Can people do emotional labour for me an explain why China good and why China not bad?
I know all countries are going to have bad things going on, but why is China especially good and why is it not especially bad?
I really do want to believe that China good, and the following stuff isn't supposed to be an excuse for me to post "China bad" stuff here. Things I'm specifically worried about are Uyghur genocide, Mongolian cultural genocide, and prison labour. All I know about those is from American documentaries that are probably anti-Chinese propaganda, but they were really convincing and had video of the bad stuff. I work with a lot of Chinese people, and only one of them says that China is bad, and I believe him the least. He had a ridiculous story about people eating his dog and he looooves capitalism.
I know the US and Canada and probably all other places have had this same stuff and are just better at hiding it or excusing it now, so I'm starting out at a point where China seems no better or worse than any other country.
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Probably a key point to consider here is trajectory. Like there were many tangible gains of the revolution w/r/t a planned economy, many have been abandoned with the restoration of capitalist relations.
there is the rub. If they don't gain power the US will destroy them like we did to the USSR. If they do gain power in this capitalist system it kinda has to be through capitalism. Given how they have systematically seized the means of production and improved the lives of millions of workers it seems like a good plan so far. It is playing with fire, this is true. There is a golden path where this 70 year old country keeps improving, while the hundred year old countries keep declining till a lifetime from now, they are the global hegemony and things are better than they used to be. We can't be sure they will end that way, we can however be sure the US is trying to speed run the any% bad ending.
I'll push back on a lot of that. Sure the US desired, had a hand in, the downfall of the Soviet Union. But US imperialism wasn't the sole cause of the downfall of the USSR. The planned economy was a massive step forward for the USSR, allowing it to develop from a sort of backwater into a world power and raising quality of life considerably for the working masses. But, economic planning by a bureaucracy was a poor substitute for truly spreading control over the economy and society into the hands of the masses, basically the full realization of the tasks of proletarian revolution. The result was a slow degeneration of the revolution, and a decay of the workers' state, until both could no longer withstand the deterioration and external pressures.
But, the example of the USSR shows why the quote above is 100% not true. It wasn't the soviet union's limited embrace of capitalism that catapulted its development, it was the rational economic planning that can be done when capitalist relations are overthrown and the bourgeoisie kept out of power. Tsarist Russia, with its lopsided capitalist development, was not on a trajectory to be a dominant world power.
Except economic growth in China has been slowing compared to where it's been. Global capitalism is in perpetual crisis, and China, having reintegrated into global capitalism, is not magically immune to the crises and limitations of capitalism. It got out of the 2008 crisis by massive debt-financed government spending, but the stimulus for covid has been smaller, in part because of debt worries. If you look at what the Covid economic relief measures have been, they've been tactics to prop up a capitalist economy--they don't look all that dissimilar to what the US has done. As Marx pointed out, capitalist solutions to capitalist crises and contradictions only serve to kick the can down the road, at best. Capitalism no longer works, as a global system, to develop the productive forces.
Sure, the general trajectory for China is up, as you point out, but there is always a valley after the peak when it comes to capitalist development. If the "fire" in your analogy is capitalism, China has not just played with fire, it has embraced it, downsides and all.
You are giving me examples of of things worked for the ussr but... Listen, we both know how it ended. I think if the USSR had been able to integrate cybernetic theory it would have done better. Similar if the USSR didn't have the threat of global thermonuclear war it would have been better.
China is trying something different. They are taking a more cautions path. Yes, moving slowly does cost human lives. However if they win the great game, which is still a strongly possible option, then the can make the entire future better. China had to work fast, and did, and has. They knew they were next in line for a cold war after the the USSR fell, and the only way they could be sure to secure their potion was the way they took. We can't talk about china as acting as a free agent here. The material conditions of them being massively under developed and having loaded nukes pointed at them does limit their possibilities.
So in a roundabout way, I feel that china's growth slowing is a sign they are moving away from using capitalism to fuel their development. Look at the belt and road system. They could do colonialism again and no one would bat an eye. Instead their belt and road plan does seem to be about development instead of capital accumulation. They used capitalism for what marx said it was good for. Having accumulated the capital, the means of production, enough solar panels to sit out the age of oil, and a population still cheap enough to feed . They are well positioned to take over once we have run ourselves into the ground.
Or shits, entirely fucked. We'll see eventually. I am cautiously optimistic.
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Honestly I see this take repeated all the time and it just doesn't seem representative of reality. The tankie subs I frequent (r/GenZeDong and r/sendinthetanks pretty much, the others aren't as active) are pretty open about criticizing China, most often on post Sino-Soviet split foreign policy and a little bit on Deng's liberalizations.
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