China

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 16, 2021 2:54 pm

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China Issues Final Version of Anti-Monopoly Guidelines as Beijing Moves to Rein in Big Tech
February 12, 2021 Editor2
By Jane Zhang and Iris Deng – Feb 8, 2021

SAMR said the new guidelines aim to ‘prevent and stop the monopolistic behaviour of internet platforms and protect fair competition’
Implementation details are left to the regulators to decide, as the new law provides only a legal framework with few specific details
China issued the final version of the country’s new antitrust guidelines targeting internet platforms after making dozens of changes to an early draft, creating an important tool for Beijing to crack down on monopolistic practices such as forcing merchants to choose only one online channel or charging different prices for clients.

The rules, which came into effect on Sunday, are based on a draft issued in November and come six weeks after the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), the country’s antitrust regulator, announced an antitrust investigation into e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding for alleged monopolistic conduct. Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, and the regulator, have not provided any updates on the progress of the probe.

While the final document is not materially different from the draft, dozens of changes were made to the earlier version, reflecting the fact that internal debate over how China should apply antitrust to rein in Big Tech continued until the last moment, experts said.

You Yunting, senior partner at Shanghai Debund Law Firm, said the final version included language that had the intent of ensuring “orderly, innovative and healthy development” of the internet platforms.

This change “made the new rules less of a containment policy and more like guidance” for internet platforms, You said.

In another revision, the term “blocking merchants” was added to describe behaviour that could be considered an abuse of market dominance. “This was obviously added for the need of enforcement,” You said.

The draft in November suggested that antitrust authorities could directly label a platform operator like Alibaba a monopoly without the need to define the relevant market, if there was ample evidence of damage to the market due to its dominant position. However, the final version deleted this part and stipulated that the definition of relevant market was a necessary precondition for calling out a monopoly.

“The most striking change is the removal of the controversial provision about potentially skipping the step to define the market in cases involving agreements and abuse of dominance,” said Angela Zhang, director of the Centre for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong. “The original draft provision received much criticism from practitioners who were concerned that such a short cut could give the agency excessive discretion.”

SAMR said the new guidelines aim to “prevent and stop the monopolistic behaviour of internet platforms and protect fair competition in the market”.

The guidelines issued by the State Council Antitrust Committee, which are expected to serve as a manual for China’s antitrust regulators when looking at internet companies, prohibit platforms from forcing merchants to pick one platform as their exclusive distribution channel, and from using price discrimination based on big data analysis, according to a statement published by SAMR on Sunday.

The “picking one from two” practise constitutes an abuse of market dominance by restricting transactions, according to the guidelines, and could include tactics such as blocking or limiting traffic to merchants, as well as subsidising users with discounts and other incentives.

The new rules will also ban platforms from exchanging user information or using data and algorithms to fix prices, and from creating barriers for others to make transactions. Internet platforms, which SAMR defines as businesses that use technology to enable interaction between bilateral or multilateral parties under specific rules, are “more concealed” in their monopolistic practices compared to traditional industries, the antitrust regulator said in a statement.

“The use of data, algorithms and platform rules are making it more difficult to discover and determine monopolistic behaviours, as [the methods] may help the operators exchange sensitive information quickly and frequently,” SAMR said.


The headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of video sharing app TikTok, in Beijing. Photo: AFP
With the new rules, “there are clearer, more precise and detailed standards” to regulate platform economy, said Zhai Wei, executive director of the Competition Law Research Centre at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai. “However, it’s still only a regulation on paper … It needs time to test whether there will be more problems emerging.”

Beijing is using antitrust as a tool to rein in the unchecked growth of Big Tech, which has been largely untouched by monopoly regulations since the country’s first antitrust law was enacted in 2008.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, has also issued draft rules to define monopoly in the third-party payment service market, a move that could affect major players such as Alipay, owned by Alibaba affiliate Ant Group, and WeChat Pay, operated by Tencent Holdings.

However, implementation details are left to the regulators to decide, as China’s antitrust law provides only a legal framework with few specific details. Until recently, antitrust regulators mainly targeted players in traditional industries such as utilities and pharmaceuticals, according to a recent Post review of more than 100 Chinese antitrust cases over the last 12 years.

Chinese courts have not yet made any antitrust rulings against Big Tech. In 2017 JD.com sued Alibaba for monopoly practices, claiming it harmed competition in e-commerce, but the Beijing court handling the case has not issued a ruling.

Zhai said the guidelines only serve as a reference for cases such as JD.com vs Alibaba and ByteDance vs Tencent as the State Council Antitrust Committee does not have law enforcement power, and such cases come under anti-monopoly law. However, for SAMR’s antitrust probe into Alibaba, the new guidelines will apply.

Separately, China’s market regulator said on Monday that it will impose a 3 million yuan (US$463,843) fine on e-commerce platform Vipshop for unfair competition.

https://orinocotribune.com/china-issues ... -big-tech/

Capitalism in China represents a tactical retreat. If one is incapable of a temporary retreat against existential threat(the US untrammeled by the 'threat' of the Soviet Union) then one will surely and irrevocably lose all. Yes, it has gone on for decades, which can be disheartening but neither we nor the Chinese can make history just as we like it. The Chinese have kept their revolution alive, maintained the sovereignty necessary for independent action. I believe they have responded to their difficulties as best as possible, brilliantly at times. All the while growing stronger and less vulnerable even as the West is increasingly beset by it's historic contradictions. Looks like a plan....

Of course a rich capitalist sector represents a possibly serious threat to the Revolution. It was a threat the Chinese had to accept, but the above article is an example of how they deal with their 'capitalist problem'. You'll not see that happening in these parts, lip-service aside. Just as you never hear of millionaires getting stiff jail sentences or even executed for the sort of acts common among our ruling class. Were it in China the Purdue Pharma ownership would all be jailed or executed, as should be. Old and moldy as I am I still expect to see Jack Ma do the perp walk before I croak.

Every revolution is bound to be as different as the history which impelled it. The Chinese appear to be humanity's best hope of surviving the jam that capitalism has gotten us into.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:49 pm

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Does the West repeating claims of China committing genocide in Xinjiang reify it?
Posted Feb 24, 2021 by Eds.

Originally published: Dissident Voice by Kim Petersen (February 22, 2021)

The Jewish Virtual Library quotes Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as having said:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
Yet that could be called a lie, or more kindly put, a misattribution. Wikiquotes provides the accurate quotation, albeit not as a Nazi stratagem: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” It is sourced as: “Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik” (“Churchill’s Lie Factory”), 12 January 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941), p. 364-369.

There is an allegation that is being repeated ad nauseam about internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang, China or even worse that a genocide is being perpetrated by Han Chinese against Uyghurs. The allegation has been denied and refuted over and over, the sources of the allegation have been discredited, but the allegation still has legs.

Canadian Members of Parliament are preparing to vote on today Monday, 22 February, on a motion to declare China to be committing a genocide that was brought forward by far-right Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has said the matter requires more study. Others are less clear about the need for study.

In an interview with CBC, Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, stated: “There is no question that there is aspects of what the Chinese are doing that fits into the definition of a genocide in the Genocide Convention.” Rae immediately followed by saying, “But that requires you to go through the process of gathering information and of making sure that we got the evidence that would support that kind of an allegation.

This is confused and contorted speak. Rae began by stating that unquestionably a genocide is occurring in Xinjiang. Then the diplomat admitted information hasn’t been gathered yet to provide evidence of “that kind of allegation.” An allegation refers to a claim typically without proof. If there were proof, then it would be a fact. Yet, the Canadian diplomat stated, “There is no question… of a genocide.” Ergo, he claims to be stating a certainty–a seeming certainty since Rae acknowledges a requirement for evidence, which Rae says is in the process of being gathered.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian hit back hard; he called Rae’s comments “ridiculous,” adding that Canada itself better fits the description of having perpetrated a genocide.(1)

CTV wrote,
Zhao on Monday used a number of select statistics that suggest China’s Uighur population is growing at a faster rate than Canada’s population to mock Rae’s suggestions that the Uighurs are being persecuted.
That the CTV reporting is disingenuous is obvious from the moving of the goalposts with the substitution of “persecution” for “genocide.” Clearly persecuting someone, however unpleasant, is absolutely and qualitatively different from killing someone. And since genocide refers to the destruction of a population, a rapidly growing population would seem to belie claims of one side committing a genocide. Moreover, what statistic is better to “select” to refute assertions of a genocide being perpetrated?

Still, to claim one group is being persecuted requires evidence.

A more pressing priority for the politicians throwing rocks from the Canadian greenhouse ought to be awareness of how rife Canada is with racism. One report reveals systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. In 2006, Canada apologized for the racist imposition of a Chinese Head Tax, but the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria has exposed lingering racism toward ethnic Chinese people. In Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North, author Graeme Truelove details the discrimination and the racist attitudes held against Muslims by the federal government and Canadian monopoly media.(2) Canada is also a partner in the US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide, as substantiated by Gideon Polya.(3) First Nations fare no better in Canada, as adumbrated in a report issued by the United Nations on severe discrimination against Indigenous peoples.

Despite this festering racism within Canada, foreign affairs minister Francois-Philippe Champagne saw fit for Canada to join 38 other countries in calling for the admission of experts to Xinjiang “to assess the situation and to report back.” As a rule, basic decency would require that one clean up one’s own yard (except in Canada’s case, the yard was stolen from its Indigenous peoples) before criticizing someone else’s yard.

Nonetheless, the world must not be silent in the face of crimes against humanity, especially genocide. And China welcomes outside observers to Xinjiang. China has invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to Xinjiang as well as representatives of the EU.

Chinese media, Global Times, writes,
China welcomes foreigners to visit Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and learn about the real Xinjiang, given that some anti-China politicians in the West are spreading lies about Xinjiang.
So much for a cover-up.

What is the real situation in Xinjiang? I will refer again to the extensive must-read report compiled by the Qiao Collective, an all-volunteer group comprised of ethnic Chinese people living abroad, on Xinjiang that warned of “politically motivated” western disinformation:
The effectiveness of Western propaganda lies in its ability to render unthinkable any critique or alternative—to monopolize the production of knowledge and truth itself. In this context, it is important to note that the U.S. and its allies are in the minority when it comes to its critiques of Chinese policy in Xinjiang. At two separate convenings of the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 and 2020, letters condemning Chinese conduct in Xinjiang were outvoted, 22-50 and 27-46. Many of those standing in support of Chinese policy in Xinjiang are Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil, including Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and Nigeria. On the issue of Xinjiang, the clear break in consensus between the Global South and the U.S. bloc suggests that Western critiques of Xinjiang are primarily politically motivated.(5)
Are the ramblings of the self-confessed liar Mike Pompeo to be taken seriously about a Chinese-perpetrated genocide in Xinjiang (which has also been accepted by the Biden administration)? Are American administration words to be believed without severe scrutiny considering the myriad lies; for example, about phantom torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Viet Nam; about yellow cake and WMD in Iraq; about soldiers being supplied with Viagra in Libya to facilitate mass rapes; about Syrian chemical weapon attacks, etc, etc.

In all my years in China, I never once encountered any expression of Islamophobia. The following video by an ex pat living in China expresses a similar sentiment. Consider when hearing stories from sources living outside China, especially those with a penchant for twisting the truth, what such a source has to gain from repeating allegations without ironclad proof.



Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter.

Notes:
The evidence for genocide committed by the Canadian state, is voluminous. See Bruce Clark, Ongoing Genocide caused by Judicial Suppression of the “Existing” Aboriginal Rights (2018). Review; Bruce Clark, Justice in Paradise (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Splitting the Sky with She Keeps the Door, The Autobiography of Dacajeweiah, Splitting the Sky, John Boncore Hill: From Attica to Gustafsen Lake (John Pasquale Boncore, 2001). Tamara Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State (Clarity Press, 2018). Review; Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance(Burnaby, BC: Dragon Heart Enterprises, 2012). Review; James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (University of Regina Press, 2013); Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, The Genocide Machine in Canada (Black Rose, 1973). [↩]
Read review. [↩]
See review. [↩]
Cited in my refutation of Islamophobia in China: “A Comparison of Respect for the Sanctity of Mosques in France, the US, and China.” [↩]

https://mronline.org/2021/02/24/does-th ... -reify-it/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 26, 2021 12:44 pm

Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation
SEP 21
WRITTEN BY QIAO COLLECTIVE

xinjiang_reading_list.jpg

Based on a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies, Western governments have levied false allegations of genocide and slavery in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. A closer look makes clear that the politicization of China’s anti-terrorism policies in Xinjiang is another front of the U.S.-led hybrid war on China.

This resource compilation provides a starting point for critical inquiry into the historical context and international response to China’s policies in Xinjiang, providing a counter-perspective to misinformation that abounds in mainstream coverage of the autonomous region.

Table of Contents
Introduction and Summary

Timeline of Events

1989-2016

Formation of the World Uyghur Congress (1989-2006)

Violence and Unrest (2009-2016)

Chinese Anti-Terrorism Policy and Context (2012-2016)

2017-present

The Seeds of Controversy (2017-Aug 2018)

Entrenching the Narratives (Aug 2018-Jan 2020)

U.S. Pursues Unilateral Action (Jan 2020-present)

On the Nature of Unsubstantiated Allegations

Resources

Overview

Chinese Perspectives on the Problem of Terrorism

Geopolitical Context

Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development in Xinjiang

Overview of Chinese Minority/Religious Policies

The Misinformation Industrial Complex

Views from Xinjiang: People, Cultures, and History

Xinjiang Responds to Pompeo

1. Introduction and Summary
In the mid-2010s, China launched far-reaching de-radicalization and economic development programs in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Before then, few casual Western observers were even aware of the province’s existence, which makes up 17% of China’s land and whose population consists of 65% ethnic minority peoples. Fewer still could speak to the autonomous region's complex political, cultural, and religious history as well as to its complex legacies as a crossroads between diverse peoples over many centuries.

However, since 2018, Western media and state officials have put Chinese government policy in Xinjiang under intense scrutiny, citing just a handful of think tank reports and witness testimonies to lodge charges of forced labor, slavery, and genocide.

Having saturated Western media, these charges are difficult to systematically refute. The situation on the ground is complex, and there are limits to what we can know. While we recognize that there are aspects of PRC policy in Xinjiang to critique, these critiques should be debated and resolved on Chinese terms and in Chinese dialogues, and not be used as crude ammunition in the U.S.-led geopolitical assault on China. Based on the history of Western atrocity propaganda, its funding sources, and the poor quality of the ‘research’ being pushed, we are skeptical that the U.S.—having engaged in two decades of perpetual war in Muslim-majority nations—has any legitimate moral interest or grounds on which to defend Muslim religious rights in Xinjiang.

Moreover, given the history of PRC ethnic and religious minority policy, and the reports from first-hand delegations to Xinjiang from countries and organizations including Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and even the World Bank, neither genocide nor slavery accurately describe the realities of Xinjiang. It is not a coincidence that these accusations have ramped up during a period of unprecedented Western antagonism towards China. Instead, these unfounded claims serve primarily to build consensus for conflict, intervention, and war with China.

The effectiveness of Western propaganda lies in its ability to render unthinkable any critique or alternative—to monopolize the production of knowledge and truth itself. In this context, it is important to note that the U.S. and its allies are in the minority when it comes to its critiques of Chinese policy in Xinjiang. At two separate convenings of the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 and 2020, letters condemning Chinese conduct in Xinjiang were outvoted, 22-50 and 27-46. Many of those standing in support of Chinese policy in Xinjiang are Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil, including Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and Nigeria. On the issue of Xinjiang, the clear break in consensus between the Global South and the U.S. bloc suggests that Western critiques of Xinjiang are primarily politically motivated.

These resources are preceded by a timeline that focuses on the events preceding China’s Xinjiang de-radicalization program, the international responses it provoked, and other relevant contexts.

This resource list is intended only for initial inquiry into the immediate controversy over China’s de-radicalization program in Xinjiang. In the spirit of seeking truth from facts, this resource does not offer definitive answers, nor is it comprehensive in scope. It aims only to be a starting point for critical inquiry, and we urge readers to seek a diversity of sources and form their own opinions. A more complete and nuanced view requires further study into the region’s history, China’s policies towards ethnic and religious minorities, and ongoing geopolitical developments.

Note: There are several ways to spell “Uygur” in English, including “Uygur,” “Uighur” and “Uyghur.” “Uyghur” is perhaps the most common in international settings, although “Uygur” is the official romanization by the Chinese government. We will use “Uyghur” in accordance with the common spelling in Western dialogue, except when referring specifically to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Similarly, the common Western spelling of “Kazakh” and “Kyrgyz” differs from the Chinese government’s official romanizations of “Kazak” and “Kirgiz.” We will similarly use the common Western spelling.

https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/educa ... troduction

This is an outstanding resource.
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sun Mar 07, 2021 3:13 pm

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Beyond the Sprouts of Capitalism

Toward an Understanding of China’s Historical Political Economy and Its Relationship to Contemporary China
Posted Mar 03, 2021 by Ken Hammond

The contemporary political economy of the People’s Republic of China, the nature of the Chinese system, has been the subject of much discussion and debate in mainstream academic, media, and political circles, as well as on the left.1 Since the end of the 1970s, China has pursued policies of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang, 改革開放) to develop its economy, a process that has resulted in the massive growth of production, China’s emergence as a major player in global trade, and the lifting of around 800 million people out of poverty, while at the same time generating serious problems of inequality, corruption, and environmental stress. At the heart of this project has been the decision by the Communist Party, originally under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping, then carrying on through successive changes of leadership, to use the mechanisms of the marketplace to develop the productive economy. How should this situation be characterized? Is it capitalism, state capitalism, market socialism?2

One can only make sense of contemporary China with a clear understanding of the country’s economic history.3 A historical materialist analysis of the nature of China’s political economic order over the course of history, especially the last thousand years, can illuminate critical aspects of the present. A serious engagement with the complexities of China’s historical economic systems must take into account knowledge about the Chinese past that was not available to Karl Marx, allowing us to go beyond the vagaries of the Asiatic mode of production and transcend the limitations of earlier theorizations of the “sprouts of capitalism” (ziben zhuyi de mengya, 資本注意的萌牙) by historians in China in the 1950s and ’60s.4 Applying categories and modes of analysis derived from Marx’s Capital and other writings to the understanding of China’s early modern history and exploring the relevance of that history to contemporary China are the main tasks of this essay.

From the period of the Tang-Song transition, roughly the ninth and tenth centuries, China developed a commercial capitalist economy that encompassed a largely urban manufacturing sector and also reshaped agricultural production in much of the empire. A ruling class evolved that was a hybrid of the long-established landowning elite and the early modern commercial stratum, which managed the economic affairs of the country through a blend of private agency and the operations of the imperial state. Through much of China’s imperial past, the state maintained a complex, not always consistent, role in economic affairs, seeking both to support the livelihood of the people, promote prosperity, constrain the pursuit of private profit, and regulate the functions of markets. This historical relationship has inflected the developmental itinerary of the country and is reflected in the deployment of the theory and practice of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the “socialist market economy.”

