Defend China. How is it currently socialist?
Some things to respond to (the gatcha questions):
The rapid expansion of capital, foreign and local, and the reemergence of capital accumulation as a production goal in the end of the 20th century
The existence of megacorporations, especially private megacorporations such as tencent and foxconn
the state of labor rights in the aforementioned megacorporations, and the state of labor rights in the industrial sector as a whole
The repression of marxist and leftist protest and critique of the current state of the system
The apparent lack of repression of non-leftist critique (I could easily be convinced that this is just because they're amplified by American media)
The great firewall (I could be convinced this is protectionism to avoid Western silicon valley capitalism's supremacy on the internet)
The social credit system
idk i guess talk about the Uyghurs if you want, but I don't really want that to become the entire discussion, as it has a tendency to be, so if you talk about that, don't make it the entirety of your defense or attack
and let's try to keep this relatively civil? Like, a random post and argument between some leftists on the internet isn't actually going to like, collapse china's rising economic and political power into nothing. We can't actually do shit about china, good or not, so try not to make this a flame war?
My friend, have you actually looked at the timeline for the reduction of poverty in China? The country has only very VERY recently gotten it to levels of acceptability that the developed world has enjoyed for 40 years and the country maintains it as its key priority for the next 5 years also. Complete and total elimination of poverty comes before lifting the population to the kind of comfortable middle-class bourgeois lifestyle you enjoy.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that a leftist criticism would be "why aren't they making a middle class fast enough?" instead of "why aren't they eliminating poverty and homelessness immediately?". I can only really assume you don't ask the latter because you know that's their current priority. Development is not a switch, it is a process. This does not happen instantly, it happens with year on year progress. They are well on the way to completely and total elimination of poverty.
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Is there a better, more proven alternative? If not, any attempt to move society left would be considered "a project which is untested."
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If there's not a better alternative, yeah, this sucks, but it might be making the best of a bad situation. Sometimes there are no good options -- look at the upcoming election.
For me, this is where the concept of critical support comes in. You don't have to support everything China does, or even most of what it does, but you can push back against racism and U.S. propaganda, and acknowledge where they do things right. No one is suggesting we just copy/paste China's government onto the U.S., anyway -- any sort of leftist project in the U.S. is going to be a mix of ideas from other countries plus whatever ideas we come up with on our own.
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Not really, there are capitalists in China with a lot of economic power, but they don’t constitute a “strong capitalist class”. Look at who constitutes the membership of CCP committee, especially as you go higher up. The capitalist class, to the extent that it even exists as a class in China, has no political power and is under the thumb of the Communist Party.