China Today?

[Maximum Marxist]

In class today some students were talking about how China is still communist but is transitioning to a more socialist state. I interjected and said that China has been capitalist for a while, the class ended shortly after this and we didn't have much of a discussion.

So is China still communist today? (i really don't think it is) and how would they go to socialism (isn't it pretty much the same thing as communism?

And what would be some of the good things that Chinese communism helped with the people?

[Return to the Source]

Here's my take on it. (http://return2source.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/china-market-socialism-a-question-of-state-revolution/)

[Proukunin]

before Mao died, he brought the life expectancy up drastically and the infant mortality rate down. Education was better than ever before in china and healthcare was free. he also formed people's communes.

[Proukunin]

oh and also, fuck no china has never been communist..even under Mao. It was sort of socialist under Mao but now after the pro market reforms and Deng's rule, China is some sort of state-capitalist mixed economy.

[caramelpence]

May I recommend that you read the 1981 resolution on party history (http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm)? I don't recommend it as an "objective" or "scholarly" analysis of China's modern history but it is interesting as a primary source because it represents the perspective of the post-Cultural Revolution party leadership on China's current position and the nature of the Cultural Revolution, and its analysis of Mao's role gives some indication of how far the current leadership has broken with the Maoist developmental strategy. I don't see China as a socialist or communist society and I don't think that the death of Mao in 1976 or the initiation of the reform period two years later signified the restoration of capitalism or anything other than a shift from one political generation to another - China was a capitalist country throughout the 20th century because at no point did the working class exercise genuine democratic control over the means of production and at no point was China able to escape the pressures of the imperialist world-system and the global capital accumulation process. The Chinese Revolution itself was an important and progressive historical event but its achievements remained within the confines of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and even in that area it was unable to fully accomplish the historic tasks of the bourgeoisie in the advanced capitalist countries. The current CPC, in my view, is neither a tool of imperialist states, nor an instrument controlled by the Chinese bourgeoisie, but is very much an interest group in its own right, and one that balances on multiple social formations in order to maintain its position, not unlike Marx's concept of Bonapartism, or the Nationalist regime during the Nanjing Decade.


healthcare was free

Healthcare may have been "free" in the sense that no worker had to hand over part of their income in order to receive it, but part of the Maoist developmental strategy was that the state created divisions within the working class whereby workers had different kinds of privileges depending on what kind of enterprise they were employed at, what their residency status was, whether they were temporary or permanent workers, whether they were regarded as "backward" or "advanced" by the heads of individual enterprises, and so on, so that there was actually a lot of variation in the actual availability of healthcare.

[miltonwasfried...man]

China is just as capitalistic as the United States. Poverty is widespread and yet there are many millionaires. That is not communism, that is not equality.

[Commissar Rykov]

Deng Xiaopeng and other Counterrevolutionaries have long since Hijacked the party. The China of today is not the China Mao envisioned.

[Tablo]

China was state-capitalist and now it is some state-capitalist along with some of your regular brand market capitalism.

[Die Rote Fahne]

I was rather pleased to hear Bill Maher say this: "China is communist in name only, it is a dictatorship with capitalism" (paraphrased)

So yeah, amongst liberals its finally beeing seen.