II
China’s recorded history goes back more than 3,200 years and can be usefully divided into four major periods: (1) antiquity, from the beginning to the end of the third century BCE; (2) the middle period, from the second century BCE to the tenth century CE; (3) the early modern period, from the tenth through the eighteenth centuries; and (4) modern China, from the end of the eighteenth century to the present.5 Throughout antiquity, China was ruled by an elite of warriors who controlled the land, collecting tribute from their subjects. Economic activity was largely locally self-sufficient, with a small layer of high-value elite trade centered on the royal court(s). Over time, a professional administrative elite developed, often referred to as the literati because of their mastery of the written records of history and their shared literary culture. These administrative officials were often rewarded with grants of land, and over time these became hereditary property, though the sovereign always retained ultimate ownership.6

The middle period began with the unification of the empire and the consolidation of the imperial system under the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). During this period, private ownership of land became a practical reality, while in theory the empire continued to belong to the ruler, now the emperor. Many officials in government service built up significant land holdings, while other great families emerged based on their local acquisition of agricultural assets. This was a complex, long-term process, with large landed estates forming by the later Han, which became the underpinning for the political influence of the landowning class. Over the centuries of the middle period, China developed an aristocratic elite, with quasi-official status and a strong transmission of wealth across generations. China went through periods of internal division after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220, and then renewed imperial unification under the Sui and Tang dynasties (589–618 and 618–907, respectively). Recruitment for service in the imperial government, which was largely pursued through a process of recommendation by serving officials, allowed established families to place their sons in careers in official life and perpetuate the power of the elite. This aristocratic class effectively dominated the state, which served to promote and protect its interests.7

Alongside the estates of the great families there was a sector of agricultural production organized around small holders, managed through a system of land tenure maintained by the imperial state, which regularly redistributed land to male heads of village households who, in turn, were taxed in grain and cloth products. The system varied in its specifics in different parts of the empire but was a clear example of state oversight and management of economic activity. This oversight also extended to urban centers and markets. Imperial law restricted the number and location of markets and established strict controls over their operations. This blend of aristocratic estates, state-managed distribution of small holdings, and tightly regulated urban markets was not in any sense feudal in its economic or political organization and functioning.8

By the ninth century, changes began to emerge in China’s cities and countryside. The Tang dynasty had been deeply shaken by the An Lushan Rebellion in 755–63, and the long-established aristocracy began to decline. But even before this, the very success of the imperial system of economic management had given rise to contradictions within the economy. Its potential for growth and development exceeded the parameters of state oversight, and new forces began to push beyond the regulations of the government. The power of the dominant elite and the control of urban space by official overseers weakened. Markets began to spread outside areas that had been designated and monitored by the state and to become more integrated into residential areas. Private ownership of farmland expanded beyond the great estates and the land subject to government distribution. The imperial court maintained a role in the production and distribution of certain key commodities through government monopolies, a practice that had its roots centuries earlier in the Han dynasty. But the overall role of the state in economic affairs declined, just as the class basis of imperial rule was itself dramatically altered.

In the later ninth century, further rebellions destroyed much of the elite’s wealth and the institutional infrastructure that had legitimized and maintained its power and prestige. Rebellious peasants attacked the estates of the wealthy, killed many members of the elite, and burned the documents that validated their status and power. The fall of the Tang in 907 led to the chaos of the Five Dynasties and Sixteen Kingdoms, with small regional states contending for power through chronic warfare and further destruction, until the Zhao brothers established the Song dynasty in 960 and reunified the empire over the ensuing decade. The warfare of this age of transition cleared the way for the further transformation of China’s economic and political order. The old aristocracy was gone, but the ownership of land and the control of agricultural production was still the primary mode of wealth accumulation.9

As the Song dynasty (960–1279) consolidated its power, a new elite emerged, formally based on the attainment of merit through education, but practically grounded in the riches produced on their estates. These provided the resources to support the education of sons in the Confucian classical traditions that formed the basis of the imperial civil examination system, which became the main vector for entry into service in the bureaucratic administration of the empire. Not all landowning families produced examination graduates or government officials. The class of landed wealth was more extensive than the group of literati who staffed the imperial state, and relations between members of this class in their capacity as local elites or as representatives of imperial power could be complex. This larger class is often referred to as the gentry, and the overall landowning class may be designated, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, the literati/gentry.10

This reconfiguration of the landholding elite took place in tandem with the further development of a commercial economy in China. Markets proliferated, woven together by networks of long-distance trade spanning the empire and linking up with larger global systems. New forms of capital valorization and accumulation took shape within an increasingly monetized economy. Division of labor both within productive enterprises and on a regional geographic basis, as well as ongoing technological innovation, drove enhancements in productivity. New developments in banking and financial operations facilitated the mobilization and allocation of capital.11 This is the key to understanding the early modern period that began in the ninth and tenth centuries and continued, with dramatic advances and retreats, throughout the following eight hundred years, across several dynastic transitions, down to the beginning of the modern era at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is the emergence of China’s early modern capitalist commercial economy and its development over the following years that must be understood to enable a better comprehension of China’s recent pursuit of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

III
China’s “commercial revolution” in the Song dynasty has long been recognized, beginning with the work of Naitō Konan and the Kyoto School of Marxist historians in Japan in the 1930s.12 But the intellectual constraints imposed by the orthodoxies of Soviet economic and historical thought, with the centrality of a stagist sequence of development that had to be applied to all societies around the world, meant that China could not be seen as having had a capitalist system before the arrival of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. China was either viewed as part of the Asiatic mode of production, which had remained essentially static and unchanging in a primitive form of feudalism over three millennia, or was assimilated into the succession of historical eras enshrined in Joseph Stalin’s 1938 Dialectical and Historical Materialism.13 Marx’s original formulation of the Asiatic mode of production was primarily concerned with India and was based on partial and often faulty information. His knowledge of China was severely limited by both the imperialist biases of most writers and the minimal access to Chinese-language sources available then. It is time to place China’s early modern political economy in a clearer perspective. Let us consider the organization and functioning of production and circulation in early modern China in Marxist terms.14

In volume one of Capital, Marx investigates and delineates several key features of capitalism as it had developed in Europe, most particularly in England. In his preface to the first edition, he makes clear that while he is relying primarily on the analysis of the dynamics of capital as it developed in the West, he sees the characteristics that he discerns in that context as applicable to a broader definition of capitalism as a system.15 Beginning with the commodity and commodity production—that is, production for exchange on the market—he goes on to discuss money as the universal commodity, the process of the valorization of capital (M-C-M′) based on the exploitation of labor power, the mechanisms of wage labor, the division of labor as the means of maximizing that exploitation, and the ongoing imperative of accumulation of capital. These are key defining elements of a capitalist mode of production.16

All of these are present in China from the Song dynasty on. Markets flourished and proliferated, woven together into networks of exchange that spanned the empire and linked up to larger regional and global systems. Commodity production, with sophisticated divisions of labor both across space and within enterprises, expanded dramatically. The growth of China’s capitalist system of manufacturing—which ranged from the elaborate putting-out system of the silk and cotton textile industries to the massive complex of ceramic kilns at Jingdezhen, the largest industrial center in the world before the nineteenth century—also reshaped the sphere of agricultural production.17 China had a sophisticated system of private property in land, and the buying and selling of real property was carried on and documented through the use of legally binding contracts enforceable through the imperial judicial system.18 Farming became increasingly commercialized, with production for national market distribution coming to form significant portions of production in provinces like Sichuan and Hunan. Tenant farming and agricultural day labor grew in importance. Wage and contract labor were central to the manufacturing sector in Jiangnan and elsewhere, from spinners and weavers to ceramics workers and carvers of woodblock printing boards. Strikes and other forms of labor unrest were recurrent in cities like Suzhou and Wuxi.19

China is a large and complex geographic space, with considerable variation and distinctive regional subunits, called macroregions, as theorized by G. William Skinner.20 Each of these is as large as a major European state. Early capitalism in China was by no means equally developed across the empire. Some regions, such as the northwest or the southwest, were much less commercially developed than others, such as the Jiangnan area of the Yangtze River delta, the southeast coast, the corridor along the Grand Canal, or the long valley of the Yangtze. China’s early capitalism was most highly evolved in Jiangnan, where networks of urban production and distribution facilitated sophisticated systems of capital accumulation and deployment. In European history, given the fragmentation of political authority into small and conflicting territorial spaces, the consideration of the economy of England as a discrete unit of analysis, as opposed to a larger European whole, has been the norm. Given China’s vast territorial extent and complex internal macroregional variation, the understanding of early Chinese capitalism as a distinctive formation within the overall expanse of imperial space seems like a more useful approach than attempting to fit the empire as a whole into a monolithic categorization.21

The point is not that China was just like Europe (or, more properly, the other way around, given the chronological sequence of developments), but that the fundamental attributes of capitalism, as explicated in Capital, were also present there, in their own historically and culturally specific forms. China’s early modern political economy, a distinctive form of early capitalism, emerged in the Song dynasty and persisted through periods of growth and contraction across the following Yuan and Ming eras and into the final Qing dynasty. Two aspects of this historical trajectory are of particular interest in understanding the distinctive course of development that characterized China’s early modernity in contrast to the later path of European experience. One is the span of time, which extended over some eight centuries; the other is the nature of class formation and interaction.

IV
Early modernity in China was not a linear process of development leading to a fully modern industrial economy. Early Chinese capitalism, despite going through periods of dynamic growth and transformation, remained essentially commercial capitalism at the level of manufacture, as described in chapter 14 of the first volume of Capital.22 This was a more sophisticated system of production than simple handicraft activities by individual households, but, other than in the special case of the kiln city of Jingdezhen, was not organized into large-scale industrial enterprises. Production was carried out through complicated networks of social relations, in workshops and households, while distribution was largely managed by networks of merchants spanning multiple provinces in interconnecting webs of commerce. Financial mechanisms of credit and banking facilitated long-distance trade.23 These structural features first arose in the Song dynasty and were elaborated and refined in the Ming and Qing dynasties. But the course of economic life, as of China’s history overall, was not one of smooth and tranquil progress. In the twelfth century, the Song lost control of the northern half of the empire to invaders from the northeast called the Jurchen, who established their own dynasty. In the thirteenth century, the rise of the Mongols plunged the remnant Southern Song into a decades-long war of resistance that ended in the collapse of the dynasty and the creation of the Mongol-ruled Yuan as its successor. These wars, and the often anticommercial policies of the Mongols during their century of rule, caused great destruction to China’s population and economy. The Mongols engaged in high-value international trade, but the domestic commercial economy declined during their time in power, though the most highly developed Jiangnan region seems to have fared better than other parts of the empire. When the Ming dynasty was founded in 1368, after central China had been further devastated by disease and the rebellions that overthrew the Yuan, the first emperor was actively hostile to merchant wealth and promoted a physiocratic vision of society based on small landholding and local self-sufficiency, although the empire-spanning network of roadways that he developed for imperial communications also facilitated the revival of long-distance trade.24

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a dramatic revival of China’s early capitalism, as production and trade across the empire flourished and the international demand for Chinese goods such as tea, porcelain, and silk and cotton textiles drew increasing amounts of silver, first from Japan and then from the mines of the Spanish New World empire via the Manila galleon trade, into China.25 Ongoing technological innovations drove improvements in productivity and quality that made Chinese manufactures ever more popular in global markets. But by the mid–seventeenth century, contradictions within Ming society and politics led to the collapse of the dynasty, and yet another invasion by a non-Chinese coalition led by the Manchus seized power and installed the Qing dynasty in 1644. In the eighteenth century, China recovered from the traumas of the dynastic transition, and a final era of early capitalist prosperity ensued.26
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“The Opium Ban in China” poster from De Amsterdammer, December 2, 1906 (via International Institute of Social History). Rough translation of bottom caption: John Bull: “Such a heathen…as a dragon slayer! … I will feel that in my wallet!” Dutch Virgin (to Marianne): “And that this guy should give us an example ….”
In 1793, the British king George III sent a diplomatic mission to China, led by Lord George Macartney, to seek new trade relations. Foreigners were allowed to trade with China in a regulated system at the port of Guangzhou, known to Westerners as Canton, in the far south of the empire. The British, imbued with the new ideology of free trade and on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, wanted China to open more ports and allow a permanent diplomatic presence in Beijing. The Qianlong emperor declined these requests and reminded the British, in a letter to King George, that China had all it needed within its own borders and had no wish for the inferior products of the West. But while this remained the case, a combination of domestic and international factors was about to bring an end to China’s early modern capitalist age. Limits on the capacity of agriculture to sustain continuing population growth began to erode material standards of living. The rise of England’s modern industrial economy brought both inexpensive goods to compete with China’s domestic products and the military capacity to force the Qing government to open the empire to Western imperialism. A new era was beginning.

V
Early modern capitalism in China endured across many centuries, with periods of expansion and contraction, but with a persistent drive toward greater sophistication and productivity, and with the accumulation of wealth derived from the extraction of surplus value from labor power reviving after each era of destruction. This generated a wealthy stratum of merchants and investors, largely urban in residence, and distinct from the more traditional elite of landowning households that, through their domination of the Confucian civil service examination system, controlled the operations of the imperial government. Within the discursive field of Confucian thought there was a strong tradition of aversion to commercial wealth and disrespect for those who lived on the profits of trade. Merchants and their sons (and sometimes grandsons) were legally excluded from participation in the examination system, and thus effectively from political power. With the rise of early capitalism and the emergence of a wealthy commercial elite, these ideas began to be challenged and changed by some thinkers. While merchants never came to be fully entitled to an equal role in the examination system or to a political status matching that of the literati/gentry elite, a convergence of interests drove a slow process of cultural adjustment that created a hybrid class more complex than either a purely land- or commerce-based elite. This change in attitude, in political culture, was driven by the convergent material interests and actions of both agricultural and manufacturing producers.27

As China’s economy became more differentiated, with regional specialization in the production of certain commodities and the attendant growth of long-distance trade in both manufactured goods and foodstuffs, commercialized farming became increasingly profitable and landowning families sought new ways to invest their wealth. Merchants and investors in manufacturing activities also were generating wealth and seeking to further expand the valorization and accumulation of their capital. At the same time, many members of the commercial elite sought to position themselves socially as the equals of the literati/gentry in status and prestige by engaging in patronage of religious establishments, cultural pursuits such as the collecting of art or the assembling of libraries, or the building of elaborate mansions and gardens.28

The intersection of the interests and ambitions of landowning and commercial elites came about through the process of investment in economic activities. Members of the literati/gentry elite directed some of their wealth into the businesses of merchants and manufacturers, and shared in the profits of those enterprises. These economic strategies resulted in a convergence of interests rather than a relationship of antagonism. This is in some ways a stark contrast with the later history of class conflict between the rising bourgeoisie and the older feudal aristocracy in Europe, but it is not without parallel. Indeed, in an 1850 review of a book on the seventeenth-century English Revolution by the French politician François Guizot, Marx described a similar convergence of class interests:

This class of large landowners allied with the bourgeoisie…was not, as were the French feudal landowners of 1789, in conflict with the vital interests of the bourgeoisie, but rather in complete harmony with them. Their estates were indeed not feudal but bourgeois property. On the one hand, they provided the industrial bourgeoisie with the population necessary to operate the manufacturing system, and on the other hand, they were in a position to raise agricultural development to the level corresponding to that of industry and commerce. Hence their common interests with the bourgeoisie: hence their alliance.29

The convergence of interests between the landed literati/gentry and the largely urban commercial/manufacturing elite in China persisted, and perhaps deepened, across the span of early modern times. Both sides of this ruling-class collaboration of course remained dedicated to the extraction of surplus value from the labor of workers, whether on farms, in workshops, households, or the marketplace. This hybridity was also reflected in economic thought and government policy. The imperial state was not a strong advocate for commercial interests, but nonetheless often played a role in economic life that benefitted both manufacturing and exchange. The construction and maintenance of roads and canals facilitated the growth of long-distance trade. Government intervention in some critical commodity markets, especially grain, often served to stabilize prices and buffer the extremes of market fluctuations, thus protecting both the livelihoods of consumers and the ongoing operations of merchants.30 The interplay of elite interests and state policy varied over time but was always complex and could certainly be contentious. Fundamental to China’s Confucian political culture was the idea that the state’s primary purpose was to create and maintain conditions of stability and security that would allow the people to pursue their livelihoods in a moderately prosperous society. Debates as to how best to achieve this ideal could be sharp, and different policy orientations predominated at various times, but the active role of the state in economic life was always a part of the mix.

This process of intellectual and cultural change went beyond the purely economic realm. In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written in 1859, Marx notes that, in the social production of their existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness.31

In China, as early capitalism developed from the Song dynasty onward, new “forms of social consciousness” reflecting these new material realities also took shape. This became especially apparent by the Ming dynasty as a new merchant culture, drawing on particular elements within the broad discursive field of Confucian thought, articulated the hybridity of China’s elite society. The integration of elite elements based in manufacturing and trade with the long-established land-based literati/gentry yielded new ideas that revealed the mutual influence of new realities and older cultural beliefs and behaviors. Merchants engaged in practices of cultural patronage and aesthetic consumption in emulation of existing “gentlemanly” norms, endowing Buddhist religious institutions, building gardens, and assembling library collections. Confucian thought was influenced by market culture, as exemplified by the emergence of “ledgers of merit and demerit,” a form of moral accountancy in which individuals produced balance sheets for their conduct, or in the production of manuals of business practice that sought to navigate the complex relationship between the pursuit of profit and the maintenance of proper social relationships of community and stability. Imperial Confucianism remained the dominant ideology of the state, and within social elites, but it was adapted and adjusted to fit with the new material realities of commercial and manufacturing capitalism.32

The form of capitalism that emerged in China during the early modern period was marked by distinctive forms of power relations. Rather than evolving an antagonistic contradiction between an urban bourgeois class of merchants and manufacturers and a conservative feudal aristocracy of landowning great families, China developed a hybrid elite in that landed and commercial interests converged and functioned as the ruling class through the instrumentality of the imperial state. China’s historical itinerary did not lead to a bourgeois revolution taking power, but rather yielded a balance of elite forces and interests that remained hegemonic across repeated transitions in dynastic rule and that endeavored to shape the policies and practices of the imperial state in its own interests.

The government was tasked at a minimum with providing the security and stability needed to allow people to pursue their livelihoods, though the state could also play a more proactive role in economic life from time to time. Imperial dynasties built and maintained important infrastructure that facilitated long-distance trade, such as the Grand Canal and other water transport systems, or the imperial post roads that spanned the empire. Government monopolies in certain critical commodities were used to buffer some of the extremes of market supply and demand and curtail excessive profit seeking by private capital. Interventions in the all-important grain markets were deployed to sustain consumers in times of bad harvests and shortages. The imperial state was hardly a mercantilist actor, but it did contribute to the development and flourishing of China’s commercial capitalism.

