I’d say if I was alive back then and had my same perspectives I probably would be way more critical too. I think while the Deng-era reforms wound up being a strategically valuable move achieving the goals they set out to, they also came with a lot of sacrifices and immiseration.

The good from Deng’s ideas: a NEP-style controlled capitalist sector for developing the productive forces while minimizing the breadth of their exploitation; IP deals with foreign capitalists to rapidly improve chinas technology; sanction avoidance and full integration with the world economy. These things would not have been clear benefits yet at the time and the sacrifices have only paid off in about the last ten years, but in big ways.

The bad from that era: overly zealous SEZs and lack of a leash for capitalists in many sectors leading to extreme exploitation for some; decollectivizing farms; dismantling of the “iron rice bowl” set of social welfare programs. I think frankly that Deng had rightist tendencies on social programs and agriculture and these were unnecessary moves in achieving the goals he was claiming to target. These blunders and missteps would also have immediate consequences and were undoubtedly negative from the perspective of a communist who cares for equity and social welfare, so it’s no wonder that few without inside perspective in China and faith in the reforms’ long term ambitions would view these as progressive and healthy policies of a socialist country.

At the time it would certainly have seemed bleak, especially backdropped by the illegal and unjust dissolution of the USSR and wider socialist collapse it triggered. I don’t think my takes would’ve been any less critical than Parenti’s. But today we have the benefit of seeing what paid off from that era.

Contemporary China certainly still garners some critiques from MLs, at least the ones I know. Some critiques I have:

• PRC have historically not had great foreign policy, and today they’re very hands off and neutral in their dealings. This is an improvement over their past policies, but the USSR set an example of supporting liberatory projects and helping others cast off their chains which China has never sought to emulate. I understand it’s for self preservation but I wish they’d show their solidarity in that way.
• Greater social programs are possible at this stage of development and would be invaluable towards quality of life, I.e. free education to the highest level of ability, guaranteed employment, free publicly owned housing, guaranteed monthly food allowance, etc.
• China has a way to go on certain social issues and policies surrounding them, specifically regarding feminism and LGBTQIA+ issues. They’re better than the West in some ways, worse in others, but the country as a whole is still developing in those areas and could use some work. I hope to see them take inspiration from the Cuban family code from 2022 which is the most progressive set of policies I’ve ever seen for women and GSRM
• I also oppose the market economy as a general structure: I think that state owned industries should operate on a more planned basis which can interact with the market but isn’t beholden to it, while a smaller controlled market exists for artisan industries and the current crop of private enterprise.
• Obviously controlled capitalist sectors exist there which come with exploitation; I oppose that but recognize it’s a sacrifice for development right now and this is acceptable for the time being.
• There is a lack of digital privacy, not as bad as say the USA but still not where I’d personally want it. This is less of a concern for me under a communist government but principally I want the option to remain anonymous or private in my digital life. I also dislike the lack of privacy VPNs and the ‘great firewall’. These complaints aren’t accounting for the greater political landscape which shaped those policies, which I do recognize, but I still am critical of the solutions.
• Too much car infrastructure. China has amazing public transit but many cities do have huge roads running through them. I wish to see a return of bike culture in Chinese cities, more emphasis on walking, and further expansion of public transportation.

While I have these critiques, it is clear to me that the CPC has begun winding down the special privileges they granted to capital and exercising greater public control of the economy again; they’ve rebuilt many social services; they’ve performed immense poverty alleviation and socioeconomic development. My analysis is that any rightist tilt has been counteracted and China is building a prosperous and progressive socialist society, and that the reform-era is their NEP moment. I believe they’ve contributed greatly to our understanding of Marxism, its flexibility, and its creative applications to different conditions and stages. Despite their present shortcomings, they give me hope that a better and more just world is still possible.

Apologies for the wall of text, I hope you find something of value in my thoughts here.

Just from the opinions and arguments I've seen firsthand over the past decade, I think the current positive view on China that at least some MLs have today is comparatively recent and largely based on the recent infrastructure development, anti-poverty, and anti-corruption campaigns the CPC has successfully carried out demonstrating that the communist bloc is back in power in the party. Even as recent as just six years ago it seemed like "the CPC is a liberal party where communists are marginalized or nonexistent" was the dominant stance I saw people in left spaces taking. Back in 2017 I got told directly "there are no communists left in the CCP [sic]" after saying it looked like there was an internal conflict between the liberal bloc and communist bloc and that it seemed like the communists might be coming back into power. Even here there was more cynicism early on, and I think the change since is mostly due to China genuinely showing progress and positive change.

Which makes sense: China has been largely passive and non-interventionalist geopolitically, siding with the status quo and mostly just trying to peacefully coexist with everyone. Which, you know, they have good reasons for even if their lack of material support for revolutionaries is obviously a big negative for oppressed people and revolutionary movements that could really use the help; this is where you get tendencies like Hoxhaism splitting from Maoism, Maoism becoming very critical of the CPC, and other "ultraleftist" tendencies developing who have a serious axe to grind with China over its foreign policy. China under the liberal bloc also really didn't give people any real reason to trust that someday they might come back around and turn the development of industrial capital that opening up as a market to the west enabled back towards benefiting the people and working towards a socialist model again. It's only comparatively recently that the CPC has gone and shown that they are willing to wield power and use capital to directly address a lot of the long-running problems China has had with rural poverty and to tackle the corruption issues that resulted from their very middle-management-centric organizational structure where the central leadership was overwhelmed and materially had to leave everything to local officials that they've struggled to maintain oversight over.

