A question on China

[BayCityProgressive]

this is not meant as a pro or anti China thread. I just had a simple question. Why do so many people say China is transitioning to capitalism? Yes,they have made reforms to bring in new technology and goods they cannot produce themselves. However all ten points in the Communist manifesto are still followed in China. there is strong rent control and the people are housed. The banks are nationalized. Much major industry is still nationalized (which is not a requirement according to the Communist manifesto) and many local governments have co-ops and local control of factories. Transportation is nationalized. Business is heavily regulated and the state still owns the property these foreign companies sit on. there is still a planned economy. The Communist manifesto (much to my surprise) does not call for national healthcare or nationalization of all business and private property in its 10 point economic program. This ten point program is meant to be the starting point for a socialist state followed by more reforms and nationalization. In my view countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and China are only allowing captial into their countries because they skipped an obvious step on the road to communism. Capitalism. Marx was a huge supporter of Free Trade because he believed you needed fuedal societies to become capitalist before they could become socialist. Also, Marx believed int he early staged of socialism that the proletariat could use segments of the ruling class to their advantage because some would profit from a partially socialized economy. A divide and conquer approach. I think China is only using the US for it's own needs at the current time. I don't think they are making any real transition. Also, they are trying to get the world to side with them now. they have given lots of third world debt cancellations as of late. What does everyone else think of this situation?

[HereSince1628]

1. At street level, it is capitalism on steroids

I visited China in June. The look on the streets was thriving retail, and in the near suburbs of many businesses there were new, occupied industrial parks.

There were also places, particularly rural places along the Yangtze where the government subsidized the population far beyong their productivity.

[Old and In the Way]

2. I'm been going there since the early 90's.

I totally agree. "Capitalism on steroids" is the operative phrase. It is fascinating....all of the steet level garage-type shops. One shop has Bridgeports milling parts...the next one is selling toilet paper...the next one is molding plastic, etc.etc.

People forget that China has been doing capitalism for 2000 years. Communism, while it did some good things early on in organizing the pheasents (it was an agririan society), ultmately, Mao and his gang turned the society on itself....sorta like what Bush is doing here now.

But these people are hustling to make a buck....very few people belong to the Party. The Party is letting capitalism drive the industrialization. Pretty much all of the state factories are gone.

[Maple]

3. Because it's capitalism with a dictatorship

Same as Hong Kong was for many many years.

Capitalism and democracy don't need to go together.

The 'communist party' now seeks out businesspeople, and encourages them to join.

China decided to do the opposite of Russia...Russia freed itself politically first...and their economy has been quite a mess as a result.

China freed itself economically first...politics may eventually follow....but slowly so things don't end up in the chaos Russia has experienced

[Old and In the Way]

5. Maybe that's true in the North around Beijing....

But most of the factory owners I've met in GuangDong Province are Hong Kong/Taiwanese people...none seem to keen in joining the Communist Party. Not to say that they don't have a lot of interaction with the local Party (permits, land-use, hiring, customs/taxes). Perhaps the domestic industries are different, but not the export factories I'm familiar with.

[Maple]

6. It's true everywhere

and I said the party is trying to encourage businesspeople to join the party...not that businesspeople were keen to do so.

The point being...no 'communist' party would want businesspeople in it.

China is no longer communist, and hasn't been for years.

It's certainly still a dictatorship...only they don't call him an emperor anymore.

[Old and In the Way]

7. They sure could use some coordination....

The sprawl and lack of planned growth is getting out of hand. The secondary road system is a mess in So. China as more and more cars are liscensed.

[Maple]

8. Not easy taking the

iron fist off...it can be a very disjointed affair.

They want to grow...and yet have clean air. Capitalize, and yet keep strict order...provide jobs for the masses, and yet have no dissent.

And of course that doesn't usually happen. They'll be lucky ...and very clever...if they can keep the explosions down to a dull roar.

[Old and In the Way]

11. Totally agree.

It's like a 15 year version of the industrial revolution all over again. The growth, in terms of population and building, is so explosive that I wonder what the ramifications will be 10-15 years down the road. They have a real tightrope to walk, growth vs. the environmental impact. To see mountain after mountain (3-4000'footer's) missing 1/2 their mass....it's pretty startling.

[Old and In the Way]

4. The cat is out of the bag.

No way will these people there head back to the communes. Ain't gonna happen. They are plugged into the world, for good and bad, and they want the same things we want. I have never met anyone who admits to being in the Party...must people there seem to have very little interest in Party politics....but they are all hustling to make a buck.

