- Why does China, a socialist country, have mega corporations like Tencent and Bytedance? Are they collectively owned by syndicates or unions? If this is a transitionary phase to socialism, can we trust China to actually enforce Socialism after this stage ends?
- Child Labor in factories: Myth or Fact? I have a Chinese friend who said he personally never worked as a child in China, but obviously if this was true not every single kid would have worked in a factory.
- Surveillance and Social Credit: are these myths, or are they true? Why would China go so far to implement these systems, surely it’d be far too costly and burdensome for whatever they’d gain from that.
- Uighur Muslim genocide: Is this true?
Thank you to anyone who answers, and if you do please cite sources so I can look further into China. I really appreciate it.
edit: I was going to ask about Tiananmen Square, but as it turns out that literally just didn’t happen. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
https://leohezhao.medium.com/notes-for-30th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-incident-f098ef6efbc2
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
For your question #1, I would highly recommend you to watch the following video without skipping. It goes into great depths.
- Combination of maintaining a financial incentive for the global bourgeoisie to protect China and oppose things that would harm it because it is in their financial interests to do so, vs a centrally planned economy with publicly owned SOEs. 60% of the Chinese economy is state owned, the rest is there to ensure that the world doesn’t do to them what happened to the Soviet Union.
- Myth in the way the media and gossip portrays it. Are there probably a handful of instances slipping through cracks? Probably. They’re punished severely.
- It’s a credit system. Surveillance could feasibly exist in the form of centralisation of all things in the anything app they use, with everything going through one app that’s an easy point of “we know you did X and when”. GCHQ and NSA are doing this too though and I suspect far worse.
- Completely false. This takes hours to debunk though, lots of that information is here - But I’m also willing to just straight up answer direct questions about specific accusations, events, etc, if reading a book’s worth of information in one sitting isn’t your jam and conversational back and forth works better. I know there’s A LOT of it. TL;DR: Lots of terrorism resulted in a re-education program. Terrorism stopped. US no longer had reason to be in Afghanistan as a result of it.
What about the accusations of destruction of mosques?
China has actually built thousands of new mosques in the past decade or two
Those accusations all ultimately source from the ASPI, which takes a large chunk of its funding from American defense contractors.
A lot of it is also verifiably false from more recent publically available information. Notice how most of the mosque demolition allegations stopped around 2020? Its because there’s now enough openly available evidence go the contrary that it’s now embarrassing.
Plus, just because some mosques are demolished does not mean evidence of persecution. Xinjiang is following the general trend of urbanization. When hundreds of thousands of people move from villages or smaller cities into large cities, new mosques are built and old mosques are converted or torn down.
Thanks. That is what I figured. It’s insane how much American propaganda comes up on this topic, all sourced to think tanks with names like The Society for the Preservation of Freedom
a better place to ask may be lemmygrad.ml btw
It’s a much more academic culture there than here
i appreciate the suggestion but i have had many in-depth responses about this topic
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Everybody can likely answer these better than I can but I’ll give you a rare answer for 1. that I hardly see for some reason
Among many reasons, one of the most important ones is that China needed to reform their markets from wholly state owned to allow private property, which of course is why there’s megacorps right now
The reason is that the US (and thus, the entire world by extension) had sanctioned China when all their industries were still state owned. China was cut off from trading with the entire world and even when they had a famine, the US would not let up sanctions or trade food with them
Thus, Deng reformed markets and allowed foreign capitalists to invest money in the country and exploit Chinese labour so that they could in exchange and acquire goods, resources, and knowledge from the rest of the world
If you wish to read more about this from an academic standpoint, the USSR also did something similar
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndY1294mVDk
Simple as.
https://hexbear.net/post/281955?scrollToComments=false
Is a 10 lecture series about Chinese development, it is a bit slow, but gives a good overview.
When you add Mao, Deng and Xi thought and Socialism with Chinese characteristics you have a very good foundation. However a couple of books about history would be relevant, too.
thank you, i will be watching this
I see a lot of people giving really good answers. What I am not seeing is people giving bad answers. Which is where I come in.