VI
This understanding of China’s past can help illuminate some aspects of the country’s contemporary economic and political formations. China today is a society emerging from a long period of humiliation and oppression at the hands of Western imperialism, and from the turmoil and devastation of decades of revolutionary conflict and the Japanese invasion and occupation from 1937 to 1945. China’s early modern order proved unable to transcend its own limitations and was incapable of meeting the challenges of foreign intrusion and domination. By the late eighteenth century, the Qing empire had begun to face serious economic challenges, with population growth pushing against the limits of agricultural production within the established systems of land tenure and productive technologies. While the Qianlong emperor could still reject Britain’s overtures for free trade in 1793 based on China’s superior economic position, contradictions within the existing mode of production were intensifying.

The Industrial Revolution unleashed both immense productive capacities and powerful new military capabilities that, combined with the ideology of free trade promoted by the competitive imperatives of capitalist production and the ideas of Adam Smith and other political economists, transformed first the British and then other Europeans’ relations with the rest of the world in a wave of colonialist expansionism that fundamentally reconfigured the global economic and political order. China was subordinated to Western imperialism. Its long-vibrant commercial capitalism, already under pressure from internal difficulties, rapidly succumbed to foreign competition. European industrial capitalism reconfigured global relationships, creating a planetary division of labor within which China, though never made a colony of an individual Western power, assumed a subordinate role as a source of raw materials and as a market for European manufactured products. New Chinese capitalist elements began to appear in the late nineteenth century, but they struggled against the dominance of foreign businesses and finance. Western capital and the national governments that served it developed and maintained their power based on a monopoly of industrial productive technologies. The colonial system, which included China’s semicolonial position, preserved this monopoly until the Soviet Union began to develop its own industrial capacity in the 1920s.

In the countryside, the landed elite maintained much of its power and cultural preeminence, but, even there, wealth dwindled and prolonged instability eroded social cohesion. The imperial system staggered to its final collapse in the early twentieth century, and nearly four decades of political conflict and foreign invasion followed, destroying countless lives and further impoverishing the country. In the absence of a coherent national government, the extraction of surplus from agricultural production by local elites intensified and was exacerbated by warlord taxation and the corrupt practices of the nationalist regime. The Japanese invasion of 1937 and the war of resistance that lasted until 1945 brought further hardship and destruction to both urban and rural China.

Only with the victory of the revolution led by the Communist Party and the Red Army could the construction of a new modern China get underway. Land reform between 1948 and 1952 swept away the last vestiges of the old gentry landowning class in the countryside and created the conditions for building a new agriculture based on collective ownership and planned development.33 The industrial economy was nationalized in stages in the early 1950s, then began to grow through the deployment of capital from surpluses in both agriculture and manufacturing according to a series of five-year plans developed from the mid–1950s onward.

Experiments with varying forms of industrial management sought new ways to contribute to the development of a modern socialist economy.34 Aid and technical assistance from the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist states was crucial in the first decade of the People’s Republic. China was able begin developing a modern industrial sector distinct from the Western monopoly.

The path of socialist construction was contentious and deep divisions over how best to advance led to decades of struggle and conflict within the party and in society. The years from 1949 to 1979 saw successes and failures, advances and retreats. Dramatic improvements were made in public health, with average life expectancy rising significantly while infant mortality fell. National infrastructure in transportation and communication was massively expanded, as were reservoirs and other hydraulic resources, and overall economic growth averaged over 3 percent per year. Basic social services were provided and education was extended to most of the country’s young people.35

Nonetheless, by 1979 China remained a poor country as population growth negated some of the increases in production and a focus on heavy industry and infrastructure kept household consumption at basic levels. In a series of decisions at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the ’80s, the Communist Party decided to embark on a path of “reform and opening to the outside” (改革開放) aimed at rapidly developing the economy and reorienting production both to meeting the needs of domestic consumers and to creating an export sector that would generate further growth through profits and the accumulation of foreign exchange. At the heart of this process was the decision to use the mechanisms of the market to develop the productive economy. In other words, a certain amount of private capital would be allowed to function within the economy, in tandem with or parallel to the continuing operations of state-owned enterprises and other forms of socialist industry and agriculture. Foreign capital would be welcomed in joint ventures, initially limited to special economic zones but eventually spreading to the country at large.

This was not a blank check written to a new capitalist class. The decision to embrace the use of markets as a driver of development was premised on the ongoing key role of the Communist Party in China’s political and economic system. The party would continue to be the guiding force shaping policy and practice, and would oversee the country’s progress toward a level of prosperity where the needs of all people could be met and where a more equitable social order could be engendered. This is the vision that is characterized as socialism with Chinese characteristics, (Zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi, 中國特色社會主義).36

Though not without shortcomings and contradictions, China’s economy entered into an era of remarkable expansion as a result of these policies and practices. The Chinese economy’s growth rates often exceeded 10 percent over the next three decades and, in the pre-COVID years, were still growing by more than 6 percent annually. Productive capacity expanded rapidly and modern technologies were acquired, in part through joint venture partnerships with foreign capital. China also began to invest heavily in research and development to be able to pursue technological innovation with reduced reliance on foreign inputs. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty, material standards of living rose dramatically, and China emerged on the world stage as an increasingly important player in global economic life.

China’s economy today is a hybrid of state and other collectively owned enterprises, ranging from huge national entities to county or township level factories or workshops (about 45 percent of asset ownership), and a private sector that includes both domestic businesses and international joint ventures (about 35 percent of asset ownership). Another 20 percent of businesses fall into an intermediate zone, with a blend of public and private ownership.37 State-owned enterprises, at both the central and local levels, form the core of the productive economy and infrastructure, predominate in banking and finance, and are the single largest source of government revenue, but the private sector has also assumed major proportions, with a number of world class corporations playing leading roles and an ever-growing number of billionaires. The private sector currently accounts for a little over half of all employment in industry, though more than 40 percent of China’s people still live and work in the agricultural sector, where land is owned by the state and leased to households. Production in both the industrial and agricultural sectors, by both public and private enterprises, is geared to a system of domestic and international markets. Much of China’s growth has come through its exports to the global economy, but domestic consumption is being increasingly expanded.

The rationale for the reform policies can be understood in part within the theoretical parameters of Marxist and Leninist experience. In the Communist Manifesto and many other writings, Marx and Frederick Engels were very clear on the power of capitalist markets to drive innovation and development. V. I. Lenin turned to market mechanisms under the New Economic Policies in the dark years after the Civil War in Russia to jumpstart the growth of the new Soviet economy. The creative power of markets always threatens to become a reckless monstrosity, like the demons conjured by the sorcerer’s apprentice. This is why the careful oversight of the party is critical to China’s future.38

In a discussion of the development of reform policies in November 2013, Xi Jinping set out the party’s position: “In 1992 the Party’s 14th National Congress stipulated that China’s economic reform aimed at establishing a socialist market economy, allowing the market to play a basic role in allocating resources under state macro control.” He noted that “there are still many problems. The market lacks order, and many people seek economic benefits through unjustified means.” He also emphasized that “we must unswervingly consolidate and develop the public economy, persist in the leading role of public ownership, give full play to the leading role of the state-owned economy, and incessantly increase its vitality, leveraging power and impact.”39 Over recent years, the party and the government have pursued an aggressive campaign against corruption, expanded regulatory oversight of industry and finance in both the public and private sectors, and promoted ideals of social responsibility and socialist values. These policies and practices suggest the complexity and dynamism of the relationship between the party, the state, and private economic actors.

Under the policies of reform, China now has capitalists, but it does not have a capitalist class that can control the state and shape it to its own interests. The practical effects of the leading role of the party can be seen in the ways in which the most dangerous aspects of capitalist economics are being buffered and constrained today. China continues to devote major resources to eliminating poverty, a key benchmark of which was achieved in November 2020 when the last few counties, in Guizhou province, that had lagged behind the internationally recognized definition of absolute poverty were finally designated as having emerged from that status. China must further improve the livelihoods of its people, but it is making steady progress in that direction. The serious environmental problems, which peaked in the first decade of the twenty-first century, are being addressed, and China’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2060 is a clear statement of the priority of ongoing engagement with the ecology of the country.40 China is also developing a culture of what are sometimes called “patriotic entrepreneurs”— capitalists who understand that, in socialism with Chinese characteristics, they have a place within a unique social system, a hybrid of markets and planning, a blend of public and private ownership, and that they have a responsibility to contribute to the development not only of their own enterprises, but to the enhancement of the people’s livelihoods.41 The operations of the United Front Department of the party have been expanded in recent years as another means of managing the relationship between the party and other social and political elements.42 The party and the state thus are pursuing practical policies and actions to direct social resources to further development, and a program of cultural politics to ensure that the operations of private capital are integrated within the overall goals of socialist development.

The political and legal infrastructure of the People’s Republic, in particular the public ownership of land and the system of household registration, ensures that, just as there is no bourgeoisie, there is also no true proletariat. Workers in China are not compelled to sell their labor power in the marketplace because they have no property. The system of socialist ownership means that everyone in China has economic resources for their maintenance. Individuals are registered in their native places and have access to land as a place to live and to at least minimal social services such as education and health care. The importance of this was clearly demonstrated during the financial crisis of 2008 and beyond, when, with the downturn in demand for goods produced in and exported from China, some twenty million workers were laid off from factories in places like Shenzhen and Shanghai. These workers were not simply cast out and left to their own devices, but instead could return to their home villages, where they remained entitled to the support of the socialist system. As China adjusted to the new demand structure of the global economy, and as productive activity revived in the following years, workers could return to their former employment or seek new opportunities without having been reduced to poverty and immiseration. The provision of dibao (低保), the basic level of support in rural China, is not enough to maintain a truly comfortable way of life, which is why so many young people from the countryside have sought better economic opportunities in factory or construction work in the cities, but it did serve to bridge the period of unemployment caused by the global crisis.

Workers have also been able to use the mechanisms of socialist legality to pursue their economic interests within China’s rapidly developing economy. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has represented workers across the country, and workers and citizens in general have exercised their rights to protest, petition, and litigate through the courts to address issues from wages and working conditions to corruption and abuse of power by officials to the dangers of environmental pollution. Beyond the operations of the union federation, Chinese workers have been militant in pursuing their interests through protests and wildcat strikes. Workers and other citizens take the law and their rights seriously and regularly engage in direct action to pursue their interests. This can be portrayed as a sign of alienation, but may perhaps more properly be seen as indicating their understanding and application of their civil powers.43 China’s socialist government and the Communist Party thus serve both to restrain the potential excesses and abuses of new capitalist elements and to maintain the central role of the working class within economic and social life.

This is not to say that workers who leave their native villages to seek employment in factories or on constructions sites are not acting out of economic motivations, nor that their labor power does not generate surplus value that is, at this stage in the developmental process, appropriated by private capital or even state-owned enterprises and other kinds of collectively owned enterprises. This is part of the bargain, part of the experiment on which the Communist Party embarked to develop China’s productive economy and accumulate wealth that leads first to a socialism of a “moderately prosperous society” (小康社會) and eventually to the level of material abundance that is the threshold and foundation of a communist future. There are risks and challenges along this path. The growth that has been achieved has not come without costs. The use of market mechanisms implied the acceptance of certain contradictions that are inherent in their operations. Inequality in the country has increased sharply, as, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping, some people got rich first. Environmental stresses became a serious problem, with pollution of the air, water, and soil damaging people’s health and undermining the quality of life. Corruption became a critical legal and political issue. The Communist Party has made great efforts to address these contradictions, but also remains committed to the path of reform. The process of experimentation and innovation that has unfolded in the course of the reform era is sometimes called “crossing the river by feeling the rocks” (mozhe shitou guohe, 摸著石頭過河) and perhaps constitutes a course of “two steps forward, one step back” as history advances.

In her book The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, Lin Chun writes that “it is no easy task to ‘join the market in order to beat it’ via relinking, borrowing, and embracing.” She goes on to ask:

Might “private” capital be simultaneously “social” in a socialized market to serve public interests? Could such a market survive and eventually overcome the capitalist world market, and on what historical and institutional basis? Imposing these questions, we can recognize the truism that even a socialist society cannot avoid being “structurally dependent on capital.”… On the other hand, however, the preserved demarcation between capital and capitalism indicates the feasibility of preventing the logic of profit from colonizing the political, social, and cultural spheres—that is, if the right agency and institutions can be put in place.44

The historical outcome of China’s experiment with building a socialist market economy, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” remains an open question. China’s remarkable success at coping with the COVID-19 pandemic and mobilizing social resources to address public health as a human right, in contrast to the catastrophic failures of capitalist, profit-seeking health care systems in the United States and the West, suggests that, while much work remains to be done, the country may indeed be on a path to socialist modernity. Looking at the history of the People’s Republic since 1949 provides one view of the complexities of China’s pursuit of a modern industrial, socialist system.

VII
Another way to consider the current reform era and the nature of China’s twenty-first-century political economy is in the longer perspective of China’s early modern capitalist history. The “Chinese characteristics” of China’s socialism can be understood in part as a structural and cultural redeployment of features we have seen in the Song-Qing era. The complex dialectic of the state seeking to both encourage and constrain the dynamism of capitalist markets that was pursued by imperial bureaucrats, to varying degrees at different times, resonates with the hybridity of public and private economic agents in China today. The shaping of a culturally specific political and economic consciousness through the interplay of market dynamics and select themes and currents within the broad field of Confucian thought and values, subordinating the single-minded pursuit of short-term profit to a longer perspective of socially responsible accumulation, perhaps foreshadowed today’s evocation of the ideal of “patriotic entrepreneurs.”

This does not mean that the People’s Republic is simply a new version of the old empire, old wine in new bottles, but rather that both the interplay of market forces and government policy in later imperial China and the present system of market socialism, or socialism with Chinese characteristics, constitute distinct modes of production that can be best understood in a historical materialist analysis that recognizes both their relationship to broader global processes of economic history and their developmental linkages to deep currents of continuity in Chinese material and cultural life. The key difference is of course the class nature of the state, which in imperial times was the instrument of class rule by the hybrid landed-commercial ruling elite, but is today, with the leading role of the Communist Party, the management committee for the building of a new social order, at least aspirationally, and to a significant extent, practically, based on the interests and wishes of the working class. This remains a work in progress, as history continues to move.

Appreciating the specificities of China’s history and its present path within the overall framework of a historical materialist perspective allows us to move beyond trying to assimilate all forms of capitalism, all paths toward socialism, all versions of early modernity, to a single universal template. It is the mode of analysis that must be universal, and the data must drive the conclusions. The analytical perspective derived from Capital and Marx’s other writings does not mean we need to seek and find the exact same totality in every place to be able to apply a precise definition of capitalism, and to fit the experience of different peoples in different places into a monolithic narrative flow. A nuanced application of Marx’s methods to the particularities of place and time will yield results of greater practical utility in both the understanding of the past and an engagement with contemporary developments.

https://mronline.org/2021/03/03/beyond- ... apitalism/

(Copious notes are to be found at the link, too long to fit here.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 16, 2021 1:20 pm

Jack Ma Is Not The Problem
FEB 21
WRITTEN BY LI XURAN

TRANSLATED BY LI RUIPENG

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Can financial technology be corralled in service of China’s people-centered development? With Jack Ma’s Ant Group as a case study, Chinese blogger Li Xuran offers a compelling analysis of the role of capital in modern China. The halting of Ant’s bombshell IPO in November 2020, Li argues, must be seen in the context of the socialist state’s role in restraining the “wild beast” of capital for the sake of socialist development and the public good.

Editors’ note: Ant Group’s much-anticipated debut on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges was expected to be the largest IPO of all time. But just days before the planned November 5, 2020 opening, Chinese regulators, led by the People’s Bank of China, halted the IPO and summoned Ant founder Jack Ma and other Ant executives to discuss what they called “major issues” with the tech giant’s pending listing.

The clash between state regulators and Ant Group—the parent company of China’s largest mobile payment system, Alipay, and a lending service for more than 80 million small businesses—was portrayed in Western media as a “crackdown” evincing the centralized power of the Communist Party under Xi Jinping. These misrepresentations even led to conspiracy theories that Ma had been “disappeared.” But far from a “totalitarian” crackdown on private industry, the freezing of Ant Group’s monster IPO must be understood in the context of China’s socialist market economy, in which traditional banking and financial services operate under state control for the public interest. In contrast to China’s 14th Five Year Plan—which prioritizes sustainable development, rural revitalization, and real economic growth—the growing power of private lenders such as Ant Group poses systemic risks for the sorts of speculation, consumer debt, and financial bubbles responsible for cyclical financial crises in the capitalist nations. As Ant Group continues to work with regulatory authorities towards a future IPO, the question remains: can fintech be corralled in service of China’s people-centered development?

In this context, Li Xuran offers a compelling analysis of the role of capital in modern China. Channeling Marx, Li argues that the control of capital is crucial to the project of socialist development, but that left unrestrained, the “wild beast” of capital will show that its class interests outstrip its national allegiance. Rejecting the billionaire cult of personality which at times surrounds Ma, Li reminds us that the successes of Ma and his ilk are not a reflection of their own abilities, but of the opportunities created by the struggle of the Communist Party and the common Chinese people. Whether Ant Group or otherwise, to control the beast of capital requires the concerted effort of the Party, the state, and the people.

This article was originally published in Chinese in Utopia (乌有之乡). Follow the author’s public page on WeChat (ID: xuranshuo).


I.

The tides are changing.

I have seen several social media posts, mainstream media publications, and vloggers starting to ferociously criticize Jack Ma, as if criticizing him would solve all their problems. I’ve given it some thought, and, risking possible backlash amongst my readers, decided to discuss this issue at length. Because in my opinion, Jack Ma isn’t the problem.

Before you roast me, let me rephrase myself: Jack Ma isn’t the root of the problem. Why? Let’s look at some recent events: the Ant Group IPO halt, Danke (蛋壳) Apartment breakdown [1], the showdown over community group-buying...

Broadly speaking, beneath these diverse incidents lies a single force. A great teacher and his generation warned of and suppressed it, but it has sprouted once more since the 1980s. After 40 years, it has taken root in multiple facets of our lives, including thought, society, reality and power. Bit by bit, it has shown its immense and power and frightening quality:

Capital.

Not even Marx’s Capital can fully discuss the complexity of capital. So here, I will summarize it into three points, per my understanding:

First: capital and development are inseparable.

Capital accelerates and catalyzes economic development. At a certain stage of social development (from capitalism to the primary stage of socialism), a rapid economic boom necessitates it.

I once read that a modernizing country seeking economic development and industrialization had only three paths: Urban-rural “price scissors,” i.e. setting low prices on rural commodities to support industrial development; plunder, the path taken by Western capitalist countries; and using foreign capital, exemplified by the four “Asian Tigers” which developed by heavily attracting massive foreign investment.