Interesting story. I'm 52. I was having a few beers one night with some people I know there. We were watching 'The Last Waltz' and I asked my friend what kind of music influenced him growing up (he's my age). He looked at me and laughed. He said they were so busy trying to find food to eat and keep from getting shot, there was no time for music and the arts. That put things in perspective.

[CHIMO]

9. It May Be

An irrelevant question.

If the people feel that they need to do something to survive and protect themselves from an evil empire one would expect that they would go down that route until things changed.

[newswolf56]

10. Knowing something about Chinese history...

I strongly suspect China is once again applying the principles of Sun Tzu (The Art of War) much as Lin Pao and Mao Ze Dong did to win the Chinese Revolution and Civil War.

One of these principles is to devise ways to use the enemy's greatest strengths against him. Hence Chinese "capitalism", which: (1)-avoids the economic errors that brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union; (2)-provides constant revenue to improve the conditions of the proletariat and the peasantry (especially the latter, some of whom -- due largely to their rural isolation -- were living in breathtakingly deprived conditions); (3)-provides constant revenue to build up the People's Liberation Army and the armed forces of Chinese allies (Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela etc.) against the threat of inevitable aggression, whether by the global capitalist oligarchy or by the burgeoning Islamic global caliphate that -- for now at least -- invariably serves the oligarchy's purposes; (4)-provides constant revenue to support the resurgence of Marxism elsewhere as the savagery of capitalism becomes ever more evident (an effort apparently now largely being directed at Russia in the form of agitation for a second Russian Revolution); (5)-provides access to revenue by which China -- playing capitalism's own game and using capitalist greed as a weapon -- can eventually force the global oligarchy to its knees: note in this context not only how China is now financing the huge (and ultimately ruinous) U.S. debt, but also Chinese efforts to buy U.S. corporations. The reason these efforts evoke such terror in the boardrooms of the oligarchy is the fear the Chinese will use their American possessions as socialist demonstration projects: fair wages, superior health care, workplace democracy of a degree increasingly unheard of in the ever-more-economically-tyrannized U.S., but ever more commonplace in socialist China.

Just as the OP stated, China remains a Marxist state; Sun Tzu merely provides the historical footnote that explains how China is going about the task of what Leon Trotsky labeled "permanent revolution." Not to belabor the point, but the Russians believed they could accomplish this ideologically, a belief profoundly shaped by their own intellectual history, while the Chinese -- who have thousands of years more collective experience at governance (the Russian state is only about 900 years old) -- recognized that revolution can come about only if ideology is economically supported. Hence the Chinese discarded Stalinism (but not Marxism itself) and now accommodate individual economic aspirations in a free-enterprise environment that -- like any predatory beast harnessed to human and humane purpose -- is nevertheless strictly leashed to keep it from running amok. (Note again the contrast to the U.S., where it becomes increasingly obvious the Bush Administration was put in office by the oligarchy specifically to restore capitalism to its Tyrannosauric worst, with the results we see not only in New Orleans but -- less vividly -- throughout the entire nation).

China's application of Sun Tzu's strategy has the additional advantage of operating under the cover provided by the capitalist oligarchy's innate and nearly infinite racism: the "little yellow inscrutables" (a term I once heard applied by a businessman who had attempted to deal with China) are regarded as scarcely better than savages -- non-Christian infidels at that -- and the oligarchy's estimate of Chinese capabilities is insultingly summed up in the term "Chinese fire-drill." Never mind the Chinese had the first successful empires on the planet -- the Hsia Dynasty reigned 4,000 years ago, older by half a millennium than the Minoan empire of Knossos; never mind the concept of the civil-service system (of which so many nations are justifiably proud) was one of the many innovations of Chinese governance that evolved from the works of Kung Fu Tse -- Confucius -- 2500 years ago; never mind that Taoism -- Tao Te Ching is Lao Tzu's record of the metaphysical principles of the Bronze Age and the Neolithic -- contains the planet's only spiritual guideposts that are truly compatible with all modern science including the Gaea Hypothesis: note in this context Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics.