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China has companies and a business sector to take money from the west. They are seizing the means of production. At every step they have invested in improving the lives of their people with that money. There is no compelling reason to think that will stop. While it isn’t a given to trust them. Too soon to tell. They have done far better than any standard we could create to judge them by.
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China has like 4 times the number of people we do. For various reasons it is more accurate to divide population by like six in your head when you think about populations in China. In that way we see China has a lower per capida rate of child labor than the US. Given that China is about as poor as Mexico it is really astounding how well they have done at eradicating that problem
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Mostly a myth. We have social credit here in America that determins much more than their system does there. In some states here in the US is you ever grew the wrong kinda flower you can never vote again, or get basic food aid, or most jobs.
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False and wildly so. They had a bunch of terrorist attacks from a region that was underfunded. They went out of their way to not hurt anyone and just make the place nicer so the people wouldn’t wanna do attacks anymore. Which, should he noted, are people we paid to do attacks there. Our defence department has said that openly. So that is our government mad all the terrorists we trained are not doing the terrorism we paid them to do.
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Listen i think you should think twice before asking random internet Marxists about options on China but here’s a better question I’ll pose are you deferring real serious inquiry into China as a way to not have to deal immediate task at hand where you live.
This aside you need to understand the history of the left in the last 70 years your gonna find three or four types of leftists in this thread,
Western Dengists that aren’t directly connected to the Chinese socalist project they belive China is a socialist country and that you should generally trust the plan, some of them are trying to fuse mmt with Marxism.
Marcyites a type of trotskyist that is so soviet defencist they are pro stalin, they do decent interestingly enough from trotskis party in America rather indirectly, some of them are pro China for soviet nep reasons
ML(stalinist) a form of leninism that flows from the same vein as trotskyist Leninism, both sects claim to be the pure forn of leninism but is not historically related to the soviet government or its various Marxist lenists traditions they typically will hold mixed right and left opposition options in the ml tradition up until the purges. Sometimes pro China for nep reasons
Something to note very important to know the left has a established history since the 1920s of talking foreign policy and focusing on staning other countries when their political project is in crisis yet again read Christopher lashs agony of the American left. It ls almost critical you understand this before picking sides in any ideological debate around China.
christopher lasch? lmao are you fuckin joking?
He was a leftist at one point and transitioned to the right in 88 his works on leftistism are still useful, I read everyone we shouldn’t just assume we know everything or that Marxism is the only heuristic worth using, you should know this as a leftist. So it goes lmao are you fucking joking? I find this unserious we should be reading everyone and develop a Critical understanding and pull what is useful from them into our huertistic. I wonder who said ruthless criticism of all that exists. The leftists that don’t know there own history is a critical mistake.
The first point is chiefly a matter of faith, first of all saying china isn’t socialist because it’s not a perfect communist utopia where everything is run collectively is extremely silly, effectively you’re saying NO country can currently be socialist because that sort of economic arraignment isn’t politically sustainable, you’ll just get invaded and perish if you don’t accommodate for capital. On the other hand as to whether china will change this economic arraignment when it’s geopolitically more favorable, or if it will itself push to create that geopolitical situation in the future, that’s what actually is worth talking about.
My take on it is that you can be informed about china and strive to understand it, you can look at reasons to think it will change the world and reasons to think it won’t, but ultimately, and especially if you don’t even speak chinese, you don’t know anything about what the future leaders of the CPC will do, and you don’t know whether the chinese working class will fight push these leaders in a socialist direction or whether it will deactivate itself as the western working class has. Statements by the CPC on their socialist orientation are not worthless, and I personally have no trouble believing that president Xi understands his country has performing a “Long NEP” that will lead to socialism, but he won’t be around forever and socialism might not even mean to him what it means to me, and besides that shit can change. In the past few years we’ve seen the chinese government reassert itself against national capitalists and it’s easy to read this as accelerating a chinese transition to socialism, but on the other side of the coin the government and Xi himself ARE continuing to liberalize the economy to try to attract foreign capital (think of the China’s Vice-Premier Liu He at the world economic forum this year to say “China is back”), so these recent reassertion of state power read more to me like Xi trying to keep the socialism with chinese characteristics system ON RAILS and preventing it from derailing to the right, to the spectator they might look like zig-zags but to the trained eye it’s a straight line, it’s maintaining the system.
