A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.
China is socialist. Socialism is serving as the stepping stone on the path from the previous system to full Communism. Socialism serves as an important developmental stage as antagonisms from within (counter-revolutionary forces) and without (imperialist powers) are resolved.
First, China does have wealth inequality, but its middling in its severity.
(The key is on the linked Wikipedia page, but darker has higher income inequality).
China has a Gini index of 38.2% in 2019, putting them at 71 out of 168 in national rankings. The USA has a Gini index of 39.4% in 2020, putting them at 107 out of 168. (Lower Gini index, and lower ranking are better). The worst nation, South Africa, has a Gini index of 63.0% as of 2014; the best nation, the Faroe Islands, has a Gini index of 22.71% as of 2018[1].
Moreover, wealth inequality has been decreasing in China for about a decade[2], whereas our point of reference, the USA, has seen its inequality steadily increase over the same time span[3]. Wealth inequality is also not unexpected in a rapidly developing economy such as China: initially, as the economy grows, certain people financially benefit more than others and wealth inequality increases; over time as the economic growth stabilizes, and with a concerted effort to combat it, wealth inequality levels out and then decreases, as we see happening. Income inequality is not automatically horrible: careful attention needs to be paid to the bottom of the income rankings; comparatively, high wealth inequality is less of a problem if the bottom is not in poverty than if they are. This ties in to my next point,
This is not true at all. Wealth does not buy political power or influence within the CPC (or indeed in the Chinese government overall); nor does having power or influence in the CPC enable one to amass more wealth. Those who are wealthy work with the party, as members, to further the goals of the Party to improve everyone’s lives, rather than working selfishly against the party to further their own personal goals. To paraphrase Boer[4], “The private entrepreneurs have not become a class in itself with associated class consciousness, but many have become CPC members or non-party supporters. The social and cultural assumption is that those that have benefited from wider support must contribute to the well-being of others”. That is, those who are wealthy do not get to exert outsized influence by way of being wealthy, and do not sit back and glorify their wealth, but instead work by giving back and improving the well-being of others.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual “socialist responsibility reports” which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Socialism (and indeed communism) is a structural form that dictates a government’s (and economy’s) purpose and its relation to society and its members. The goal of a socialist government is to improve the material and cultural lives of its people. To a Westerner, it seems foreign or fantastical that a country could genuinely operate with this goal in mind, and so people would rather say “it’s not real socialism”, or say that “because it has some problems, it’s all bad”, than to acknowledge that no system is perfect and as long as the system works to fix its issues and help its people, it is on the right track.
The OP has a non-nuanced and seemingly uninformed opinion on China as well,
They are not capitalist. Infrastructure spending is also not what determines whether they are capitalist, socialist, or something else. Moreover, nobody is arguing that a strong central government determines whether they are communist or not. To say that China is capitalist is a category error and falls into the trap that dictates that using aspects of a market economy automatically negates socialism and makes a system capitalist. I’ve written a bit more in depth on it elsewhere, but plenty of sources dive in to why China is indeed socialist and why it is faulty to see them as capitalist. Chapter 5 (“China’s Socialist Market Economy and Planned Economy”) from Richard Boer’s book I’ve cited above serves as a good overview of why it is a category error to call China capitalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality ↩︎
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2019&locations=CN&start=1990&view=chart ↩︎
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?end=2019&locations=US&start=1990&view=chart ↩︎
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Boer, Roland. ↩︎
Lol
They are. Technically. It’s the most warped twisted definition of socialism. But being socialist isn’t what’s important in ML Communist regimes. They, like their mirror on the right. The fascists. Are all about authority and authoritarianism.
The biggest problem for most of us westerners trying to understand this. Is that we are propagandized and indoctrinated to view left and right as being about social issues. And that thou shall have no economy before God but capitalism. And that socialism does not exist as anything other than a boogeyman to scare us with. We are not taught in schools what socialism actually is beyond Marxist-Leninist communism bad. And as a socialist while I do agree that Lenin’s monster he is indeed quite bad. And that while reading the philosophy and theory of Marx he managed to make all the worst possible interpretations. His version of communism doesn’t even define all of communism let alone all of socialism. But it is still technically socialism.
China doesn’t even have a free healthcare system. Everyone still needs to pay, even though there are subsidies. In real life, there’s little difference between the US and China
Socialism doesn’t require that. So that does not make it any less socialist. As a socialist however. I would argue that since Karl Marx’s time. The concept of health care has become a much more important notion to the welfare of the general populace that should include universal health care. It isn’t part of the definition however.
Thank you for posting this well sourced reply. I’m sorry that you’re being downvoted. Libs have an aneurysm anytime someone challenges their current world view. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is on my to read least and I may just have to start reading it tonight.
Well they are not wrong to criticize and reject ML communism. But they are however rather hypocritical.
Good reply, thank you.
And I’ll defer to your categorization and consider the reading recommendation.
I weighed calling them socialist, but it seemed… unhelpful when what i was trying to highlight that the unemployed youth are relying on family, and not the state.
The responses yesterday seemed to think China is just giving away money. They aren’t.
Also: all developed nations are socialist. What people argue over is where lines are drawn.