The capitalist oligarchy ignores these truths at its greatest peril -- especially now as capitalism once again reveals the relentless savagery at its core: the savagery it concealed in terror after the Russian Revolution but is now again so evident not only in New Orleans but in all Bush's policies -- outsourcing, downsizing, pension-looting, methodical destruction of the social safety net, skyrocketing prices and (again precisely as it was done to the survivors of New Orleans) the malicious, forcible reduction of wages specifically to facilitate the oligarchy's obscene profiteering and thus the further concentration of wealth. Contrast the horrors of New Orleans and the rage evoked by its aftermath with China's recent evacuation of nearly 900,000 persons -- complete with their pets and livestock -- from the path of a Category IV typhoon. Indeed I believe the oligarchy's viciously greedy obliviousness to the lesson implicit in the ever-more-antithetical realities of global capitalism will be the oligarchy's ultimate downfall. Alas, given my age, I doubt I will live to see it, nor to see the truly democratic United States that -- quite possibly with Chinese help -- might then arise from the ashes. But do not doubt for a minute the now-proven fact that a Marxist nation is able to fully care for its disaster-displaced persons -- while the crown jewel of global capitalism heartlessly abandons its own such people to drowning, starvation, disorder and disease -- has already conveyed a message that is a modern-day equivalent of "the shot fired round the world."

[Old and In the Way]

13. Extremely thoughtful post.

Thanks for sharing. A country's values are reflected in it's leadership...we're in big trouble when we value and promote greed, hate, hubris, incompetence, hypocrisy, arrogance, and sloth rather than honesty, cooperation, sharing, peace, compassion, and humility. Unless we take back our government soon...this country is history. Sad thing is, the "USA-USA-USA" will never see it coming.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. I was there fifteen years ago, and this was what I saw:

1) No more rural communes. Lots of private farming and even old communes being turned into farms for profit.

2) No more Maoist egalitarianism. Unlike the Maoist system, where there was affirmative action for peasants, the educational system is now highly unequal, with the urban rich getting a fine education and the rural poor sitting in schools with dirt floors.

3) No more social safety net. No more "barefoot doctors."

4) Entrepreneurship on steroids. Street markets all over the place. People literally chasing our van with their goods for sale.

5) People leaving state industries and state-sponsored jobs because of low pay. The cab driver who took us around Beijing on one of our free days earned as much for that day as the professors earned in a month at the school where we were housed.

6) Students at all three universities we visited complaining about being required to study Marxism, even though neither they nor the professors believed in it.

7) Large classes of fabulously wealthy, even larger, yea massive classes of desperately poor.

You can have capitalism without democracy. Just because a country is undemocratic and has a horrible human rights record doesn't mean that it's Communist.

[Old and In the Way]

14. The political "Communist" upperclass in China shares a lot in

common with the political "Conservative" class here. Both use government to enrich themselves while perserving the status quo to maintain their exclusionary position in society.

[newswolf56]

15. What you describe sounds more like South Korea eight years after...

constant warfare stopped, not at all like the China I heard about from Britishers who had visited there during the 1950s and 1960. I have never been there myself, but read extensively about it during the '60s and early '70s. Too -- and with all due respect -- the Chinese social safety net cannot have been completely obliterated (as ours has been), else the Chinese would not have been able to evacuate as they did for the typhoon -- a story widely reported by the world press.

Moreover, the Chinese think generations ahead -- and often with the breathtaking cunning acquired by thousands of years of governance. Who is to say the conditions you describe have not been allowed specifically to facilitate future reforms? And the comparative human-rights records of one ideology versus another mean absolutely nothing to those who are starving and dying. All that matters is which army provides adequate food and medical care: a critical lesson of Vietnam too many Americans have yet to learn.

As far as capitalism is concerned, its record (past and present) proves unequivocally there is no more relentlessly savage "ism" in human history. Until now, that truth was most clearly expressed by fascism in Spain and Italy and by Nazism, which despite the deliberately misleading "socialist" in its name was ultimately the manifest will of the German oligarchy: Krupp, Farben, etc. But from the grossly limited American perspective, the malevolence of capitalism was obscured by the New Deal, when -- terrified by the Russian Revolution -- the American oligarchy opted to share its wealth and so deliberately obscure the core truth of class struggle. But now, specifically because capitalism believes it has triumphed forever, it no longer bothers to conceal its innately murderous greed. Thus I believe we are witnessing, in the American expressions of the New World Order, the unveiling of something as bad (if not worse) than Nazism: New Orleans, I fear, is just the beginning. And in that context, China -- as wretched as conditions there might be -- could easily become a beacon of hope simply because, like Cuba, it cares enough to rescue its people from natural disaster.