That is all to say that, as things are NOW most people’s decision as to whether to believe china is socialist or not is a matter of faith, the information they have is not sufficient to truly know, but it’s enough to for them to decide whether they believe in china or not. And this is not exactly a criticism because, like I said, it’s near impossible to actually know for real.
But politically these 2 stances are not equivalent, generally the “china socialist” internet leftists have more and better information than the “no socialist” leftists, who don’t feel the need to explain their stance besides saying “it’s not communist utopia right now and also it has bad things”. And personally I side with the former usually.
On a final note, for the most part, politically it doesn’t fucking matter all that much whether china is socialist, if it IS then yeah fight against the anti-china hate because you’re defending a socialist state but even if it ISN’T then guess what you should still push back on brainless anti-china propaganda because it’s fucking leading us into a war with them (and also if you’re in a small-medium size country, like myself in Portugal for example, even if China isn’t socialist they showed that if your socialist party takes over China will probably not sanction you to hell like America and might even support you, unless you support chinese separatism or something).
If you’re a communist your goal isn’t just to defend communist states it’s also to take power, and that means participating in working class politics, and for that the china question doesn’t matter, the only reason why this is an issue that people obsess about is that if you’ve resigned yourself to NOT do anything in your own country, to NOT join parties or working class organizations because they’re “reformist” or “FBICIA” or whatever the fuck, to NOT meet people where they are and help them fight for their interests, then all you can do is cheerlead online, and for that yeah it’s actually EXTREMELY important to decide whether you cheerlead for the last holdout of the big 20th century socialist states or for some random anarchists in Rojava.
As to your second question the presence of child labour in china wouldn’t shock me but I have trouble believing it doesn’t happen against the will of the central government (probably happens with the consent of corrupt local governments).
And your third and fourth questions are exaggerations of real things, they’re not based on literally nothing but exaggerations are mixed with so many lies that one might as well say that they are.
It depends on how you use the terms ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’. If you equivocate with either of these terms them it becomes unclear what you’re talking about. People often equivocate in these discussions between meaning ‘is the society/economy socialist/communist’ and ‘are the CPC ideologically communist’.
By the very definitions of communist and socialist economies, China is not a socialist, let alone a communist society, nor do they claim to be either, as the mode of production is not socialist, as the means of production are not directly under the socialized, democratic control of the proletariat. The base is not socialist.
Superstructurally it is a different issue, though related, because to the extent that a communist or socialist superstructure exists is very much a product of the far more radical Maoist era. Whether they CPC, or members of it, are ideologically communist or socialist is another, dinstinct but closely related (due to the fact that we should try classify the socio-economic mode of production in terms of the structure of the base, superstructure, and the nature of their dialectical relation to eachother) question to the economic one. An issue with being able to know this is that the internal workings of the CPC are very opaque. Here it perhaps becomes closer to a matter of faith, though reducing it to that is a bit facile imo. The only indication we can possibly be have are the actual externally visible economic, social and foreign policies of the current CPC, in which case it is undeniably a very mixed bag (especially when it comes to foreign policy; funding both the Palestian authority and the Israeli IDF is not socialistic by any stretch of the imagination, not matter how far certain people might want to desperately stretch their interpretation of it through mental gymnastics whereby they’re somehow playing both sides in a historically progressive way; if China started actively supporting revolutionary movements and foreign leftists more seriously then people on this site who otherwise forgive their policy through real-politik interpreted as historically progressive foreign policy would champion it, but you can’t have it both ways).
You can also, however, see a large shift in the ideology of Chinese society. Take economics departments for instance: they are still dominated by Neoclassical economics, which is deeply bizarre for a society claiming to be guided by Marxism, given that the former is a form of economic though which naturalizes capitalist relations and thus acts as a form of mystification with respect to the actual workings of the economy.
