GenZhouArchive

u/aimixin - originally from r/GenZhou
Well, if China replaces all the boards with public officials, that's pretty much nationalizing all industries outright, so the question to me seems to be more generally about why hasn't China abolished all non-public property, which then goes back to why the reforms were implemented by Deng Xiaoping in the first place.

The Manifesto argues against the immediate abolition of private property, saying that private property should be abolished "by degree" alongside a rapid development of the productive forces. This sentiment is repeated in Engels's The Principles of Communism, saying that private property cannot be abolished "in one stroke" but only when the productive forces have developed sufficiently.

Why? Because Marxists see markets as inevitable from small production and exchange. Lenin even argues in The Tax in Kind that the state trying to "put the lock" on the development of private property in areas of the economy dominated by small production would be "economically impossible" and "suicidal" to the party that tried it.

Public ownership is based on central control, which requires real infrastructure to collect information on social demand, and real computational power to process that information in order to allocate resources efficiently to provide adequate outputs. It's not a matter of government policy but real material economic development, so if you have an underdeveloped sector dominated by small production, trying to nationalize it would just lead to immense inefficiencies and economic hardship.

Stalin explains this quite well in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, explaining why he did not nationalize all the peasant farms due them being too underdeveloped and dispersed to be reasonably nationalized and explained how the markets they produced were also useful in "disciplining" the economic planners, because the underdeveloped infrastructure often caused them to price things completely wrong, while the law of value in the markets would provide more accurate pricing. Engels states in The Principles of Communism that competitive markets are the only way to transition a sector of the economy dominated by small production to centralized production needed for public expropriation.

Of course, this then raises the question of when does a non-state business become "large enough" to be expropriated? It's honestly a bit vague and that itself is sort of an unanswered question. What would the line be? How would you even make a measurement to know if it's above or below that line? What would you be measuring?

It's honestly enormously vague and is a bit of a problem in Marxism.

The CPC has taken to approaching the problem effectively getting rid of the black-and-white distinction between public and private property and introducing a spectrum of public control, and it moves up that spectrum out of necessity.

For example, if a private enterprise is getting quite large and seems to be challenging public control, the CPC's first resort won't be to expropriate it but to try other methods to get it under control first. If those work, it will then continue to let it develop.

In China, industries can be wholly state owned or wholly privately owned, but they can also be partly state owned since the state can buy shares in companies. Even McDonald's in China's has something like 10% state ownership. But there is also the party committees, which are a sort of soft state control in private companies, where if a private company has 3 or more party members in it (which is basically inevitable from any large-scale company), then they have to legally form a party committee which has the ability to observe the company and write reports back to the central party. In China, currently about half of private companies have party committees within them.

You mention Jack Ma, one of the founders of Alibaba. Is Alibaba large enough to be expropriated? Maybe. The CPC had no problems with Alibaba in the past, up until recently. One of the reasons is that Alibaba's Beijing headquarters already is 30% staffed by party members. Clearly, recently, with Jack Ma stepping out of line, the company is becoming too powerful to just let it continue to develop uncontrolled.

The CPC, again, loves incrementalism, doing things very slightly and experimentally. So its first step is not going to be full expropriation, but slightly increasing soft power to see if that will work first. First, heavily punishing Jack Ma to make an example of him. Then the CPC setup a party committee at the Beijing headquarters of Alibaba. Finally, the CPC is looking to directly nationalize data which will hugely impact Alibaba specifically.

You can clearly see the CPC's taken some control in Alibaba because recently Alibaba produced a propaganda app specifically for the Communist Party.

You also say, "Couldn't the CPC just staff some of it's members to carry out whatever functions CEOs like Jack Ma", but I would point out to you that Jack Ma literally is a communist party member, just one who stepped out of line, but the fact he is a party member made it easier to get the situation under control.

If Alibaba ceases to be a problem with these new controls, the CPC will likely not step up its control for awhile and will let it continue to develop normally. If it does continue to be a problem, it might try to step up its control even further. China nationalized mask manufacturers in response to COVID-19, so they will nationalize things, but only if it's viewed as necessary, and that other incremental increases in public control can't solve the problem.