Council on Foreign RelationsWashington, D.C. MR. SULLIVAN: At least I had the bravery to give that speech at Brookings rather than at CFR. So — (laughter) — Mike, I want to say thank you for having me back at CFR. And to Susan and Kurt and Charlene and Steve, thank you for having me back…
This will be downvoted by some of the authoritarians who dominate this sub but China is not a socialist country. It is state capitalist. Maybe this will help you understand why it is not a good place to live unless you belong to the upper echelons of society. It’s not so different from the US, despite all the propaganda to convince people otherwise.
Actually you could argue that many Western countries are closer to socialism because they have stronger unions. Not that that makes them socialist on their own but it is at least in line with socialist ideals.
The means of production are mostly out of the hands of private hands though, and are in the hands of the state, which does not run the economy for pure profits for the very few. Private property is (thankfully) less of the sacrosanct guiding principle it is in the West.
It’s definitely not “public” as we leftists think it should be, and corruption gets in the way, but I don’t think capitalism is the right word to describe the economic model of China. State “something”, sure, state capitalism, hell no. The goal is not accumulation of capital.
I agree it’s not socialism though, because I feel that the state is too much of a self-preserving entity that outlived its purpose as the mean to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Well, feel free to suggest a term you think fits better, but I think it fits, even if it is clearly a different flavor of capitalism than the US or other similar economies.
The point is that socialism means the economy is managed by and for the benefit of workers and ordinary people. In all major imperialist countries like the US, China, and the Soviet Union, the economy is managed by and for the ruling elite, whether that may be private owners as in the US, party leadership as in the Soviet system, or a blend of these two as in modern China. That is why I feel they are similar and belong in similar categories, despite some differences.
Actually existing socialism (AES) is a term commonly used to refer to socialist states, that is, states governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The five predominantly recognized AES states are China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and, Korea, while examples of former AES states include the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe.
It’s funny because this term kind of underlines how ridiculous the claim is. Would we feel the need to stress the fact that socialism Actually Exists every single time we even refer to it if there really were prominent and obvious examples of it?
I watched about half of that video but it really made no attempt to justify the designation of these far-right governments as socialist. Similar to others in this thread, it’s just asserted and then any attempt to question this assertion is dismissed as “imperialist propaganda”. This despite the fact that imperialist propaganda is exactly why people falsely believe China is socialist. So that the West can point to all of the obvious problems and say “See?! Socialism is bad actually! Please don’t read about meant before the Cold War!” This propaganda has been extremely effective and is why there hasn’t been much of a socialist movement in the West since before WWII.
Your definition does not fit though. It contradicts the very definition of the word “capitalism”, which is defined by the accumulation of capital, which does not seem to be what’s driving the Chinese government.
I’m not being pedantic. If you’re going to come criticize the authoritarians on their home turf, you’re going to have to be rigorous in your terminology.
Isn’t it though? If the goal of China’s economic policy is to avoid the accumulation of capital, they are failing miserably. China has more billionaires and more economic inequality than almost any country on earth—including classic capitalist countries like the US.
Even if we agree to disagree on whether China is capitalist, it just doesn’t resemble socialism in its original conception in any way. Working people have no control over industry or the government, and both exercise repressive controls on any movement towards such a system. Recent reforms have moved things further in that direction by enabling loyal party capitalists to accumulate huge amounts of wealth at the expense of workers, and as Xi Jinping continues to strengthen his control of the state apparatus. It’s hard to see how this will lead to socialism unless you are an accelerationist.
According to the Hurun Global Rich List 2023, China housed the highest number of billionaires worldwide in 2023. In detail, there were 969 billionaires living in China. By comparison, 691 billionaires resided in the United States. India, Germany, and the United Kingdom were also the homes of a significant number of billionaires that year.
So which is it, are the Chinese capitalists in control of the State, or is the “authoritarian” Xi Jinping in control? Or do Chinese workers actually have more effective democratic control than workers in bourgeois democracies?
BBC, 2014: Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracyThe US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.
Working people have no control over industry or the government, and both exercise repressive controls on any movement towards such a system.