Overall I really don’t think that anyone outside the higher levels of the CPC really has much of an idea whether or not the country is heading towards a real socialist transition. It’s also important to underline the fact that simply because it might be transitioning away from what we have historically meant or understood by capitalism, does not necessarily mean that it is transitioning to socialism. To know that, you have to actually look at the transformations at the level of its socio-economic and political structures and institutions, and how people are incentivized to behave economically. You get conflicting reports and opinions from Chinese people themselves, which is, in and of itself, possible evidence that the country does not have a fully radical, socialistic or communist form of democracy, if there is huge difference of opinion between alot of people from the country as to what the actual long-term plan economic plan of the CPC is.
All of this if ofc independent of the necessity to combat Sinophobia and to deconstruct anti-Chinese propaganda, and also for the purposes of promoting the idea that multipolarism is preferable and that anti-imperialism (which today is largely, but not entirely, American and western European) should be combated as the most serious form of capitalist exploitation and the most serious political obstacle to radical politics, but we should not be making ourselves look stupid or insane by slipping from that to having an overly rosy view of what China has become. People are not stupid. They can tell often tell when that slip occurs and it delegitimizes the serious part of what we say about China in their eyes. So it’s not even good politics, and practically counterproductive.
I’d also add that Rojova is not really anarchist, no more so that the Zapatistas.
Whether China is socialist or not is a different question from whether China is capitalist or not. China has not experienced any meaningful boom-bust cycle. This is very strange for a country that many people allege is capitalist. It certainly isn’t a capitalist society if we understand a capitalist society to be a society with a capitalist base and a capitalist superstructure that reinforces one another through a dialectical relationship.
I totally agree. A society can, in principle, transition from capitalist to another form of class society without going through socialism, and there’s nothing prevented an already imperfect attempt at socialist construction in adverse conditions from transitioning to a form of class society that is not capitalism, although as Russia shows it can also transition to capitalism. As East Germany showed, you can transition from capitalism, through fascistic capitalism, through imperfect but in many mays very movingly impressive attempts at socialist construction, back to capitalism (albeit in neoliberal form). As I mentioned in my other comment in this thread, they don’t have boom-bust cycles which we expect to be necessary to any capitalist economy (and which Marx establishes rigorousless in Capital. It’s work pointing out that while, as a single, circularly unified economy, I dont think we can call the mode of production in place there ‘capitalist’, this doesn’t mean that at the local level, we might not find local economies that seem to function capitalistically, at least in the short-term, due to the presence of certain economic institutions that form the sociological relations of the capitalist base, namely the existence of the social relation of capital, private property, capitalists, and workers. So at the micro-level we can see capitalistic socio-economic situations but at the macro-level I don’t think this is the case, as evidenced by the lack of traditional business cycles, at least of the short-to-medium-lengh wave variety. Ofc, microeconomics if practically meaningless without macroeconomics (as the classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo, as well as Marx and Keynes, realised).
Ofc, there were limited forms of capitalistic behaviours in late feudal societies among the burghers, merchants and bankers. The emergence and development of the economic institutions, social relations and political conditions leading to capitalism as a mode of production in which a certain kind of economic behaviour is predominates, was a gradual process leading to certain politically revolutionary situations.
On the relation of the superstructure to the base structure: if we are going to use this to classify a mode of production, then this raises again my point that Chinese society is different to capitalist societies as those in the rest of the world have lived them, or to the Eastern Bloc or Maoist, (early) Vietnamese, Cuban or North Korean societies. Firstly the base is organized differently; secondly the superstructure has a different relation to said base, including to the capitalistic parts of the base, compared to the relationship between the western capitalist state and its capitalist base.
I also don’t really think it normally makes sense to describe China as state capitalist, pending whatever anyone might happen to mean by this term, which is often looks like it gets used in many different senses. If one meant that the state essentially acts a single large corporation, then that implies that it is concerned with surplus-value maximization in the form of profit-maximization, and would directly or indirectly control commodity production with that purpose in mind. In one sense the party is obviously concerned with the production of profit in the economy. They are connected to international and localized national capitalism in that sense. But that does not imply that that is the be-all and end-all of their economic policy. Indeed it seems like it isn’t in the long-term. The party are not a capitalist class in their running of the state, and have apparently made it clear that political considerations come before profit-maximization. In any case, the behaviour of the Chinese state is not reducible to the behaviour one would predict of the entire economy or a large and dominant section of the commanding heights of the economy run as a single nationalized firm,.