So, we can’t discuss too deeply the primitive accumulation of capital. Like all great fortunes, developmental history needs glorification. Only the rise of modern China has been achieved without plunder, and instead was built up on a barren ground once plundered by invaders.

The first part of New China’s path took place shortly after its founding. It consisted of controlling the price of agricultural products, limiting the movement of rural households, and country-wide restraint on food and consumption. Instead, the Chinese people channeled their energy into construction and accumulated a solid, thorough industrial foundation, summed up as “tightening the belt, to pool our resources to complete major missions.” On the other hand, after reform and opening up, China attracted massive amounts of foreign capital and released state and partially private capital, invigorating the economy.

We must understand that though we consider capital frightening, we need to acknowledge its great power in pushing economic development.

I bring this up because we must understand that though we consider capital frightening, we need to acknowledge its great power in pushing economic development. We cannot negate China’s last 40 years using its first 30, nor can we negate its first 30 years using the last 40. This is historical materialism.

Second: expansion is capital’s basic instinct.

Capital is like genetic code, whose sole purpose is to populate, duplicate, and grow. In the natural world, a creature without a predator will surely overpopulate, like the Asian carp in the United States. Capital without competition and regulation will lead to large-scale monopoly in all areas.

Liu Cixin, in his sci-fi novel The Wages of Humanity, imagines the ultimate stage of capitalism in which a “final producer” monopolizes all the planet’s resources, including land, air and water. People pay taxes just to breathe. This speculation is based on the recognition of reality.

Isn’t the reoccurring financial recession in capitalist society, at its core, the result of capital expanding to the extreme, while suppressing labor cost to extreme, leading to production capacity far exceeding social need?

In the area of production, since the cycle is relatively long, the re-occurrence of crisis is long. But nowadays, the reason why we feel capitalism will fall into “crisis” once every few years, is because in the current era, the extreme expansion of capital is financial capital, which accelerates the progression of capital rapidly expanding until explosion. Because when capital enters industry, it realizes that it has to go through input, production, sale, re-input and other elements in the cycle, and that is way too slow to gain added value. So, we have financial capital using many dazzling leverages, tools, and products to reach the goal of producing money with money.

A friend in the financial business tells me that once being in the world of finance and having some results, you won’t want to do anything else because other industries make money far too slowly.

To some degree, finance is like drugs. Normally people derive pleasure from action, rewarded by their brains through the release of certain chemicals. But what’s horrifying about drugs is they bypass this reward system and directly stimulate the brain via chemicals to produce pleasure. That’s why people addicted to drugs are so hopeless; everything else becomes meaningless.

Financial capital is just as horrifying. From the early days of winning the stock market, to the recent subprime crisis and P2P lending platforms crisis, it will not stop.

Third, capital’s class attribute is larger than national attribute.

To be honest, I was going to skip this part — for some people, it’s a bit of a soft spot.

When dealing with capitalists, I say spare me the talk of “heart for the country and the world.”

In this world, patriotic capitalists exist, but they are hardly a class that has the self-awareness to limit their capital to national borders. While there are individuals who betray their class, there is no class that betrays its interests and profits. In the eyes of capital, the world is flat. Where there are people, there is profit, it will find its way there by any means necessary.

Much like the East India Company all those years ago; people who know their history will understand: from the standpoint of government alone, the Western powers wouldn’t have necessarily started the Opium War. European capital’s vicious interests and ambitions of expansion necessitated the war. Unlike Japan, Britain didn’t have a direct geopolitical conflict with us.

Since the 1990s, a handful of Western financial crocodiles have been making waves around the world, plundering fortune using financial tools, the result is no less severe than a hot war invasion. Many countries have suffered and have yet to recover.

Capital, once uncontrolled, can exercise enormous influence in a state’s political scene. In some small to mid-sized countries, the government has little authority and easily collapses due to the power play among many forces, including capital.

This is the reason why Sun Yat-sen called for “control of capital” over a hundred years ago.

In modern society, there is no “capital” in a purely commercial sense. All capital is closely tied up with politics, especially big capital and big tycoons. If any mature politician still believes nonsense such as “capital is only a tool,” “capital doesn’t talk politics,” and “when in business, only talk business,” they’re basically out of the game.

II.

I have said a lot already. My core intention is to tell everyone: Jack Ma is fine, Danke Apartment too. Even community group-buy, a recent popular phenomenon, are nothing but embodiments of capital. They themselves are not the problem. The true problem arises if we overlook the issues driving these forces.

Capital is like a wild beast: if we are able to tame it and use it for our needs, it will help with the development of productivity. Uncontrolled and unrestrained, it will bite us and cause great harm.

Capital is like a wild beast: if we are able to tame it and use it for our needs, it will help with the development of productivity. Uncontrolled and unrestrained, it will bite us and cause great harm. On this point, Ma isn’t the last tycoon, Danke isn’t the last bankruptcy, community group-buy won’t be the last battleground.

Because capital is an essential element of production, but it is not production itself. I give you 50 cents, you will try and produce things that are worth 50 cents. It indeed can stimulate creative potential and economic liveliness.

But the problem lies in, who monitors or guarantees that things worth 50 cents get made?

Capital enters the market, increasing its value constantly through finance, stocks and other shiny packages. Every process in the middle would create fortune. But in the end, the product has to get made, or society’s economic system would collapse.

Us producers jokingly call ourselves “da gong ren” (bricklayers, laborers), because people in other positions are not really involved with production, they might be in charge of spreadsheets, sales, marketing, advertising, even holding meetings.

They then wait for manufacturing and production, jobs that, at least theoretically, someone else should be doing.

But this hypothetical “person” can be exhausted, left unable to work.

Then comes insufficient production, advance consumption, then overcapacity, deflation. Next comes the decline and collapse of the whole economic system that was constructed with it.

Remember the famous passage that Marx quotes?

“With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certainly will produce eagerness; 50 percent—positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent—and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.”

The periodic crises of capitalist society has led economists to a consensus: uncontrolled capital will definitely lead to mad self-destruction.

The breakdown of Danke Apartment is due to this: they used low rent prices to lure tenants, put their money into financing and repackaged them as financial product (even offering loans to those who couldn’t afford to pay rent), then put this financial product back into financial market, getting more funds, to take more houses…

Using tools of capital, they expanded rapidly in just two years. Theoretically, as long as there are “laborers” who rent houses, pay rents, this game of capital can continue, the market will continue to be “vigorous and energetic”.

But what we didn’t expect is the pandemic. The economy suffered, many people couldn’t afford their rent, breaking the tightrope. In the end, those who suffer the most are always tenants, unable to afford homes.

So, in the face of capital, we must not be blinded by its sugary coat. Like community group-buying, vegetables and fruits that sell for a couple of yuan seem cheap. With a clearer outlook, we see that this is only a means through which capital enters a market where interests are diverse and scattered. Price wars, merely tools to suffocate small businesses, create monopoly and centralize interests.

After the Danke Apartment breakdown, I asked a friend who lost over ten thousand yuan and was then evicted: why did you choose Danke? He said, in his neighborhood, Danke has squeezed other agencies and he had no choice.

I was speechless.

III.

Apart from the risk of freely expanding, capital has another noteworthy hidden effect: capital warps people’s minds.

In the forty years following reform and opening up, our society’s thinking has changed tremendously. While we are more prosperous in a material sense, we also lost many things in terms of philosophy and values.

Consumerism has taken center-stage. A frivolous, anxious and interest-driven mentality has spread. On social platforms such as Douyin (Tiktok for the Chinese market) and Kuaishou, we see many youngsters showing off designer bags, cosmetics, luxury clothing, even expensive cars and houses.

It pains me to imagine how many youth will be influenced by then and become the next ones with bourgeois dreams. Many have been brainwashed by the short-sighted consumerism and interest-driven “way of success”. To fill our desires, we slowly embraced loan services and over-consumption.

Every now and then in the news we see young adults, unable to repay their loans, break the law. What’s more frightening is that this phenomenon and mentality influence the younger generation. “Studying is such a chore, people become more famous and wealthy as influencers rather than admission into Tsinghua or Peking University. Being a celebrity, making money, having plastic surgeries, finding a sugar daddy is the true path to success.”

Facing this phenomenon, a netizen asks: “Should 17-year-olds be partying or preparing for the gaokao [the national college entrance exam]?” If you come from a wealthy family and happen to have the freedom of choosing your life, the former option would be beyond reproach. But how many people have the resources to actually indulge in this dream?

In a street interview, when asked “who is your favorite celebrity,” an old man said: “I don’t like celebrities. They contribute nothing to the country, only harm to the next generation. If you ask kids nowadays what they want to be when they grow up, they all say stars, singers, no one say scientists, teachers, or joining the army.…Stars don’t make a country great—scientists, engineers, working people do.”

IV.

One more thing.

In contemporary China, what’s most frightening about capital is that after growing wildly for an extended period, it has almost become “too big to fail.” This is also why many spokespersons of capital have the gall to say some outrageous things.

Jack Ma, in his speech at the Bund in Shanghai in October, made remarks that he would probably take back now: financing in China “doesn’t have systemic risks” because there is “no system.”

Jack Ma saying that there is no systemic risk in China’s finance only proves that he represents that risk.

This reminds of a meme: “In every team there is a rookie. If you don’t spot the rookie, you are the rookie.” The most dreaded thing in a financial system is systemic risk. Jack Ma saying that there is no systemic risk in China’s finance only proves that he represents that risk.

The following day, the chief of National Economic Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference pointed out in a financial summit: no matter whether we call it financial technology or technological finance, one mustn’t forget the attribute of finance, mustn’t disobey the basic rule of financial running, or one will be punished by the market.

If you still can’t comprehend what’s frightening about Ma’s speech, here I will quote what was stressed in a lecture of the Central Committee’s Political Bureau: Preventing systemic financial risk is the fundamental task of our financial work.

After Ma’s speech, I have seen many bloggers saying he’s “over the clouds.” I think they are blinded by appearance. For Ma, a person who’s shouting about retiring all the time, to have the nerve to speak like that, “over the clouds” is in fact an understatement. I’ll refrain from talking about him further, everyone can contemplate themselves.

V.

I feel fortunate to live in a socialist country.

Most people here grew up with a Marxist-Leninist education. Many lack a clear understanding or have even forgotten our coursework. However, when we grow up, get “beaten up” by society, and encounter all sorts of social problems, we seek answers. We will remember what the textbooks have taught us and will think: our textbooks were so thorough! What a shame we didn’t understand them back then.

What other countries in the world teach students to see capital through “surplus value?” What other countries explain the world with “materialism,” or ask questions beginning with “if capital has 50 percent profit...”?

Because the majority has such fundamental education, a blog like ours, founded at the end of 2019, can earn the support that it has earned. Just like in the discussion of “Xinyu Project,” a student said: “Capitalism will always be capitalism. Luckily, we’re born in China, the country that belongs to the Chinese people. Many times through these events, we can see that China led by Communist Party of China is worth our trust.” This isn’t blind worship. Rather it’s an empirical truth. If China isn’t trustworthy, how did China accomplish in forty years what capitalist countries accomplished in several hundred years?

And just because of this, in China capital will have a very hard time expanding unrestrained. When even youths and ordinary common people understand, do you think the state would not? Not only did the state notice, they responded swiftly. From the Ant Group IPO halt, to the statement of strengthening anti-monopoly and preventing capital’s free expansion, issuing The Guidance of Anti-Monopoly in the Area of Platform Economy, to strengthening the regulation of Internet finance, to the recent statement that capital needs to flow more to the real economy... These decisions are consistent with the Party’s ideology. Designed at the top level, come in prepared, hit the target, think over strategy, and deal with the root of the problem. In areas such as thought, theory, communications, and publication of policy documents, different departments work together, to form a united force.

In Western capitalist countries, anti-monopoly investigations are exceedingly difficult efforts. Big corporations, big capital hire political spokespersons and lobbyists to persuade Congress and drive policy making. But in China, a single conference, a single social commentary can change the current. Here, giants walk on ice.

In Western capitalist countries, anti-monopoly investigations are exceedingly difficult efforts. Big corporations, big capital hire political spokespersons and lobbyists to persuade Congress and drive policy making. There are also legal elites searching for loopholes, rationalizing decisions that would be considered irrational and unethical to any clear-minded person -- all to seek excuses for capitalists to snatch profit. Even if a company or a person gets sentenced for monopoly, the long process of investigation would have likely already caused a great enough risk.

But in China, a single conference, a single social commentary can change the current. Here, giants walk on ice. This is the strength of the system, and the strength of people’s hearts. In our social system, capital can never seize our country. Why have people been praising and applauding the documents of anti-corruption and re-enforcing regulation? Is this not “representing the fundamental interest of the common people?”

VI.

Last of all, I want to talk about the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee—the most important event in the second half of the year. This meeting, in my opinion, largely revolves around one question: what is the point of development?

Let’s review the essence of socialism: liberate and develop productivity; eliminate exploitation and polarization; and reach common prosperity.

In this respect, no matter Jack Ma or any other tycoon, they’re all “front runners in wealth accumulation” that exist in a specific historical phase. Such people with capability and speciality can establish companies and bring about good management, and gain wealth for their own while helping accelerate the wealth accumulation of the whole society. But one mustn't forget where one comes from, and where one must go. If our ass sits in the wrong camp, we will find ourselves in greater danger the greater our strength.

A TV drama set in the Qin Dynasty has recently gone popular.

I’d like to share with you a piece of commentary on the Qin state from Han Fei Zi [2]. It’s right on point and has much educational significance to this day. He says: “General Rang of Qin attacked Qi in the east overcrossing Han and Wei. After five years, Qin hasn’t gained an inch of land but General Rang gained the fief of Taoyi. General Ying attacked Han, eight years later he gained the fief of Runan. Since then, many statesmen of Qin have been like Ying and Rang. If a war was won, they were made nobility, expanding their territories and establishing private fiefs.”

It means the achievement of one person of high rank is attributed to the many from below [3]. Mobilizing the forces of all of Qin to attack other states merely contributes to the interests of individual bigwig politicians.

Our own business elite shouldn’t regard the opportunities created from our country’s development as their own. If without a stable political and societal environment, if without tolerant, supporting policies, if without the wide coverage of basic education, if without the steadfast hard work of billions of common people, how did they end up having everything they have today?

We often say: don’t mistake the abilities of a platform for your own. Our own business elite shouldn’t regard the opportunities created from our country’s development as their own. If without a stable political and societal environment, if without tolerant, supporting policies, if without the wide coverage of basic education, if without the steadfast hard work of billions of common people, how did they end up having everything they have today? One must know where one’s ass “sits,” and one must know where one’s feet “stand.”

In the Fifth Plenary Session, great emphasis was placed on interpreting the concept of “common prosperity.” More importantly, in the explanatory draft of the 14th Five-Year Plan illustrated by President Xi, seven important issues that needed explanation were mentioned, each of great importance. One of them was “On the Advancement of Common Prosperity of All People”:

“Common prosperity is the essential demand of socialism, it is the common expectation of the people. We push the economy and society to develop, all in the goal of achieving common prosperity of the people.”

What’s worth noting is that such expression is a first in the documents of the Party’s plenary sessions. We must think it through: is the goal of development merely creating a “richest person”? Or creating hundreds of rich persons through IPOs? Neither. To 1.4 billion common Chinese people, such actors are an occasional wave in a tumbling river. The wave may astonish and attract attention and adoration, but it’s nothing if without the tumbling water everlastingly running through. Still water runs deep. Those who are quiet, working hard day and night, are the majority of China—it is them for whom we toil, work, and fight.

[1] Danke (蛋壳) is a Chinese startup that serves as a middleman between landlords and tenants. The company rents units from landlords on a long-term basis, then sublets these units to tenants, many of whom are students or young professionals, on a short-term, flexible basis. In late 2020, the company allegedly ran out of cash and couldn’t pay apartment owners, leading some owners to evict tenants and sparking government intervention to settle disputes and issue greater regulatory oversight amidst claims of Danke’s bankruptcy.

[2] Han Fei Zi (韓非子) is a foundational political text dating to China’s Warring States period (战国时代), attributed to the Legalist philosopher Han Fei (韩非, lived ~280 BCE to 233 BCE), who is also known as Han Fei Zi.

[3] The original text is “一将功成万骨枯,” a famous quote from a late Tang era poem by Cao Song (曹松, lived 828 to 903). The literal translation would be “a general succeeds while ten thousand bones rot.”

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 18, 2021 11:57 am

The watchdogs of imperialism and the Uyghur genocide slander

March 2, 2021

By Stephen Gowans

On February 26 the Canadian Parliament passed a motion, by a vote of 226 to 0, expressing the opinion that “the People’s Republic of China has” implemented “measures intended to prevent” Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births and that these measures are “consistent with” the United Nations Genocide Convention.

The reality is that Beijing is not preventing Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births, and a report by a German anthropologist widely cited as evidence that it is, contradicts this claim. That report, by Adrian Zenz, a fellow at a US government-created foundation whose mission is to bring about the end of communism and the Chinese Communist Party, reveals that while Chinese family planning policy restricts the number of children Chinese couples are allowed to have, it does not prevent couples in any group, including Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, from bearing children. Moreover, limits on family size are the same between the Han Chinese ethnic majority and religious minorities. There is, therefore, no discrimination in Chinese family planning policy on the basis of national, religious, or ethnic affiliation.

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Perhaps aware their position was untenable, the parliamentarians sought to buttress their motion by citing political opinion in the United States, where “it has been the position of two consecutive administrations that Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims are being subjected to a genocide by the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” the motion observed. In an act of unseemly subservience to imperial power, Canada’s parliament constructed a motion, based on no evidence, to echo a point of view articulated in Washington, also based on no evidence.

Significantly, the last two consecutive administrations have designated China a rival, and therefore have politically-motivated reasons for slandering their challenger. Moreover, apart from using the hyper-aggressive US military to extort economic and strategic concessions from other countries, US administrations have a long record of fabrication to justify their aggressive actions. That “two consecutive administrations” have held that the Chinese are carrying out a genocide is evidence of nothing more than Washington continuing to operate in its accustomed fashion of churning out lies about states that refuse to be integrated into the US economic, military and political orbit. A Serb-orchestrated genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; moderate rebels in Syria: these are only the tip of the iceberg of US lies and calumnies offered as pretexts for imperial aggression. Genocide in Xinjiang is but the latest.

Below, I look at the genocide slander from four perspectives:

The geostrategic context.
Who is behind the accusation?
How do the accusers define genocide?
What is the evidence?
The geostrategic context

In 2003, Graham E. Fuller, a former vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Estimate and one-time CIA station chief in Kabul, wrote a book for the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Study at the Johns Hopkins University, titled The Xinjiang Problem. His co-author was the academic S. Frederick Starr.