This is what we’re constantly told by our governments and our corporate media that parrot them. I would suggest that your understanding of China comes from imperial core propaganda for the purposes of Cold War II. The propaganda is also important to the capitalist class that doesn’t want workers here to take note of a threat of a good example.
This isn’t the gotcha that you think. Party and business elites (to the extent that these two groups are even distinct—in many cases there are overlapping members) cooperate to maintain control over the economy and political system at the expense of working Chinese. In recent years, Xi Jinping’s tightened grip on power has involved the elimination of some rivals from the ruling class, but he has not changed its overall structure, merely eliminating those deemed threatening and replacing them with allies. But we’ve seen many examples of countries where totalitarian dictatorships coexist with capitalism. Though the capitalists often have more power collectively, as long as they are allowed control of the economy and fabulous wealth, it’s not worth the risk of resisting the president, Führer, chairman, or whatever he wants to call himself.
I’m familiar with and agree with these criticisms of republican democracy in the West. But what you don’t seem to understand is that the situation in China is not materially different. In fact, the idea that China is socialist is actually also Western propaganda—and very successful propaganda at that. Most informed people can see that China is not a good place to live for ordinary people, and by labeling this system socialism, it confuses people into believing that socialism is a bad economic system. This is a big reason we have not had a real socialist movement for the past 100 years. The west was able to successfully associate the term with unpopular totalitarian governments, even though they never allowed any kind of real worker control or autonomy. For example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY. These films were effective because people could see that workers under Stalin or Mao did not have appreciably more control over their own lives or prosperity than workers in the US.
But I am interested in your claim that Chinese workers have more of a voice than we do in the west. Others have merely attempted to assert China is definitionally socialist or distract with irrelevant and cherry-picked economic statistics. Can you substantiate this claim? In my view this is the heart of our disagreement. From where I am I do not see much to suggest that Chinese workers have any say at all in political or economic decision-making but if that is incorrect there must be evidence.
I’m pretty sure you already made this point earlier in the thread, or perhaps in some other thread.
We Marxist-Leninist do think that China is an Actually Existing Socialism. Whether Western propaganda uses the term to its advantage is not our concern. We don’t at all agree with these “informed people” on whether China is a good place to live. Those people get their understanding of China from Western propaganda.
Also, totalitarianism is a bullshit term created by Western propagandists in order to equivalate socialism and fascism. Hannah Arendt came from a petty bourgeois family and was a paid propagandist.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
From our own Western propaganda, you hear and credulously believe that Chinese workers have no say, and now the burden is on me to prove that they do have a say. If you really want to know, you’re welcome to look into it yourself. You might start with The East Is Still Red, which is short and provides a lot of references.
I’m not spending 25 dollars to win an internet argument but I would consider reading it if you have a free way. But from my experience debating you previously, you have a tendency to post sources that do not support your claims at all, and often contradict them.
China is following the essentially the same development path as other capitalist countries so I’m not sure what you mean by this. In recent years it has become increasingly nationalistic, imperialist, expansionist, and staggering wealth inequality continues to develop and entrench. Barring a real bottom-up movement for equality I expect these types of governments to gradually slide towards fascism.
If you can’t figure out how to get the book for free on your own then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe ask your friends to teach you what bittorrent is. There are however plenty of other free resources explaining how Chinese system works. It’s interesting that you decided to slander me here though. It suggests to me that you’re not interested in having an constructive discussion.
Nevertheless, I’ll address your misinformed claims for other people reading the thread. If China was following the same path as other capitalist countries than it would look like India or countries in Latin America today where standard of living isn’t improving for workers in any meaningful way. China is pretty much the only developing nation where the standard of living is rapidly improving for the majority. This does not happen in any capitalist country. Here are a few concrete examples of what I’m talking about.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
I’m not slandering you, just expressing skepticism at your own interest in constructive conversation and explaining why I don’t value your book recommendation very highly.
As to the rest of this, it is again much too long to read in its entirety but it seems to come down to the same economic growth metrics that are used to justify neoliberal economics in every country. Yes, a small fraction of the wealth falls down to the poor and by some metrics this leaves them better off. This is not socialism in Western countries and it is not socialism in China. In fact, these are the same reasons people supported far right politicians like Trump or Hitler. If we concentrate power in the hands of the people who know better, they will grow the whole economy and we will all get richer, right? It doesn’t matter if the ruling class seizes most of the wealth and power, now you can buy two toys for your kids instead of one!
