Then why does a communist party still govern China? Can someone who subscribes to the conspiracy theory that China is just pretending to be socialist please, please answer me this? What is the purpose of continuing this pretense of communism that is drawing the ire and hostility of the capitalist West? Why this elaborate decades long charade?
If the bourgeoisie rules in China why does it not switch to a liberal bourgeois democracy, like the former Soviet republics and other ex-socialist states did? Or conversely, if pretending to be socialist is somehow in some convoluted way advantageous for the bourgeois class, why do they not do this same game of pretending to be communist in the West?
Why do the West’s bourgeois states and media demonize communists and communist states while in China, which is supposedly also ruled by the bourgeoisie, they do the opposite? Do you think that Chinese bourgeois for some reason just gain some perverse enjoyment from playing pretend when they wouldn’t need to do so to be in charge?
Why do they curtail their own profits by allowing such heavy state regulation and such a large state owned sector of the economy? Why do they not adopt the West’s neoliberal model? And why do they punish themselves much more harshly for corruption than would ever occur under liberal democracy? Please make it make sense.
P.S. mods, if an ultra/lib actually answers me please don’t ban them, i genuinely want to hear their explanation.
Liberals at the same time think Russia is communist while Putin explicitly says they’re as bourgeois as them, and China is capitalist while Xi explicitly speaks about Marxism-leninism.
It’s a good thing that mental gymnastics is not an olympic discipline because western liberals would be taking home the gold every single time. They are very, very confused.
I remember a poll I saw a few years back where a majority of Americans said something along the lines of “communism and dictatorship are the same thing”, and ever since then the way certain people sling around accusations of communism made a lot more sense to me.
I mean a lot of “leftists” dont even know what communism is either. Even some self called marxists dont know what marxism is.
I’ve heard it phrased several ways, all of which are a little ludicrous:
- The Chinese public is too brainwashed to know what socialism is
- The Chinese government pretends to be socialist and that’s good enough for people living in cities, but people in rural areas actually want to revolt (but don’t?)
- China is so backwards and evil they rewrote the meaning of what socialism is, and the public is too brainwashed to know the difference
- Inevitable comparison to the Nazis being “national socialists”
Ultras and liberals don’t come at this from the same angle. Ultras believe socialism only exists when value has been completely removed from the economy. Liberals just use racism and say there’s no way China can be socialist because only white people can do that correctly, like they’ll point to Sweden and Norway or whatever.
Yep. It always goes back to western chauvinism. They’d rather instead that they are smarter than the 1.4 billion people in China and that those people are a inscrutable orientals than they would like to admit that maybe China is successful socialism.
Then why does a communist party still govern China?
The most coherent answer to this is “because the Chinese people still believe in communism, the ruling class must pretend to be communists.” But the more common answer you’ll get from a liberal is “Communism is when you have a dictator and the Chinese are brainwashed into liking having a dictator.”
So the claim is that the bourgeoisie in China has all the power and wealth and yet are somehow simultaneously hostage to their own population? What a peculiar system China must have where the government is accountable to the wishes of the people. Wish we could have that kind of not-socialism here in the West too.
On a serious note though, the people of the USSR by and large still believed in communism even into the late 80s yet that didn’t stop the traitorous clique who had managed to infiltrate the party from destroying socialism and openly restoring bourgeois rule. There was considerable resistance to the dissolution of the USSR, to which Yeltsin responded by sending tanks to shell the parliament.
Does anyone really honestly believe that if enemies of socialism managed to seize power in China they would not seek to dissolve the socialist system as soon as possible and openly declare China as capitalist, then immediately calling on the West to help them stay in power by any means necessary while instituting shock therapy? How does that square with every other counter-revolution that we have ever witnessed?
Accusations of revisionism at least i would understand…if it was still the 1980s and we didn’t know how the situation would develop in China over the next 40 years. But to actually believe that capitalists having seized power would go on pretending to stil be communists for half a century is frankly incomprehensible and absurd to me.
How are the Chinese people so powerful and so staunchly communist that their supposedly bourgeois rulers are afraid of them finding out the truth and have to continue larping as commies, yet simultaneously so stupid or gullible that they cannot distinguish between capitalism and socialism? Like, i’m sorry but this shit only makes sense if you’re racist toward Chinese people.
