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China's economy is 40% state-owned – compare Lenin's NEP period, 70-77%
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Soviet state-owned enterprises were designed to make a thing (like the water service, like the post office). Chinese state-owned enterprises are different: they are profit-making players in the market.
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China has enterprises owned by local and provincial government – sometimes they compete with each other! So the state competes with itself on the market!
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They can sell 49% of their stock on the stock market, even to foreigners.
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The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) is an institution directly under the management of the State Council. It is an ad-hoc ministerial-level organization directly subordinated to the State Council – http://en.sasac.gov.cn/sasacaboutus.html – It's like the Chinese statist Berkshire Hathaway. In theory, it can control a company as much as a shareholder can.
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Li-Wen Lin & Curtis J Milhaupt write about Chinese corporate structure. They say when direct state industries (like post offices or Soviet bureaux) turned into profit-seeking state-owned things and essentially bought the party off, made it rich.
Mia is an anticommunist shitass with a grudge against China so I highly doubt this is worthwhile.
Are you saying that Chinese state-owned enterprises are based on planning, not profit?
I am not educated enough to comment on the nature of Chinese state-owned enterprises. I just don't trust Mia with regard to China.
Kinda surprised that comments here are about some pre-emptive argument about wether China is really communist or not. Communism is the endgoal, the socialist state is an experiment, and none of the things listed in the OP really surprised me. If capitalist monopolies can learn from the soviet union how to in effect do planned economy with their massive market shares, I'm not shocked that a socialist state can have it's enterprises compete with one another, wield market forces, or borrow the form of a shareholder board to manage it's leadership of the economy. I'm not shocked that China's economy is 'merely' ~40% state owned. China has been at the heart of world economic development and in active exchange with the capitalist world for 40 years now. Tsarist Russia was not. I'm also unsurprised that oligarchs exist in the chinese system. That's a common liberal critique of it.
Capitalists outside of China will praise it for developing along capitalist lines. Except if any country in the capitalist West adopted 1% of the raison d'etre that exists in China, it's oligarchy would stage a counter-revolution. It doesn't matter if the policies are correct in the development of productive forces and or even in the enrichment of the oligarchs, the point is owning the system. The point is being on the driver's seat. And at some point, you've got to wonder about wether leftists aren't doing the equivalent of splitting hairs. Capitalist countries invented rail, industry, labour organization, modern academia, and so on. A socialist country is moving towards decreasing and then eliminating exploitation. Not all of the tools are innovations of the creed.
Ultimately I suppose all of the reasons I have to point out that China is different from, say, the EU or the US, someone else might hold as reasons for why the State is being consumed by the market from within. Well, I on one hand I think that's still premature. On the other, I believe that the creation of communism is a struggle on the longest terms possible, and that criticism is important to make sure one does not collapse on the way.
People nitpick or otherwise air out various grievances with the PRC. They fail to look at the big picture:
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The PRC once had a GDP per capita lower than Ghana. It obviously has a far higher GDP per capita while Ghana is far less fortunate. Why is that? Are Chinese capitalists simply smarter and had bigger brains than Ghanaian capitalists? Or was there something more at play?
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The PRC managed to avoid every single recession that hit everyone else, including the Covid Recession and the Great Recession. They even managed to dodge the 1997 Asian financial crisis. I guess Chinese capitalists are not only smarter and more big brained than Ghanaian capitalists but also smarter and more big brained than almost every other capitalist in the world. The closest thing to a Chinese recession is stock market turbulence and "our economy grew less than projected during Covid."
The fundamental flaw that critics of the PRC have is they believe that capitalism is somehow efficient or efficient enough to develop the productive forces of a country when capitalism is actually extremely inefficient. The main reason why Western countries were able to industrialize sooner had more to do with slavery and stealing land from Indigenous peoples than their economic system. This is why Tsarist Russia lagged behind Western countries. It lacked both oversea colonies and didn't have an army of slaves to provide near-free millions of hours of labor-time. So, when the PRC economically outperforms another country like India, they inevitably try to rationalize this by saying the PRC just did capitalism better than India or go to full-on cope mode by denying the PRC's economic progress.
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Maybe a bit tangential to the direct topic at hand, but I found this paper the other day, discussing the government's relationship with the banking sector. Over 1.2 million Party members are employed in the financial sector, which is nearly 20% of the entire sector (and apparently up to 56% of one bank were Party members). Some banks have preemptively taken on their own projects to comply with political aims (the poverty alleviation campaign for one), as well as develop others with Party inspectors. I think the market incentives posed by only 40% of the economy being state-owned is definitely something to be examined going forward (and I have reasonably solid trust in them to do what's needed), but it's not like the Party doesn't have other methods of control.