Honestly I think that fleshing out in rigorous politico-economic terms the nature of the contemporary Chinese economy should be a pretty imperative question for Marxists intellectuals to answer. Suppose, for example, that a revolutionary situation develops in contemporary China. If we do not understand the politcal-economy of China we are not going to be able to properly understand how, why, or when such a revolutionary situation could be expected to occur. Obviously this is easier said that done and it would require spending serious time in China, but I’m still relatively unaware of relevant theory on the topic that I’ve found compelling. The CPC’s characterizations of ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ are also not enough for me imo.
Yes, this is broadly the conclusion I have with China. On a micro level, your average Chinese worker isn’t experiencing a society that’s that much different from a capitalist one, but on a macro level, the economic characteristic of China isn’t remotely similar to what-should-be similar countries like India or Indonesia at all. I mostly chalk it up to how a nascent stage of socialism would actually look like just like how Italian city-states during the Renaissance is how a nascent stage of capitalism looks like. And I know many people wouldn’t consider the Republic of Venice to be a capitalist state.
It’s just natural for people to disagree where the cutoff point is. Take England. Everyone agrees 18th century England was capitalist and 11th century England under William the Conqueror was feudal, but people will disagree on where to exactly draw the line in this 7 century timespan. And I think most people would realize going from feudalism to capitalism isn’t an instantaneous process, so there’s at least two lines, one line where before it is definitely feudalism and one line where after it is definitely capitalism with the time span enclosed by the two lines to be where the magic happens. So now, instead of arguing over a line, there’s now 2+ lines to bicker over. And this isn’t even going over a truth in dialectics where everything is constantly in motion so feudalism and capitalism themselves are processes going from one one place to another. The genius of the NEP is Lenin understanding capitalism is just the transitional phase from feudalism to socialism, and there’s nothing stopping a vanguard party or any other form of org to oversee this transitional phase and ensure it isn’t anything more than a transitional phase.
I much enjoyed reading your reply, thank you.
A question I have is parallel to it though.
I’m in the middle of reading Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng, which I think is well regarded but he doesn’t go into the cultural revolution as much as I would like, in another comment in this post you talk about the Deng’s reforms coming after “a period of great socialistic economic development”, at the point where I’m at is Mao already rehabilitated Deng and Deng is wielding power again but Vogel still characterizes the pre-reform era has very backward, do you have anything I can read on the cultural revolution to the pre-reform era’s economic achievements?
I’ve watched this interview with Dongping Han last year which I intend to rewatch
The Vogel biography is well worth reading imo, although it’s important to bear in mind that’s it’s very much not impartial, as Vogel is a liberal who sees Deng’s reforms as essentially a pragmatic move towards the intrinsic pragmatic wisdom of capitalism and liberalism, which is a great simplification.
To say that China had greatly developed is not to say that there was not poverty, or that it didn’t have a great way to go. But it is important to note the fact that an industrial revolution did take place during the Maoist period, and that the rate of this industrial development compares favorably to cases as dramatic as those of German and Japan in the 19th century. It is also important to recognise the massive achievements in terms of education, literacy, scientific and technological development, healthcare, life expectancy, and the elimination or radical reduction in the level of disease. Recall that China was an economically and exhausted ruined country with a life expectancy of 30 and low levels of literacy in 1949 (which is not actually that long ago, everything considered). They did receive important aid from the Soviets, but this was limited and not for an immense length of time. They also achieved this without engaging in imperialism.
Take a look at my other post in this thread where I mention Sen and several international health and development orgs on Maoist China’s achievements.
Why does China, a socialist country, have mega corporations like Tencent and Bytedance? Are they collectively owned by syndicates or unions? If this is a transitionary phase to socialism, can we trust China to actually enforce Socialism after this stage ends?
The “capitalist roaders” won as Deng and his allies came into power. They were Marxist, but wanted to approach China’s development very differently - by allowing markets, i.e. a form of market socialism - and doing two mutually-reinforcing things:
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Seek (qualified) foreign investment and build up China’s productive forces, which is to say, build up heavy industry, light industry, services, etc, the whole shebang.
