• Darkmatter2k [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    Just the mention of “planners” (central planners of Mao’s era) is seen as a joke among top Chinese economists, and is often used in a derogative manner.

    Can't remember who explained this in a talk, it's either Mark Blythe, Richard Wolf or David Harvey but I can't remember which or what talk it comes from :(.

    China's economy isn't a centrally planned one, It's still state controlled but it's in large parts decentralised. When the Chinese state wants something done it tells all districts (not Chinese so don't know the proper term) what they want to achieve, officials in districts determine their own course of action and the central government makes the money available. Some of the districts waste the money on corruption, some of them fail, but a few succeed. The government then goes to the district that succeeds and gets all other districts to replicate what they have done. This allows china's economy to run multiple parallel economic experiments and find the best solution.

    China has also resisted privatized banking as I believe they know that wallstreet will use a privatized banking system to loot the country (se Greece etc. etc). This is also a large part how companies in China are able to out compete western companies, the major state owned ventures can simply go to the central banks and borrow at almost non existent rates for near indefinite periods of time. It's a huge competitive advantage over the west, and angers western capital to no end. China is essentially running the largest venture capital fund in the world.

    I see this as an evolution of the USSR's state capitalist model, it's still state control of the economy but its not the old style centralized planning that many western economist have critiqued greatly.

      • Darkmatter2k [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        I can't speak to whether or not the Chinese government subscribes to the "eternal growth" ideology that has infect western ideology. It's clear that china benefits from growth right now as it's still raising the living standards of the population, but they have shown themselves willing to limit growth before.

        Edit: Thanks for the info about the floods, shows how insular western media is, haven’t seen any stories about this anywhere.

    • IceWallowCum [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      When the Chinese state wants something done it tells all districts what they want to achieve, officials in districts determine their own course of action and the central government makes the money available

      Interesting, that's exactly how Brazil's universal health system works. Every single building has a lot of autonomy (one little health unit will determine what goal they want to achieve within the community, then get the resources), and the biggest problems arise from where they don't (commissioned chairs get us health secretaries that don't have any experience in health, for example, so the federal money leaks into their pockets and the rest is badly distributed - in my city, it's some random lawyer). I've asked many professionals during classes and literally every single one of them confirmed me that the health system would be 1000 times better if the professionals could decide the funding between themselves

    • CenkUygurCamp [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      You are saying China today is like if the SU stuck to the NEP instead of moving to a top down planned economy

      • Darkmatter2k [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        Not familiar enough with the details to say if its the exact same thing, sounds similar from what i can grok from the wikipedia, though china doesn't pretend it's internal market is a free market, It's very clearly heavily regulated.

        I would also caution against view this as a linear sequence of events. One of the best points that Richard Wolf makes is that the USSR was an experiment, an attempt at building an alternative to capitalism, viewing the USSR as the holy text that must be followed is a bad idea as it in the end did collapse.

        I try to see what the Chinese are doing in much the same way. An attempt at finding new paths while learning from the worst failures of the USSR.

    • callovthevoid [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      Oh that'd be David Harvey. I remember re-watching his talks on China and mentioned that. I don't recall which video it was specifically though.

    • Sushi_Desires
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      4 years ago

      This sounds familiar, I think I remember hearing something like it in one of those live Wolff update episodes from d@w where he talks for an hour or two in the lecture hall. I’ll link the playlist when I get to my desktop

      -I am still looking for the video... maybe it was a mark blyth one after all?