it worries me how little emphasis is put on pr and international relations. if they dont clean up their act, they will lose momentum and international standing real fking quick. the anti-chinese sentiment is spreading rapidly, especially in critical zones like east and southern africa
This is a major criticism I see from Chinese folks on r/sino. The west is waging a massive propaganda war and the Chinese Government isn't really hitting back. Beijing thinks truth will prevail, but it rarely does in the face of coordinated disinformation.
There's exceptionally little China can do about it though. Aside from dismissing the West's claims as nonsense and lies, anything they publish will simply be counter-dismissed as Chinese gommulist propaganda, topped off with a double helping of sinophobic red scareism.
I mean I'm sure they can do something, especially in places in the global south.
I think we in the west have a tendency to overestimate and project people's distrust of China onto others with drastically different material conditions. What western imperialist governments find repulsive might be viewed positively or indifferently. For the most part, China's role in Africa is leaps and bounds far less harmful than anything the west ever did since they set foot there. Its regional neighbors depend heavily on it for trade and support. Same applies to South America, and they have plenty of problems of their own with their belligerent neighbor to the north. For the most part, poorer nations are simply content to have China as a beneficial trade partner and care little for their domestic politics as it doesn't affect them.
I know that China is seen generally positively in Africa but there are some places where the public opinion isn't great and other places where there probably isn't much opinion on China at all. I think they are making great strides in Africa materially but propaganda is extremely powerful. The US wants to push anti-china propaganda globally and we are better at it and take its importance more seriously. I just think if you're trying to be a world power and your economy is massive enough to spare the expense, you should invest in a sophisticated global propaganda network.
Yeah. There was something on twitter today about how China has a role in the Nigerian SARS program. I know China does soft power, but they need to be careful.
You seen Wolf Warrior 2? They still have a lot to learn about implementing film-as-propaganda.
It may be a problem that they are (somewhat justifiably) afraid of letting creative forces free, and err on the side of caution with censorship. I've seen webnovels get cancelled by authorities where it would be very far-fetched to say they had subversive content.
Chinese propaganda for foreign consumption is all hamfisted too. Not nearly as sophisticated as what VOA or the big European state-run broadcasters put out.
True, I'll watch some CGTN and CCTV videos and it is very obviously state-run propaganda, which is going to turn off most western viewers. China is a massive and rich country, they've gotta be able to get someone who understands how to effectively propagandize westerners. I saw one of those little segments they run in between news shows that's like a commercial for the network and tbh it looked like an SNL skit. The white people had really weird makeup on that made them look like androids and they said something like "I'm an American but I live in China and I'm bringing you the news". Any normal american who saw that would immediately think it was bizarre unless they were like 75.
It makes no difference what China says, absolutely no one would believe them, the propaganda in the west would just step up.
Any attempt to compete with western propaganda would require such demented levels of dishonesty that it would corrupt their entire system.
lol as if pr would help them
nothing they actually say or do matters in that regard, they're right not to focus on it
If they are a rival to the US, the US will try to destroy them. How they run their country in no way shape or form changes that fact.
core socialist values shall be embraced by the people
:CommiePOGGERS:
tfw you legit want to ask if the cpc has a history of fulfilling their stretch goals
Going to make a post that will anger both hardline Marxist-Leninists who hate Dengists and weirdo Western leftists who think Stalinism and Dengism aren't real socialism yet simultaneously both state capitalism
I think the prospect of synthesizing the original orthodox Marxist belief in the necessity of a stage of bourgeois capitalist development with the Leninist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat is actually extremely good and based and intriguing
National liberation is a pretty key struggle, and I think there is every reason to believe that developing a national bourgeoisie is helpful in that struggle so long as they don't gain undue influence in politics. Even the phillipines communist party, no fan of China, supports national liberation through the national democratic front. You can't develop a communist society while imperialism is the principle dialectic in the world.