The global definition of poverty is an especially misleading metric since it doesn’t actually measure people’s material conditions, just “dollars per day” which is often only tangentially related to actual well-being. See this paper for more information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
Notably:
The results of this method demonstrate there is often a significant divergence between the poverty rate as defined by the World Bank’s $1.90 method and the BNPL. Consider the case of China, for example. According to the $1.90 method, the poverty rate in China fell from 66% in 1990 to 19% in 2005, suggesting capitalist reforms delivered dramatic improvements (World Bank 2021). However, if we instead measure incomes against the BNPL, we find poverty increased during this period, from 0.2% in 1990 (one of the lowest figures in the world) to 24% in 2005, with a peak of 68% in 1995 (data from Moatsos, 2021).3 This reflects an increase in the relative price of food as China’s socialist provisioning systems were dismantled (Li, 2016). It is likely that something similar occurred across the global South during the 19th century, as colonial interventions undermined communal provisioning systems. As a result, the $1.90 PPP line likely reflects a changing standard of welfare during the period that the Ravallion/Pinker graph refers to.
But even if conditions did improve during some periods, none of this means there isn’t a better economic system, nor does it make any country where conditions improve socialist. There have been periods of economic improvement in many capitalist countries, partly because pure capitalism is extremely difficult to implement and maintain, so most capitalist countries do allow for some socialist practices to exist. Again, socialism means proletarian control of the means of production, something that no one in these conversations has even attempted to argue is happening in China. Workers in China, like workers in all capitalist countries, have very little say over their own working conditions and economic decision making. This is extremely obvious from the fact that corporate structures in China are very similar to elsewhere in the world; a structure that is incompatible with socialism.
TLDR you can’t be bothered to read things that contradict your narrative, and just cherry pick things that fit it. I’m not going to bother arguing with you further since it’s about as productive as banging ones head against a wall. You keep on believing whatever nonsense you want.
Funny because I was going to say the same thing. Keep on believing imperialist propaganda, I’m sure communism will arrive any day now. Just need to force capitalism on a few more generations.
While I appreciate you going through the trouble of finding this, it kind of misses the point. Have you read this book? Is it an honest examination of the Chinese economic system? Is it acknowledged by the wider community (and not just Leninist and Chinese apologists) to be a serious work that is based on reality and not propaganda? I don’t have enough faith in the other user to read something this long solely on their recommendation.
This will be downvoted by some of the authoritarians who dominate this sub but China is not a socialist country. It is state capitalist. Maybe this will help you understand why it is not a good place to live unless you belong to the upper echelons of society. It’s not so different from the US, despite all the propaganda to convince people otherwise.
Actually you could argue that many Western countries are closer to socialism because they have stronger unions. Not that that makes them socialist on their own but it is at least in line with socialist ideals.
The means of production are mostly out of the hands of private hands though, and are in the hands of the state, which does not run the economy for pure profits for the very few. Private property is (thankfully) less of the sacrosanct guiding principle it is in the West.
It’s definitely not “public” as we leftists think it should be, and corruption gets in the way, but I don’t think capitalism is the right word to describe the economic model of China. State “something”, sure, state capitalism, hell no. The goal is not accumulation of capital.
I agree it’s not socialism though, because I feel that the state is too much of a self-preserving entity that outlived its purpose as the mean to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Well, feel free to suggest a term you think fits better, but I think it fits, even if it is clearly a different flavor of capitalism than the US or other similar economies.
The point is that socialism means the economy is managed by and for the benefit of workers and ordinary people. In all major imperialist countries like the US, China, and the Soviet Union, the economy is managed by and for the ruling elite, whether that may be private owners as in the US, party leadership as in the Soviet system, or a blend of these two as in modern China. That is why I feel they are similar and belong in similar categories, despite some differences.
Actually Existing Socialism
Gabriel Rockhill - How The Left Should Analyze the Rise of a Multipolar World, China, Russia & BRICS
It’s funny because this term kind of underlines how ridiculous the claim is. Would we feel the need to stress the fact that socialism Actually Exists every single time we even refer to it if there really were prominent and obvious examples of it?
