China

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Back to the roots: rural Red Army schools and training centres
Posted by stalinsmoustache under China, communism, communist party | Tags: Red Army schools, revolutionary training centres |
[2] Comments
Two other aspects of the rural revitalisation under way in China: Red Army primary schools and rural revolutionary centres. Over the last ten years, more than 200 primary schools have been established in rural areas to specialise in teaching children about China’s revolutionary spirit and history – alongside regular education. In the enmeshed socialist market economy of China, much of the funding for the schools comes from donors, especially families with a history in the Red Army.

Further, the revolutionary training centres have been revived in order to engage with farmers about new developments in rural policy and its implications. In an age of easy access to internet information, it is felt that good old face-to-face engagement is still far better. So local party members and officials, often from villages themselves, organise discussion groups in order to discuss and plan new developments – and, crucially, to gain feedback from farmers themselves so as to shape local implementation. These ventures are the modern form of Jiangxisuo (‘teach and study centres’), the Peasant Movement Training Institutes run by the early Chinese Communists, including Mao himself.

These developments are part of Xi Jinping’s and the CPC’s focus on the rural areas, since farmers are, after all, the heart of the CPC.



https://stalinsmoustache.org/2017/12/30 ... g-centres/

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What does China’s ‘ecological civilization’ mean for humanity’s future?
Posted Feb 12, 2018 by Eds.

Originally published: Eco Watch by Jeremy Lent (February 9, 2018) |

Imagine a newly elected president of the United States calling in his inaugural speech for an “ecological civilization” that ensures “harmony between human and nature.” Now imagine he goes on to declare that “we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it” and that his administration will “encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.” Dream on, you might say. Even in the more progressive Western European nations, it’s hard to find a political leader who would make such a stand. And yet, the leader of the world’s second largest economy, Xi Jinping of China, made these statements and more in his address to the National Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing last October. He went on to specify in more detail his plans to “step up efforts to establish a legal and policy framework … that facilitates green, low-carbon, and circular development,” to “promote afforestation,” “strengthen wetland conservation and restoration” and “take tough steps to stop and punish all activities that damage the environment.” Closing his theme with a flourish, he proclaimed that “what we are doing today” is “to build an ecological civilization that will benefit generations to come.” Transcending parochial boundaries, he declared that his Party’s abiding mission was to “make new and greater contributions to mankind … for both the well-being of the Chinese people and human progress.”


China’s President Xi Jinping addressing China’s Communist Party National Congress in October.

It’s easy to dismiss it all as mere political rhetoric, but consider how the current president of the United States came to power on the basis of a different form of rhetoric, appealing to the destructive nationalism of “America First.” In both cases, it’s reasonable to assume that the rhetoric doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Just as Trump‘s xenophobic vision spells potential danger for the world, so could it be that Xi’s ecological vision could offer a glimpse to a hopeful future?

A Transformative Vision
In fact, this is just the type of fresh, regenerative thinking about transforming the current global economic system that many in the environmental movement have been calling for. And this hasn’t been lost on some leading thinkers. David Korten, a world-renowned author and activist, has proposed expanding the vision of Ecological Civilization to a global context, which would involve—among other things—granting legal rights to nature, shifting ownership of productive assets from transnational corporations to nation-states and self-governing communities, and prioritizing life-affirming, rather than wealth-affirming, values. Within a larger historical context, it’s not too surprising that this vision of “harmony between human and nature” should emerge from China. As I’ve traced in my book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, traditional Chinese culture was founded on a worldview that perceived an intrinsic web of connection between humanity and nature, in contrast to the European worldview that saw humans as essentially separate from nature. Early Chinese philosophers believed the overriding purpose of life was to seek harmony in society and the universe, while Europeans pursued a path based on a different set of values—which have since become global in scope—driven by “conquering nature” and viewing nature as a machine to be engineered. Furthermore, Xi’s rhetoric does seem to be grounded in at least some reality. Two months before Xi’s speech, China announced they were more than doubling their previous solar power target for 2020, after installing more than twice as much solar capacity as any other country in 2016. This new target—five times larger than current capacity in the U.S.—would entail covering an area of land equivalent to Greater London with solar panels. They are similarly exceeding their wind power targets, already boasting more capacity than all of Europe.