Love or hate Deng or China, it is undeniable that they are creating a multipolar world that is making it possible for other countries to follow their own socialist path.
The problem ultimately I think is in trying to discern what 'undue' influence is. I think what bothers me about this view is that it pretty much erases the historical fact that 1. Maoist China existed, 2. It survived despite imperialism and aggression from both superpowers, 3. The nationalist bourgeoisie were liquidated after New Democracy properly came to an end in 1954. What made China a success in my view compared to say India is in fact that they realized that the bourgeoisie could never be CURTAILED so much as they had to be abolished, which is why Mao was so paranoid about capitalist roaders propping up - the revolution would never be complete without them being sequestered from society.
In my view, what you have in China is a situation where many of the elites that Mao and the left of the Party disdained are suddenly in a much better situation. As a personal anecdote - I knew kids who joined the Party in college because it meant that they would be able to get better finance jobs. The Party has become a sort of quasi corporate entity in that as an institution it doesn't have a hostility to capital per se so much as it uses certain language to proclaim that it is against capital's dominance. But my bet is that of Mao's: an iota of capitalist influence will eventually corrupt any political project to overthrow it.
As a personal anecdote - I knew kids who joined the Party in college because it meant that they would be able to get better finance jobs.
Why is that a bad thing? Would you prefer if success in finanace wasn't contingent on joinging the party?
I would prefer if the Party had a hostile attitude to the idea of finance, frankly. Having posters at econ schools that have mottos along the lines of "March with the Party - start your own company!" does not scream hostile to capital to me. Yes, I am not joking - it exists.
Well we can prefer it until we are blue in the face, but it's not really going to stop them from doing it. I guess at the end of the day, after our revolution we will have to choose whether or not to implement dengist policies based on the material conditions at play in our own path towards communism.
Dengist policies were not pursued out of material necessity - it was an ideological choice. By erasing the Maoist legacy (read the Party's 1980 statement of the Party's historical achievements) they were able to suggest that there was no choice but the path they took and that ultimately nothing about their class character or driving political economical concerns changed. But these policies were opposed by plenty of intellectuals, workers, peasants etc and some of that opposition has lived several afterlives even today (wildcat strikes, resistance against forced removals etc). To say so matter of fact that ah the Party will just do what it says and if doesn't matter what anyone thinks seems to me to entirely ignore the conscious decisions made in favor and against certain types of policy.
I can't imagine they care very much what you think.
But let's pretend for a moment our opnions are even remotely important on how Chinese people should run their country. I don't really get your point. If the priniple contradiction is Imperialism seems to me their focus should be on anti-imperialism. What would you do differently?
It’s not about convincing them it’s about what exactly our vision is here.
Let me rephrase. What's the biggest threat to China. Capitalism, or the USA?
Ok, let me try again. What's a bigger threat chinese national self determination.
The party is now populated by finance groups.
Do you see the issue yet?
I think it’s doomed to regress to capitalism and the thought of that is terrifying.
some good shit, but they need to strive for universial health care, not just "multi tiered" whatever that means.
