Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.
The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.
It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.
China has been a so-called communist country for over half a century and the number of private billionaires has grown, so this whole “billionaires happen during the gradual transition to communism” argument doesn’t really work when you start with zero billionaires with Mao and now have 814 billionaires.
Or am I to believe the number of billionaires keeps going up and up and then -bam- elimination of market economies?
But I’m sure Roderic Day, who appears to have no academic credentials, can find all kinds of explanations.
And in 20 years when there are over 1600 billionaires in China? Communism is just around the corner, baby!
This is such an oversimplified way of critiquing the world it defies response. Pack it in everybody, Flying Squid has determined that when a society gets many times wealthier than it was prior to the communists taking over, if they can’t successfully micro manage every single yuan to ensure that that wealth is perfectly evenly distributed then the communist project is a bust and the working class has been betrayed. Turns out it doesn’t matter which economic class controls the flow of Capital within a country, communism is when everybody gets the same paycheck.
Do tell me which workers control Nongfu Spring Water’s means of production. Because as far as I can tell, the control rests in the hands of Zhong Shanshan, China’s richest man, and not the company’s 20,000 employees.
But I’m sure if we wait another half-century, at least two workers can control the means of production at that company.
(Now it’s your turn to tell me that the workers controlling the means of production is not something that helps define communism.)
Who controls Zhong Shanshan? The Communist Party, which is the highly popular and effective representative of the workers. If he breaks the rules he gets punished harshly, if he tried to flee the country his Capital would be seized. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m a practical person who believes in evidence based policy and not letting perfect be the enemy of good - and it is a system that outperforms any capitalist system currently on this earth, not only in terms of growth, but in its ability to service the people who make it up over the profits of the people who nominally own things within it.
Prove it.
Which… also happens in capitalist countries.
So, let’s review all of the features of communist countries we have discussed so far:
Wait a second… you said something…
Capital… capital… where have I heard that word?
Oh right!
Another feature of communist countries:
But the government is very popular with the workers. Unless you’re a Tibetan or a Uyghur worker. I’ll give you that.
Instead of arguing with me over every single little point, I suggest you read The East is (Still) Red: China as a Socialist State for a more comprehensive overview that cites multiple western and eastern academic sources.
I’m going to be at my actual job for the rest of the day, so I won’t be able to argue with you further.
Oh, I don’t think I need to argue with you on every single point since you’ve made it explicitly clear that capitalism is a feature of communism.
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The person I am arguing with says otherwise, so talk to them about it.