Reganoff2 [none/use name]
Regarding China being ‘better off’, again I think if one compared the metrics that I think are quite pertinent (infant mortality, longevity, literacy, unemployment, wealth inequality), China was doing very well and better than most of the Third World. I don’t think using GDP or GDP per capita to analyze the question is enough. The point was that certainly by the mid 70s, when the very high of the Cultural Revolution (though I want to talk about this more as you mentioned it as well) was done with, necessities of life were decommodified and provided for most people. There were of course problems (the rural and urban divide, for one) but I think what ultimately made the economy function relatively well was that China had a large enough internal market to keep demands for production fairly high.
Regarding depoliticization, I think it really depends on what you regard as a revolutionary society. For me, such a society necessitates some element of mass participation, because otherwise I think the Party becomes disconnected from social reality. In fact, lots of scholars would call what happened after the reform as essentially a technocratic revolution - a class of cadres who became suspicious of the ‘mass’ after the Cultural Revolution and were trained mostly at Tsinghua in engineering and other sciences made it their mission to reformat the political economy in a way that the ‘mass’ could never again challenge elements of the Party bureaucracy. That chilled discourse in society in a very profound way. As to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I think we are often fooled into thinking it was a purely chaotic time for ten years. The Cultural Revolution actually formally ended in 68/69. Most of the violence that happened in the whole period, in fact, came when Mao turned on the Red Guards and sent the PLA to clear them out. What some authors argue is that Mao very clearly did fear the Party was going revisionist and needed disciplining by the people, but then ultimately backed down from going ahead with his real goal (‘bombard the headquarters’ ie restart the Party). So in some ways this wasn’t even the consequence of the mass going crazy or anything, rather it was the product of a lot of politics going on behind the scenes.
I actually just completely disagree with your empirical evidence in that again I am not sure there is any real proof that the Maoist economy was crumpling or under any particularly dire productivity issues. I understand Marx’s position on it and yes I would certainly agree there are some material limits that one runs into without a certain amount of capital accumulation. The question really is a matter of did China need foreign capital and demand to fuel its rise or could some form of sustainable development have taken place by replying on the internal market alone. China followed a playbook that was used successfully by S Korea in the 60s and 70s - have the state basically throws firms to the mercy of the international market in order to compete and grow, and use excess human capital to give them a fighting chance. It is a model that works for becoming a rich society, yes. But I am unwilling to state it is the only one.
In regards to Confucianism, it is actually pretty easy to see. I don’t have an academic work on hand at the moment but there has been a lot of writing on the CCP promoting certain family values and Xi, for example, going to Qufu (Confucius’ birthplace), making a fairly praising speech of traditional Chinese values etc. Actually you can see a lot of this cultural shift just by the way Chinese history is invoked. The ‘five thousand years of continuous history’ and other civilizational language was almost never used in the Maoist era, because it was seen as pretty ahistorical. I agree that it is, and I think it promoted a certain cultural chauvinism amongst the Han in ways that has manifested itself quite clearly in attitudes towards minorities etc.
In regards to negotiating with capital vs collusion, for me it is a rather simple question - look at reforms or lack thereof of mechanisms that have rendered huge sectors of the working class impotent. For example, Xi has talked about the growing divide between rural areas and urban ones as a massive issue. He has made a lot of effort to promote devopment in deprived areas and yes poverty as a metric has decreased, I won’t deny that. But as one of the consequences of this divide, rural people have flocked to cities at huge rates. Not in itself any different from any developing country. But the issue lies in the fact that China’s hukou system prevents rural migrants from accessing healthcare, from having their kids go to most schools, from being able to rent in certain parts of the city, from being able to buy land at all, and basically makes them an underclass due to their lack of institutional and legal access. This system is what has been able to fuel fast economic growth. Basically the principle is you can just take very cheap labor and then replace it (rural migrants have little choice but to leave after a few years, not by any formal mechanism but just because you do ultimately want to go back to your family back home and there are limited opportunities of advancement available to you in the city. So cities get fresh pools of labor all the time, providing wages to rural migrants that are better than rural areas but certainly very far off from ‘fair’ when looking at their contribution to the economy.