EcoWatch
@EcoWatch
China Building Second Enormous Floating Solar Farm on Top of Defunct Coal Mine http://ow.ly/aPDU30hbiVE @SolarEnergyNet @SolarPowerWorld

9:45 PM - Dec 12, 2017

China Building Second Enormous Floating Solar Farm on Top of Defunct Coal Mine
The state-run energy company, China Three Gorges New Energy Co., is building a 150-megawatt floating solar farm that sits on top of a lake that formed from a collapsed coal mine

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As a result, China has recently halted previous plans for building more than 150 coal-fired power plants. In electric cars, China is leading the world, selling more each month than Europe and the U.S. combined, with more aggressive quotas on gas-guzzlers than anywhere else in the world, including California. Additionally, China has the world’s most extensive network of high-speed trains, and has already passed laws to promote a circular economy where waste products from industrial processes are recycled into inputs for other processes.

China’s Industrial Avalanche

Some observers, however, are far from convinced that China is on its way to an ecological civilization. Economist Richard Smith has written a detailed critique of China’s quandary in the Real-World Economics Review, where he argues that China’s political-economic system is based on the need to maximize economic growth, employment and consumerism to an even greater extent than in the West. These forces, he claims, run diametrically counter to the vision of an ecological civilization. There are compelling arguments for why this makes sense. Beginning in the 19th century, China suffered more than a century of humiliation and brutal exploitation from Western nations as a result of its relative military and industrial weakness. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1978, Deng Xiaoping transformed China’s economy into a hybrid of consumer capitalism and central planning that catapulted China to its current prominence on the world stage. Astonishingly, China’s GDP is more than fifty times greater than at the time of Mao’s death, the result of a growth rate approaching 10 percent per year for four decades. This achievement, perhaps the most dramatic economic and social transformation of all time, is bringing China back to the dominant role in global affairs that it held for most of history. Within a decade, China’s GDP is expected to surpass that of the U.S., making it the world’s largest economy. It is just in the early stages of a profusion of record-breaking industrial megaprojects of a scale that boggles the mind. It plans to extend its influence further through its Belt and Road Initiative, a vast infrastructure and trading project encompassing sixty countries in Europe, Asia and Africa, envisaged as a 21st century version of the famed Silk Road. This industrial avalanche comes, however, at great cost to China’s—and the world’s—environmental well-being. China is by far the world’s largest consumer of energy, using over half the world’s coal, a third of the world’s oil, and 60 percent of the world’s cement. Astonishingly, China poured more cement in three years from 2011 to 2013 than the U.S. used during the entire twentieth century! China is also the world’s largest consumer of lumber, as Smith described, “leveling forests from Siberia to Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Congo, and Madagascar.” These are just some of the forces that draw Smith to the conclusion that Xi Jinping’s vision of an ecological civilization is untenable. “The hyper industrialization required,” he wrote, “to realize this China Dream of great power status compels him … to let the polluters pollute, pump China’s CO2 emissions off the chart, and thereby bring on the ecological collapse not just of China but the whole planet … Xi Jinping can create an ecological civilization or he can build a rich superpower. He can’t do both.”

Intimately Placed Between Heaven and Earth

Or can he? That is a crucial question with ramifications for all of humanity. While it is clear that future economic growth at anything close to China’s historic rate is untenable, there is a more nuanced question that poses the possibility of a sustainable way forward for both China and the world. Once China has regained its status as a leading world power, can it achieve yet another transformation and redirect its impressive vitality into growing a life of quality for its people, rather than continued consumerism? Is it possible that Xi Jinping is sowing the seeds of this future metamorphosis with his vision of an ecological civilization? There is urgent awareness among thought leaders around the world that continued growth in global GDP is leading civilization to the point of collapse. Movements are emerging that call for “degrowth” and other approaches to a steady-state economy that could allow a sustainable future for humanity. But how can we break the death-grip of a global system built on continually feeding the growth frenzy of gigantic transnational corporations voraciously seeking a never-ending increase in profits to satisfy their shareholders? Along with the grassroots citizen movements emerging around the world, is it possible that China could pioneer a new path of sustainability, steering its citizens back to the traditional values that characterized its culture over millennia? Even if China could achieve this redirection, the continuous human-rights abuses of its authoritarian government raise further questions. An ecological civilization—as envisaged by Korten and many others in the environmental movement—seems inconsistent with a centralized bureaucracy forcing its rules on citizens through coercion and repression. For China to genuinely move in this direction, Xi would need to be prepared to devolve decision-making authority and freedoms back to the Chinese people. It’s a tall order, but not necessarily inconceivable. For those living in the West, it would take a tremendous dose of cultural humility to accept philosophical leadership from China on the path to a flourishing future for humanity. But, if we are to get to that future, we must recognize the structural underpinnings of Western thought that brought us to this imbalance in the first place. A thousand years ago, Chinese philosopher Zhang Zai expressed a realization of connectedness with the universe in an essay called the Western Inscription, which begins with these words:

Heaven is my father and earth is my mother, and I, a small child, find myself placed intimately between them. What fills the universe I regard as my body; what directs the universe I regard as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters; all things are my companions.

