this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
105 points (94.1% liked)
World News
31476 readers
676 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
China is socialist. Socialism is serving as the stepping stone on the path from the previous system to full Communism. Socialism serves as an important developmental stage as antagonisms from within (counter-revolutionary forces) and without (imperialist powers) are resolved.
First, China does have wealth inequality, but its middling in its severity.
(The key is on the linked Wikipedia page, but darker has higher income inequality).
China has a Gini index of 38.2% in 2019, putting them at 71 out of 168 in national rankings. The USA has a Gini index of 39.4% in 2020, putting them at 107 out of 168. (Lower Gini index, and lower ranking are better). The worst nation, South Africa, has a Gini index of 63.0% as of 2014; the best nation, the Faroe Islands, has a Gini index of 22.71% as of 2018^1.
Moreover, wealth inequality has been decreasing in China for about a decade^2, whereas our point of reference, the USA, has seen its inequality steadily increase over the same time span^3. Wealth inequality is also not unexpected in a rapidly developing economy such as China: initially, as the economy grows, certain people financially benefit more than others and wealth inequality increases; over time as the economic growth stabilizes, and with a concerted effort to combat it, wealth inequality levels out and then decreases, as we see happening. Income inequality is not automatically horrible: careful attention needs to be paid to the bottom of the income rankings; comparatively, high wealth inequality is less of a problem if the bottom is not in poverty than if they are. This ties in to my next point,
This is not true at all. Wealth does not buy political power or influence within the CPC (or indeed in the Chinese government overall); nor does having power or influence in the CPC enable one to amass more wealth. Those who are wealthy work with the party, as members, to further the goals of the Party to improve everyone's lives, rather than working selfishly against the party to further their own personal goals. To paraphrase Boer[^4], "The private entrepreneurs have not become a class in itself with associated class consciousness, but many have become CPC members or non-party supporters. The social and cultural assumption is that those that have benefited from wider support must contribute to the well-being of others". That is, those who are wealthy do not get to exert outsized influence by way of being wealthy, and do not sit back and glorify their wealth, but instead work by giving back and improving the well-being of others.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual "socialist responsibility reports" which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Socialism (and indeed communism) is a structural form that dictates a government's (and economy's) purpose and its relation to society and its members. The goal of a socialist government is to improve the material and cultural lives of its people. To a Westerner, it seems foreign or fantastical that a country could genuinely operate with this goal in mind, and so people would rather say "it's not real socialism", or say that "because it has some problems, it's all bad", than to acknowledge that no system is perfect and as long as the system works to fix its issues and help its people, it is on the right track.
The OP has a non-nuanced and seemingly uninformed opinion on China as well,
They are not capitalist. Infrastructure spending is also not what determines whether they are capitalist, socialist, or something else. Moreover, nobody is arguing that a strong central government determines whether they are communist or not. To say that China is capitalist is a category error and falls into the trap that dictates that using aspects of a market economy automatically negates socialism and makes a system capitalist. I've written a bit more in depth on it elsewhere, but plenty of sources dive in to why China is indeed socialist and why it is faulty to see them as capitalist. Chapter 5 ("China's Socialist Market Economy and Planned Economy") from Richard Boer's book I've cited above serves as a good overview of why it is a category error to call China capitalist.
[^4]: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Boer, Roland.
Good reply, thank you.
And I'll defer to your categorization and consider the reading recommendation.
I weighed calling them socialist, but it seemed... unhelpful when what i was trying to highlight that the unemployed youth are relying on family, and not the state.
The responses yesterday seemed to think China is just giving away money. They aren't.
Also: all developed nations are socialist. What people argue over is where lines are drawn.
My issue is that you said they're capitalist. They're not. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It's not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn't mean it's capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn't mean it's socialism. When I said they're structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism's purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism's purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn't use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There's also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.
I also don't know what you meant about a "strong central government" not making them communist. That seems like a strawman. Nobody would say that a strong central government makes it communist, or a lack of a strong central government means it's not communist. "Strong" with no other qualifies is also not very useful: do you mean tough and resilient, or do you mean controlling?
This is a trap that people keep falling in to. Just because a socialist country doesn't do "good thing X" doesn't mean it's not socialist. No system is perfect; the difference is that the CPC makes strong plans, sticks to them, and publishes progress reports to address the problems that do arise. Should the state be taking the burden here where family currently is? Perhaps. But it's failure to do so doesn't mean the system isn't socialist. Again, I'll repeat my earlier statement: being "socialist" is a statement that is about the purpose of the government and the relation of the government to its people; it is socialist if it is for the benefit of the people en masse. Being "socialist" is not a statement of a utopic ideal antithesis to capitalism.
If you truly are willing to read about this, the book I mentioned is a good overview of China as it exists, as an implementation of a socialist society, at a level that does not require previous knowledge of theory or of China. Being intended for a foreign audience, it makes a concerted effort to address common misconceptions held by those outside of China about China. It's also very heavily sourced: each chapter ends with several pages of citations used in that chapter, including primary sources from CPC members, official government documents, analysis and critiques, and "historical"/foundational texts.
If you don't like them being called capitalist, then your quarrel is with a whole heap of people (and academics).
The question, like I alluded to earlier, isn't whether they are capitalist, but a question of how much. And many, after careful study, have determined them to be capitalist.
Those determinations are based on measurable things and philosophy (somewhat).
Also: you are clearly not my original intended audience. In the referenced thread I was getting low-effort, glib comments that snowballed upvotes.
Not unlike the person who deemed me to be a republican. It's easy to look at my post history.
I'm not a republican. But glib is easy. And glib, low-effort posters were the primary intended audience. Know-it-alls.
I'm going to make a glib comment; So they're 25% capitalist and 30% socialist and 10% communist and the rest something else. It doesn't mean they're a primarily capitalist economy.