Pretty much every leader since Jiang Zemin has said they want to reform this. They’ve all done something - Xi implemented a sort of temporary housing permit that one can get if they have lived in a place for a certain amount of time and have a certain level of education. But no one, despite them proclaiming that hukou is an issue, wants to do away with the system. Largely, again, this is because both domestic capital and foreign capital requires this large pool of expendable bodies. China has noted at every turn that this gives itself an advantage in terms of luring investment and manufacturing from foreign across in comparison to say India. Maybe with an emphasis on dual circulation this may change but there are also growing cultural norms. Rural people are denigrated for being uneducated, having low suzhi (hard to translate, basically status of value as a person), lazy etc even as urban economies run on their efforts. Actually this is discussed a lot in rural workers’ new literature efforts. There are some really harrowing stories, I’d be happy to send them your way.
Now some of these growing pains are to be expected when going through a phase of capitalist development, sure. But when does it really end? Mao certainly thought you needed state capitalism for a time, thus New Democracy existed for five years. Does China really need fifteen more years to complete a transition? If interest groups prevent reforms to stop the unceasing exploitation of rural migrants (who are, again, a huge portion of the population), can we really say with total confidence that all the new wealth and capital in the country that has captured the Party’s interests will allow it to also jettison these interests and squash them eventually? Because ultimately if you believe in class struggle then you must believe that the Party is currently empowering the working classes to engage in a conflict with its homegrown bourgeoisie in order to reach a new form of political economy. What the 1980s represented (again, Wang Hui) was a reverse form of this wherein new bourgeoisie interests aligned with the party against mass interests and destroyed them. Will the 2030s really strive to completely undo that?
Yes but I think the lack of definitiveness is what makes history so compelling to me! There were potentials for something different, and we cannot erase them. I guess ultimately my stance on this is that I do not genuinely believe that the CCP introducing market forces into healthcare was necessary for good health outcomes (in fact, there is also a lot of literature on how access to certain technologies such as MRIs also does not wholly necessitate better health outcomes). Whole other sectors of the economy (defense, energy) were shielded from marketization due to national interests. Why couldn’t healthcare also have been shielded? Important to note that the UK may be a rich country but the NHS is breaking down because the Tory party doesn’t want to fund it. China has the will to fund lots of infrastructure projects for example. Money could be found for an expansion of public healthcare as well, but Whyte argues the issue is that China’s aging society plus the total lack of any welfare infrastructure means that the costs would be tremendous (along the lines of Japan, but without the benefit of Japan being an already wealthy society). That is a political economical deficiency that was caused, he argues, by the one child policy and also macroeconomic policy in the 80s and 90s that left poor provinces at the mercy of the market.
So while I agree that a one to one comparison of the healthcare systems of Maoist and post Mao China isn’t the most helpful, I also don’t share your optimism about the current model getting much better, simply because I do fundamentally believe that the sector could have been left decommodified to some degree or at least wholly state owned.
Is it indeed? There are actually some pretty clear practices that I think one could certainly suggest that the Muslim faith is not ‘celebrated’ in Xinjiang or in Hui areas in Gansu, Ningxia etc. One thing that comes to mind are the restrictions on fasting amongst students, government officials (including teachers), Party members (which includes a lot of fairly ‘normal’ people, not just officials). The Arabic script, which Muslims worldwide would be familiar with, is largely discouraged from use in places like Ningxia and Henan, where you have a lot of supposedly Han-ified Muslims known as the Hui. The logic is ultimately that if Muslims live in China, they should be at least somewhat ‘Sinicized’. Why this rustles feathers is that even under Mao, where there was certainly a lot of violence against religious institutions (a lot of it justified, of course), there was also a lot of insistence on the necessity for Han people to not pressure ethnic minorities to also necessarily act like the Han. This meant that there were practical limits on Han migration to ethnic minority areas, more employment opportunities in local Party bureaus for minority cadres etc. But following the 80s in particular, a lot of that got tossed out of the window. There is a reason, imo, that violence and separatist tendencies in Xinjiang began in the late 80s - the Han population in Xinjiang had rapidly increased. And it has continued to increase.
