A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.
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.
I get that you’re having a bit of fun. On a separate branch here, I make a similar point.
What people argue about is how much of one makes it “x.” They can seldom say it’s not capitalist, socialist or even communist.
We quibble over which side of a line it lands. And googling this lead to about a 50/50 split between capitalist and socialist.
I didn’t pull the idea that they’re capitalist out of my ass.
And all of the side stuff is people completely missing the article. It’s pedantic and cheap intellectual points and so rarely thoughtful or insightful.
Is lemmy usually this wannabe edgelord?
Aren’t all the reddit expats intentionally edgy by leaving reddit? You’ve got the cream on top.
Highly recommend this book to understand how China actually works https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red