Is China Socialist

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Wait there are socialists in China still?

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” -Karl Marx

If you think socialism or communism is just going to the wikipedia page and treating the characteristics listed there as a checklist on a scorecard, then you have some more reading and some more growth to go through.

Communism, or at least Marxism, is about understanding the material conditions of the world and creating an actionable theory of change which can succeed in changing the world and successfully advance our class interests.

Or in other words, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

If you look at China and you're confused about how they could be socialist, and you have objections like, "Wait, but they don't have public ownership of industries, the workers don't own the means of production, they still have private enterprise," those are all understandable. I can take another post to explain the rationale behind Chinese socialism and why those decisions are rational responses to the material conditions they are addressing which serve to advance the class interests of the working class despite also introducing their own contradictions. But for this post what I want to highlight is the fact that the policy prescriptions and plans of action that are suggested in works like "The Communist Manifesto" are plans developed with the European context in mind.

In fact, the general check list for "This is what communists should do" that comes from the Communist Manifesto even comes with this caveat acknowledging that this is only applicable to the conditions of the developed world.

"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable..."

You can only organize the workers, march on the factories, and seize the means of production and start employing them to satisfy your communal interests instead of the interests of the capitalist class if you already have developed industry. The slogan "Seize the means of production" is completely nonsensical in the Chinese context. When China emerged victorious from its revolutionary struggle in the 1950s, it had just ended a century of colonial occupation, during which time all of their natural resources and labor had been robbed from them at gunpoint and used to develop the colonial powers instead of their homeland.

So you have a country that is starting out with absolutely nothing. Over 90% of the country is peasant farmers, with the vast majority of them still carrying out the arduous work of tending to the land with hand tools. These conditions were so brutal that before the revolution the average life expectancy was only around 30 years.

So you're setting off on the path of socialist construction, and if you want to advance the class interests of the working class you need to be able to build up the advanced industry that is capable of providing everyone with a decent standard of life. Your options are:

a) stubbornly try to build an advanced economy from sticks and stones

or

b) implement some mechanism of exchange to gain access to the means of developing an advanced economy, giving you access to important, labor saving tools and technologies that dramatically reduce the amount of toil needed for that development.

If you choose b, your options for that mechanism of exchange in current conditions are:

a) markets

or

b) war and conquest, where you rightfully claim that capital by force as reparations for a century of brutal exploitation

Let me know which of these options you would choose, and if you're interested in discussing this topic further, let me know!

Genuine question, I’d really like to hear what you think about the Chinese governments treatment of citizens throughout its attempts and successes to reduce class disparities. Means to an end I guess is what I’m asking?

Also as I look at it there is a third option besides war and market that China is taking. The South China Sea expansion, and the predatory loans to developing nations, or ownership by stealth. Does subjugating ‘other’ (non-Chinese) lands and people prevent it from claiming any credibility in a socialist agenda?

Sorry if this isn’t clear it’s late and I’m tired and I knew I’d never come back

Sure, I'd be glad to address these issues.

Personally, I'm persuaded by the Marxist theory of change. This is a theory of change that doesn't prescribe a course of action, but rather is a process of understanding reality by studying the contradictions between opposing forces, and using that analysis to put into practice a plan of action that uses those contradictions as the motive force. This is a scientific process, which means all of your theory must be tested against reality by putting it into practice.

What this does mean is that sometimes you make mistakes or errors in your analysis, and this can lead to serious errors and mistakes in your practice. This doesn't make something not Marxist, however. You only become anti-Marxist if you make mistakes and then refuse to correct them. In other words, if you test your practice against reality and reality shows you to be wrong, you must adapt. My criteria for judging a socialist project is not that they make no mistakes, but they constantly adapt to their changing material conditions and that they address mistakes where they arise.

Incidents like the Great Leap Forward are an example of such mistakes. It arose for an ultra-leftist position and a desire to leap ahead and immediately build up the advanced industry needed to secure a high standard of living for all, but this plan was too optimistic given the current material conditions. Agricultural development suffered as a result of this focus on industrial development, and they were left under-prepared when droughts hit and the result was widespread starvation. However, it would be wrong to use this incident as evidence of some innate characteristic of Chinese socialism, because it is an error that is well recognized by the party, much study has been done on these mistakes and how to avoid them, and it is an incident which has not been repeated.

With all of that said, lets begin discussing the market reforms of the Deng period, what contradictions they were responding to, and what contradictions they introduced as a result.

We've established that China has a tremendous problem with scarcity at this time period. They've just come out of a century of colonial rule where all of their development had been robbed from them, and all of the tools of developing an advanced economy are locked behind global capital.