Too much bickering about personalities in this comment section, and not enough materialism. Can any China-heads give actual insight into the critiques here? I'd be interested to hear some actual informed takes
Well it all began when I, Chairman Mao, came up with some funny ideas
Chinese state-owned enterprises are different: they are profit-making players in the market.
Oil certainly makes them a lot of money, but many of the enterprises are not profit-based.
I think Robert Evans is (mostly) funny and has some good content, but I’ve seen people here call him a fed…. BTB has some hits though like the one about the FDA and the one about Chris/tine Chandler.
Worked for an NED funded org, bellingcat, foreign policy takes somehow often end up agreeing with us foreign policy, works with law enforcement... Hard to come up with a better word to describe him than fed.
I honestly don't think he is a fed. I regard him similarly to the way I do the What a Hell of a Way to Die or Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
You are allowed to enjoy things as long as you keep your materialist hat on.
Well, I suppose that beyond finding his political takes cringeworthy at best, I also find his humor pretty bad. There's only so much "ho ho ho, I am waving a machete around, I am so raandom" that a person can take.
It doesn't matter whether someone is cognizantly doing the anticommunist work of capital or not. Just that they do it.
Same thing to do in irl orgs: someone's true motivations matter much less than their actual actions and how they came to happen. If someone is trying to get people in your org to do dangerous things to get arrested and with poor opsec, it doesn't matter of they're a fed - they are acting like one and need to have an intervention (stripped of power and retrained or just kicked out).
Robert Evans is a hyper sectarian shit stirrer with a ton of awful takes, every one of which is a hill he insists on dying on in the name of sectarianism.
hyper sectarian shit stirrer
I don’t doubt that you have a good reason to believe this, I just don’t see it - can you explain a little? There’s probably something I just don’t pick up on, but I do prefer the pop culture episodes (John Wayne, vince McMahon, etc) to the political ones so maybe I’m missing it.
Or maybe it’s something to do with his social media presence? I don’t do Twitter/etc
Or maybe it’s something to do with his social media presence? I don’t do Twitter/etc
Yeah, it's him picking fights and doing sectarian trolling on social media.
Fortunately I don't use the stupid fucking bird site, so I can enjoy a decent-quality podcast free of baggage
He's called Robert Fedvans in left circles.
He does the things you would do if you wanted to be, at minimum, a useful idiot for capital, starting with kneejerk anticommunism and being selectively lazy at researching the things behind your various accusations against others living or dead. And he is paid by Bellingcat, itself paid by a CIA cutout. It doesn't really matter if a self-labeled lefty doing toxic shit is secretly in favor of the US war and intelligence apparatus or not - the feds think the person is an asset and fund them through the same channels they use to destabilize "enemy" countries.
Think about what you're saying.
You're saying "Don't listen to this guy here! This guy here is guilty of leftist infighting!"
Present a well-grounded criticism of the points. Don't be sectarian.
Doesn't Evans literally use the pejorative "tankies"?
edit: yep, nuclear level neoliberal take here https://twitter.com/IwriteOK/status/1378906962436354053
i stopped listening to all his shit when it seemed he was just itching to find any reason to bring up "soviets bad" no matter how flimsy the context.
I was listening to the occasional episode that seemed interesting for a while after I decided he was basically a radlib, then at the outset of the Ukraine war he did an episode with some guy where the first thirty minutes were just two liberals going "Sure, you might see some Nazi imagery on Ukrainian soldiers but hey, you can probably see that in any European military I am guessing right now without checking and have no intention to check! It's like, Russian misinformation to say that a lot of Ukrainian troops are Nazis, you have to understand the culture to get the nuance, Totenkopfs are just their form of trolling or whatever" and I couldn't take him seriously any more.
Robert Evans is well known to be a lib shit-stirrer that is paid by Bellingcat, which itself takes fed money (from a literal CIA cutout).
If someone wants to learn more about why he sucks, they can always just engage or ask questions. It would be really bad if folks here started writing several-page responses explaining a person's history and why it's bad, which is what would be required in this case, in response to statements like these.
Communists don't engage in splitting/wrecking/name-calling. Communists don't drop investigations because they're scared of conflict (1 & 6). Communists seek the truth, follow antagonisms to their conclusion. They certainly don't shy away from seeking truth from facts out of fear that it might require reading several pages.
Having established the basic task-at-hand (to understand whether Chinese state-owned enterprises, have significantly diverged from the sort of bureaux that existed under Lenin, becoming instead profit-seekers) and set deviations of sectarianism and laziness (or an incorrect view that anything the Chinese government does can always be assumed to be correct without any investigation: "Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things") let's set about the task....