Fuller and Starr wrote that:

“the historical record suggests that the decision of countries and even of international organizations to raise specific human rights issues is often politicized and highly selective. Many countries will devote attention to human rights issues in China in inverse proportion to the quality of their overall bilateral relationship.“

It need not be said that today, 18 years later, the quality of overall bilateral relations between the United States and China has deteriorated sharply. China has emerged as a formidable competitor to US economic and technological supremacy, and US policy has shifted, beginning with the Obama administration, toward an explicit program of eclipsing China’s rise.

In recent days, US president Joe Biden has said “American leadership must meet … the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden’s “goal is to stay ahead of China in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other advances that are expected to define the economy and military of the future.” However, the US president, according to the newspaper, intends to portray the conflict as one based on “a clash of values: democracy vs. autocracy,” rather than a clash of economic interests.

At the base of a deteriorating Sino-US relationship, then, lies a commercial rivalry, on top of which Washington has layered a narrative about a clash of values. In a Foreign Affairs article written before he became president, Biden outlined a strategy of confronting China over the economic challenges it poses to US businesses, US domination of the industries of tomorrow, and US technological (and concomitant military) supremacy. Biden said he would use a human rights narrative to rally support for a US-led campaign against China.

Fuller and Starr continued: “It would be unrealistic,” they wrote, “ to rule out categorically American willingness to play the ‘Uyghur card’ as a means of exerting pressure on China in the event of some future crisis or confrontation.” Many “of China’s rivals have in the past pursued active policies in Xinjiang and exploited the Uyghur issue for their benefit.” Almost two decades later, with US hostility rising as Washington’s claim to primacy on the world stage is under challenge, the United States has decided to play the Uyghur card.

Who is behind the accusations?

A network of groups and individuals, animated by an antagonism to the Chinese Communist Party, and supportive of continued US global supremacy, are involved in originating the slanders against Beijing. At the center is the German anthropologist, Adrian Zenz.

Zenz’s opposition to Beijing lies in his religious beliefs. A fundamentalist Christian, he views communism, feminism and homosexuality, as abominations against God. Zenz also believes that he is on a divinely-inspired mission to bring about the demise of communist rule in China.

Zenz is a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation, created by the US government to discredit an ideology which competes against the United States’ first favorite religion, US state-capitalism (Christianity being the second) seeks to free the world “from the false hope of Marxism” and save it from “the tyranny of communism” (the leitmotif of Hitler’s political career.) This it strives to do by educating future generations that “Marxist socialism is the deadliest ideology in history,” (one that, by this view, is fully capable of carrying out a genocide), a task the foundation sees as especially pressing today, when “Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States.”

Zenz has also written anti-Beijing reports for the Jamestown Foundation, an anti-Communist outfit supported by corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals, whose mission is to shape public opinion against China and North Korea.

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The slanderers also include a number of Uyghur exile groups, including the World Uyghur Congress, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a US government-bankrolled organization whose first president conceded that it does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely destabilize foreign governments by strengthening fifth columns. The NED does so under the cover of promoting democracy and human rights. The organization has boasted on Twitter that it has been funding fifth columnists in Xinjiang since 2004.

Another propagator of anti-Beijing slanders is the Epoch Times, the newspaper of the Falun Gong. Like Zenz, the roots of Falun Gong’s anti-Beijing animus lie in reactionary religious convictions. The cult deplores gender equality, homosexuality, and communism as affronts against God.

How do the accusers define genocide?

Those who accuse Beijing of carrying out a genocide employ a ruse regularly used in the corporate world to dupe consumers and employees. The subterfuge is to redefine a word to mean something other than what the word would be reasonably interpreted to mean.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo used this ruse. He accused Beijing of trying to integrate Xinjiang and its Turkic people into the larger Chinese society. While this did not meet the definition of genocide, Pompeo labelled Beijing’s actions as genocide all the same. According to the magazine Foreign Policy, State Department lawyers told Pompeo that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang did not satisfy the UN convention’s definition of genocide. Pompeo, who has no respect for the truth, much less the contrary opinions of government lawyers, was undeterred.

The current US secretary of state Anthony Blinken also accused Beijing of genocide. Using the same ruse, Blinken pointed to non-genocidal actions, namely one million Uyghurs in ‘concentration camps’, to make the claim that Beijing was trying to destroy a Muslim minority. The claim was a double deception. First, there are no Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang, and second, even if there were, concentration camps do not equal genocide. Blinken was likely trying to exploit the association of the Holocaust with German death camps to insinuate that concentration camps and genocide go together, like the artic and snow, and that the Chinese government, and its Communist Party, are contemporary expressions of Nazi horror.

The source of the concentration camp allegation is yet another of Beijing’s political foes, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists in Turkey, which serves as a platform for the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, an al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist outfit which seeks to transform Xinjiang into an Islamic State. ETIM is considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States—or was considered a terrorist organization by the United States until Pompeo removed the group from the US terrorism list in October, thereby eliminating an impediment that had limited the contribution the jihadists could make to the US project of destabilizing Xinjiang, propagating calumnies about the Chinese government, and ultimately undermining China’s ability to compete with US businesses on the world stage.

In July of last year, Zenz wrote a paper for the Jamestown Foundation on Uyghur birthrates, which appears to be the basis for the claim cited by Canadian parliamentarians that China is carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang. Zenz’s report raised the question of genocide only in its final sentence, and then only tentatively. It was, instead, the Jamestown Foundation editor, John Dotson, a former US naval officer and US Congressional staff researcher, who concluded in an introductory note that “Zenz presents a compelling case that the CCP party-state apparatus in Xinjiang is engaged in severe human rights violations that meet the criteria for genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Zenz, however, concluded only that Chinese policies “might be characterized” as constituting “a demographic campaign of genocide per” the UN convention. To be sure, any policy might be characterized in any particular way one wants, but the ad rem question isn’t, can policy x be characterized as y, but is it y? Zenz, unlike Dotson, was not prepared to say that Chinese birth control policy constitutes genocide. And there’s a good reason for this; it clearly doesn’t.

Zenz’s paper was a political tract erected on the foundations of a report on Beijing’s family planning policies and their effects on Uyghur and Han birthrates in Xinjiang. What the report showed, notwithstanding Dotson’s politically-motivated misinterpretation, was that:

Previously, Han Chinese couples were limited to one child, while Uyghur couples were allowed two in urban areas, and three in rural areas. Family planning restrictions were not rigidly enforced on Uyghur couples.
Today, Han Chinese couples are permitted to have as many children as Uyghur couples are permitted (two children in urban areas, and three in rural areas.)
Family planning restrictions are now rigidly enforced.
The change from lax to rigid enforcement has been accompanied by a decrease in the Uyghur birth rate.
Zenz’s report showed that the Uyghur population continued to grow, despite enforcement of family planning policies; Uyghur couples are not prevented from having children, (they’re only limited in the number of children they can have); and family planning rules apply equally to Han Chinese.

Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, reads as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The relevant consideration is the fourth item, namely, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Chinese family planning policy does not prevent births within the Uyghur population; it only restricts them, and the restriction is non-discriminatory; it applies equally to all groups.

What is the evidence?

US State Department lawyers told Pompeo there is no evidence of genocide in Xinjiang. As we have seen, that didn’t stop Pompeo–who once boasted that as CIA director “we lied, cheated, and stole“– from making the accusation. He simply changed the definition of genocide, carrying on the US state tradition of fabricating lies to advance its interests.

Bob Rae, Canada’s representative to the UN, accused China of committing genocide, and then said efforts should be made to gather evidence to demonstrate this to be true.

John Ibbitson, a columnist with Canada’s Globe and Mail, conceded that Chinese government actions in Xinjiang do not meet the UN definition of genocide, but that Beijing is carrying out a genocide all the same.

The watchdogs of imperialism

The United States is waging an economic and information war on China, to preserve its economic, military, and technological supremacy. Washington is recruiting its citizens, its allies and their citizens, and the progressive community, into a campaign to protect the international dictatorship of the United States from the challenge posed by the peaceful rise of China. Every manner of slander has been hurled at China to galvanize popular opposition to Beijing and mobilize popular support for economic aggression and growing military intimidation against the People’s Republic, from accusations that Chinese officials concealed the spread of the coronavirus; to calumnies about Muslims being immured in concentration camps, subjected to forced labor, and targeted for genocide; that Beijing is violating the one state-two systems agreement in Hong Kong (when in fact it’s only implementing a security law to undergird the one state part of the accord) and that Beijing’s efforts to reunify the country by re-integrating a territory the US Seventh Fleet prevented it from reintegrating in 1950, are really acts of aggression against an independent country named Taiwan.

Progressive forces, from Democracy Now!, which has provided Adrian Zenz a platform to traduce Beijing, to the New Democratic and Green parties in Canada, which voted for the motion declaring a genocide is in progress in Xinjiang, collude in the campaign to protect and promote the profits of Western shareholders, investors, and bankers from the challenges posed by China’s rise. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about communism, international rivalries, and the perfidy of progressives, described the predecessors of today’s Democracy Nows, Greens, and New Democrats as the watchdogs of imperialism. His words echo through the corridors of time.

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The problematic relationship of Canada’s parliament to the concept of genocide
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The Chinese Uyghur Dark Legend and Washington’s Campaign to Counter Chinese Economic Rivalry
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Published by Stephen Gowans
Stephen Gowans is the author of Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform (2019); Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom (2018); and Washington's Long War on Syria (2017). For notification of updates, send an e-mail to stephen.roy.gowans@gmail.com with "subscribe" in the subject line. View all posts by Stephen Gowans

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 19, 2021 12:17 pm

The American side will "discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion of our allies," Blinken said.

"Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability," he said.

<snip>

It is important for the U.S. and Japan "to make clear together that China cannot expect to act with impunity when it comes to its actions" in places ranging from the South China Sea to Taiwan, Blinken told Nikkei in a Wednesday interview, a day after he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met for "two-plus-two" talks with Japanese counterparts Toshimitsu Motegi and Nobuo Kishi.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Intern ... lunt-words
Ah, the arrogance of imperialism. How much delusion and how much 'whistling past the graveyard'?

**********************

China will never accept US unwarranted accusations: Chinese FM
Xinhua | Updated: 2021-03-19 19:24

Image
Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan attend a high-level strategic dialogue in the Alaskan city of Anchorage, the United States, March 18, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

ANCHORAGE, the United States -- China has never accepted and will never accept unwarranted accusations from the United States, said Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi here on Thursday.

The United States should quit its old bad habit of hegemonism and completely abandon its overbearing behavior of interfering in China's internal affairs, Wang said at the start of a high-level strategic dialogue with the United States in the Alaskan city of Anchorage.

Noting that Anchorage is located in the middle of the air route between the capitals of China and the United States, Wang called the city a "gas station" for China-US exchanges and an "intersection" for the two countries to meet each other halfway.

In the past few years, due to the irrational suppression of China's legitimate rights and interests, China-US relations have encountered unprecedented difficulties, Wang said, adding that this situation has harmed the interests of the two peoples as well as stability and development of the world, and should stop.

He said the US escalation of sanctions on Hong Kong-related issues on March 17 is a gross interference in China's internal affairs, which has aroused strong indignation among the Chinese people.

It is not a normal way of hosting guests that the United States introduced the sanctions on the eve of the Chinese side's departure for the dialogue, Wang said.

If the United States wants to enhance its so-called advantage over China through the act, it has totally miscalculated as this just exposes the inner weakness and powerlessness of America, the Chinese official said.

This practice will not at all affect China's legitimate position, nor will it shake the firm will of the Chinese people to safeguard sovereignty and dignity of the nation, he added.

Wang said that since the US side mentioned in opening remarks that some countries believed that China coerced them, it should clarify whether such a claim came from those countries or America's own assumption.

If the United States is partial to some countries just because they are its allies, or even takes sides with their wrong words and deeds, it will be difficult for a smooth development of international relations, Wang added.

Emphasizing that the phone conversation between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden on the eve of the Chinese lunar new year is very important, Wang said the consensus reached by the two heads of state has guided the direction for China-US relations to get back on track.

The international community is paying close attention to the Anchorage dialogue over whether China and the United States can truly show sincerity and goodwill, and whether the two sides can send out positive signals to the whole world, he said.

If the US side is willing, China can work with the United States to exchange views on the basis of mutual respect, take on their responsibilities, and deliver on the tasks they are given, Wang added.

Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, as well as Wang, are attending the two-day high-level strategic dialogue with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202103/ ... b05ea.html

********************

Meanwhile...

Wall Street, investors reject decoupling from China
By HENG WEILI in New York | China Daily Global | Updated: 2021-03-18 07:24

Image

Foreign institutions eye nation's financial liberalization

While talk of economic decoupling from Beijing has been floated in Washington, the notion has not resonated on Wall Street or with investors, who have been spurred by lucrative opportunities in the opening-up of China's financial markets.

Politics will likely continue to play a role in economic exchanges between the United States and China in the nascent administration of President Joe Biden, but Wall Street will be inclined to do what it does best-pursue profits.

As part of trade talks under the previous US administration, officials in Washington requested that China open up its markets, which would suggest that decoupling would not apply to Wall Street banks.

Beijing offered to remove restrictions on foreign capital in the phase one trade deal signed with the US in January last year.

Some of Wall Street's biggest banks have been preparing for greater access to China's financial sector. Goldman Sachs will raise the number of its staff members on the Chinese mainland this year, where by 2024, it expects to have a workforce of 600, up from the current 400, Nikkei Asia reported on Feb 27.

In December, the company applied to take full ownership of a Chinese securities joint venture, which would be the first by a foreign multinational bank.

JPMorgan Chase will expand its asset and wealth management business as well as investment banking operations in China.

"Asia will be one of the fastest-growing markets in the world," JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in an earnings call last month.

Morgan Stanley's joint venture partner, China Fortune Securities, announced that it would auction off stakes, leaving an opening for the New York bank to take full ownership. In 2019, Morgan Stanley bought a 2 percent stake from China Fortune Securities, also through an auction.

Majority or full ownership could make it easier for foreign banks to expand their operations in the multitrillion-dollar Chinese financial sector.

Zhang Monan, senior fellow at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, wrote in a Feb 23 article on chinausfocus.com, "China's financial liberalization will create huge value-added and profit margins for foreign financial institutions."

She noted that in 2019, PayPal became the first foreign company to provide online payment services in China after acquiring a 70 percent stake in Chinese company GoPay.

In June, American Express became the first foreign credit card company to conduct domestic operations in China through a joint venture with a Chinese financial technology company, and it also was allowed to carry out network clearing operations. Visa and Mastercard applied to form a network clearing license.

S&P Global established a wholly foreign-owned company in 2019, the first foreign company licensed to run credit rating services in China's domestic bond market, Zhang wrote.

China will target GDP growth of at least 6 percent this year as it looks to shore up its economic fundamentals from the pandemic fallout.

Premier Li Keqiang made the growth announcement in the Government Work Report delivered at the opening of the fourth session of the 13th National People's Congress on March 5.

"In setting this target, we have taken into account the recovery of economic activity. A target of over 6 percent will be well aligned with the annual goals of subsequent years in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period, and they will help sustain healthy economic growth," Li said.

The value of China's financial market is estimated at $47 trillion. Foreign financial institutions account for less than 2 percent of banking assets and less than 6 percent of the insurance market in China, Zhang wrote.

Strong rebound

On Feb 6, the South China Morning Post reported, "Encouraged by signs of the world's second-largest economy mostly back to pre-pandemic levels of production, they (foreign financial institutions) have snapped up Chinese stocks, bonds, exchange-traded funds and other financial assets available to them under the country's tightly controlled capital account."

UBS Global Wealth Management, which invests $3 trillion for wealthy individuals, expects "China equities, fixed income and currency to shine" amid a strong economic rebound.

According to analysis of Treasury data by Seafarer Capital Partners, at the end of 2019, US investors owned $813 billion worth of stocks and bonds issued by Chinese mainland companies, compared with $368 billion in holdings three years earlier.

Eswar Prasad, an expert at Cornell University on China's financial system, told the Financial Times in October: "Economic imperatives are certainly overriding political concerns. Ultimately, private capital and private financial institutions are going to respond more to economic incentives, irrespective of what political masters say."

Hayden Briscoe, head of fixed income for Asia Pacific at UBS Asset Management, told the newspaper: "Money is starting to pour into China because they're looking for that income. It's a really interesting point in history-the Chinese have opened up and you've got the rest of the world in dire straits."

One wealth manager told Bloomberg in an article on Wednesday, "The rivalry between the US and China means that investors can no longer afford to leave Chinese assets out of their portfolios."

Another investor said, "As both countries test their power and influence in the coming years, investors should build portfolios resilient enough to withstand all possible outcomes."

Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio sees China's economy outperforming the world, regardless of other nations' attempts to contain it.

"For as long as I can remember, people have said that China cannot succeed. Yet every day we see China succeeding in exceptional ways," he wrote in a post on his LinkedIn page in October.

"Over the past year (2020), its economy grew at almost 5 percent, without monetizing debt (such as the US Federal Reserve does when it buys US Treasuries for its own account), while all major economies contracted.

(more...)

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... afd8a.html

The imperialists establishment and it's close backers got a problem, a 'fifth-column', US capitalists investors in China. Given the consistent superior return and the Chinese dangling other greatly desired bait this sector is a real drag on the maintainers of hegemony.

"Wassa matter think tankers, don't you like capitalism or something?" Bwahaha...are we selling rope yet?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 25, 2021 1:23 pm

(The following is perhaps the best overview of the development of 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics' that I've seen. It responds to every criticism of the infantile left on a historical and theoretical basis. It is divided into two posts to fit our requirements.)

Part 1

The War On China
JAN 2
WRITTEN BY IZAK NOVAK

This article has been republished from the author’s website with permission.
“We are here at the starting point of the Long March to remember the time when the Red Army began its journey. We are now embarking on a New Long March, and we must start all over again.” – Xi Jinping, May 2019.
The propaganda surrounding COVID-19 and China’s response is only the latest escalation in a long term geopolitical strategy by U.S. imperialism to destroy it. Few people on the left or the socialist movement in the imperial core have been paying attention to the historic breakup of the U.S.-China relationship. Since Deng Xiaoping, the U.S.-China relationship has been contingent on what I call “The Bargain” between U.S. capital and the rising Chinese socialist state.

The United States ruling class now understands that it got the losing end of The Bargain. With China’s growing vertical production and technological capacity, its desire to develop neighboring countries and upend the post-WWII order led by Washington through the BRI, that deal is unwinding quickly. Market reforms of the Chinese system did not do what they did in the Soviet Union – on the contrary, the leadership of the Communist Party of China has strengthened as the state adeptly captured the technological, organizational and productive capacities of U.S. capital.

As a result, a steady process of political and economic “decoupling” has been underway and accelerated by the Trump regime. We are now in the era of hybrid warfare between the U.S. and China.

This article will outline the historical progression of this new era.