People seem to think that China abandoned the socialist path since the reforms, which is invalid. They have been on the socialist path the entire time. Many factors show this. One is the Four Cardinal Principles that Deng Xiaoping had developed to ensure they stayed on the path of socialism. We must also consider that the economy’s commanding heights are planned and are subjected to five-year plans. 70% of the top 500 companies are state-owned. 50% of the economy is in the socialist public sector and directly follows the plan (40% if you ignore the agricultural industry). 20 to 30% is inside the state capitalist sector, partially owned by domestic capitalists but run by the CPC or local workers’ councils. The rest comprises the small bourgeois ownership like in the NEP. Due to the socialist nature of the economy, they have been able to lift over 800 million people out of extreme poverty, accounting for 75% of global poverty reduction. No country governed by capitalists could ever achieve such a feat. Such a feat can be accomplished only when the productive forces have been freed. Heres is a quote from Marx in the critique of the Gotha program which reaffirms China’s position as a developing socialist country:
“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, ECONOMICALLY, MORALLY, and INTECTUALLY, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”
Workplace democracy in action in the CPC. The real wage (IE the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering, considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. The US real wage by comparison is lower in 2019 than it was in 1973.
Basic healthcare is free in China. After the reforms, some mistakes were made, one being the privatisation of healthcare, which quickly reverted to free public basic healthcare. The workplace safety standards of China are better than in the capitalist countries of the West, like Australia, which has a higher rate of work-related death despite having a GDP per capita of 3-5 times higher.
Actually sweaty, don’t you know that if it isn’t 100% state owned in all enterprises it is actually capitalism? Socialism means: Perfect utopia where there is nothing wrong ever. and if you disagree with me, I’m going to tell you that actually my random MLM-Troskyite-Hoxaist Commune of 4 people is actually the closest thing to actually existing socialism in the world and that you’re completely wrong and an idiot Dengist who worships the free market?
The workplace safety standards of China are better than in the capitalist countries of the West, like Australia, which has a higher rate of work-related death despite having a GDP per capita of 3-5 times higher.
One might suggest that Australia’s GDP per capita is higher in part because their workplace safety standards are lacking.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The recently I talked to a Chinese banker in one of the biggest Chinese banks. We where walking around a beautiful park, which also had a public library in it overlooking the park. A very nice public space overall. Anyway, in the library there was a stack of The Governance of China (third volume) by Xi Jinping on one table. So we talked about it, and it turns out the bankers in China read this book, have classes/study sessions, and try to find ways to implement Xi Jinping thought. Imagine calling a country capitalist when bankers read communist theory and have study sessions for it. That’s China; not a capitalist country, but a socialist country where the party is doing it’s best to develop material conditions, and they have largely been successful.
If they’re not why do we hate them then. Human rights violations??? The US is King of “human rights” violations, why do they only care when China is accused. why do they only accuse china
Even if China were capitalist the US would still hate them for being a check to US hegemony. No one thinks Russia is socialist (other than a few on the fringe).
Actually i’ve heard quite a few liberals call Russia communist.
i have, as well, but that was only after the Russia-Ukraine conflict started to get internationally “popular”. because Russia = Evil again, so now their brains have gone back to yucky, evil Communism.
TCS is pretty clearly subverting MSAndreou’s argument with the baseline demonstration that the means of production is indirectly owned by workers, and has bent to the will of said workers.
I recall reading an article just a few days ago that stated the CPC was moving to seize property and house people. Isn’t that directly in line with our actionable goals as leftists?
The way they build a communist Boogeyman out of development and change that we’ve been begging for is honestly really sad because it suggests to me that the user ingests tons of sinophobic propaganda, probably doesn’t read theory, and doesn’t surround themselves with leftists.
China is ostensibly socialist.
Do you have a specific article on that?
I think this is corroborative
You could take darn near everything MSAndreou posts and put it here.
The fact that he’s also acts as an american mouthpiece for what the KKE says as well shows to what extent the ultra-Left rot has pervaded the professional communist world as well.
does anyone know what the text says? i recognise 一十 (eleven), 会 (can), and some other individual characters but i am not good enough at reading for this 😭
十一届三中全会胜利召开
Guessing it’s referring to this
@[email protected] English
This text was translated using DeepL.