It's mostly to do with these two, as far as I can see –
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We Are the (National) Champions: Understanding the Mechanisms of State Capitalism in China, DOI: 10.2307/23530170 (64 pages)
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Li-Wen Lin, Curtis J. Milhaupt, Bonded to the State: A Network Perspective on China's Corporate Debt Market, Journal of Financial Regulation, Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2017, Pages 1–39, https://doi.org/10.1093/jfr/fjw016 (39 pages)
The first source is notable for some pro-free-market assumptions, e.g. talking about "the detriment of entrepreneurship, innovation, and efficient capital allocation". It talks about the "vertical integration" of firms such and the CNNG (aluminium). It's worth pulling out this part –
"CNNG has four levels of firms organized to collaborate ferrous metals production chain. The first three levels resemble the other national SOE groups. They consist of the core company, Chinalco, its wholly owned subsidiaries; and its noncontrolled, downstream subsidiaries. What makes this group unusual is the huge fourth level consist companies in which Chinalco holds no shares but with which it or other Chinalco group members have long-term trading relationships"
The interesting thing to me here is the "trading relationships". There's an evident difference between what China has now and the Gosplan bureaux: both are vertically integrated, but the relationships between them are profit-based rather than plan-based.
The last paragraph on page 707 of the first source says that there are different types of enterprises, some probably more market-like and some more "authoritarian". That is to be expected in such a huge and complex economy of course, but it says something about the question under consideration.
The take-home point of the second source is that some state-owned enterprises bail out other ones (the Chaori example), giving them an edge over private firms who don't have those guarantees.
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The discussion is about Chinese state-owned enterprises, not about some internet celebrity 99% of us have never heard of.
Whether Chinese state-owned enterprises serve the people or not is an important question. Z-list celebrity-gossip is not.
His series on the Battle of Blaire Mountain, the Behind the Police series, The War on Everyone, etc are good.
Sure he has lib takes but everyone calling him a fed when the dude literally stood on the front lines of the portland protests and whose podcast has a guide on how to protest without getting identified idk I just don't think he's an actual fed. Naive? Sure.
the dude literally stood on the front lines of the portland protests
I'm not saying he's a direct police or law enforcement employee or anything, but direct employees of law enforcement also stand on the front lines of protests as agents provocateur. To be clear, I don't think his participation in the protests is as an agent provocateur but his presence there also doesn't absolve him or prove him to be a genuine leftist.
Isn't it fair to say anyone who sees their long term lot with the working class a leftist of some stripe.
I mean yeah but the entire set of reactionary values dosent all belive in class collaboration theory, you know what i mean? I was just stating the left starts after the social dem not before.
I think there needs to be a lot more than seeing your lot being with the working class to make one a leftist
I think thats where the spectrum of the left starts, for me this is the most basic base value you have to hold to be on the left, what value or values do you think they are?
Elon musk has called himself a socialist and would probably tell you everything he does is to improve the lot of the working class. I think it takes action or at minimum, some kind of real analysis, not just supposing that when it all breaks down you'll be with the workers. Plenty of elected Democrats would proudly call themselves leftists, then vote for an increase in military spending and to send more weapons to Ukraine.
In the case of Evans, nobody who has devoted an entire episode (and probably more at this point) of their podcast to making excuses for Azov nazis gets to consider themselves a leftist.
I see what your saying, but I think this is kinda of a vulger position, which normaly im all I about it, I want the left to inclusive of people of left and right leftist opositions, I think one of the biggest issues within the 20th century left was shuffling of all would be left intellectuals into the university system, I think this damaged the movment( at least as I experienced it in the 70's-80's ) we need working class Intelligencia to be healthy and connected to the working class more directly, id even say the anti intellectualism we see now in people like vash is a result of this era of very radical but disconnected by extention of university carteling of knowledge from the working class in general.
I guess to support your point I think we should make being left more then seeing your lot with the working class but also even leftist in academic situations do need to be looked at with skepticism as they are insulated from harsh working conditions and the worst wages that working people suffer, they are more so insulated from econmic down turns more then other workers. I guess what I'm saying is we gotta be more picky about what workers get elevated as leaders but also we need more organic Intelligencia who can speak to divisions of labor better. Like how many though leader Marxists are not heavily credentialed university labor. You feel me? I'm not saying all collage educated is bad we need them but we need more then just their perspective like we need other segments of the labors to handle rural workers vs city ect
Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. Particularly in the US the left should be very critical of and concerned about who the leaders of orgs are
One of the reasons he gets called a fed is that his org is NED-funded. Fed-funded by a literal CIA cutout. Anyone that does that is our enemy and will be the first to get us killed (by ratting us out, by directing the forces of capital at us cvia sectarianism).