There was a real fear at the time that China would follow the the west into neoliberal reform hell. The west thought they would follow along as well and relations improved a lot, and western media portrayals of China started to become less hostile. Under Xi it became clear China wouldn't follow along and sell everything they have to western interests for cheap, official attitudes towards China took a 180 and started becoming hostile again.

There is a massive gap in communication between China and the Western world that I think a lot of very "Internationalist" Marxists would like to pretend does not exist. If you are a non-Chinese leftist in America (and often even if you are Chinese), your idea of the priorities of the CPC and the general attitudes of the Chinese public and the problems they face is incredibly vague.

To word it another way: we have almost as good of an idea of how things stand in France or Germany or the U.K. as we do the United States; and those who are paying attention have a good grasp on even Cuba and Venezuela and Mexico and such. But with China, we are still solidly in the "Sovietologist" era of information.

Western Marxist-Leninists of the late 80s/early 90s operated on the assumption that China's liberal reforms meant that it was abandoning Socialism in favor of Social Democracy. China's return to stronger Socialist reforms over the past decade or so has shown that this was in fact a gambit and that it has paid off, but it is difficult to say for sure whether this was always their trajectory, how much Parenti and his contemporaries knew, and the internal currents of Party.

This is from 2021, but probably covers what you are asking about: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

Basically, socialism with Chinese characteristics is an effort to synthesize a better methodology that avoids known pitfalls of other attempts and is very specific to the material conditions that exist.

From Deng to Xi, let them cook.

The Sino-Soviet split and its consequences. Looking back we can see that Deng's plan worked, but at the time it was coming alongside China siding with the US on a lot of foreign policy issues and it really seemed like Neoliberalism was coming for China the same way it came for everyone else. Even the modern CPC considers that era of China to have committed "right errors."

In an alternate universe, the Tiennenman Square protests resulted in a liberal political revolution and Jack Ma ended up the most powerful man in China.

I don’t remember what exactly Blackshirts and Reds said about China, but you have to remember that it was published in 1997, so some things are going to be outdated.

Given the circumstances in the 90’s, I can’t fault socialists and communists of the era being pessimistic about market reform in AES countries. After what happened to the USSR, it must’ve looked like a slippery slope to the same outcome.

However, I think time has born out that those reforms were necessary for the continuation of socialist political economies. It added a flexibility to their economies that the strictly state capitalist economies didn’t have. Of course I’d still prefer for those market institutions to come in socialist forms like worker co-ops or public corporations run by boards jointly made up of worker and public representatives rather than traditional capitalist structures.

China was just starting on the path that would lead them to the successes we have seen. It is fair to be skeptical before we saw the results

Do remember that Parenti wote that book in something like 1997, by then the situation in China looked pretty bleak and also he only had access to western media, where "China is liberalising and is capitalist now" was basically only thing anyone could read, even someone like Parenti who was usually very good with critical analysis of western rags.

So while he was wrong, i wouldn't blame him for it.

I mean this is the same Parenti who defended Gorbachev on cspan with the claim "he was making modern socialism" while Gorbachev was dismantling the USSR. As mentioned below Parenti had real connections to the USSR so this opinion makes sense, although it should be evident to people here that if Parenti's views were commonplace then that the modern incarnation of people defending china with little investigation is aberrant and regrettable in how limiting the AES horizon of thought is. We are on an explicitly leftist website, dispense with the arguments you make to your lib friends to justify china to them.

"Market socialism" as practiced by modern china is basically a couple arguments masquerading as justification for capitalist restoration. Either you have to let foreign capital into your nation in order to bamboozle them and acquire their leverage/tech/forex etc, and this is merely a tactic in crisis(and also completely breaks with lenin's work on how foreign trade should be conducted by socialist states, see "Red Globalization" and read up on the NEP more and how its practices used to justify the opening up while actually being completely flipped on their head). Commodity production but under state control, e.g. parts of cuba. At least this is honest about the capitalist production. If this is not the case then maybe capitalist markets are a stage in the development towards communism, especially in "underdeveloped" countries. E.g. Deng when he sometimes said that he didnt care if china was capitalist as long as the line went up. Yugoslavia tried this, and we saw how that went, although perhaps china's stalled attempts due to political gridlock has something to do with that.

Or perhaps the "market" is more efficient as a director of investment. profit allocates resources better than any state level bureaucrat. This is the most trite, especially looking into china's agricultural sector which saw almost no increases in efficiency when they were exposed to free market prices, they just started growing cash crops.

And all of this cant be removed from how advanced various aspects of the relations of production are in 2025. Amazon in and of itself removes any ability to say the "market" is a better planner of investment than a massively centralized system of management.

China's existing system is a series of contradictions defined by various powerful blocs within china that all fundamentally disagree on how it will continue. At least Xi and the various plenums reports are completely honest that the "market" will continue its dominance. It is now, more than ever, impossible to imagine the end of capitalism. www.news.cn/politics/20240721/cec09ea2bde840dfb99331c48ab5523a/c.html From a comrade doing some translating:

"Focus on building a high-level socialist market economic system, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources, give better play to the role of the government, adhere to and improve the basic socialist economic system, promote high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance, promote high-level opening-up, build a modern economic system, accelerate the construction of a new development pattern, and promote high-quality development"

They might damn well privatize what little remains of the SOE's within our lifetimes.

And to anyone who continues to defend the opening up period as some magical moment when state controlled capitalism was able to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, there is plenty of modern scholarship that challenges that conclusion. https://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/DSullivan-JHickel-CapitalismExtremePoverty.pdf

Listening material: https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/the-deng-reform-period-w-ken-hammond-modern-chinese-history-pt-4

You can also buy Ken's book, I haven't read it, but I plan to in the near future

Book: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:China%27s_Revolution_and_the_Quest_for_a_Socialist_Future