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Im just gonna drop this here and I dont care who I upset https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153
So much ignorance on display here in this thread. People talking out of their ass with no clue or care why and how China has implemented economic reforms and development policy. No clue what communists even are much less the details of how they manage the economy of a developing socialist state within a capitalist global economy. Just thought-terminating clichés about billionaires and so-called "state capitalism".
Fun fact: you can actually read the justifications for why socialist countries managed by proletariat governments have implemented limited market systems in their economies in China, Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, even Korea. Their thoughts are public!
I might go one further and suggest this is why the "Just tax the billionaires" line never actually delivers the goods. It's a classic Belling-The-Cat problem, because its very easy to say "Tax the Billionaires" but its very difficult to move forward with a policy that does the actual thing, without billionaires pooling their resources to prevent you from accessing any of the levers of power.
You need a certain collectivist worldview to even attempt the problem of regulating and sanctioning a bourgeois class. And when you're brainwashed by some combination of out-of-context Adam Smith quotes and reskinned Milton Friedman / Ayn Rand videos, good fucking luck.
Fun fact: you can actually read the justifications for why socialist countries managed by proletariat governments have implemented limited market systems in their economies in China, Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, even Korea. Their thoughts are public!
If you know where to look and you trust the source material and you've got the patience to work through the finer details, sure.
But that's the sort of learning you typically need to tackle in grade school if you want it to stick. Open minds and lots of free time are necessary to get this kind of rigorous political education. By the time you've had your head crammed full of cable news fearmongering and employer-sponsored propaganda, you'll be allergic to the very idea of taking a book like Fanshen or The Bolivian Diary at face value.
i have it on good authority from about half of lemmy that china is a wonderful place where everyone feels safe and actually there never were any uyghurs, since that's just western propaganda
itt: people confirming the premise. ni hao baybeeee
Being banned from .lm is a badge of honor.
Same reason the US has the most prisons even though it's aiming to be the freest country.
China does not claim to be a fully communist society yet. Official ideology describes the country as being in a long-term developmental phase of socialism; communism is portrayed as a future goal. However, if they continue as they have been treating people like mere numbers, keeping them in poverty under total control, while billionaires amass wealth they will never achieve that anyway. In a society that ideologically advocates for overcoming class distinctions and capitalist exploitation, enormous private fortunes exist. Entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have at times amassed wealth running into the billions. At the same time, the Party controls key sectors of the economy and can exert massive pressure on companies. That transitional phase has gone spectacularly wrong. That is not how communism is defined. Private property is accepted only as long as it remains compatible with the Party's political interests. This is very convenient for the government: it can harness the productivity and innovation of capitalism without adopting the political power structures of a liberal political system.
Their own brand of capitalism is one tied to a penultimate patriotic goal, where all enterprises are convinced by the Party they are working to achieve supremacy by 2049 where by that time, the Mainland topples and humiliates what they see as American hegemony and exceptionalism, while expecting the rest of the world -- including developing countries who are now tied to the Mainland through heavy imports -- to acknowledge its being figuratively the Middle Kingdom.
This is the China that can say "no", and a book that once vigorously supported the idea of confronting American hegemony and was banned briefly, is now cashing in on the winnings as its authors are seen as prophetic.
They didn't used to have billionaires, when Mao was in power. Strangely, a lot of Westerners seem to hate what China is now, but also hate what China was before, which seems very strange to me. "The reforms were bad and China should be more Maoist" that is a coherent position, "The reforms were good but should have gone further and become even more capitalist" that is also a coherent position. But "China is bad now because they allow billionaires but they were also bad when they didn't allow billionaires" isn't really coherent, it just seems like knee-jerk opposition to whatever they do or don't do. Anyone who wants to offer critiques should be able to answer the simple question of whether the reforms were good or bad, whether they moved in the right or wrong direction.
On the off-chance that you actually want a serious answer to the question, let's start with some history. Before the revolution, China's average life expectancy was in the 30's, it experienced frequent famines, had no access to medicine, and had had similarly awful conditions for literally thousands of years with no improvement for the average person. The revolution brought about huge improvements in life expectancy and the basic necessities of life (with the failure of the Great Leap Forward being an exception to this general trend).
However, while central planning works for providing basic necessities because the demand for those necessities is very predictable, it is not the most efficient regarding consumer goods. This was one of the failures that caused the collapse of the USSR, the desire for consumer good and the inability to compete domestically. Furthermore, despite the increases in life expectancy, virtually everyone in China still lived in extreme poverty. The reforms in the 80s were intended to address this, and they were wildly successful at it:
In the words of Deng, it doesn't matter if the cat is white or black, so long as it catches mice. It doesn't really matter if a policy is ideologically "pure," so long as it provides clear material benefits for the common people.
Where I'm standing, the whole point of having any sort of political beliefs at all is to figure out which policies will improve people's lives. And lifting 800 million people out of extreme poverty over the span of 40 years, can you name a more successful policy, ever, in all of history?
They aren't trying to be communist, they are trying to be "Communist with Chinese elements" which is just capitalism. Similar to how they are a "Democracy with Chinese elements" which is just a dictatorship.
Because their wealth is tied up in speculation.
