- Why does China, a socialist country, have mega corporations like Tencent and Bytedance? Are they collectively owned by syndicates or unions? If this is a transitionary phase to socialism, can we trust China to actually enforce Socialism after this stage ends?
- Child Labor in factories: Myth or Fact? I have a Chinese friend who said he personally never worked as a child in China, but obviously if this was true not every single kid would have worked in a factory.
- Surveillance and Social Credit: are these myths, or are they true? Why would China go so far to implement these systems, surely it'd be far too costly and burdensome for whatever they'd gain from that.
- Uighur Muslim genocide: Is this true?
Thank you to anyone who answers, and if you do please cite sources so I can look further into China. I really appreciate it.
edit: I was going to ask about Tiananmen Square, but as it turns out that literally just didn't happen. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
https://leohezhao.medium.com/notes-for-30th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-incident-f098ef6efbc2
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
From what I understand it's worth reading about the NEP/New Economic Policy that was in place in Russia shortly after the revolution to get a better grasp of what's going on with China's capitalism. My understanding is that in both cases the goal was to leverage capitalism for economic growth before implimenting socialist methods.
The NEP is definitely relevant, insofar as in both cases they can be interpreted as pragmatic responses to certain situations in order to develop productive forces by allowing capitalistic economic relations.
The difference is that the NEP was far more clearly a matter of existential pragmatism after the civil war. The Dengist reforms, it could be argued were less a matter of survival. The Maoist/Neo-Maoist view is that they represent a counterrevolutionary bureacratic tendency with behaviour that mirrored in some ways petit-bourgeois ideology that Mao was very explicit throughout his life in warning about and attempting to combat. Hence the purges of Deng and Liu Shaoqi.
Defences of these reforms often argue either that they were necessary for China's survival, or that they are a grand strategic move to get the West to move its productive base to China. I think that the latter argument is stronger than the first.
These defences often hinge on the assumption that the period of the Cultural Revolution, or the Maoist period in general, were periods of serious economic failure. Now there are massive failures here, notably the Great Chinese Famine and much of the disorder and violence of the Cultural Revolution, but the idea that Chinese was rendered economically backward by these periods is simply false. It continued to grow, develop and industrialize greatly during this period. The Dengist reforms were introduced after a period of great socialistic economic development, whereas the NEP was introduced after the desolation of the civil war. The economy had barely even introduced capitalism out of feudalistic socio-economic and political relations in Russia. China already had developed institutions and infastructure in place, and this was not at all comparable to War Communism, which was initially and largely seen as a necessity, and only later on the left-wing of the part was it seen as a virtue.
If we say that both had the similarity of introducing capitalistic elements into the economy in order to allow certain kinds of development of the economic forces, the historical conditions in which they were introduced were very different, and this changes the meaning, purpose, function and effects of the policies, despite their similarities.