this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Communism
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That's a very broad question, can you be more specific?
Do you think China is a socialist country?
Yes. China is controlled by the Communist Party of China, who maintain an unbreakable grip on the commanding heights of the economy - energy, utilities, infrastructure, steel, finance etc. State-owned enterprises are some of the largest companies in the country, and hence also some of the largest in the world.
Foreign capitalists were invited to invest in China starting in the 80s, in order to bring in the technology and capital (tools, machines and money) that China was sorely lacking. This unfortunately led to several of the problems typical to capitalist economies - uneven development between the cities and countryside, increases in wealth inequality, the strengthening of the national capitalist class and the spread of liberal (pro-capitalist) ideas - but through the whole process, and unlike in the USSR, the CPC maintained total political control and didn't allow the capitalists to dictate policy.
It's true that China appeared to go quite far in a liberal direction, including by joining the WTO; around the turn of the millennium, the US and the rest of the capitalist world assumed that China would soon liberalize completely, both economically and politically, and they'd be able to break it open and feast on the insides like they did with the USSR. Instead, since then, and especially since the appointment of Xi Jinping as President, China has been moving, more or less rapidly but seemingly inexorably, towards more outright socialist policies. The result of the swing to the right and now back to the left is that China has had one of the longest and fastest sustained periods of economic development in human history.
Here are some images demonstrating their economic success
China's growth outperformed every other major economy by an absolutely unfathomable degree:China, following a centrally-planned socialist development scheme, went from poorer than to richer than nearly all of Africa, which was trapped in extractive capitalist "development" hell by coercive IMF and World Bank loans and the austerity policies forced on them by the terms of these loans:
And China didn't just create products for export, but materially improved the lives of its citizens to an enormous degree. This is just one example of the kinds of change that Chinese citizens saw in a single generation:
This is a really important image - China's economy grew massively while its workers' salaries also grew massively in the same period, going from the cheapest labor in South East Asia to the most expensive (but, thanks to development of technology, also by far the most productive):
And here is China's response to a growing bubble in the Chinese real estate market:
No capitalist country could ever even conceive of going against the wishes of the finance capitalists, who make huge fortunes off of real estate speculation even as it drives the economy into devastating recessions. But China was able to forcibly deflate the bubble, transferring investment from speculating on real estate into the further development of industry.
In short, no capitalist economy run by and for the capitalist class could ever have made these achievements. Only an ideologically committed and politically dominant communist party would be able to manage an economy this way, wielding the capitalists as tools to improve the productive forces and raise their people out of poverty while setting the stage for the transition to socialism.
Edit: here is a long essay, China Has Billionaires, on the same subject, which is well worth the read
However, its economic development relies on the exploitation of its people, just as it did during the development of liberal capitalism. Moreover, the Communist Party of China can no longer represent the Chinese proletariat. The targets of the CCP's anti-terrorism drills are workers who are owed wages, and the policy is "If you can avoid arresting them, don't arrest them." against the capitalists.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/27/196226493/u-s-businessman-trapped-by-chinese-workers-is-freed
And that was 11 years ago. You better have some counter evidence instead of making stuff up.
It is still the same in China now. I am currently investigating in China.
The market economy determines that it will inevitably produce exploitation and oppression, because the so-called "national entrepreneurs" (that is, capitalists) must exploit workers in order to make profits. In addition, the Chinese Communist Party cannot represent the Chinese people. Now many Chinese people are always inexplicably "represented" without knowing it.