There are some elements of cultural erasure that comes with this sort of population manipulation. Yes, Uyghurs learn their language. But the emphasis has changed in some pretty pointed ways. In a lot of ‘bilingual’ schools, where Uyghur was once more dominant or at least taught in a fair amount of classes, it has become somewhat circumscribed as a specialty subject compared to Mandarin, which has gained more of an outsized importance. Bearing in mind that, one of the core tenents of the early PRC’s constitution was that autonomous regions could maintain their own educational standards and policies, and I think it makes sense that people are upset. I would also argue that policies targetting ‘fundamentalism’ are somewhat misguided in that we have to also understand what the source of fundamentalism is. The Chinese government currently uses the language of ‘war’ and ‘terror’ (where did they get that from…) to describe its attitude towards fundamentalism. The argument is that ultimately foreign madrasas and ‘Islamicization’ has eroded what was previously a secular culture, and poses a threat to China. But in my opinion, as with fundamentalism in the US or Europe or wherever, ‘Islamic’ terrorism is ultimately caused by socio-economic factors, namely the economic transformation that has happened in Xinjiang since the reform era, coupled with changing demographics. There is a reason that even Hui people, who again are supposedly much more ‘Chinese’ in their outlook, have also been recently targeted by anti-terror measures. Perhaps fundamentalism is growing, but it is as a consequence to what was a fairly flawed policy of the central government trying to shore up its presence in the periphery in a way that even local officials have grumbled about.
I think one thing that is worth posing is putting China’s reforms in Xinjiang in a wider comparative framework. I wrote my dissertation on Xinjiang and Kashmir and comparative policy from the 50s onwards. It is worth noting that both places, even if they were treated rather roughly by the central government, had little ‘extremism’ or ‘separatist’ tendencies until certain economic shifts in the late 80s and early 90s. This ultimately culminated in a sudden jump in separatist violence, which was then met with mass securitization and surveillance, as well as demographic shifts (Han migration spiked in the 90s, and likewise India’s recent constitutional changes are to try and encourage largely Hindu populations in northern India to move to Kashmri). This securitization and central government intervention creates a cycle of resentment and backlashes, and I think coupled with subtle but pretty effective policy changes to try and destabilize the foundations of local culture and ideology (interventions in the way imams are trained, language policy, education policy, the presence of pseudo-military contractors like the bingtuan in Xinjiang etc) there is definitely something akin to cultural and demographic transformation happening along the scale of what China did in the southeast in 50s, or India in its northeastern states in the 60s. Whether you want to term this cultural genocide is entirely up to you, I suppose, but to be honest there are comparisons to be made with how other settler states have operated in the past, ie racial prejudice, Otherization, attacking traditional institutions etc.
And of course, need to remember that the US is hardly a shining figure here, considering that China literally took the War on Terror framework from Bush, who in turn classified major Uyghur groups as terrorist organizations in return for China acquiescing to the US having a major military operation right on its doorstep (Afghanistan). Don’t believe American propaganda, but I think we should be critical of some of the Han chauvinism that has been being propped up in certain Chinese governmental circles. Mao and Zhou Enlai warned about this all the time, and I think major aspects of the original promises to minorities have been really broken. Ultimately, I have to also ask - Belgium had a shit ton of radicalized Muslims leave the country to go fight for ISIS. If the Belgian government were to suddenly spend all of its time putting Muslims in special schools and training camps, securitizing Muslim suburbs in Brussels, setting up cameras and police checkpoints on major roads in Muslim neighborhoods, etc…Would we not be at least a little appalled? Even if the end result was some level of greater economic development? What about if the US did this to its own problematic minorities (I suppose it does - prison!)? What methods are we really willing to endorse to destroy so-called ‘Islamism’ - how can we actually destroy something if we don’t want to address its root, material causes ie discontent? The old government in China, despite again its pretty heavy-handed policy at times, understood some aspect of this, or certain notioned towards it. I am not sure the same is true today, and it is made worse by the fact that frankly most Han people have some pretty appallingly chauvinistic views towards ethnic minorities as either needing ‘civilizing’, or a bunch of moochers who live off the government.