I watched about half of that video but it really made no attempt to justify the designation of these far-right governments as socialist. Similar to others in this thread, it’s just asserted and then any attempt to question this assertion is dismissed as “imperialist propaganda”. This despite the fact that imperialist propaganda is exactly why people falsely believe China is socialist. So that the West can point to all of the obvious problems and say “See?! Socialism is bad actually! Please don’t read about meant before the Cold War!” This propaganda has been extremely effective and is why there hasn’t been much of a socialist movement in the West since before WWII.
Your definition does not fit though. It contradicts the very definition of the word “capitalism”, which is defined by the accumulation of capital, which does not seem to be what’s driving the Chinese government.
I’m not being pedantic. If you’re going to come criticize the authoritarians on their home turf, you’re going to have to be rigorous in your terminology.
Isn’t it though? If the goal of China’s economic policy is to avoid the accumulation of capital, they are failing miserably. China has more billionaires and more economic inequality than almost any country on earth—including classic capitalist countries like the US.
Even if we agree to disagree on whether China is capitalist, it just doesn’t resemble socialism in its original conception in any way. Working people have no control over industry or the government, and both exercise repressive controls on any movement towards such a system. Recent reforms have moved things further in that direction by enabling loyal party capitalists to accumulate huge amounts of wealth at the expense of workers, and as Xi Jinping continues to strengthen his control of the state apparatus. It’s hard to see how this will lead to socialism unless you are an accelerationist.
Chinese billionaires
Chinese income inequality
So which is it, are the Chinese capitalists in control of the State, or is the “authoritarian” Xi Jinping in control? Or do Chinese workers actually have more effective democratic control than workers in bourgeois democracies?
BBC, 2014: Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.
This is what we’re constantly told by our governments and our corporate media that parrot them. I would suggest that your understanding of China comes from imperial core propaganda for the purposes of Cold War II. The propaganda is also important to the capitalist class that doesn’t want workers here to take note of a threat of a good example.
This isn’t the gotcha that you think. Party and business elites (to the extent that these two groups are even distinct—in many cases there are overlapping members) cooperate to maintain control over the economy and political system at the expense of working Chinese. In recent years, Xi Jinping’s tightened grip on power has involved the elimination of some rivals from the ruling class, but he has not changed its overall structure, merely eliminating those deemed threatening and replacing them with allies. But we’ve seen many examples of countries where totalitarian dictatorships coexist with capitalism. Though the capitalists often have more power collectively, as long as they are allowed control of the economy and fabulous wealth, it’s not worth the risk of resisting the president, Führer, chairman, or whatever he wants to call himself.
I’m familiar with and agree with these criticisms of republican democracy in the West. But what you don’t seem to understand is that the situation in China is not materially different. In fact, the idea that China is socialist is actually also Western propaganda—and very successful propaganda at that. Most informed people can see that China is not a good place to live for ordinary people, and by labeling this system socialism, it confuses people into believing that socialism is a bad economic system. This is a big reason we have not had a real socialist movement for the past 100 years. The west was able to successfully associate the term with unpopular totalitarian governments, even though they never allowed any kind of real worker control or autonomy. For example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY. These films were effective because people could see that workers under Stalin or Mao did not have appreciably more control over their own lives or prosperity than workers in the US.
But I am interested in your claim that Chinese workers have more of a voice than we do in the west. Others have merely attempted to assert China is definitionally socialist or distract with irrelevant and cherry-picked economic statistics. Can you substantiate this claim? In my view this is the heart of our disagreement. From where I am I do not see much to suggest that Chinese workers have any say at all in political or economic decision-making but if that is incorrect there must be evidence.
I’m pretty sure you already made this point earlier in the thread, or perhaps in some other thread.
We Marxist-Leninist do think that China is an Actually Existing Socialism. Whether Western propaganda uses the term to its advantage is not our concern. We don’t at all agree with these “informed people” on whether China is a good place to live. Those people get their understanding of China from Western propaganda.
I think your conceptualization of socialism is a utopian one, which Marxists reject. This is why Engels wrote Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Lenin wrote “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder.