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Do this at the expense of their own exploitation at the hands of imperialism. Accept the exploited country arrangement, but on their terms. Create an export economy, but one of commodities not raw materials. Depress wages (to an extent), depress exchange rates.
This resulted in an entanglement as well, a defensive strategy against imperialists. It is not easy for, for example, the US to cut off China, because it exported most of its manufacturing base to China, and China took over most new manufacturing since.
There’s plenty to criticize (carefully!) on this path, but one thing is for sure: China’s model coincides with its continued existence, which is more than you can say of, for example, the USSR. It is also in a strong position, having developed massively and lifted a billion people out of poverty in the last few decades.
To go over your other questions:
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China’s government owns or co-manages many companies, usually when they exceed a certain size. Some are co-ops, with government mandates. Many are also private companies operating in special economic zones, i.e. market zones. China will also heavily regulate many industries.
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The question of when something is Real Socialism ™ should be fuzzier, imo. There are many different socialist projects taking different approaches to gaining and wielding the power of the working class and we should (critically) support all of them. China is going in a good direction and has a seemingly valid strategy.
Child Labor in factories: Myth or Fact? I have a Chinese friend who said he personally never worked as a child in China, but obviously if this was true not every single kid would have worked in a factory.
Generally a myth. It’s a real, large, diverse country, but has made huge strides to create an education-filled childhood for its people.
Surveillance and Social Credit: are these myths, or are they true? Why would China go so far to implement these systems, surely it’d be far too costly and burdensome for whatever they’d gain from that.
Outdoor surveillance is no worse than London. It’s a myth in that it’s ridiculously exaggerated and not fairly compared to surveillance in the countries that make anti-China propaganda.
Internet surveillance is probably about the same as well, but China’s government acts on it more often. Not a ton more, but they do look out for various claims/behaviors and will take action in some circumstances.
Social credit is largely a myth. It’s basically the same as a credit score.
Uighur Muslim genocide: Is this true?
No. Liberals are doing an old trope of genocidal trivislization by putting this in the same category as the holocaust. Happy to go into a critical look of what’s happening, but the dominant western narrative is inventive and exsggerative.
China’s model coincides with its continued existence, which is more than you can say of, for example, the USSR.
To be fair, the USSR abandoned the Stalinist model as early as 1955, which sealed the fate of its inevitable downfall.
Khrushchev’s economic model of abandoning the financial system set up under Stalin led to the sovereign debt default in 1957, the excuse being “the government can’t afford to pay back the exponential growth of debt owed”. The whole point of national debt is for it to keep growing so that people have income to spend and to drive the local economy, because the state that prints its own currency can never run out of money. This was Khrushchev succumbing to liberal (neoclassical) conception of monetary theory and the start of food/goods shortage era in the USSR.
Khrushchev also had a weird fascination with American consumerism and vowed to compete with the American light industries using state planning. This led to the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of artels - cooperative enterprises producing a vast variety of consumer goods that had existed since the times of Tsarist Russia and were massive expanded and flourishing under Stalin’s USSR, and their consolidation into state planned industry doomed the Soviet economy to fail. State planning was meant for capital-intensive investment such as heavy industries and cutting edge R&D, not for producing furnitures and clothing.
It needs to be said that the USSR under Stalin had the highest and most rapid economic growth of any country in the history of humanity (a feat that will likely never be repeated again) - and they did it without relying on foreign capital investment or lowering the labor wages, maintaining its working conditions on par with Western Europe, keeping pensions and social safety nets intact, restored its economy to pre-war era within 5 years after WWII after losing 27 million people, all the while being sanctioned by the entire prosperous Western capitalist world.
China simply could not have done that with its huge population. They had to participate fully in the neoliberal model, driving the wages down and using its cheap labor to serve as the world’s factory for the American/European consumerism in order to attract foreign investment and build up the national wealth/capital accumulation. And all this was only made possible because America desperately needed to de-industrialize to crush the growing labor movements at home during the crises of 1970s.
The trajectories are different for both the USSR and China because of the differences in the historical development of their respective economic conditions. One simply cannot copy the other and make it work.
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