily-unionized industry in northern China in favor of a much more “flexible” neoliberal-style labor market.
Thanks for the in depth answer, this actually nearly perfectly answered my question, I have one more though. You said that the progress was allowed to happen because of the brutal rise in exploitation of the labor of the Chinese working class, so how is china going to deal with that now? I thought I heard somewhere that companies were moving manufacturing away from china because there were cheaper options in nearby countries. Is china doing something to combat the worker exploitation going on?
Anarchism does not exist outside the west. Anarchism has never worked
Therer are 90 million people in the Chinese Communist Party yet western leftists convinced themselves that they’re the ones who figured it all
People who discovered socialism a few months ago acting like they’re enlightened on the entire history of socialist and working class struggle and that they’ve discovered something the rest of the world has never thought of before is absolutely mind bogging and enraging. I’ve seen so many surface level “socialists” with absolutely no understanding of anything beyond just wanting free healthcare who talk about socialist countries around the world with the utmost disdain and how we actually need to distance ourselves from them to be successful socialists lol. Do people never ask themselves why the us isnt even a social democracy?
this is silly, unless you’re a Western Chauvinist yourself, the Socialist movement is not confined to struggles between Western internet kiddies, there are actual Maoist movements engaged in Protracted People’s War in India and the Philippines. MLM is not what China practices, it was synthesized by the Maoists in Peru and India, they see China as Capitalist since Deng’s reforms. If you guys were around when Jiang Zemin was in power, I would guess there would be far fewer Dengists around. Jiang and his Shanghai clique were the most blatant expression of Chinese Capitalism. It was under Jiang’s rule that the CCP officially allowed Capitalist to be members of the “Communist” Party. That’s why Chinese Bezo, Jack Ma is a full Communist member. The CCP and Xi knows that the excesses of Capitalism will lead to more and more unrest in China, that’s why they will try to keep the mega capitalists under their control. Defend China against Western Propaganda, a strong China will at least give countries under the chokehold of US imperialism some breathing space.
Respectfully, I don’t see a lot of newer socialists saying China is “doing socialism wrong”. What I do see is a lot of confusion on how China is socialist when it appears awfully capitalist. And I think it’s pretty reasonable to be confused. It doesn’t help that I haven’t seen it explained in a form that is from a Chinese source, is accessible in English, and understandable to anyone less than a black-belt ML. Like, I get that we shouldn’t trust western sources on this but I haven’t seen the CCP really explain it much either.
What I do see is a lot of confusion on how China is socialist when it appears awfully capitalist.
This runs dangerously close to the inverse of the “Socialism is when government does stuff”.
Capitalism isn’t when market participants do stuff.
The Chinese state bureaucracy has, time and again, demonstrated a willingness to prosecute corrupt business practices. The various industrial sectors are not calcified by the demand for profit, and so environmental reforms can occur far more rapidly. Neither are state bureaucrats beholden to the nation’s investor class in a way that inhibits development of education, housing, or medical services.
I’d dig up links, but Google only wants to show me the crap trending on CNN from last week. But pick up a copy of “The Third Revolution” and - after you’re done scraping off the neoliberal dog-whistling and agitprop - you end up with a picture of Chinese bureaucracy and economic management that is markedly dissimilar to Western Capitalism. Or just dig in and learn about the nation’s fifteenth five-year plan, it’s BRI initiative, and it’s domestication of foreign technologies.
China isn’t America. The Chinese economy is not following American neoliberal rules. The Reagan Revolution never happened in Beijing. It’s still authoritarian and nationalistic, but it is not beholden to financial interests in any way comparable to Western governments.
China’s success story is a capitalist success story, or rather, a success story of authoritarian capitalism.
Compare China under balkinized colonial rule in the 19th century and China under a unified People’s Republic in the 20th century.
I see substantial differences in everything from local autonomy to economic prioritization to legal standing of native peoples that would suggest a very explicit change in policy.
Maybe I’ve got my eyes too focused on the colonialist neoliberal ball, and I’m missing all the same sins playing out domestically. But I would argue the major distinction between Chinese domestic policy and western economic policy is that the Chinese government leadership is focused on satisfying the expectations of Chinese locals in order to maintain political security and autonomy. Westerners are attempting to upset Chinese locals, manufacture discontent and division in the Chinese state, and use the chaos to plunder the Chinese economic interior.
I might go so far as to compare the Chinese state as a massive multi-industry union and western capitalists as bosses attempting to fracture and exploit that union. Whether you believe the Chinese union leaders are clean or corrupt is incidental to the core class struggle - the solidarity they’re trying to cultivate versus the disunity western agencies are attempting to inspire.
The point is, China’s economy is operating within the global capitalist framework
China’s economy is operating alongside the western capitalist framework. There’s an interface. But the systems remain distinct. The policies and goals of western society are not driving China’s domestic agenda. Wall Street and the IMF are not writing up China’s next five year plan. The CIA/MI5 is not setting China’s production or infrastructure development goals. Beijing is not a puppet state.
They might still be adhering to capitalist growth strategies, but the benefits for western investors are incidental rather than engineered. The real strategy is to build a strong, unified Chinese state that can operate independently of western business.
The Chinese “Communist” Party isn’t doing socialism tho