The Mao land reforms had made tremendous progress at alleviating some of these conditions, guaranteeing basic subsistence for everyone and doubling the average life expectancy from only around 30 years up to over 60 years.
But basic subsistence is not the end goal of socialist development.

We want to be able to guarantee everyone a good standard of life in return to their contribution to society, and you need advanced and modern industry in order to do that. There's a few problems to deal with here. One, industrialization is difficult, back-breaking work, especially without the modern labor saving tools and equipment of modern construction. And two, China is attempting this industrialization right in the middle of Cold War hostilities being directed at every socialist bloc country.

The market reforms helped address both problems. You gain access to foreign investment in incredibly important labor saving technologies which reduce the toil involved with industrialization by a tremendous amount. Additionally, by inviting in foreign investment and reintroducing private control of some of your industries, you create an effective deterrent to imperialist aggression by creating a kind of "mutually assured economic destruction." If your country's economic well-being is tied together with China's, then you're not likely to start a war with China or try to destabilize their country.

Alongside of this, you do also introduce all of the contradictions of private enterprise. The contradictions of exploitation, of uneven development, of inequality, and so on. Of course these are contradictions we should not be happy with or celebrate, even if the bigger picture shows tremendous development and gains in wealth for China as a whole. At the same time, it would be a mistake to flatly condemn China and completely negate their efforts because these contradictions exist. Again, it depends on how these contradictions are handled.

In order to do this analysis, we must once again broaden our scope. Because participating in the global market means that the contradictions you are dealing with come from the global marketplace. Namely, the Marxist idea of the "Industrial Reserve Army of Surplus Labor" comes into sharp focus here. This idea is that one of the tools of private enterprise to depress wages and neglect working conditions comes from the fact that your labor is in competition with everyone else, and if someone else is unemployed, living in squalor or on the streets going hungry and are desperate for work, then you don't have any negotiating power over your own wages and conditions. After all, why would your employer offer you a fair wage when they could hire the person who is desperate and willing to work for scraps?

The same sort of principle applies when you are attempting to attract investment on the global market. When you are a desperately poor country like China was at this time, you don't have the leverage to negotiate for good pay and good conditions, because "Why should I build my factories here when I could go to some other desperately poor formerly colonized nation and build my factory over there?"

So the beginning of these reforms absolutely introduced difficult working conditions for low pay, and it would be dishonest not to recognize that. However, I think that the rationalization for the market reforms that I gave above outweighs most of the negatives. And it is also important to note that most of the worst conditions and worst exploitation came out of areas like Taiwan, which is an autonomous region that is not directly administered by the PRC, but is managed instead by local officials. When you read stories about Foxconn factories where working conditions were so bad they had to install suicide nets to keep people from jumping out of the building, most of those stories came out of Taiwan.

However, what we also see is as these material conditions change, the better negotiating position China has, and that additional leverage gained is consistently transformed into improving conditions and improving wages for the working class. The less reliant on foreign investment China becomes, the less it has to accept shitty deals. And the more capital that gets invested in Chinese markets, the harder it is for any company to pull out without losing a huge sunk cost. This gets transformed into leverage that the government uses to consistently drive wages up, for an average of 17% every year and an around 400% increase over the past 3 decades. Chinese labor rights and reforms are now on par or better than most Western markets. And sometimes, this does result in companies shutting down or going out of business and choosing to outsource to a cheaper labor market instead of staying in China, just as had happened in the US. The difference is that when a company outsources jobs in the US, the result is thousands of people go out of work and the local economy is irrecoverably destroyed. When it happens in China, those business assets simply become part of a State Owned enterprise and production keeps going as long as there is a need for it.

One of the problems with unions in America is that unions could never ask for that much because they had to make sure the business that they were working for didn't go out of business and put them all out of work. The CPC has no such issues, and is much more effective at addressing the contradictions of private enterprise because of it.

I'm going to take a separate post to talk about the idea of China engaging in imperialist exploitation.

Now, regarding claims of China dominating other nations through means of predatory loans and the like, and militaristic expansion, these things fall under the general umbrella of imperialist exploitation. So I feel it's useful to have a discussion about imperialism, how and why imperialism manifests itself, and then see how this compares to the character of Chinese foreign policy.

The purpose of Imperialist finance is the extraction of capital and resources. The way that this works, and what enables modern imperialism, is the conditions left over from centuries of colonization and colonial looting. You have the former (and in some cases current) colonial nations as members of these large imperialist finance groups like the IMF and World Bank that give loans to other nations. Typically, these relationships are characterized by the fact that the formerly colonized nation is still desperately poor and in need of investment and modernization, and the imperialist financier (who is using capital gained in part from previous colonial exploitation) has leverage over the terms of these loans.

