Hide China struggle threads.
Ignore China struggle posts.
Do not reply to China struggle posters.I don't agree with some of your points, and some of your affirmations are just plain wrong.
I will start with the following:
The effect is the same as above: it succeeded in attracting foreign companies at the expense of working conditions and domestic industries.
You are putting it like China doesn't has its own industries, when China is precisely one of the few countries that has its own industries in pretty much all fields. Also, most of Chinese industries produce for domestic consumption.
While I don't agree with the bad working condition (someone close to me its a victim of them), I'm also aware that these conditions work both ways: Chinese workers in R&D work more, so they achieve results quicker.
China effectively gave up domestic R&D in favor of cheap consumer goods export.
China used these cheap goods exports as a way to initially build their economy. Now, not only has China moved away from that, but also – contrary to popular belief – its exports currently only represent around 17% of China's GDP.
China never gave up its domestic R&D, this affirmation couldn't be more wrong. China always focused its R&D in the fields it considered the most important: trains, public services, military, aerospace industry, etc.
You could argue that they should have focused on doing much more instead of letting private companies take care of it, but they couldn't do it in the past because they had no capital to do so. "Made in China 2025" is intended to address this old problem, and make China more self-reliant.
As a result, China has become defenseless under Trump’s move to choke them of their semiconductor industry - the masterplan to stifle China’s technological growth.
Defenseless? I chuckled a little. China could do a lot to hurt the US, but won't do it – that's exactly what the US wants. Trump has been a blessing for China, as it has accelerated "Made in China 2025" more than anything else could have.
You also seem to not be very aware of modern Chinese history. The Soviet Union didn't gave China the atomic bomb, so Chinese learned how to make it. The US blocked China from space organisations, and soon China will have its own space station. There are thousands of examples like these, never underestimate the will of Chinese people.
Fast forward to present day, TSMC is doing 5nm fab and going into 3nm next year and has planned for a 2nm debut within the next few years, while SMIC is still struggling to mass produce 14nm fab and is just able to break into 7nm.
First: achieving 7nm is a big deal. The fact that SMIC will soon surpass Intel and most foundries in so little time deserves recognition. China is certainly not getting technologically behind, but by your logic the US soon will.
Second: you forget that TSMC is a Taiwanese company, Taiwan is a province of China. If China is desperate, it always has the nuclear option of taking it.
Third: 7nm is barely used in most products (as far as I know, it is manily used on phones), and too costly. 3nm and 2nm will be used even less, and be even more costly. Besides, soon we will be reaching Moore's law.
Last but not least, 3D IC is the new shit, and China is investing in it. If China gets a head start, and dominates this technology, we won't have to worry about 7nm, 3nm, etc.
China has no chance of overtaking the US technologically.
In many ways China has already surpassed the US technologically, or will do it soon. I will also remind you – again – that, while Taiwan is a vassal of the US, it is still a province of China (you know what I mean).
China has no such long-term strategic planning that fully integrates state agencies with private industries to pioneer R&D, instead they throw massive funds into the industry and hoping that the money will solve the problem by itself.
While I agree, there are also state companies that are working on those projects, China is absolutely not only letting private companies do all the work.
I will also remind you – again – that, while Taiwan is a vassal of the US, it is still a province of China (you know what I mean).
Is this supposed to mean "Taiwan is politically dominated by US foreign policy, but culturally and historically it is connected to the mainland and those ties are still present even under current geopolitical relations"?
Yes, it also means that Taiwan is quite literally a province of the People's Republic of China. ROC still claims all China, and the PRC does it too; the war will only fully end when China is unified, and we already know who won (one China is recognised officially by every country, and other isn't). It's all a matter of waiting.
That's a lot of words to say:
Without the Communist Party there would be no new China.
No tankie thinks china is socialist. we think it has the best chance of creating the conditions under which socialism might happen of any government going. It is going to be the next global hegemony if it isn't already. So that means the time for a good lasting socialist project is fast approaching and that is rad.
How is it not socialist? If their stated goal is communism, and they've begun taking action to get there, they are in a transitionary state. Just because they haven't nailed the two most popular theories of successful transition doesn't mean they aren't transitioning. Even if they never establish a dotp or eliminate private property, whatever experiment they are conducting is socialist as long as communism is it's goal, no matter how early on in that experiment they happen to be.
That’s not how I would define socialism, but I understand your point.
Well, Marx described it that way, but a bit more specific and in a longer form of definition
because we define things based on material conditions. They don't have a system you could describe as socialism. They have a system that could describe the prefiguration of socialism. We likely won't be able to tell it's socialism until well after it has actually done the thing and become socialist.
We can be pleased because that is their stated goal, and we can be hopeful what might happen because of those goals. the country is 70 years old more history will need to be observed.
I agree with you in a lot of points. Afterall, without international proletarian revolution in highly developed countries, it would be very difficult (if not impossible) for a real socialist state to exist without being isolated and embargoed to the death, therefore I honestly justify what China did to survive and how is threatening U.S hegemony.
That said, my main problem with China is that I don't see a clear path in which the progress of China unquestionably leads them to a socialist state; we have to rely on the good will of the CCP that, at some point, they will say "ok now we're implementing socialism"?. Anyway, I think that, as leftist militants, China shouldn't be our main focus, but to spread and create class consciousness, mainly in developed countries; rooting for a country and not organizing in ours is not gonna accomplish anything. Good post tho
At what point is a country "strictly-speaking" socialist?! Socialism is literally just the transitionary state between capitalism and communism. That's it.