it's 5 years though
by multi-tiered i think they mean accessibility to/affordability of different levels of treatment, complexity wise
to use a somewhat large country (brazil) with universal health care (public option called SUS) as an example: we have it on paper, but in practice we lack doctors and it's really, really hard to execute it in "deep brazil" (mainly the countryside) - existing doctors don't want to go there, there's barely any useful infrastructure, etc
another issue is that, when it comes to specialized treatments and exams, where the technology is much more expensive, supply often doesn't meet demand
to make things worse, these technologies also need technical training to be used, so sometimes we have the machines but no one who can properly and safely use them
now, this is for a somewhat large country with a rural population of 14%; imagine a massive country like china, with a rural population of 40% and vastly underdeveloped regions more to the center (as they had been focusing mostly on the coastal cities until recently)
and still they already have 95% coverage for basic treatment, so i guess they're doing ok? i mean, my main point is that i wouldn't criticize this without really knowing in detail what they're doing wrong, because in my country we literally have universal health care in our constitution, but regardless of our printed words our actual conditions haven't allowed us to make this a reality
This is all well and good but I think what we ignore here is that China had a system of universal healthcare before. It was dismantled, I think frankly quite haphazardly, and suddenly talk of that old system is dismissed out of hand as unachievable. And it was not a joke medical system either! It accomplished huge strides in infant care, women's morality, basic health outcomes etc. All for free and entirely uncommodified. Whereas now the real issue is that for many people even if 'access' exists if is curtailed by hukou, employment status, quality of care in shitty public hospitals, doctors having extremely limited time to see patients, etc. There is a whole phenomenon of mobs beating doctors up because they prescribe medicine that is pushed by insurance sponsors (like the US lol). Saying that things will change slowly ignores how quickly the state was able to change things before, which in my opinion is just a matter of a vastly changed political economy.
this is why i mentioned basic healthcare
the system during the mao period managed to do that really well - this is doable, since whenever the material requirements are low enough you can change things through sheer force of will, as the barefoot doctors certainly did and got huge gains from it
but it wasn't universal healthcare - or do you think the barefoot doctors had access to the latest chemotherapy medicines? radiotherapy machines? MRIs? respirators, ICUs, and so on
unless you believe traditional chinese medicine can take care of this stuff, which it obviously can't, there are very real material limitations and ideals can only take us as far as they allow us to
my criticism to the reforms was shutting off free access to basic treatment in the short term, because this, as you said, could have easily been provided - but i haven't read their justifications for it
You'd actually be surprised as to what level of care was conducted by the barefoot doctors. Also I might point out that there is nothing in the definition of universal healthcare that suggests you need to have the very advanced equipment (not sure how much of that was largely available in the 1950s anyway). Universal healthcare is simply a system where all citizens are guaranteed easy access to healthcare. FYI the Maoist regime didn't care for 'traditional Chinese medicine' (a nonsense term btw) but it is actually being significantly more espoused TODAY and even by government sources.
The justification as for why basic treatment's access was changed was because the nature of health care largely changed. It stopped being solely the purview of the state. Private actors were allowed in, provincial governments felt they could let budgets slide. You can say that ah they couldn't have gotten better tech if not for this budgetary change but I mean most government run healthcare programs would disagree.
Universal healthcare is simply a system where all citizens are guaranteed easy access to healthcare
i understand, but if you can't afford specialized treatment that means people won't have access to it
so how universal is that access, really?
traditional Chinese medicine’ (a nonsense term btw)
what do you mean by that? TCM has a very identifiable theoretical basis for each of its branches, i don't see the issue with the term
but it is actually being significantly more espoused TODAY and even by government sources.
this wasn't really my point, and i don't know how much more espoused it is today
but it's still far more incentivized by the government than i deem ideal, that's for sure. i don't know if they've just decided these practices are so deeply rooted in their culture that they're impossible to suppress, and that it was better to just cave in and regulate it instead, but it's a waste of resources that could be used for stuff that actually works
The justification as for why basic treatment’s access was changed was because the nature of health care largely changed. It stopped being solely the purview of the state. Private actors were allowed in, provincial governments felt they could let budgets slide. You can say that ah they couldn’t have gotten better tech if not for this budgetary change but I mean most government run healthcare programs would disagree.
this makes sense, do you have a source i could look at? especially for the effectiveness of government run healthcare programs
I mean the question about specialized treatment is a valid one but again I am not sure how valid it is in the face of the Maoist project being dead for 50 years. We cannot really definitively say that the latest advancements would not have been procured by the state later on, and again I am not sure that we can sya the state of the field today is one where every villager has access to an MRI machine. There are certain treatments one cannot get in the UK under free healthcare today, but you can get them in the US if you pay a shit ton of money. The UK still has 'universal' healthcare, though, as it can offer some treatment of the illness even if not the specific, best one. The US will give it to you if you are willing to pay a shit ton of money. I would wager we would both take the former.