Contents:
1. U.S. Imperialism’s Strategy in Eurasia – The Brzezinski Plan
2. “The Bargain” Between U.S. Capital and China
3. The Single Largest Threat to U.S. Empire – The Belt and Road Initiative
4. The Breakdown of the Bargain – Hybrid Warfare on China
The Single Largest Threat to U.S. Empire – The Belt and Road Initiative

Part 1. U.S. Imperialism’s Strategy in Eurasia – The Brzezinski Plan

Zbigniew Brzezinski died on May 26th, 2017 almost exactly three years ago. Very few on the left understand this person or his significance as a U.S. empire planner. Brzezinski was National Security Advisor under Carter, a role he took in 1977 after serving as his chief foreign policy adviser. As a Council on Foreign Relations member, a Bilderberg participant and chief founder of the Trilateral Commission, Brzezinski was as deeply embedded in the imperial core’s planning bodies as anyone else in history.

Brzezinski is best known for his support of the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union, “Operation Cyclone”. This operation – which had a cascading effect throughout the region and established firm links between the CIA and Bin Laden – reveals the extent to which Brzezinski saw it necessary to stop the USSR and intervene in Central/South Asia. But why is this region so important to U.S. empire?

In his 1997 book “The Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski bluntly laid out the importance of the Eurasian landmass and America’s control over it. From the book description:

“The task facing the United States, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasian lands and to prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass, home to the greatest part of the globe’s population, natural resources, and economic activity is the “grand chessboard” on which America’s supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come.”

What does this strategy look like in practice? Preventing the rise of a rival power in Eurasia means employing all manner of covert and overt subversion and attack. As we have seen in U.S. interventions in Iran, repeat attacks on Iraq, invasion of Afghanistan and a devastating contra war in Syria, the U.S. is keen to pick off weak links in the chain of countries stretching through Central and South Asia.

It is this region from Kazakhstan in the North, to Palestine in the West, and through India and Western China that forms a triangle shaped wedge splitting Russia’s Southern and China’s Western geopolitical expansion. This vast area is where U.S. empire has for decades waged war against countries that don’t fall in line, while solidifying comprador alliances in places like Israel, India, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies. While a direct conflict with Russia or China is unlikely given the nuclear implications, controlling this polygon politically, militarily and economically will greatly diminish either state’s options.

Image
Figure: U.S. empire’s “triangle of control”, a geopolitical target area it seeks to control to prevent Russia’s southern and China’s western geopolitical advances as well as the emergence of any local power (think: Iran)

Further, the U.S. has sought to dominate the world’s oceans as a means of controlling Eurasia. This follows from American naval theorist Alfred Mahan’s assertion that control of the sea would yield control of the world’s resources and ability to dominate any adversary. This theory rested on the notion that a naval power needed to be able to destroy the enemy’s fleet and blockade enemy ports. His thinking influenced Theodore Roosevelt and successive application of his theory resulted in the U.S. becoming the world’s leading naval power. The U.S. currently has eleven aircraft carriers in service, far more than any other country (China has two) and its network of bases and allies in the Pacific give it launching pads throughout Eurasia.

From China’s present position, it faces nearly complete encirclement. With a U.S. occupation force stationed in Korea, a compliant regime in Japan hosting three air bases, Guam and other client state bases, the U.S. has a dominating military position in the Pacific. This closes China’s Eastern flank. To the West, it faces India which has close U.S. ties, an occupation force in Afghanistan and all the client states and interventions throughout that Triangle of Control referenced above. This closes their Western flank.
What has changed under the leadership of Xi Jinping is China’s desire to break through this encirclement by U.S. empire.China is today faced with the prospect of a “New Long March” against U.S. imperialism.
What has changed in recent years and particularly under the leadership of Xi Jinping, is China’s desire to break through this encirclement by U.S. empire. Much like how the early Communist Party of China escaped encirclement by the KMT via the Long March, China is today faced with the prospect of a “New Long March” against U.S. imperialism. Xi Jinping himself used that phrase in May of 2019 to describe China’s way forward in the Trump trade war. Reference to the Long March is very deliberate, and Xi Jinping through his speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Long March eloquently laid out the importance of the Long March to the modern Chinese nation. If he is willing to compare the present situation to such a heroic act of sacrifice and determination, we should take that seriously. But first we have to understand how we got here.

2. “The Bargain” Between U.S. Capital and China

At the time of his official role in the U.S. empire, Brzezinski’s main concern over “rival powers” in Eurasia was obviously the Soviet Union. China in 1979 was still a very poor country, had just exited the Cultural Revolution which had a crippling effect on its development, and was just beginning its market reforms.

1971-1979 was a pivotal period for U.S.-China relations (Brzezinski became NSA in 1977). 1979 was the year of the “Second Communique” which established normalized diplomatic relations between the PRC and the U.S. while ending the latter’s recognition of Taiwan as the seat of China. It followed the Shanghai Communique of 1972 in which the U.S. and China agreed (on paper) to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. In 1971, Nixon lifted the 21-year trade embargo on China that was in place since China backed the DPRK in the Korean War. Nixon famously visited China in 1972, the first U.S. president do so since the revolution. These moves were controversial among different factions of the U.S. ruling class at the time, but U.S. empire leadership (primarily through Kissinger) saw the opportunity to drive a wedge between China and the USSR and took it. Any effort that the U.S. could take to weaken the links between the USSR, China, the DPRK and North Vietnam would be taken. Winston Lord’s (National Security Council member at the time) account of this strategy is telling:

“Kissinger’s rationale, and Nixon’s, included the following. First, an opening to China would give us more flexibility on the world scene generally. We wouldn’t just be dealing with Moscow. We could deal with Eastern Europe, of course, and we could deal with China, because the former Communist Bloc was no longer a bloc. Kissinger wanted more flexibility, generally. Secondly, by opening relations with China we would catch Russia’s attention and get more leverage on them through playing this obvious, China card.

The idea would be to improve relations with Moscow, hoping to stir a little bit of its paranoia by dealing with China, never getting so engaged with China that we would turn Russia into a hostile enemy but enough to get the attention of the Russians. This effort, in fact, worked dramatically after Kissinger’s secret trip to China.

Thirdly, Kissinger and Nixon wanted to get help in resolving the Vietnam War. By dealing with Russia and with China we hoped to put pressure on Hanoi to negotiate seriously. At a maximum, we tried to get Russia and China to slow down the provision of aid to North Vietnam somewhat. More realistically and at a minimum, we sought to persuade Russia and China to encourage Hanoi to make a deal with the United States and give Hanoi a sense of isolation because their two, big patrons were dealing with us. Indeed, by their willingness to engage in summit meetings with us, with Nixon going to China in February, 1972, and to Moscow in May, 1972, the Russians and Chinese were beginning to place a higher priority on their bilateral relations with us than on their dealings with their friends in Hanoi…”1


It is important to understand that China’s willingness to normalize ties with the U.S. at this time was, in part, an outcome of the Sino-Soviet split, in which China viewed the USSR as a revisionist power and threat to China on its borders. While relations with the USSR began to warm through the 80’s, each side viewed the other with suspicion. Both sides certainly continued to feel the effects of the 1969 border conflict which nearly ended in war between nuclear powers (Interesting side note: this conflict also extended to China’s western border in Xinjiang). From the U.S. perspective, the Sino-Soviet split was a gift that severed the two most powerful communist countries from united anti-imperialist action. Upon exiting the Cultural Revolution, China was left extremely isolated and weak both politically and economically. Struggle with the U.S. while dealing with a potentially hostile USSR was not an attractive course of action. At the same time, China’s economy was struggling relative to other capitalist Asian powers. Radical changes in strategy were needed, hence the “bargain.”

While China did see gains in GPD per capita since 1960, by the mid-1970’s signs of a crisis were emerging. Output became volatile and stagnant and by 1978 GDP per capita had fallen to its 1973 level. And this was a fall in GDP that was already far below its nearby capitalist competitors.

Image
Figure 2: China’s GDP per capita during the lead-up to economic reform. Notice the instability between 74-78.

This is not a mere footnote. Central to understanding China’s geostrategic moves of the last 50 years is understanding the importance placed on development of the “productive forces.” Allow me here to take a brief detour into the theory (if the concept of productive forces is familiar to you, feel free to skip ahead).

A key concept in Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism and political economy, the productive forces are essentially how a society combines human labor with the means of labor (tools, machinery, infrastructure etc.). The level of productive forces, which can be roughly viewed as the productivity of a society, will increase up to a point where they come into conflict with that society’s mode of production. In the pre-capitalist feudal mode of production, the productive forces were at a low level given the scattered and individualistic nature of production mostly for consumption’s sake—commodity production as such only existed in embryo. In capitalism, productive forces are unleashed by concentrating human labor and means of labor into social enterprises (the modern capitalist company is in fact often hundreds or thousands of individuals cooperating, who under a different mode of production might never associate) and applying scientific methods of production. Contradiction emerges in the fact that the very social and cooperative nature of the capitalist enterprise is controlled by private capitalists who extract surplus-value from the workers and take their work product to sell in the market. The product of collective labor is seized by private capitalists for their own profit. Additional contradiction emerges as the anarchy of competition between capitalists incentives the further advancement of each capitalist’s productive forces, which in turn creates economic crises of various forms. Economic crises push capitalism towards monopoly— fewer capitalists command larger and larger enterprises, cartels and whole industries. As these crises become deeper and more frequent, they expose the unnecessary role of the capitalists themselves and the truly social and cooperative nature of the productive forces. The capitalists have at this advanced stage of monopoly capitalism rendered themselves superfluous and indeed a barrier to the advancement of the productive forces. The situation is now ripe for the state, commanded by the workers, to seize the means of production and become the masters of production.

Engels espoused this theory of the development of productive forces and the role of capitalism in his landmark work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The fact that the socialized organization of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalist themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance.

But “abundance becomes the source of distress and want” (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labor-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers to work and live.

On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social production forces.2


Marx, in the Poverty of Philosophy, was explicit about the central role of productive forces in the structure of a given mode of production:

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.3

However, as history has proven, this process is not so straightforward. Capitalism has proven adept at fending off potential revolutions and the era of imperialism has provided further ways for capital to stave off crises and keep parts of the world in a backwards state with a low level of productive forces. This is the situation in which China found itself at the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. As Mao made it abundantly clear in his seminal work On New Democracy, the revolution in China was firstly aimed at ending China’s long history as a semi-feudal and semi-colonial nation with the defeat of imperialism as the core objective. In fact, Mao laid out the principles of New Democracy as being the alliance of all revolutionary classes, including the national bourgeoisie, against feudal and colonial oppression. Mao further explained the unity of “the people” in his 1949 On The People’s Democratic Dictatorship:

Who are the people? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These classes, led by the working class and the Communist Party, unite to form their own state and elect their own government; they enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism — the landlord class and bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices…4

This is reflected in the flag of the PRC itself, with its four smaller stars representing the four revolutionary classes and the big star representing the leadership of the Communist Party of China. All four stars point towards the CPC, signifying its leading role. This is the nature of China’s People’s Democratic Dictatorship. It may come as a surprise to many Western communists that Mao, like Deng Xiaoping, fully understood how backwards China’s economy was at the founding of the PRC and the necessity of uniting with the national bourgeoisie while retaining the leadership of the CPC:

The national bourgeoisie at the present stage is of great importance. Imperialism, a most ferocious enemy, is still standing alongside us. China’s modern industry still forms a very small proportion of the national economy. No reliable statistics are available, but it is estimated, on the basis of certain data, that before the War of Resistance Against Japan the value of output of modern industry constituted only about 10 per cent of the total value of output of the national economy. To counter imperialist oppression and to raise her backward economy to a higher level, China must utilize all the factors of urban and rural capitalism that are beneficial and not harmful to the national economy and the people’s livelihood; and we must unite with the national bourgeoisie in common struggle. Our present policy is to regulate capitalism, not to destroy it. But the national bourgeoisie cannot be the leader of the revolution, nor should it have the chief role in state power. The reason it cannot be the leader of the revolution and should not have the chief role in state power is that the social and economic position of the national bourgeoisie determines its weakness; it lacks foresight and sufficient courage and many of its members are afraid of the masses.

Without getting too bogged down in the details of Deng Xiaoping Theory (a subject vast enough that it deserves its own article), it is important to understand that CPC leadership has consistently viewed the development of productive forces as the central objective of socialist construction (albeit with delayed implementation thanks to the Cultural Revolution). Deng Xiaoping simply expanded and made concrete this idea by implementing market-based reforms that unleashed the latent productive forces of the country, while retaining the leading role of the state and state enterprises led by the CPC. For Deng and CPC leadership, the goal is to allow the development of the productive forces through a limited, highly regulated capitalism while retaining state ownership of the “commanding heights” of the economy. Perhaps surprisingly, this idea does not originate with Deng Xiaoping but with Mao Zedong in his 1940 On New Democracy:

If such a republic is to be established in China, it must be new-democratic not only in its politics but also in its economy. It will own the big banks and the big industrial and commercial enterprises.

Enterprises, such as banks, railways and airlines, whether Chinese-owned or foreign-owned, which are either monopolistic in character or too big for private management, shall be operated and administered by the state, so that private capital cannot dominate the livelihood of the people: this is the main principle of the regulation of capital(…) In the new-democratic republic under the leadership of the proletariat, the state enterprises will be of a socialist character and will constitute the leading force in the whole national economy, but the republic will neither confiscate capitalist private property in general nor forbid the development of such capitalist production as does not “dominate the livelihood of the people”, for China’s economy is still very backward.


Socialism is not defined by the mode of distribution (a market-based or planned system), but in the leading role of the state led by workers and placing social needs above and beyond the law of value. So long as the latter is retained, the advantages of a semi-open economy and the development of productive forces via private capitalism can be leveraged to strengthen the whole material base of the country. It is important to remember that not only is China attempting to build the necessary material base for socialism, but to make it strong enough to withstanding the competing pressures of existing capitalist rivals. In his 1963 speech Be Realistic and Look to the Future5, Deng made this clear:

What is our objective to be accomplished? We want our country to be among the advanced countries in the world through our forty years of hard work. That is, we want it to become one of the few major industrial powers in the world, but not to surpass all the other countries. We are not sure whether we shall be able to surpass all the other countries, because our economic foundation is different from that of other countries and they are also advancing. Of course, it may not necessarily take forty years for China to become one of the major powers in the world.

The method by which China, a vast country with a huge population starting from an extremely low economic base, takes to this end is not going to apply to other countries with differing levels of production. Instead, a scientific approach based on “实事求是 (Seeking truth from facts)” is required- this is the essence of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. It is Marxism as applied to the conditions of China. We can see the essence of this pragmatic approach throughout the history the Chinese revolution, especially in the treatment of the national bourgeoisie. Deng highlighted the historical importance of resisting both Left and Right opportunism during the revolution in this manner in his 1965 Build a Mature and Combat-Effective Party6:

The attitude to be adopted towards the national bourgeoisie is another highly important question in the stage of national democratic revolution. Failure to handle it properly could lead to the error of either “Left” or Right opportunism. As a vacillating class, the national bourgeoisie has a thousand and one links with imperialism and feudalism. On this question our Party made both “Left” and Right opportunistic mistakes. The former lingered longer than the latter and inflicted greater damage on us. In the early stage of the Great Revolution our Party handled the question appropriately by working together with the bourgeois revolutionaries represented by Dr. Sun Yat-sen and initiating Kuomintang-Communist co-operation to advance the revolution, and we also co-operated with Chiang Kai-shek. It would have been a mistake if, in the course of this co-operation, we had only maintained relations with the bourgeoisie. When we entered into alliance with the bourgeoisie to lead the democratic revolution, one question of supreme importance was to develop the progressive forces, the forces of workers and peasants, under this alliance. In the later stage of the Great Revolution our Party was misled by Chen Duxiu’s Right opportunistic error, when we were afraid of engaging in a political struggle with the bourgeoisie, afraid of irritating it, and not daring to arouse the masses into action. Consequently, the Great Revolution ended in defeat as soon as Chiang Kai-shek betrayed it. Then the “Left” opportunistic mistakes occurred in our Party three times which were characterized by the practice of overthrowing everything. At that time we were chiefly attacking the bourgeoisie, its intellectuals and the parties of the petty bourgeoisie, which resulted in our self-isolation. Many people in the cities, including the intellectuals and youth, were alienated from us for a long time. It was hard to launch workers’ movements; strikes were held aimlessly and, moreover, the demands were so outrageous that the movements ended in failure. Our strength in the cities kept dwindling until at last it was nearly gone. Correct policies were adopted, however, in the rural areas which were under the leadership of Comrade Mao Zedong. In those days the Red Army protected industry and commerce. Some industrial and commercial capitalists were practising feudalistic exploitation, which was all eradicated. We did not do anything with regard to their shops or factories and we did not confiscate anything from them; instead we provided protection for their property. Benefiting a great deal from policies such as these, we were able to break the economic blockade imposed by the Kuomintang against our base areas. Later, when the leaders of the “Left” opportunist line came to the Central Soviet Area, they opposed Comrade Mao Zedong’s correct policies and attacked national industry and commerce. As a result, under Chiang Kai-shek’s blockade, even salt was unavailable in the base areas. Even when Chen Duxiu’s Right opportunism was prevalent, “Left” mistakes were made in urban work. For example, the government in Wuhan at that time was led by left-wingers of the Kuomintang who were co-operating with our Party in opposition to Chiang Kai-shek. There we organized strikes and set economic demands which were more than the bourgeoisie could bear. Consequently, the market slumped, to the detriment of the economic base of the revolutionary regime. In dealing with the national bourgeoisie, our Party has made both “Left” and Right mistakes. It is essential to adopt correct policies. Without doubt, the national bourgeoisie tends to vacillate, but we should, nevertheless, make use of its positive side, uniting with it as well as struggling against it. We cannot lay down rigid rules as to the circumstances under which mainly to unite with it and circumstances under which mainly to struggle against it. This is a question that requires flexibility and solution based on concrete analysis of the national bourgeoisie in one’s own country.

In giving these two examples, I have been trying to illustrate that in order to formulate correct programmes and policies, it is necessary to obtain a thorough understanding of the actual conditions in one’s own country. This is no easy job, especially when it comes to trying to understand the peasants.


I quote this passage at length to underscore the pragmatic brilliance of the CPC in recognizing the necessity of protecting capitalist industry in order to break the economic blockade of the KMT. One can imagine how this experience weighs heavily on the strategic thinking of the CPC today given its encirclement by U.S. imperialism. Now we can understand more fully the methods of the CPC and its willingness to embark on creating what we now call the Socialist Market Economy. A cornerstone of Deng Xiaoping Theory is the concept of the Primary Stage of Socialism. This theory states that China has entered the “primary stage” of socialism lasting roughly from 1956 until the middle 21st century in which China must overcome the backwards level of productive forces and achieve socialist modernization. This humble and realistic assessment of China’s position in the world and its weakness compared to advanced capitalist countries is an essential point needed to understand the CPC’s view of socialist development against the capitalist world. The course through which China has proceeded along this socialist modernization is complex, but important to understand to appreciate the current situation.