The goal of the imperialist is not to develop the self-sufficiency of these countries, but to ensure that these countries remain dependent on external investment so that the imperialist can keep extracting capital through predatory interest rates.

There are a few ways that this takes place. For one, the goal is extraction of resources, so these loans usually come with terms requiring that it is used to develop extractive industries such as mining. Any food aid usually comes in the form of direct food imports, rather than sustainable agricultural development and investments in things like farm equipment. Aditionally, political reforms are often pre-conditions for these loans, specifically economic liberalization of the economy. Governments are expected to divest from any public run industries and sell them off to private enterprises.

Any public infrastructure that does end up being developed as a part of these loan agreements also usually prioritizes subsidizing these extractive industries, which all belong to private companies. You can look at maps in countries all throughout Africa who have received IMF loans, and a pattern you'll usually see is that some of the only roads and railroads that have been built go straight from mining towns and factory towns out to the coast, so that all of those goods and resources can be loaded up at the harbor and sold overseas to help pay down the interest on those loans with the export tax revenue. If a country ever fails to keep paying these predatory loans and defaults due to the natural fluctuations of the market, these finance institutions take this opportunity to force through even more political reforms, such as more privatization, or forcing through austerity measures that sell off whatever meagre public safety net and public spending that they may have in order to "trim their budget" so they can pay back the loan. The domestic policy of a sovereign nation is thus dictated from the loan office. Naturally all of these loan agreements are backed by the vastly superior military and economic might of the financers. The fact that the USD is the global reserve currency that almost all international trade is done with gives incredibly leverage through way of sanctions to any nation who doesn't comply with these loan terms.

Chinese finance, on the other hand, shares almost no similarities to this process. Chinese loans don't have predatory interest rates, they are usually given at close to market rates (roughly around the rate of inflation), or in some cases at a zero percent interest rate. They don't exclude national development in favor of extractive industries, instead they have helped to build up national infrastructure that have helped tremendously to improve the self sufficiency of these nations rather than keep them trapped in debt. And when recipients are facing financial hardship and default on their loans, China has been known to completely forgive the remaining loan balance, rather than using that as an opportunity to force through austerity and privatization.

It is true that Chinese businesses get priority as suppliers and business contracts as part of the development plans that these loans are funding, but those materials and that investment has to come from somewhere. The fact that Chinese businesses and Chinese State Owned Enterprises benefit from these deals doesn't make them exploitative. Typically, we refer to exchanges where both sides benefit as normal trade relations, not anything nefarious like "imperialism" and "financial exploitation." I am firmly of the opinion that these accusations about China are projection by those who want to distract from their own misdeeds.

Generally, it would seem to me that China's investment policy in Africa and throughout the global south is genuinely motivated by the same issue that I highlighted in the previous post about the industrial reserve army. Their negotiating power on the global market is tied together with those who are the most impoverished, who are the most desperate, and China invests in those economies because the better those at the bottom are doing, the less leverage capital has to enforce poor working conditions and low wages. That power comes from the ability to pick up shop and move to somewhere more desperate, and if you lift up those who are the most desperate alongside of and as part of your development then not only do you get more reliable trading partners so you don't have to rely on western capital as much, but you also remove the leverage western capital has to simply pick up and leave for a more desperate market.

What this means is having normal diplomatic relationships with countries regardless of whether you support the current government in power, because what matters is whether the material conditions are improving. There's an essay I really like called "The Long Game and its Contradictions" that addresses this point really well.

"The CPC understands that national leaders and ruling parties are fickle and ephemeral, but development and the improvement of material conditions will have long lasting effects. Creating a more balanced global playing field is the long game, which will create the conditions necessary for systemic change in each country, by their own agency."

https://leohezhao.medium.com/the-long-game-and-its-contradictions-8ff92823cf68

This can be contrasted with the former Soviet Union's model of "exporting revolution," which tried to agitate change outside of its borders by funding and educating revolutionaries, and providing assistance and support to revolutionary governments. This model of "open antagonism" has some merit, but the problem we saw during the Cold War is that it invites the crushing weight of capitalist and imperialist aggression with nearly every resource available to crush the socialist bloc in response, and most socialist governments couldn't survive under the weight of that repression and didn't survive into the 21st century as a result. Maybe history would have turned out differently had the Sino-Soviet split never happened, but that's an incredibly complicated subject and I don't think that it fundamentally changes the fact that when you try to instigate revolution as an outside force, it becomes too easy to rally the forces of reaction against you. Social/political change has to come from inside, or else you run into the issue of reactionaries having the rallying cry of "those dirty commie invaders are trying to destroy your god, your country, and your way of life, so you need to go grab a gun and defend our flag and our fatherland!"