Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real-estate tycoon with close ties to senior Chinese officials, disappeared in March after he allegedly penned a scathing essay criticizing President Xi Jinping's response to the coronavirus epidemic.
I hear the same vague talking points repeated by a number of CPC supporters on here, but the more I look into specifics, whether it be for coronavirus response or “taking control” of the private sector, the more it’s obvious that the Chinese state functions to prop up and defend capitalist relations.
We can explore the specifics of how, why, and at what frequency billionaires are imprisoned or killed, but killing the people behind capital doesn’t change the productive and property relations that create billionaires, not from a Marxist sense anyway.
From everything I’ve read, capitalism in China generates new billionaires at a higher rate than any other national economy. An unusually high number of them are jailed/executed, but their ranks are replaced and expanded.
At least according to the CPC itself, most of the time it would appear to be punishments for corruption or murder or other crimes, not for betrayal of the working class interest. They are not killed so that their means of production can be expropriated and given to the workers, they are killed as individual punishment for crimes. From the extent of the criminality, it would actually seem like corruption is widespread among Chinese capitalists, which is not surprising, because capitalism itself is a petri dish for corruption.
There would appear to be zero trajectory towards transferring ownership and control of the productive forces to the working class, which would be the necessary step to reign in capitalist productive relations and not just the criminality of individual capitalists.
I hear the same vague talking points repeated by a number of CPC supporters on here, but the more I look into specifics, whether it be for coronavirus response or “taking control” of the private sector, the more it’s obvious that the Chinese state functions to prop up and defend capitalist relations.
We can explore the specifics of how, why, and at what frequency billionaires are imprisoned or killed, but killing the people behind capital doesn’t change the productive and property relations that create billionaires, not from a Marxist sense anyway.
From everything I’ve read, capitalism in China generates new billionaires at a higher rate than any other national economy. An unusually high number of them are jailed/executed, but their ranks are replaced and expanded.
At least according to the CPC itself, most of the time it would appear to be punishments for corruption or murder or other crimes, not for betrayal of the working class interest. They are not killed so that their means of production can be expropriated and given to the workers, they are killed as individual punishment for crimes. From the extent of the criminality, it would actually seem like corruption is widespread among Chinese capitalists, which is not surprising, because capitalism itself is a petri dish for corruption.
There would appear to be zero trajectory towards transferring ownership and control of the productive forces to the working class, which would be the necessary step to reign in capitalist productive relations and not just the criminality of individual capitalists.