TCM is a moniker that actually a lot of Sinologists really get irritated at. My apology if I did as well. We don't like it because it projects the idea of a single or even single continuum of traditional practices that were part of a body of scientific or pseudo-scientific knowledge in pre-modern China. But no such body existed. Much of the stuff was actually invented after the fact, many of the medicinal prescriptions were practiced by people that were very much at odds with each other, and the idea of medicine in say Qing-era China was radically different. TCM is very much an invented category for what is largely a set of practices that were made traditional, rather than really representing 'tradition'.
It is more 'espoused today' in the sense that, again, Maoist era officials hated the idea of anything 'traditional', invented or not, and strictly forbid 'superstitious' practices like qigong etc. Again there is nothing about these practices that are deeply rooted in a singular 'Chinese culture' because that singularity is actually a lot more hetereogenous than people give it or credit for, and a lot of these supposedly popular 'ancient' practices were only made popular after the fact.
If you want a good source on healthcare in China today vs the Maoist era, Martin Whyte has written a lot on this.
We cannot really definitively say that the latest advancements would not have been procured by the state later on
we can't definitively say anything regarding hypotheticals in general, right?
and it's also very hard to compare because, for instance, i could use your example to say "see, even the UK, one of the richest countries on earth, has been unable to provide certain specialized care for its citizens", but that leaves out the fact that they're a capitalist country, which implies different priorities for the government; or i could try to be more fair and mention how cuba, which has a similar per capita GDP and a socialist government still has trouble acquiring medicines and specialized equipments, but that in turn leaves out the embargo and how this relates to the fact that most of those are produced by american companies
but i think that would be pointless as i'm not arguing the current healthcare system is better: but that it has the potential of being such, whereas i don't see this being the case for the previous one
TCM is a moniker that actually a lot of Sinologists really get irritated at. My apology if I did as well.
it's cool, if you did i didn't notice it
i get what you mean about TCM. i'll try to be more specific next time
If you want a good source on healthcare in China today vs the Maoist era, Martin Whyte has written a lot on this.
right, putting it on the list
Yes but I think the lack of definitiveness is what makes history so compelling to me! There were potentials for something different, and we cannot erase them. I guess ultimately my stance on this is that I do not genuinely believe that the CCP introducing market forces into healthcare was necessary for good health outcomes (in fact, there is also a lot of literature on how access to certain technologies such as MRIs also does not wholly necessitate better health outcomes). Whole other sectors of the economy (defense, energy) were shielded from marketization due to national interests. Why couldn't healthcare also have been shielded? Important to note that the UK may be a rich country but the NHS is breaking down because the Tory party doesn't want to fund it. China has the will to fund lots of infrastructure projects for example. Money could be found for an expansion of public healthcare as well, but Whyte argues the issue is that China's aging society plus the total lack of any welfare infrastructure means that the costs would be tremendous (along the lines of Japan, but without the benefit of Japan being an already wealthy society). That is a political economical deficiency that was caused, he argues, by the one child policy and also macroeconomic policy in the 80s and 90s that left poor provinces at the mercy of the market.
So while I agree that a one to one comparison of the healthcare systems of Maoist and post Mao China isn't the most helpful, I also don't share your optimism about the current model getting much better, simply because I do fundamentally believe that the sector could have been left decommodified to some degree or at least wholly state owned.
Richest man in China got there off health care and bottled water. Massively hoarded wealth off of basic necessities.
But the exploration is well supervised or something.
Yeah when China does “affordable” or “multi-tier” it’s fine. It’s socialism. Its the exact same exploitation, but the rhetoric sounds better so it’s socialism.
There isn’t a five year plan, but there is a four year plan.
VOTE 😎
I like the part where the only mention of socialism is tied to civility.