Is it possible that this deep recognition of human interconnectedness, rooted in traditional Chinese culture, could form the philosophical basis for a future ecological civilization? The answer to this question may ultimately affect the future well-being, not just of China, but of the entire human family.

https://mronline.org/2018/02/12/what-do ... ys-future/

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China reassigns 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in bid to fight pollution
Area to be planted by the end of the year is roughly the size of Ireland


A large regiment of the People's Liberation Army, along with some of the nation's armed police force, have been withdrawn from their posts to work non-military tasks, such as planting trees China Photos/Getty Images

China has reportedly reassigned over 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in a bid to combat pollution by increasing the country's forest coverage.

A large regiment from the People's Liberation Army, along with some of the nation's armed police force, have been withdrawn from their posts on the northern border to work on non-military tasks inland.

The majority will be dispatched to Hebei province, which encircles Beijing, according to the Asia Times which originally reported the story. The area is known to be a major culprit for producing the notorious smog which blankets the capital city.

The idea is believed to be popular among members of online military forums as long as they can keep their ranks and entitlements.

It comes as part of China's plan to plant at least 84,000 square kilometres (32,400 square miles) of trees by the end of the year, which is roughly equivalent to the size of Ireland.

The aim is to increase the country's forest coverage from 21 per cent of its total landmass to 23 per cent by 2020, the China Daily newspaper reported.

Zhang Jianlong, head of China's State Forestry Administration, said by 2035 the figure could reach as high as 26 per cent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 08836.html

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Three questions about China and the Communist Party of China



The Communist Party of China is the vanguard both of the Chinese working class and of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. It is the core of leadership for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics and represents the development trend of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of China’s advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The realization of communism is the highest ideal and ultimate goal of the Party.



Constitution Of The Communist Party Of China

What does the CPC think it’s doing?

The CPC uses a lot of specialised language which is impenetrable at first, but it becomes very familiar once you know what everything means. The core idea behind a lot of what the CPC does is the idea of the primary and advanced stages of socialism. Primary-stage socialism is characterised by underdeveloped productive forces, which themselves prohibit the development of advanced social relations. Advanced-stage socialism is characterised by highly-developed productive forces and material abundance. As Marx eloquently put it in The German Ideology:

it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse
To summarise, the project of socialism is advancing society towards communism, and the prerequisite of this advancement is an advanced material-technical base. This is especially the case for countries such as China, which was kept in chronic underdevelopment as the part of legacy of imperialist plundering.

This isn’t at all a new idea, it’s just a more concrete articulation of preexisting ideas that you’re probably already familiar with. For example, at the 1st Zhengzhou Conference, when asked about the necessity of commodity relations in the construction of Chinese socialism, Mao responded by reaffirming that China was in the initial stage of socialism. Stalin talked about it at length in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. Lenin, too, wrote about the subject:

Capitalism is a bane compared with socialism. Capitalism is a boon compared with medievalism, small production, and the evils of bureaucracy which spring from the dispersal of the small producers. Inasmuch as we are as yet unable to pass directly from small production to socialism, some capitalism is inevitable as the elemental product of small production and exchange; so that we must utilise capitalism (particularly by directing it into the channels of state capitalism) as the intermediary link between small production and socialism, as a means, a path, and a method of increasing the productive forces.

Lenin, “The Tax in Kind” (1921)

Within the limits indicated, however, this is not at all dangerous for socialism as long as transport and large-scale industry remain in the hands of the proletariat. On the contrary, the development of capitalism, controlled and regulated by the proletarian state (i.e., “state” capitalism in this sense of the term), is advantageous and necessary in an extremely devastated and backward small-peasant country (within certain limits, of course), inasmuch as it is capable of hastening the immediate revival of peasant farming. This applies still more to concessions: without denationalising anything, the workers’ state leases certain mines, forest tracts, oilfields, and so forth, to foreign capitalists in order to obtain from them extra equipment and machinery that will enable us to accelerate the restoration of Soviet large-scale industry…

Lenin, Third Congress Of The Communist International, 1921

So again, not a new idea. Why am I reiterating this? I’m reiterating it because a lot of leftists treat socialism with Chinese characteristics as some kind of extraordinary rightist deviation, but in reality, there’s nothing new at all behind it. It’s completely consistent with the framework of Marxism-Leninism, and there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about it once you get down it.

