• China's economy is 40% state-owned – compare Lenin's NEP period, 70-77%

  • 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.

  • China has enterprises owned by local and provincial government – sometimes they compete with each other! So the state competes with itself on the market!

  • They can sell 49% of their stock on the stock market, even to foreigners.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Nakoichi [they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Maoo [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      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).