Socialism is when you just do capitalism and make vague references to that changing someday.
We can argue the morality of turning to capitalism to solve that, but it’s still not socialism.
eh i think this guy is just one of those people who think you can just smash the "activate socialism" button and create a new world out of thin air
No, I even get the appeal of a socialist market economy. I understand the stated explanation.
I just don’t buy it. I don’t this as any more than capitalism with some window dressing.
i know, and i understand the skepticism, but you're thinking of the situation as it stands while ignoring the historical process leading to it
this is why i don't like calling china X or Y, because i think even classifying china as a socialist market economy is a mistake since it gives the impression that there's a final historical point
i don't even have an issue calling it state capitalism - i have done so myself here, and i still do, i think it's a fitting name for this exact point in chinese history - my problem is when these names make people think this means there's no more dialectical movement forward in the country, managed by the party
I mean I think we should also look at how the term was used in the relatively recent past. People want to shout about how China was a poor country in the 1970s and yet 'socialist' but the story is so much more complex. China was still the most successful Third World country by a long shot, it had successfully resisted both superpowers, launched an ambitious program of international aid in Africa (almost totally interest free at that, very much unlike today), literacy rates were incredibly high, healthcare was free, etc etc. Lots of incredible problems, sure, but most of these were the consequences of either misguided agricultural policies (I will maintain that center imposed quotas on agricultural production is dumb) or a lack of international trade.
What happened in the reform era was a very definite switch in terms of total political economy - privatization, mass cuts, depoliticization of local life...Much of this has been reversed somewhat but I think we need to look at fundamentals of political economy to actually gauge the 'dialectical direction' a country is taking. It is not enough to have a communist party in government if they do not try and establish some sort of decommodified understanding of economic life imo. Just calling yourself communist hardly fixes things.
literacy rates were incredibly high
can you source this? because the sources i have put literacy rates at 65% in 1982, which means it was probably even lower during the maoist period
it was even worse for women as about half of them were illiterate
the maoist period improved things for sure, in many ways - the country absolutely started at a miserable state, having to rebuild everything after decades of war and over a century of colonialist plundering, and their synthesis at this time put the country at a relatively decent condition, though still poor and mostly rural
but the progress coming with the reforms has never been seen before, even in the USSR (though i argue it would have, if stalin had been allowed to let the NEP stay in place for longer)
What happened in the reform era was a very definite switch in terms of total political economy
certainly
depoliticization of local life
i'm interested in this, what leads you to say it? this is actually my biggest worry regarding china, have you got any numbers i could look at?
i mean, i obviously don't think ideals can ever lead anyone to socialism, so no matter how much politicization we get it won't do much in the present, but once the necessary material conditions are set you definitely need a supportive, ideologically sound majority to suppress any conservative and/or reactionary forces
It is not enough to have a communist party in government if they do not try and establish some sort of decommodified understanding of economic life imo
i think this depends on the stage of development
you can't have a decommodified understanding of economic life if your material conditions don't allow you to have a sustainable decommodified access to and production of material resources in the first place
or rather, you can, but you're bound to fail at some point
this is why, though i've criticized cuba's reforms before, now i'm very thankful they've done it
Just calling yourself communist hardly fixes things.
the important thing about a communist party is that it is able to impose its will on reactionary forces and to negotiate from a position of strength with the conservative ones
everything else is highly dependent on whatever situation we're in
I dunno how to properly quote you so am gonna respond in a big old lump of text!