In 1977, China finally implemented under Deng Xiaoping the “Four Modernizations”, a theory of development first espoused by Zhou Enlai in the 1960s. This theory seeks to place primary national importance on the development of industry, agriculture, defense and science & technology. The beginning of the reform period saw major changes to agriculture, moving from a commune-based system to one of “household responsibility” or “contract” system. This change was brought about to deal with agricultural shortages, and was originally conceived of by commune members in Anhui Province. Essentially, the highly centralized agricultural system was struggling to deal with shortages and inefficiencies. The move towards more localized, unit-based agricultural production yielded significant gains in agricultural output and may have averted a serious food crisis.

The success of this reform opened the way to further market-based reform of the Chinese economy, which rolled out progressively and through many trial phases. What followed is what I am calling “The Bargain” between the PRC and foreign capital. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s and extending into the 2000s, the PRC opened what are known as Special Economic Zones and allowed for investment by foreign capital in the economy. This had obvious appeal to foreign capital – a large and relatively cheap labor force that could be used to produce export-oriented commodities at lower prices than competitors. This was made possible by advancements in containerization, transport and modern production methods, allowing commodities to shipped globally in record time.

However, this was not simply a concession to foreign capital. It is extremely important to remember that key demands and restrictions were placed on companies investing in China. Among these included:

*Requiring foreign investors to form Joint Ventures with Chinese firms (essentially, a partnership between a foreign firm and a Chinese one, either state or private), thus facilitating the transfer of technology and methods to Chinese entities.

*Outright restrictions on key sectors deemed “commanding heights” of the economy – including defense, infrastructure, finance, construction, telecommunication, etc. These are the industries typically dominated by State Owned Enterprises (SOEs).

*All companies are still required to adhere to PRC laws and regulations. Although some foreign firms received preferential treatment, none operated without state oversight.

This situation afforded many advantages to the construction of the socialist market economy. First, it granted China access to the most current and advanced technology and production methods of the time. This is something that would be mostly impossible under a closed economy. Second, it provided an immediate source of non-state employment, significantly easing the burden on SASAC (the central body responsible for overseeing the country’s state enterprises) to ensure employment. Third, it enabled a direct economic and diplomatic link to capitalist competitors thereby reducing the likelihood of direct conflict. Fourth, it opened huge inflows of foreign currency reserves further strengthening the country’s international financial position. And finally, the restrictions placed on foreign capital (most of which are still in place today) combined with the dominant position of CPC power in monopolized industries via the SOE system, ensured that the capitalist class in China would be defanged, monitored (keep your enemies close) and unable to assert control over the political system. The state, with control over construction, land, finance, infrastructure, education and all of the major levers of the economy is able to direct and control the development of capital in China as it pleases – this is in stark contrast to capitalist countries where capital directs the state and the people. In China, the people direct the state and the economy, not the other way around. This is aided by China’s robust internal democratic systems and extensive community-level grassroots organizations. What resulted from this bargain, as controlled by the state, is the “economic miracle” that I’m sure you are aware of- unprecedented growth in economic output and huge gains in the living standards of people with a massive reduction in poverty. While there are no doubt problems and negative consequences of such efforts, including unequal development and pollution, present leadership is focused on resolving these contradictions.

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Figure: China’s explosive GDP per capita growth since the reform era, a virtually unprecedented economic feat.

Here is a brief glimpse of some of the achievements of this socialist market economy:

*Life expectancy has soared from 43.7 years in 1960 to 76.7 in 20187

*Extreme poverty has been virtually eliminated since 1990, with the $1.90/day headcount falling from 66.2% in 1990 to 0.5% in 20168 and the $3.20/day headcount falling from 47% to 1%.9 Other measures of poverty are on a steep decline.

*Adult literacy has risen from 65% in 1982 to 96% in 2018.10

*Average yearly wages have grown dramatically in the last 25 years, going from 5,348 Yuan in 1995 to 74,318 Yuan in 2017 for workers in urban state, collective and other non-private enterprises.11 For private urban employment, average wages have more than doubled between 2009 and 2017.12 *Average wages in the non-private sector are about 47% higher than the private sector, indicating that the state system is to a large degree pulling the wage floor up.

*China is now, by far, the world’s leader in renewable energy with over 788,000 MW of total installed capacity in 2019. The closest competitor, the U.S., has about 1/3rd of that capacity.13 Electricity production from renewables (excl hydro) has increased 9,054% from 3.1bn kWh in 2000 to 283.8bn kWh in 2015.14 The energy sector in China is dominated by SOEs.

*China has become a world leader in science and technology. By one measure, patent applications by residents in China have exploded from about 4,000 in 1985 to 1.3 million in 2018. By comparison, Japan saw just 253,630 in 2018.15 China’s Sunway TaihuLight super computer was the world’s fastest between 2016 and 2018.16 China is expected to outpace the U.S. in STEM, training nearly five times as many people between 2015 and 2030.17

*Gains in science and technology have translated into major military and defense achievements. In 2014, China became one of the first countries to successfully test a hypersonic glide vehicle, the DF-ZF.18 This is a crucial advancement that, combined with other advanced missile technology, could severely limit U.S. naval options in China’s territory.

*China is now the world leader in transportation infrastructure. As of 2018, China had 17,000 miles of high speed rail or 60% of the world’s total.19

*Chinese SOEs are world leaders in their industries. These include the world’s largest, or near-largest: Telecom, energy company, bank, infrastructure company, railway, metals company, shipping company, mobile telecom and automobile company. The four largest banks in the world are Chinese SOEs.20

China’s state sector accounts for about 50% of output when accounting for sub-national SOEs, FDI round-tripping by SOEs and subsidiaries that are substantially controlled by the state.21 A conservative estimate of the state economy puts it at roughly twice the size of Russia’s entire economy (only counting central SOEs). In addition, Xi Jinping has in recent years overseen the largest and most dramatic expansion of CPC power into the private economy in the history of the country. Remember that Mao specifically called for certain enterprises, even if foreign-owned, to be “operated and administered by the state.” While the CPC has exercised a sophisticated multi-level strategy of preventing capital from forming class consciousness or exerting political control (leveraging state-sanctioned and controlled business associations22, inclusive measures, anti-corruption campaigns, etc)23, it has also pursued a direct strategy of establishing CPC committees within private companies. This effort went through several phases, and accelerated rapidly under Xi Jinping. In 2012, an opinion was released by the Central Committee that greatly expanded the call for CPC party building in private companies.24 In 2017, the number of CPC committees in private companies reached 70%, and that number is expected to have grown since.25 Not only are these committees widespread, they are beginning to take an active role in strategic decisions made by companies beyond simply surveilling them. This has sparked a flurry of concerned reporting from Western media and is likely contributing greatly to the US’ current strategic attitude towards China.

I have written before on the nature of China’s socialist system (HERE and HERE). Others, such as Marxist economist Michael Roberts have written at length on the China model (HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). Roberts makes a strong case that China’s model does not fit a traditional capitalist model and points to its response during the great financial crisis. I strongly recommend reading these materials, although I have some disagreements with Roberts about the nature of China’s democratic systems, which I think are far more robust and expansive then he allows (an understandable oversight as most in the non-Chinese left have never seriously studied the Party-State political system). What is important to understand is that this bargain with capitalism, rather than upending the socialist system has actually strengthened it. Today, Chinese SOEs are among the largest and most powerful enterprises in the world. The state has unprecedented control over the economy through the financial system, its SOEs and more directly through Communist Party committees in nominally “private” enterprise. Despite the rhetoric around “opening up” which is often mischaracterized and exaggerated in the West as “liberalization”, control over the economy has tightened under the present leadership of Xi Jinping. This has sparked books like Nicholas Lardy’s 2018 The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China? which speculates on the possible end of the market reform era.
Market reforms and a semi-open economy in China were supposed to not only afford huge benefits to U.S. capitalism but also destroy the ideological base and power of the CPC. Instead, the opposite has happened.
For the capitalist powers, and especially U.S. imperialism, the failure of market reforms to undo the CPC and socialist construction is a major issue (infamously memorialized by Gordon Chang’s 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China). Market reforms and a semi-open economy in China were supposed to not only afford huge benefits to U.S. capitalism but also destroy the ideological base and power of the CPC. Instead, the opposite has happened. The CPC is one of the most popular ruling political parties in the world and enjoys broad-based support. CPC leadership including Xi Jinping have vigorously affirmed the importance of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, while expanding Marxist education across China. Meanwhile, China has proven almost impervious to global capitalist crisis, thanks to its unique economic structure and the continued control of the commanding heights and financial system by the CPC. This is in stark contrast to the U.S. While still a dominant economic power relative to its size, the U.S. was sunk into a massive crisis in 2008 thanks to a secular decline in profitability and the hyper-financialized capitalism that has run the country since the 1980s.

In recent years, it has become clear to U.S. empire planners that China’s collapse is not coming anytime soon, and that they have gotten the losing end of the bargain. In fact, China is moving to expand and export the lessons of its development model to other countries – this is the era of the Belt and Road Initiative under Xi Jinping.

https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/articles/war-on-china

continued...
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 10, 2021 2:03 pm

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‘Wipe out China!’ US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Gun-Toting Foot Soldiers for Empire
April 10, 2021 Ajit Singh

Cultivated by the US government as human rights activists, Uyghur American Association leaders partner with far-right lawmakers and operate a militia-style gun club that trains with ex-US special forces.

On March 21, US-government-funded Uyghur activists were caught on video disrupting a gathering against anti-Asian racism in Washington DC, barking insults at demonstrators including, “Wipe out China!” and “Fuck China!” The Uyghur caravan flew American and “East Turkestan” flags and drove vehicles adorned signs bearing slogans such as, “We Love USA,” “Boycott China,” and “CCP killed 80 million Chinese people.”

Organized by the Uyghur American Association (UAA), the drive-by heckling of anti-racist demonstrators drew widespread condemnation on social media, including from other sections of the Uyghur separatist movement. Salih Hudayar, the self-proclaimed “Prime Minister of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile,” slammed “the UAA’s reckless drive-by” for causing “severe backlash against Uyghurs,” and insisted that Uyghur Americans were “not racist.”

The UAA has attempted to distance itself from accusations of extremism and racism, stating that its members’ actions were misrepresented. Despite refusing to rescind their call for China to be “wiped out,” the UAA declared that it “condemns any form of bigotry and stands with all victims of racism.”

However, an investigation by The Grayzone into the Uyghur separatist movement in the Washington DC area has uncovered a jingoistic, gun-obsessed subculture driven by the kind of right-wing ideology that was on display during the March 21 car caravan through downtown.

Leading figures of the UAA operate a right-wing gun club known as Altay Defense. Proudly dressed in US military fatigues, Altay Defense drill in advanced combat techniques with former members of US special forces who also train private mercenaries and active duty US service members. Members of the militia-style gun club espouse pro-Trump politics and anti-immigrant resentment.

The UAA is the US-affiliate of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an international network whose first president outlined an objective to precipitate the “fall of China” and establish an ethno-state in Xinjiang. The recipient of millions of dollars of funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-sponsored entity, this network works closely with Washington and other Western governments to escalate hostilities with China.

Despite claiming to represent the interests of China’s Uyghur and Muslim minority populations, many of the UAA’s closest allies represent some of the anti-Muslim, far-right forces in Washington, from Republican Rep. Ted Yoho to the Family Research Council, as well as the FBI.

During the pandemic, the UAA and members of its affiliate organizations helped inflame anti-Asian resentment by spreading far-right propaganda referring to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus,” and claimed that China was waging a “virus war” against the world, “[p]urposefully, intentionally export[ing] the virus to cause the pandemic.”

Behind its carefully constructed image as a peaceful human rights movement, the UAA and its offshoots in the DC-based Uyghur separatist lobby are driven by far-right ideology and envision themselves as militant foot soldiers for empire.

“I belong to America!” Uyghur human rights leader teams up with far-right, Islamophobes in anti-China crusade
The UAA’s ultra-patriotic reverence of the US and fanatical anti-China politics have been on full display under the organization’s current president, Kuzzat Altay.

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A demonstration organized by the UAA in Washington DC on June 21st, 2020, to “thank the Congress and the White House for passing the [Uyghur Human Rights and Policy Act] into the law.”

Altay frequently takes to social media to make his allegiance to Washington known.

“May GOD bless you American Veterans! May GOD bless America!” declared Altay on Veterans Day in 2019.

Shortly following the illegal US assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, Altay left no doubt as to where he stands: “Looks like the war just started […] I belong to America!”

Amid the US uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Altay chided Black Lives Matter protesters, saying that he “support[ed] peaceful protestors […] but do[es] not support looters, rubbers [sic] and criminals”

“Your LOVE for #America should be greater than your HATE for #Trump,” Altay pronounced.

The degree of Altay’s infatuation with the US is only matched by the ferocity of his enmity towards China. “The most normal thing that I could ever imagine is anti-China activities every freaking day,” Altay stated on July 25, 2020. “You should help us to stop China. China is ALREADY the common enemy of humanity.”

Altay is a staunch supporter of Washington’s new Cold War agenda. Applauding the Trump administration’s trade and technology war, Altay declared “[a]ll counties [sic] should treat #Huawei as war criminals.”

Despite claiming to be the international representatives of Xinjiang’s predominantly Muslim, Uyghur ethnic group, and struggling against religious persecution, Altay and his comrades have routinely teamed up with far-right, Islamophobic forces in the US to advance their separatist campaign.

The UAA has worked closely with Republican Rep. Ted Yoho, a homophobic, anti-abortion ultra-conservative who once told a Black constituent that he was not sure if the Civil Rights Act was constitutional. Yoho was one of only four lawmakers to vote against legislation making lynching a federal hate crime. In a high-profile dust-up on Capitol Hill, he reportedly called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch.” In 2019, Yoho was one of 24 members of Congress to vote against a resolution condemning bigotry because it included anti-Muslim discrimination.

Yoho has also ardently supported regime change in Venezuela, defended US missile strikes against Syria, and proclaimed that the “US army must defend Taiwan” against China.

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A demonstration organized by the Uyghur American Association in Washington DC. Rep. Ted Yoho appears at the center of the photograph, with Kuzzat Altay to his right and Rushan Abbas to his left

In 2019, Altay spoke on a panel of US government-funded Chinese dissidents organized by the Family Research Council (FRC). The FRC has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) due to its extreme anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice, and anti-Muslim ideology.

Retired US General and undersecretary for defense under former President George W. Bush, Jerry Boykin, serves as the FRC’s vice president. Boykin is a virulent Islamophobe who believes that the religion is evil and should be outlawed, and that there should be “no mosques in America.” During a sermon at an evangelical church during the US war on Iraq, Boykin boasted of taking on a Muslim warlord in Somalia: “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” he declared. Boykin’s anti-Muslim tirades grew so extreme that he was investigated by the US Department of Defense and drew a rebuke from Bush.

In recent years, Altay has organized several events for Uyghur Americans in collaboration with the FBI, the federal law enforcement agency notorious for its surveillance of Muslim Americans and ensnaring countless mentally troubled young Muslim American men in manufactured terror plots. In 2020, the UAA organized an “FBI Workshop for Uyghur Community” which aimed to teach Uyghur Americans about “the role of the FBI in protecting Uyghurs” and how “Uyghurs [can] communicate with the FBI”.

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Graphic designed for an “FBI Citizens Seminar” hosted by the Uyghur American Association
Throughout the pandemic, Altay and fellow leaders of the Uyghur separatist movement have incessantly spread right-wing conspiracy theories blaming China for Covid-19 and all related deaths. Such disinformation has played a key role in whipping up anti-Asian racism in the US and West.

Altay’s Twitter page is an endless stream of noxious, far-right coronavirus-related propaganda.

“I support @realDonaldTrump’s decision to call it ChineseVirus,” declared Altay on March 18, 2020, defending Trump against criticism from “[p]eople whining about racism.” Altay also routinely referred to Covid-19 as “Wuhan virus” and “CCP virus”, as have WUC leaders such as Dolkun Isa and Rushan Abbas.

Altay promoted Steve Bannon’s claims that the “CCP unleashed [Covid-19] on the world”, and would later echo this sentiment. “China [p]urposefully, intentionally exported the virus to cause the pandemic,” Altay declared on July 5, 2020. “No war has kileed [sic] more people than China’s Virus war.”

Altay also endorsed right-wing conspiracy theories which claimed that Covid-19 was engineered as a bioweapon in a Wuhan lab and the World Health Organization was controlled by the Chinese government.

Kuzzat Altay’s political activities are a reflection of the deeply rooted right-wing culture that pervades the Uyghur separatist movement.

Foot soldiers for empire: Uyghur human rights activists training with US military instructors for “mission readiness”
Leading members of UAA have founded Altay Defense, which arranges for constituents in the Uyghur separatist movement to receive arms training by former US special forces soldiers and instructors. The organization boasts that “[a]ll security training [is] provided by former special force officer!”

A mission statement published by Shadow Hawk Defense outlines a goal to train “elite armed security professionals, who serve the high threat needs of the US government, military, and intelligence communities,” including “hosting and training classified security personnel.” The facility employs “trainers [who] have years of experience training contractors for the U.S. Government” with the goal of “achieving mission readiness.”

In a recent interview, Shadow Hawk’s co-founder and Director of Training, Randy Weekely, described his work in detail: “I teach military contractors before they deploy to these ‘other places’, defensive tactics, CQB [close-quarters battle], pistol, rifle, bounding, attack on vehicles, all the skills that they need […] before they deploy.”

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Screenshot of Shadow Hawk Defense website

Altay Defense receives instruction from James Lang, a former US Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and works as a firearm instructor for the US Department of Defense. Lang also operates Ridgeline Security Consultants, which provides firearms and tactical training to “prepare law enforcement officers [and] armed security professionals […] to survive and win deadly force confrontations.”

Leaving little to the imagination, UAA members conduct training using assault rifles while dressed in official-seeming battle dress fatigues bearing the US flag.

Altay Defense is led by Faruk Altay, brother of UAA President Kuzzat Altay and nephew of Rebiya Kadeer, who is perhaps the most prominent international figurehead of the Uyghur separatist movement.

A look at Faruk Altay’s online activity reveals him to be a far-right, anti-communist, ultra-nationalist.

“Trump is the best!!!” Altay posted to Twitter in 2018. Faruk Altay also expressed support for Trump’s border wall and seemingly justified the “Stop the Steal” Capitol riot which took place on January 6, 2021. He has also shared an anti-immigrant meme comparing Central American migrants to the international criminal gang MS-13.

Faruk Altay flaunts his dedication to the US military, posting images on social media of himself dressed in US military fatigues, wearing a skull face mask, and holding an assault rifle, with captions reading: “I STAND WITH UYGHUR, TIBET, HONG KONG, AND FREEDOM AGAINST COMMUNISM”.