I dunno man. Maybe it’s just because I am Muslim, and I have grappled a lot with what causes ‘extremism’ and how to rectify it, but I do not think hardline policies will be all that effective in the end. It will simply provoke a simmering resentment that is almost guaranteed to boil over at some point.
Yes and I think that shift on the part of the USSR was a colossal mistake. But moreover, while I agree that the WTO and frankly the post Bretton Woods international trade regime is to blame in the largest sense, we should also hold to account the choices of local and regional policymakers that made a conscious decision to pursue policies that exacerbated the fault lines that said economic regime created. There was another choice in managing minority relations and the corrosive effect that economic change would have on the periphery, and in fact PRC policy makers debated a lot of this in the 80s and 90s before ultimately taking a much harsher line than they had before.
While the Adrian Zenz stuff is suspect, there is actually a lot of very good faith analysis of the situation in China by people who (very much unlike the vast majority of people on this website) speak Chinese, have been to China, and actually want to encourage a balanced narrative about the CCP. A couple examples that immediately come to mind are some great articles from Made in China:
https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/10/05/china-xinjiang-india-kashmir/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/07/09/good-and-bad-muslims-in-xinjiang/
What these articles do a good job of doing is laying out the basis for current policy in Xinjiang (ie shift the centers of cultural and ideological power in order to quell separatist tendencies, terrorist or otherwise) while also showing the clear geneology these policies have with US war on terror rhetoric and broader shifts in the regime against ‘Islamist threats’. You will often here spouted that Muslim countries do not critique China and most of the critique comes exclusively from the NATO powers. This is true, because the former have clear economic ties with China that they are in no position to sever or put in jeopardy, and the US-backed NATO clique is escalating rhetoric against China. You will note that very few Muslim countries said anything about Kashmir, with the exception of Imran Khan in Pakistan, where the stakes are too high to not say anything. And I very much suspect most people on this chat will not approve of India also pursuing policies to defeat ‘terrorism’ and ‘separatism’ via manipulation of the education system, military occupation, securitization etc. The point here is that we should oppose all ideas that Americans are trying to help Uyghurs or promote freedom or whatever nonsense they spout. But to assume immediately that the opposite (that China simply wishes nothing more than to educate its backward populations to defang terrorism) reeks of frankly a colonialist mentality that suggests that wherever ‘Islamist’ politics is gaining traction, there is no material basis in this politics beyond ‘Muslims are mad and must be put in schools to cure them of their disease’. We must understand the material reasons as to why discontent is simmering in Xinjiang (and elsewhere - it is hardly the only restless border region).
Put another way, British policy during their war on Afghanistan in the 19th century was rather simple: Pathans have a violent, radical understanding of Islam, and the only language they will ever understand is that of terror. In other words, justification for a war program that consisted of burning villages, stealing children and putting them into schools to undo their ‘radical indoctrination’, etc. Obviously China isn’t going around butchering anyone (the initial takeover is a slightly different story, but anyway). But there is something to be said about the commonalities in governmental technologies - you securitize, you transform the educational system, you remake the religious landscape, you encourage migration from the center, etc. Just a quick look at demographics in Xinjiang and how quickly the Han population grew after the 70s will tell you a lot about the state of discontent in Xinjiang at the moment. Obviously there are actors who are under the thrall of ‘foreign’ influence, but if we step away from the discussion of camps and reeducation, everyone in Xinjiang is ultimately influenced by the reality of everyday policies in schools, on the street, racial profiling, etc, including those whose version of Islam is basically going to the mosque once a year to say your Eid prayers.
Revolution is not a dinner party, but apparently it is brunch.
I voted Green. Safe as fuck blue state so I suppose it doesn’t matter at all, but fuck me I’ll probably never vote for a Democratic candidate after the joke that was the primaries.
I’m not sure how you get to IDPOL is dead, and the fact that the Senate hasn’t been taken back is that tangible short term stuff that wouldn’t make a difference in the long term but would help people now (stimulus checks, infrastructure) is all pretty much in the dumpster. This is literally Obama minus the first two years where small things at least happened.