So in regards to literacy, I don't think even a comparison to Russia is all that useful considering how dire conditions of literacy were in China by 1949. Let's compare them to a country with similar rates of (il)literacy at the time - India. This is what Jay Taylor does in his book The Dragon and the Wild Goose. Despite the shit title, it is a good book in that it uses a comparison that is fairly apt - by 1950 both countries had similar metrics in pretty much everything (actually India, having not gone through a devastating war with Japan, was slightly better off in terms of industrialization etc). He states that China had a literacy rate in 1951 of 26% compared to 77% in 1982. (I believe in the 71 it was something like 70%, but I am having a harder time finding my previous sources for that) I believe Wang Zheng's recent book also notes that women's literacy is harder to track, but she estimates that by the mid-1970s it was around 50%.; at 1949 it was less than 5%. For comparison, in India (which also had a relatively interventionist state, and a few fairly well-run literacy programs in certain states) had 18% women's literacy in 1971. Total literacy that same year was 34%. That is a monumental difference. Only Sri Lanka was able to outperform China in Asia.
In terms of depoliticization of local life, I mean that in the Maoist era power ultimately did stem, at least in part, from 'the people', or 'the mass line'. People went out on campaigns. Bands of women beat up abusive husbands. You'd insult your landlord on the street. In the village you would all work together and learn from your local cadre and then distribute the material to your neighbors. In the urban danwei you would live next to your manager, wear the same clothes, get called off from work to go to protests, signature campaigns etc. There was a sense that life was inherently poltiical, because it is. Today, there is nothing along those lines. Wang Hui makes note of this, but after the protest movements of the 1980s were crushed, people's relationship to politics (Party endorsed or otherwise) became entirely disembodied. Politics became something only a very small subset of individuals did. 'Campaigns' in China now are not so much little laboratories of people's democracy wherein individuals have a huge role in making sure they are carried out in a certain way. Rather, they are systematized, choreographed little things that have little substance beyond the full power of the state. Now granted, that counts for a lot - but it does mean your local kuaidi deliver man is probably not thinking about campaigns as integral to his life. In my opinion, this isn't a simple issue of ideals or even ideology - practices are what make politics and can have a profound affect on the way people interpret and understand their material conditions. People are not thinking in such a way in China anymore, and this is a massive issue.
I actually reject stagism entirely. Several historians of Maoist China (Viren Murthy, Rebecca Karl, Arif Dirlik - all Marxists) have mentioned that the profound theoretical contribution of Maoism lies in its desire to break the idea of historical teleology. Revolution is possible, Maoism states, because one is backwards. To be 'backwards' means that you can transform things in a way that advanced capitalist powers cannot. I am aware that this goes against orthodox Marxist understandings of revolution. But pretty much every major revolutionary force in Asia disagreed with that understanding (and also with the Soviet notion of WORKERS and not peasants driving revolutionary change) because they saw it as too dogmatic and teleological. I think we ought to respect this somewhat. The idea that Maoism was doomed to fail materially doesn't really stand up to snuff. The economy had certainly had its ups and downs but a lot of modern economic historians note that post-Deng growth would have been impossible without Maoist industrial policy. Who knows what the future could have looked like?
I agree a communist party is important. I believe, at least somewhat, in something resembling a vanguard party. I do not believe the CCP meets that category necessarily. I do not think they are holding back the tide of reactionary forces. Certainly, if one looks at cultural attitudes in China (for example, towards women, towards Confucianism, towards family hierarchy etc), the reform era has seen a lot of setbacks. My worry is that actually many cultural conservatives with a veneer of supposedly 'socialist' economic thinking have been in the Party for a while and are a pretty core element of its leadership. Again, the overtures towards Confucianism, against the discussion of sexual harassment etc all bodes badly. But even just from a purely materialist perspective, I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.