No, the workers don't have to own the means of production. No, the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't have to be established. No, private property doesn't have to be abolished.
Those are all great theories on how to progress towards communism, but they are just theories.
Any state whose goal is communism and they are working towards that goal, in ANY manner, is socialist.That's the only litmus test. Even if you disagree with their hypothesise on how to go about it, they are still partaking in the socialist experiment.
Genuine question: How do you differentiate between a State that is genuinely working towards communism and a State that only claims to be in order to maintain its power? Especially if we are supposed to be accepting of any method they claim to be using?
I don't think you can. Especially if you're looking at it from the outside. The material conditions influencing their decisions are infinitely complicated and obfuscated by time and distance and otherness.
We can look back and analyse past events, and even judge their experiment as failed for x reasons, but at the end of the day all we can do is use the gathered data to inform and better our decisions going forward, not pass some sort of value judgement on the intentions of others.
If we genuinely can’t tell if any State is truly working towards communism, then wouldn’t it be better to not call any State socialist until they acheive at least some concrete aspect of socialism, like abolition of wage labor, abolition of private property, or direct worker control of the economy? This would at least avoid the risk of erroneously calling a State controlled by opportunists and revisionists “socialist” and lending the revisionists some credibility.
I fully support China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea in their struggle against the US and in their attempts to acheive communism, but it seems more accurate to say they are State-capitalist nations led by communist parties (which is obviously far superior to neo-liberal capitalist nations led by captialist parties). This isn’t to imply that they’re working toward communism the wrong way or anything, just recognizing that they haven’t yet acheived it despite their stated intentions.
Or perhaps you just define the word “socialist” to mean “any nation or group that claims to be working towards communism” and we’re just arguing definitions? That would seem to be an overly narrow and unhelpful definition to me, but I could see it.
If a communist party took over the US they would have to implement free market reforms to build up the productive forces that was destroyed with de-industrialisation.
China’s mass surveillance of its citizens is really rlly my only issue.
While I agree that yes clearly by a lot of metrics life has gotten better for a lot of people in China, this premise supposes that life was not getting better in the Maoist system too. The economy was growing at a very steady rate (outside of the idiocy of the Great Leap anyway), services were slowly expanding, infrastructure was being built, life expectancy getting longer etc. The point is not to compare Maoist China to a China today where it followed the Korean model of basically opening up aspects of the country's market and labor force open to foreign players thus creating huge growth, but to other countries in the Global South ie India. India was more developed in 1950 than China, but by the end of the decade was far outstripped, let alone by the end of the 70s.
So the question is would these successes have continued? People make the point that living standards in other socialist countries stopped getting better but China had something they didn't - a massive population and internal market that, coupled with total state control over land, could really keep growth peddling along. No doubt that without Dengism you wouldn't have had huge growth, but we have to remember the maxim of capitalism: growth and development in one place means the underdevelopment and exploitation of another. Lots of coastal provinces and cities got incredibly rich off of poor nongmin from places like Anhui or Gansu. 400 million peasants became proletarianized, and essentially because of the way the hukou restricts access to services they are also second class citizens and are told as much too with the whole suzhi discourse.
So yes I think we can say in some respects that sure the jury is out on whether or not poverty in socialism versus riches in temporary capitalism is better or not, but this also presumes that the CCP is absolutely acting in good faith when it says it is moving to somewhere else. You mention the healthcare system but even the current five year plan says very little about nationalizing care, so much as they are hoping for a hodge podge of private and public care. Let alone the fact that yes, much of the country's culture has changed. Becoming rich is more important in a lot of circles than being active in society or politics. Hell, most people have no relation to politics in anyway. Politics is reserved for the technocrats who run things - not the masses. Mao's genius was understanding that orthodox MLism will always degrade into some sort of weird personality based organization or sheer bureaucratism without the mass line and people's input in daily politics. There is no such input now, and the class character of the CCP because of how rich sectors of the country have gotten is entirely different than 1949. How can we really know that socialism is still the goal? Are there any real movements to decommodification, work place democracy, economic equality, ending the surveillance state, reforming prisons and penal laws, empowering progressive cultural movements etc? As someone who deeply loves China from the language to the cultures, I can't really see any of that.
So what you have is then, okay, a country that is willing to rein in capital's excesses, sometimes by force if it needs to for the nationalist interest, but ultimately has no stake in fueling class war (one thing that I am always reminded of when visiting the country - even the phrase class conflict is barely used anymore, in favor of the language of peace and compromise in the workplace etc), is thoroughly depoliticized, and frankly growing increasingly chauvinist. That does not strike me as very different than South Korean managerial capitalism, save for the obvious exception that one country is an opponent of the US and one is not. But I am also reminded always of the fact that many leftists, particularly leftists of color, believed that the Japanese Empire would wind up becoming a progressive force because of its economic hostility to the United States and liberalism. The CCP is of course different, but it really remains to be seen what they will do to help working people imo
I just had a minor struggle session, but you are right. Some caveats will have to be made to keep the country stable, especially a massive and diverse country like China, and it also needs to build up a global alliance with other socialist states. I just have questions about the way they are building up productive forces, and I’m biased against third worldism
Potentially hot take: market socialism might very well be superior to state capitalism in many ways as a transitional model towards socialism that allows for participation in the current global economy. Yugoslavia under Tito seemed to have some success with this, and countries like Vietnam and Cuba are currently experimenting.