Is their developmental strategy successful? Well, decide for yourself:

One million people are being lifted out of poverty in the PRC every month.
Even adjusted for inflation, the wages of Chinese manufacturing workers are rising by ~11% a year, in a world where wages are stagnant almost everywhere.
Neoliberals love to claim that the IMF and the World Bank have helped pull hundreds of millions of people above their shitty fictitious $1.20 a day poverty line. They neglect to mention that the PRC is single-handedly responsible for three-quarters of all poverty reduction since 1981.
In 1980, GDP per capita (in PPP — which accounts for inflation and purchasing power) in the PRC was $310. In 2017, 37 years later, it’s $16,676. That means that in less than two generations, people have become fifty-three times as wealthy. According to current projections, in the PRC, per capita GDP will be $30,000 by 2030 — around the level of Italy.
So we’ve established that the rationale behind socialism with Chinese characteristics is, first and foremost, oriented towards development. Second, it’s pretty clear that, on the whole, Chinese socialism has been wildly successful on this front — more than any other country in history. This is important because I’m about to move onto the second question.



Is the PRC a dictatorship of the proletariat?

Here’s a surprise: this question isn’t actually that difficult to answer.

The PRC can either be a dictatorship of one class, or a dictatorship of another. Under capitalism, it can either be a dictatorship of the proletariat, or a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. If it is not one, then it cannot be anything but the other. So really, ask yourself whether a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would:

Mandate re-education courses in Marxism for all government officials?
Order all journalists and students of journalism to take courses in Marxism?
Step up the ideology drive on college campuses and introduce Mao Zedong thought classes in 2,600 universities?
Would a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, deliberately ensure that average manufacturing wages have been rising consistently by ~11% per year at the expense of corporate profits, compared to other “developing” countries like India where wages have stayed repressed for decades?
Would a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie roll out comprehensive social programmes in the middle of a neoliberal wave of austerity in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis?
Would a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, in a situation where workers beat a steel executive to death due to privatization plans, step in, prevent workers from being prosecuted, and then reverse the privatization?
Let me respond in advance to three objections. First — no, you cannot excuse the predominance of ‘worker-friendly’ (to say the least) policies by saying that the PRC is a social democracy. Social democracies existed within specific social conditions (from the 1940s to the 1970s) within specific geographical areas (Europe and the settler-colonies of North America, Australia, and New Zealand), and often existed only for the settler/labour-aristocratic/petit-bourgeois classes. It was the displacement of exploitation from the First World to the Third — it was imperialism, plain and simple. Social democracy never represented a distinct articulation of capital, and has never, ever been a phenomenon in periphery countries. It’s funny because these are the same people who claim the PRC is a brutal hell-hole of rabid exploitation where workers have no power, and then do a rapid about-face and say that the Chinese government is just compromising with workers and doing all of this shit because reasons (i.e because they don’t know what social democracy actually is and they don’t understand how social democracy is financed by imperialist value-transfer).

Second — if you still think that when the cameras switch off, every one of the 88.76 million members of the CPC dons a black top hat, hi-fives their neighbour, and says ‘gee we sure fooled those folks into thinking we were dedicated Marxist-Leninists’ then you’re being silly. It’s an orientalist fantasy that the CPC gives enough of a shit about what Western leftists think of them, that they went to the effort of mandating courses in Marxism for every university student in the country just for show.

Third, if you think that the PRC was, at any point, a dictatorship of the proletariat, then you can’t claim that it’s now a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. To those people, if I asked you whether communists could simply get elected into power and turn the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into an organ of proletarian class power, then you would say no. But then you have people going around and saying that a dictatorship of the proletariat can be reformed into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, when those same people know that in order for the bourgeoisie become the ruling-class, a sharp rupture is required in which the proletarian state is overthrown and supplanted by a bourgeois state. There has been no such rupture in China. There was a rupture in the USSR, a rupture in Yugoslavia, in Albania, and across eastern Europe — but no rupture in China.