thanks for elaborated answer! i'll avoid quoting too so we don't delve into massive posts
my discussions about china aren't coming from personal ego, or from picking a team and wanting it to win or whatever; like i said earlier, i'm from the 3rd world myself so i'm interested in discussing every aspect of the chinese experiment (and the cuban, the vietnamese, the bolivian, etc) as they're going to give us clues on how to solve our own problems. so i really like that i can have some useful discussion for once lol
regarding literacy rates: thanks for the sources, and i'm gonna read that book as china really should be compared to india (this is something vijay prashad insists on and i deeply agree with). but i did agree with you that the country improved a lot with mao, what i don't see is how we could say the country was in a good position back then, even compared to other 3rd world countries, aside from specific areas of low material requirements
regarding depoliticization: i'm aware people were more politically active in that sense, and i understand the new left's criticism - but do you think that resulted in an overall positive for china? to me it seems like a defense of aspects that would ultimately result in another cultural revolution, and it would again happen at the wrong time and space
regarding stagism: i dislike the term and i very much disagree with my position being teleological - i think there's a dialectical relationship between ideals and material conditions too, and stating that we need to deal with material limitations before we can move forward is in no way dogmatic, but a way of avoiding what marx used to call the various kinds of conservative socialism. it's not dogmatic to say decommodification requires a certain level of abundance (and therefore, development), it's just empirical observation; it's also just empirical, not dogmatic, to think market forces play a very useful part in the beginning, before the contradiction between productivity incentives and rates of profit becomes unsustainable (as is already the case for so much of the modern economy in developed countries). in fact, i think the dogma lies in believing we can have (and maintain) these large productivity rises under a decommodified economy in spite of all the empirical evidence to the contrary from the previous experiments - especially the USSR before, during and after the NEP, but also just china itself
i guess if we disagree on these premises we're not gonna find common ground in the inferences either; for instance, i'm getting the impression you believe china could've got here (and kept moving forward, in terms of economic, and therefore social, development) without the reforms, and i clearly don't
i'm not well-versed in confucianism and which aspects of it have been focused on in their more recent cultural developments, i would enjoy sources on this if you've got any (though i guess this would be wang hui as well?)
I believe that the level of collusion between Party elites and domestic and international capital is high enough to merit tremendous concern.
can you go into more details on that level of collusion, especially since xi? i understand they negotiate with capital, and like i said, i'm ok with that; actual rampant collusion would be an entirely different thing and yes, a huge issue
Regarding China being 'better off', again I think if one compared the metrics that I think are quite pertinent (infant mortality, longevity, literacy, unemployment, wealth inequality), China was doing very well and better than most of the Third World. I don't think using GDP or GDP per capita to analyze the question is enough. The point was that certainly by the mid 70s, when the very high of the Cultural Revolution (though I want to talk about this more as you mentioned it as well) was done with, necessities of life were decommodified and provided for most people. There were of course problems (the rural and urban divide, for one) but I think what ultimately made the economy function relatively well was that China had a large enough internal market to keep demands for production fairly high.
Regarding depoliticization, I think it really depends on what you regard as a revolutionary society. For me, such a society necessitates some element of mass participation, because otherwise I think the Party becomes disconnected from social reality. In fact, lots of scholars would call what happened after the reform as essentially a technocratic revolution - a class of cadres who became suspicious of the 'mass' after the Cultural Revolution and were trained mostly at Tsinghua in engineering and other sciences made it their mission to reformat the political economy in a way that the 'mass' could never again challenge elements of the Party bureaucracy. That chilled discourse in society in a very profound way. As to the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, I think we are often fooled into thinking it was a purely chaotic time for ten years. The Cultural Revolution actually formally ended in 68/69. Most of the violence that happened in the whole period, in fact, came when Mao turned on the Red Guards and sent the PLA to clear them out. What some authors argue is that Mao very clearly did fear the Party was going revisionist and needed disciplining by the people, but then ultimately backed down from going ahead with his real goal ('bombard the headquarters' ie restart the Party). So in some ways this wasn't even the consequence of the mass going crazy or anything, rather it was the product of a lot of politics going on behind the scenes.