Altay refers to himself as a “freedom fighter” taking “revenge for my father,” and refers to his children as “[m]y future West Point officers!

Far from a lone wolf, Faruk Altay has been joined by leading figures of the Uyghur separatist movement. Social media posts show UAA President Kuzzat Altay, Murat Ataman, and Bahram Sintash, among others attending Altay Defense training sessions.

Murat Ataman is affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—the funding engine of the US government’s regime change apparatus—UAA offshoot Uyghur Human Rights Project. A veteran of the Uyghur separatist movement, Ataman works for US military and intelligence contractor General Dynamics, and has previously held positions at the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Veteran Affairs.

Bahram Sintash is also affiliated with the NED-funded UHRP, authoring reports which allege that the Chinese government is demolishing Uyghur mosques and shrines. Sintash was a key player in lobbying efforts to urge the US Congress to pass the Uyghur Human Right Policy Act of 2019, visiting more than 380 members of Congress.

In his spare time, Sintash keeps company with the far-right, evangelical Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz. During a meeting at Radio Free Asia (RFA), Sintash referred to Zenz as “the CIA agent,” and the US government-sponsored broadcasting service as “the original CIA branch of RFA’s headquarters in DC.”

While Sintash may have been sarcastic, the New York Times has described RFA in no uncertain terms as part of a “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA.”

As prone as they might be to unalloyed expressions of right-wing jingoism, the leaders of UAA operate at the heart of a multi-million dollar lobbying complex funded and cultivated by the US government.

Uyghur separatist movement cultivated by the US government for “toppling” Beijing
Established in 1998, the Uyghur American Association (UAA) is the Washington DC-based affiliate of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which claims to be “the sole legitimate organization of the Uyghur people” around the world. Portrayed by Western governments and media as the leading voice for Uyghur interests and human rights, the WUC has played a central role in shaping Western understanding of Xinjiang.

As The Grayzone previously reported, the WUC is a right-wing, anti-communist, and ultra-nationalist network of exiled Uyghur separatists who have stated their intention to bring about the “fall of China” and establish an ethno-state called “East Turkestan” in Xinjiang. The WUC has developed deep ties to Washington’s regime change establishment and received extensive US government-funding and training.

In recent years, the WUC has worked closely with US and Western governments, and partnered with fraud-prone pseudo-scholars such as Adrian Zenz to intensify their New Cold War against China, advocating for Chinese policy in Xinjiang to be labeled ‘genocide,’ along with sanctions and boycott.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been central to the rising international prominence of the Uyghur separatist movement. In 2020, the NED boasted that it has given Uyghur groups $8,758,300 since 2004 (including $75,000 in annual funding to the UAA) and claimed to be “the only institutional funder for Uyghur advocacy and human rights organizations.”

“As a result of NED’s support, the Uyghur advocacy groups have grown both institutionally and professionally over the years,” said Akram Keram, a program officer and regional expert at NED. “These groups played critical roles in introducing the Uyghur cause in various international, regional, and national settings against China’s false narratives, bringing the Uyghur voice to the highest international levels, including the United Nations, European Parliament, and the White House. They provided firsthand, factual resources documenting the atrocities in East Turkistan, informing and inspiring the introduction of relevant resolutions, sanctions, and calls for action to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.”

“The National Endowment for Democracy has been exceptionally supportive of UAA,” echoed former UAA President, Nury Turkel, in 2006, “providing us with invaluable guidance and assistance” and “essential funding.” According to Turkel, thanks to NED support, the “UAA and UHRP have gained a new level of influence and credibility among media organizations in the U.S. and other countries.”

“In short, NED has helped us to increase our credibility in Washington and throughout the world. We are very moved by and grateful for their steadfast assistance,” stated Turkel.

Turkel confirmed that the UAA aims to leverage Washington’s support to advance regime change in China. In 2006, he told his allies, “as we witnessed the ‘Tulip Revolution’ and the toppling of the former government of Kyrgyzstan, our hopes were again reinforced.” Turkel emphasized that the US-sponsored color revolution sent a “strong message” to China, and recalled how he was immediately summoned to Bishkek to coordinate with the new government.

The NED helped the UAA launch the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) in 2004, serving as its principal source of funding, with $1,244,698 in support between 2016 and 2019 alone. The UHRP has brought together leading figures of the WUC, including Turkel and Omer Kanat, and NED, with former NED Vice President, Louisa Greve, serving as the group’s Director of Global Advocacy.

The UAA’s leadership consists of US national security state operators including employees of the US government, US propaganda network Radio Free Asia, and the military-industrial complex. Past leaders of the organization include:

Nury Turkel, former President (2004-2006)—Co-founded the UHRP with the NED. In 2020, Turkel was appointed a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Rebiya Kadeer, former President (2006-2011)—A self-described oligarch and longtime figurehead of the Uyghur separatist movement. According to The New York Times, Kadeer’s “[d]issidence [in Xinjiang] brought the end of her Audi, her three villas and her far-flung business empire.” Kadeer’s husband, Sidik Rouzi, worked for US government media outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Under Kadeer’s leadership, the WUC and UAA forged close ties with the Bush administration.

Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, former President (2016-2019)—Since 2008, Kokbore has worked with notorious private US military and intelligence contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton. Edward Snowden was employed at the firm when he decided to blow the whistle on the National Security Agency’s invasive, all-encompassing system of mass surveillance.

Omer Kanat, former Vice President—Serves as the WUC’s Chairman of the Executive Committee. Kanat helped found the WUC and has been a permanent fixture in its executive leadership. The veteran operative has a lengthy history of work with the US government, from serving as senior editor of Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service from 1999 to 2009 to covering the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and interviewing the Dalai Lama for the network. In an interview with Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal at a 2018 NED awards ceremony in the US Capitol building, Kanat took credit for furnishing many of the claims about internment camps in Xinjiang to Western media.

Rushan Abbas, former Vice President—Previously boasted in her bio of her “extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, and various US intelligence agencies.” Served the US government and Bush administration’s so-called war on terror as a “consultant at Guantanamo Bay supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Following a disastrous publicity appearance on Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” question and answer forum, during which participants blasted Abbas as a “CIA Asset” and US government collaborator, she has attempted to scrub her biographic information from the internet. Abbas currently heads the WUC affiliate organization, Campaign for Uyghurs.

The UAA current leadership includes:

Kuzzat Altay, President—Nephew of Rebiya Kadeer. As documented above, Altay is a rabid anti-communist and ardently pro-US. He has favorably compared the establishment of Israel to the separatist movement for “East Turkestan.”

Elfidar Itebir, Secretary—Sister of Elnigar Itebir, who was appointed by the Trump administration as Director for China in the White House National Security Council. Itebir’s father, Ablikim Baqi Iltebir, worked for the US government media outlet, Radio Free Asia, from February 2000 to August 2017

Arslan Khakiyev, Treasurer—Previously worked at Radio Free Asia for over 18 years. Khahkiyev’s wife, Gulchehra Hoja, has worked for Radio Free Asia since 2001.

The weekly deluge of US media reports of Uyghur oppression in Xinjiang is clearly designed to appeal to liberal sensibilities, presenting the struggle of an oppressed minority against a tyrannical government, and omitting any pieces of context that might prove disruptive to the David-versus-Goliath narrative. But it is becoming clear that some profoundly illiberal forces lie behind the veneer of a peaceful campaign for human rights.

The US government has engaged in a marriage of convenience with a Uyghur separatist movement that is firmly aligned with the gun-obsessed, anti-immigrant subculture of Trumpism. As the Biden administration turns up the heat on China, it has turned a blind eye to the far-right politics of one of its most important proxy groups.

The UAA did not respond to multiple requests for interviews from The Grayzone sent by email and on Twitter.

Featured image: File photo

(The Grayzone)

https://orinocotribune.com/wipe-out-chi ... or-empire/

Numerous screen shots and images at link.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 12, 2021 2:16 pm

Why China’s Vaccine Internationalism Matters
APR 8
WRITTEN BY QIAO COLLECTIVE

As rich nations stockpile COVID-19 vaccines, China is providing a lifeline to Global South nations spurned by Western pharmaceuticals and excluded by the West’s neocolonial vaccine nationalism. So why is China being smeared for its efforts?

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called it “the biggest moral test” facing the world today. World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom warned of a “catastrophic moral failure” whose price would be paid with the lives of those in the world’s poorest countries.

Such cautionings of inequitable global vaccine distribution have been shunted to the margins; instead, optimistic chatter of “returning to normal” is circulating once again as Global North citizens line up for their long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine. But normal, as ever, is relative: public health advocates warn that some countries may not be able to even begin their vaccination campaigns until 2024.

Vaccine apartheid is here, and it is revealing once more the ways our world continues to be structured by the geopolitical binaries of colonialism, capitalism, and racism. The People’s Vaccine Alliance reports that rich countries have bought enough doses to vaccinate their populations three times over. Canada alone has ordered enough vaccines to cover each Canadian five times over. Until March, the United States was hoarding tens of millions of AstraZeneca vaccines—not yet approved for domestic use—and refusing to share them with other countries (only under immense pressure did the Biden administration announce it would send doses to Mexico and Canada). Israeli officials, lauded for delivering a first dose to more than half of its citizens, have likened their responsibility to vaccinate Palestinians living under apartheid to Palestinians’ obligation to “take care of dolphins in the Mediterranean.” The European Union has extended controversial “ban options” which allow member states to block vaccine exports to non-EU nations. Meanwhile, countries like South Africa and Uganda are paying two to three times more for vaccines than the EU.

As of March 2021, China had shared 48% of domestically-manufactured vaccines with other countries through donations and exports. By contrast, the United States and United Kingdom had shared zero.


While the Global North hoards global vaccine stockpiles, China—alongside other much-maligned states such as Russia and Cuba—is modeling a very different practice of vaccine internationalism. As of April 5th, the Foreign Ministry reported that China had donated vaccines to more than 80 countries and exported vaccines to more than 40 countries. Science analytics firm Airfinity reported that as of March 2021, China had shared 48% of domestically-manufactured vaccines with other countries through donations and exports. By contrast, the United States and United Kingdom had shared zero. China has also partnered with more than 10 countries on vaccine research, development, and production, including a joint vaccine in collaboration with Cuba.

Crucially, China’s vaccine sharing has provided a lifeline to low-income Global South nations who have been out-bidded by rich nations racing to stockpile Western-made vaccines. Donations to African nations including Zimbabwe and Republic of Guinea, which both received 200,000 Sinopharm doses in February, have allowed those countries to begin vaccine rollouts for medical workers and the elderly rather than wait months or even years for access to vaccines through other channels. Just a week after Joe Biden ruled out sharing vaccines with Mexico in the short term, the country finalized an order for 22 million doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine to fill critical shortages.

Even more, Chinese vaccine aid has reached countries isolated from global markets by sanctions and embargoes enforced by the United States and its allies. In March, China donated 100,000 vaccines to Palestine, a move praised by the Palestinian health ministry for enabling the inoculation of 50,000 health workers and eldery in Gaza and the West Bank who have been cut off from accessing Israeli vaccine rollouts. Venezuela, with many of its overseas assets frozen by U.S. sanctions, received 500,000 vaccines donated by China in a gesture praised by Nicolás Maduro as a sign of the Chinese people’s “spirit of cooperation and solidarity.” China’s international vaccine policy follows the broad pattern of China’s early pandemic aid, which similarly equipped low-income and sanctions-starved nations with the tools to combat the pandemic at home.

From Venezuela to Palestine, Chinese vaccine aid has reached countries isolated from global markets by sanctions and embargoes enforced by the United States and its allies.

In the face of a global pandemic that the U.S. alliance has used as a political cudgel against China, China’s vaccine internationalism has been a natural outgrowth of its philosophy of mutual cooperation and solidarity. From rapidly sequencing the viral genome and making it immediately publicly accessible to world researchers, to sending medical delegations to dozens of nations around the world, China’s pandemic response has been guided by a simple axiom of global solidarity. Xi Jinping made China the first nation to commit to making a COVID-19 vaccine a global public good in May 2020, meaning any Chinese vaccine would be produced and distributed on a non-rivalrous, non-excludable basis. In a telling contrast, that commitment came just as President Donald Trump threatened to permanently freeze U.S. funding to the World Health Organization in an attempt to punish the organization for daring to work cooperatively with Chinese health officials. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has similarly emphasized vaccine solidarity, urging his colleagues at the United Nations Human Rights Council in February that “solidarity and cooperation is our only option.” Wang chastised countries that he noted are “obsessed with politicizing the virus and stigmatizing other nations” and implored that global vaccine distribution be made “accessible and affordable to developing countries.” China’s record to date shows it is working to follow through on the lofty rhetoric its officials have used to implore global solidarity to defeat the pandemic.

Because China’s vaccine internationalism models a form of multilateral cooperation beyond the scope of U.S. hegemony, it has been met with relentless media propaganda designed to cast China’s vaccination efforts as shady, manipulative, and unsafe. In November 2020, the Wall Street Journal gleefully announced that Brazil had suspended trials of the Sinovac vaccine following an “severe adverse event.” Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing Brazilian president and Trump ally, declared it a “victory.” Casual observers would reasonably assume that there were serious safety issues with the Chinese vaccine; only closer reading would fill in the crucial context, that the cause of death of the participant was in fact suicide. A similar ruse was exploited in January, as headlines blasted that a Peruvian volunteer had died in the midst of a Sinopharm vaccine trial. Again, behind the salacious headlines was a crucial detail: the volunteer, who died of COVID-19 complications, had received the placebo rather than the vaccine.

Because China’s vaccine internationalism models a form of multilateral cooperation beyond the scope of U.S. hegemony, it has been met with relentless media propaganda designed to cast China’s vaccination efforts as shady, manipulative, and unsafe.

As study after study shows the efficacy of Chinese and Russian vaccines, the media has turned to painting vaccine aid and exports as a dangerous form of “vaccine diplomacy.” Human Rights Watch nonsensically described China’s vaccine aid as a “dangerous game,” citing conspiracies about the research development of Chinese-made vaccines. The New York Times wondered if China had “done too well” against COVID-19, claiming that the government was “over-exporting vaccines made in China in a bid to expand its influence internationally.” Headline after headline bemoaned that China was “winning” at vaccine diplomacy, making clear that Western pundits view the lives of Global South peoples as pawns in a zero-sum game valued only insofar as they further the interests of Western hegemony.

Some advocates say the bias against Chinese vaccines is based both on geopolitics and racist notions of scientific expertise. Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which coordinates medical access in India, Brazil and South Africa, said “the entire world—not just the West—is incredulous at the idea that you could have useful science in this pandemic come out of places not in the West.” Yet he emphasized the importance of Chinese and Indian vaccines as a “lifeline” to low and middle-income countries, both in addressing vaccine gaps in the developing world and as a “useful cudgel” for negotiations with Western pharmaceuticals.

Despite mainstream media tropes of Chinese “vaccine diplomacy,” it is the United States—not China—whose pharmaceutical companies are employing exploitative tactics to profit from vaccine sales. Pfizer, for instance, has been accused of “intimidating” Latin American governments in their vaccine sale negotiations, asking countries to put up embassy buildings and military bases as collateral to reimburse any future litigation costs—leading countries like Argentina and Brazil to reject the vaccine outright. One can only imagine the media hysteria which would ensue were Sinopharm to be caught demanding overseas military bases as collateral for its vaccine exports. But because it is a U.S. company, Pfizer’s medical neocolonialism has been absolved and flown under the radar.

Despite allegations of Chinese vaccine opportunism, it is the United States which has politicized its recent foray into vaccine exports. During his first meeting with leaders of the “Quad,” an anti-China alliance likened to NATO and consisting of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan, Joe Biden announced his intention to use the alliance to produce one billion vaccines for distribution in Asia in an explicit bid to “counter” China. It is telling that while China stresses global cooperation through channels such as COVAX (to which it has donated 10 million doses) the WHO, and the UN peacekeeper’s vaccination program, the United States is pursuing vaccine diplomacy through a highly-politicized military alliance designed to contain China. Likewise, despite the Biden administration’s lofty rhetoric about its leadership over a global “rules-based order,” it is the United States which has violated a UN Security Council resolution demanding a global military ceasefire to facilitate pandemic cooperation with recent airstrikes in Syria.

Perhaps most egregiously, the United States and other rich nations have blocked a proposed World Trade Organization waiver on intellectual property restrictions which would enable Global South countries to manufacture generic versions of COVID-19 vaccines. Proposed by South Africa and India with the backing of China, Russia, and the majority of Global South nations, Global North obstruction of vaccine IP waivers in the WTO makes clear that the status quo of vaccine apartheid is not an accident, but a product of deliberate policy by Western nations to put the profits of their pharmaceutical companies above the lives of the world’s poor.

Obstruction of vaccine IP waivers in the WTO makes clear that the status quo of vaccine apartheid is not an accident, but a product of deliberate policy by Western nations to put the profits of their pharmaceutical companies above the lives of the world’s poor.

With Global North nations stockpiling vaccines and experts warning that new rounds of vaccinations may be necessary to combat COVID-19 variants, critical vaccine shortages are here to stay. China’s manufacturing power and macroeconomic policy puts it in a position to continue to be the world leader in vaccine production. As of April, China’s Sinovac announced it had reached the capacity to produce a whopping 2 billion doses of CoronaVac per year, thanks in part to Beijing district government efforts to secure the company additional land for vaccine production. China’s vaccine production builds on the successful model of state intervention and coordination through which state-owned enterprises and private companies rallied to construct hospitals, manufacture PPE, and coordinate food supplies during China’s February 2020 outbreak.

The vaccine policies forwarded by China versus the U.S. and its allies serves as a microcosm for two very different worldviews: where China has insisted on global solidarity to defeat the pandemic, the Western world has refused to ease the pressures of its neocolonial regime. While China supports bids for vaccine equity in the WTO and UN, the Global North is bolstering vaccine apartheid for the sake of corporate profits. These differences alone ought to be enough to put to rest vacuous assertions that render U.S.-China conflict as a matter of “competing imperialisms.”

Xi Jinping stressed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic a commitment to “protect people's lives and health at all costs.” Not when it is profitable, not when it is geopolitically expedient—at all costs. Western obstruction of efforts towards vaccine equity forwarded by China, Cuba, South Africa, and other Global South nations only reveals the very different calculus which governs the West’s continuing neocolonial regime.

https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/artic ... ationalism

As with most of the most heinous crimes of capitalism in the imperialist phase of capitalist development are manifest overseas out of sight and mind of the local proletariat.( Wouldn't want the masses to know they are ruled by monsters, ya know.)

The Chinese do the right thing and the US talks trash. (It is telling how often the propaganda hit pieces 'splash' then quickly sink out of sight and mind after the initial and all-important impression has been obtained.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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