Also, totalitarianism is a bullshit term created by Western propagandists in order to equivalate socialism and fascism. Hannah Arendt came from a petty bourgeois family and was a paid propagandist.
The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
If fact, almost all of the “Western left” was captured by the imperial core propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
From our own Western propaganda, you hear and credulously believe that Chinese workers have no say, and now the burden is on me to prove that they do have a say. If you really want to know, you’re welcome to look into it yourself. You might start with The East Is Still Red, which is short and provides a lot of references.
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It helps to learn about the subject you’re opining on. Here’s a book you can read that explains in detail how China is very much a socialist country https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red
And if China was capitalist as people like you argue, then we’d expect China to follow the development path of actual capitalist countries.
I’m not spending 25 dollars to win an internet argument but I would consider reading it if you have a free way. But from my experience debating you previously, you have a tendency to post sources that do not support your claims at all, and often contradict them.
China is following the essentially the same development path as other capitalist countries so I’m not sure what you mean by this. In recent years it has become increasingly nationalistic, imperialist, expansionist, and staggering wealth inequality continues to develop and entrench. Barring a real bottom-up movement for equality I expect these types of governments to gradually slide towards fascism.
Removed by mod
If you can’t figure out how to get the book for free on your own then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe ask your friends to teach you what bittorrent is. There are however plenty of other free resources explaining how Chinese system works. It’s interesting that you decided to slander me here though. It suggests to me that you’re not interested in having an constructive discussion.
Nevertheless, I’ll address your misinformed claims for other people reading the thread. If China was following the same path as other capitalist countries than it would look like India or countries in Latin America today where standard of living isn’t improving for workers in any meaningful way. China is pretty much the only developing nation where the standard of living is rapidly improving for the majority. This does not happen in any capitalist country. Here are a few concrete examples of what I’m talking about.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
I’m not slandering you, just expressing skepticism at your own interest in constructive conversation and explaining why I don’t value your book recommendation very highly.
As to the rest of this, it is again much too long to read in its entirety but it seems to come down to the same economic growth metrics that are used to justify neoliberal economics in every country. Yes, a small fraction of the wealth falls down to the poor and by some metrics this leaves them better off. This is not socialism in Western countries and it is not socialism in China. In fact, these are the same reasons people supported far right politicians like Trump or Hitler. If we concentrate power in the hands of the people who know better, they will grow the whole economy and we will all get richer, right? It doesn’t matter if the ruling class seizes most of the wealth and power, now you can buy two toys for your kids instead of one!
The global definition of poverty is an especially misleading metric since it doesn’t actually measure people’s material conditions, just “dollars per day” which is often only tangentially related to actual well-being. See this paper for more information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
Notably:
But even if conditions did improve during some periods, none of this means there isn’t a better economic system, nor does it make any country where conditions improve socialist. There have been periods of economic improvement in many capitalist countries, partly because pure capitalism is extremely difficult to implement and maintain, so most capitalist countries do allow for some socialist practices to exist. Again, socialism means proletarian control of the means of production, something that no one in these conversations has even attempted to argue is happening in China. Workers in China, like workers in all capitalist countries, have very little say over their own working conditions and economic decision making. This is extremely obvious from the fact that corporate structures in China are very similar to elsewhere in the world; a structure that is incompatible with socialism.
TLDR you can’t be bothered to read things that contradict your narrative, and just cherry pick things that fit it. I’m not going to bother arguing with you further since it’s about as productive as banging ones head against a wall. You keep on believing whatever nonsense you want.
Funny because I was going to say the same thing. Keep on believing imperialist propaganda, I’m sure communism will arrive any day now. Just need to force capitalism on a few more generations.
Message me if you want a copy, I can get the epub for you. It’s really good.
Here you go https://archive.org/details/the-east-is-still-red-chinese-socialism-in-the-21st-century
While I appreciate you going through the trouble of finding this, it kind of misses the point. Have you read this book? Is it an honest examination of the Chinese economic system? Is it acknowledged by the wider community (and not just Leninist and Chinese apologists) to be a serious work that is based on reality and not propaganda? I don’t have enough faith in the other user to read something this long solely on their recommendation.
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