1. 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?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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/

  • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.