My issue is that you said they’re capitalist. They’re not. They do use a market economy in addition to a planned economy, as part of the overall socialist economic system. It’s not a binary either-or; using a market economy doesn’t mean it’s capitalism, and planned economy (intervention) doesn’t mean it’s socialism. When I said they’re structural terms, and relate to purpose: capitalism’s purpose is to maximally extract profit and concentrate wealth; socialism’s purpose is to better the lives (materially and culturally) of its people. China, as a socialist system, takes advantage of the benefits that a market economy can offer (efficiency, competition, resource allocation, demand and pricing signals) but doesn’t use it to extract and concentrate wealth: instead, it uses the net benefits of the market economy to benefit the people. Similarly, a purely planned economy can be very stable and fair but is prone to stagnation and slow progress. By using both systems simultaneously, taking the relative advantages of each, China is able to benefit from efficiency and stability. There’s also no pure free market economy: every capitalist economy has degrees of government intervention (another name for planned economy), especially in times of crises.
I also don’t know what you meant about a “strong central government” not making them communist. That seems like a strawman. Nobody would say that a strong central government makes it communist, or a lack of a strong central government means it’s not communist. “Strong” with no other qualifies is also not very useful: do you mean tough and resilient, or do you mean controlling?
This is a trap that people keep falling in to. Just because a socialist country doesn’t do “good thing X” doesn’t mean it’s not socialist. No system is perfect; the difference is that the CPC makes strong plans, sticks to them, and publishes progress reports to address the problems that do arise. Should the state be taking the burden here where family currently is? Perhaps. But it’s failure to do so doesn’t mean the system isn’t socialist. Again, I’ll repeat my earlier statement: being “socialist” is a statement that is about the purpose of the government and the relation of the government to its people; it is socialist if it is for the benefit of the people en masse. Being “socialist” is not a statement of a utopic ideal antithesis to capitalism.
If you truly are willing to read about this, the book I mentioned is a good overview of China as it exists, as an implementation of a socialist society, at a level that does not require previous knowledge of theory or of China. Being intended for a foreign audience, it makes a concerted effort to address common misconceptions held by those outside of China about China. It’s also very heavily sourced: each chapter ends with several pages of citations used in that chapter, including primary sources from CPC members, official government documents, analysis and critiques, and “historical”/foundational texts.
If you don’t like them being called capitalist, then your quarrel is with a whole heap of people (and academics).
The question, like I alluded to earlier, isn’t whether they are capitalist, but a question of how much. And many, after careful study, have determined them to be capitalist.
Those determinations are based on measurable things and philosophy (somewhat).
Also: you are clearly not my original intended audience. In the referenced thread I was getting low-effort, glib comments that snowballed upvotes.
Not unlike the person who deemed me to be a republican. It’s easy to look at my post history.
I’m not a republican. But glib is easy. And glib, low-effort posters were the primary intended audience. Know-it-alls.
I’m going to make a glib comment; So they’re 25% capitalist and 30% socialist and 10% communist and the rest something else. It doesn’t mean they’re a primarily capitalist economy.
Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107. It’s fair to say both countries have “rampant income inequality” right now. Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.
Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.
I’m not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it’s 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn’t do. My point was they’re similar and middling in the ranking.
This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn’t that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it’s decreasing. The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”) in part because the issue doesn’t address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn’t magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.
The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn’t publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren’t doing what they said they would. You’re confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There’s a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it’s because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn’t have so much support for the party.
(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it’s ranking; inverting the sort order doesn’t make the countries less similar, and since they’re middling, inverting the sort order means they’re still middling. I didn’t make a claim that one was better than the other).
You literally have it backwards:
Sort Gini index by ascending: China is #98 at 38.2, US is #107 at 39.4
Sort Gini index by descending: US is #62 at 39.4 and China is #71 at 38.2.
It seems you’re right. I will edit that part of my comment. But I will point out: I wasn’t making a statement that one was worse than the other. I made the point that they’re similar in ranking and like I said, even if you reverse ranking order they’re still just as similar. And, since they were middling in their ranking like I originally said, if you invert the sorting, they’re still middling.
What’s the point of downvoting a reply that’s exactly on topic and fully sourced? Is it the redditors again?
They sourced gini information three times, and then cited what dollars-to-donuts is a propaganda work from someone that agrees with them. It’s on topic, but it’s also a lot of words to prop up a weak point.
You could say people should respond instead of downvote, but they also say to pick who you argue with carefully, because most arguments are a waste of time.
Fully sourced means my statements were sourced, not that it was dripping in sources.
Also, the book I cited is not propaganda. Please don’t resort to calling everything that posits an alternate view propaganda.
From the Springer page on the book,
So he has a degree in and is a professor in the exact subject he’s talking about, from a respected University:
Moreover, it’s not some random publisher or some guy’s PDF on the internet. It’s published by Springer which, if you have done any academic reading in almost any field, you will know that Springer content is high-quality and trustworthy. In fact, at a lot of the university libraries I’ve been in, some subjects (maths, especially) are probably three-quarters Springer publications,
Yep, a professor of Marxism in a state-run Chinese university, definitely sounds very neutral. /s
Springer is an academic publisher, but that doesn’t mean they agree with the viewpoints of every niche humanities publication in their catalogue. It’s sort of like how Penguin offers both Das Kapital and Mein Kampf (with a disclaimer that I’m not calling anyone a Nazi).
Even when propaganda is true it’s propaganda. Leftists are usually pretty good about acknowledging that, even.