I actually just completely disagree with your empirical evidence in that again I am not sure there is any real proof that the Maoist economy was crumpling or under any particularly dire productivity issues. I understand Marx's position on it and yes I would certainly agree there are some material limits that one runs into without a certain amount of capital accumulation. The question really is a matter of did China need foreign capital and demand to fuel its rise or could some form of sustainable development have taken place by replying on the internal market alone. China followed a playbook that was used successfully by S Korea in the 60s and 70s - have the state basically throws firms to the mercy of the international market in order to compete and grow, and use excess human capital to give them a fighting chance. It is a model that works for becoming a rich society, yes. But I am unwilling to state it is the only one.
In regards to Confucianism, it is actually pretty easy to see. I don't have an academic work on hand at the moment but there has been a lot of writing on the CCP promoting certain family values and Xi, for example, going to Qufu (Confucius' birthplace), making a fairly praising speech of traditional Chinese values etc. Actually you can see a lot of this cultural shift just by the way Chinese history is invoked. The 'five thousand years of continuous history' and other civilizational language was almost never used in the Maoist era, because it was seen as pretty ahistorical. I agree that it is, and I think it promoted a certain cultural chauvinism amongst the Han in ways that has manifested itself quite clearly in attitudes towards minorities etc.
In regards to negotiating with capital vs collusion, for me it is a rather simple question - look at reforms or lack thereof of mechanisms that have rendered huge sectors of the working class impotent. For example, Xi has talked about the growing divide between rural areas and urban ones as a massive issue. He has made a lot of effort to promote devopment in deprived areas and yes poverty as a metric has decreased, I won't deny that. But as one of the consequences of this divide, rural people have flocked to cities at huge rates. Not in itself any different from any developing country. But the issue lies in the fact that China's hukou system prevents rural migrants from accessing healthcare, from having their kids go to most schools, from being able to rent in certain parts of the city, from being able to buy land at all, and basically makes them an underclass due to their lack of institutional and legal access. This system is what has been able to fuel fast economic growth. Basically the principle is you can just take very cheap labor and then replace it (rural migrants have little choice but to leave after a few years, not by any formal mechanism but just because you do ultimately want to go back to your family back home and there are limited opportunities of advancement available to you in the city. So cities get fresh pools of labor all the time, providing wages to rural migrants that are better than rural areas but certainly very far off from 'fair' when looking at their contribution to the economy.
Pretty much every leader since Jiang Zemin has said they want to reform this. They've all done something - Xi implemented a sort of temporary housing permit that one can get if they have lived in a place for a certain amount of time and have a certain level of education. But no one, despite them proclaiming that hukou is an issue, wants to do away with the system. Largely, again, this is because both domestic capital and foreign capital requires this large pool of expendable bodies. China has noted at every turn that this gives itself an advantage in terms of luring investment and manufacturing from foreign across in comparison to say India. Maybe with an emphasis on dual circulation this may change but there are also growing cultural norms. Rural people are denigrated for being uneducated, having low suzhi (hard to translate, basically status of value as a person), lazy etc even as urban economies run on their efforts. Actually this is discussed a lot in rural workers' new literature efforts. There are some really harrowing stories, I'd be happy to send them your way.
Now some of these growing pains are to be expected when going through a phase of capitalist development, sure. But when does it really end? Mao certainly thought you needed state capitalism for a time, thus New Democracy existed for five years. Does China really need fifteen more years to complete a transition? If interest groups prevent reforms to stop the unceasing exploitation of rural migrants (who are, again, a huge portion of the population), can we really say with total confidence that all the new wealth and capital in the country that has captured the Party's interests will allow it to also jettison these interests and squash them eventually? Because ultimately if you believe in class struggle then you must believe that the Party is currently empowering the working classes to engage in a conflict with its homegrown bourgeoisie in order to reach a new form of political economy. What the 1980s represented (again, Wang Hui) was a reverse form of this wherein new bourgeoisie interests aligned with the party against mass interests and destroyed them. Will the 2030s really strive to completely undo that?
Yes, I'm sure the Global Time's English infographic is a good way to gauge this (it's fucking not).
