- 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/
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.