In fact, the only basis for the claim — that a proletarian dictatorship can reform into a bourgeois dictatorship — is in the supposed case-example of China. It’s circular logic: China is a bourgeois dictatorship — how are we supposed to know whether this is possible? Well, according to our theory of revisionism, that cultural revolution is necessary to counteract the immanent embourgeoisifying processes which occur under socialism, which manifests itself in the ideological line struggle within the party apparatus, it is definitely possible. How do we know that this is true? How has this theory been validated? Well . . . China is capitalist now, isn’t it? That’s not to say that the MLM conception of revisionism is irredeemably false in every aspect, but that instead it has become overgeneralized to situations where it is genuinely inapplicable.

The fact that there has been no rupture, that the PRC which existed in the 1950s still exists today, alone should suggest that the PRC is a dictatorship of the proletariat.

But then again, the USSR was also proletarian dictatorship — but it was overthrown due to the prevalence of bourgeois forces which enjoyed a new social basis following Gorbachev’s reforms, paving the way for an unrestrained, total capitalist restoration. So there’s a new problem here: what if market reform has taken on a momentum that the CPC can’t control? Are they really ‘riding on the back of a dragon’ (as I heard someone describe them), or do they have a handle of the situation? Are they in a position where they can continue refining and enriching the basis for advanced socialism, enough to transition to it by 2049?

This brings us to the next question.



Can the CPC actually pull it off?

Can the CPC actually pull it off? If we think of primary-stage socialism as a transitional stage, like the NEP, will the CPC actually be able to make good on the implicit promise they’ve made to 1.379 billion people?

Here’s my take: absolutely.

The SASAC (China’s State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which answers directly to the State Council) has a state monopoly in every important industry sector — here are a few:

aerospace
airlines,
aluminum,
architecture & design,
automotive,
aviation,
banking,
chemicals,
coal,
cotton,
electronics,
engineering,
forestry,
heavy equipment,
gold,
grain,
heavy machinery,
intelligence services,
iron,
materials,
metallurgy,
mining,
non-ferrous metals,
nuclear energy,
ocean shipping,
oil,
pharmaceuticals,
postal services,
rail,
salt,
science and technology research,
ship building,
silk,
steel,
telecoms,
travel
utilities
Not only do they own all of these critical strategic sectors — out of the twenty largest companies in China, all twenty of them are controlled by the SASAC, or by local governments (with the exception of Noble Group, which is based in Hong Kong).

This evidently puts the PRC government in the same position as the USSR in the twenties with the New Economic Policy, where the state retained control over the heights of industry. The key difference between the two is that although the USSR from 1921–1928 had no comprehensive system of economic planning, the Chinese government has been using Five-Year Plans ever since 1953. Another difference is that the Soviet state had nowhere near this amount of leverage. Combined with modern information technology and an extremely pervasive technical infrastructure, this ultimately puts the CPC in a much, much stronger position than the CPSU when it comes to entering into the advanced stage of socialism, and in the end, towards the realisation of world communism.

To summarise, the CPC has not deviated from Marxism-Leninism, and has faithfully and successfully carried out the task of socialist development. The PRC is a dictatorship of the proletariat, and the backbone of the Chinese economy continues to be socialist state planning. Furthermore, the CPC is in an excellent position to carry out the long-term goal of attaining advanced socialism.

But a word of caution is necessary: the bourgeoisie is active in China, and it is actively working to overthrow the socialist CPC. Calls for multiparty liberal bourgeois “democracy” are ever-present, and the next economic crisis will bring the contradictions that characterise modern Chinese society to the foreground.

The PRC’s socialist character does not render all of our work null and void , dwarfed by the unprecedented magnitude of Chinese socialist construction — instead, it’s a good reason to stand with China, stand with the Chinese people, and to work even harder to realise communism on a global scale.

https://medium.com/@wolf.aldrich/three- ... 56e40b40f3

this is well done.

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U.S. expert hails China's achievements in poverty reduction, environmental protection



Farmers collect sweet potatoes in Santuan Village, Miao Autonomous County of Rongshui, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Oct. 24, 2017. (Xinhua/Long Tao)

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- China has made great achievements in poverty reduction, environmental protection and assistance to third world countries since China adopted the policy of reform and opening up 40 years ago, a U.S. expert on China said Tuesday.

In a written interview with Xinhua, Charlotte Christensen, a board member of Oregon-China Sister State Relations Council, said China has lifted over 800 million out of poverty over the past 30 years.

"With this accomplishment alone, China has provided a remarkably positive example for the world," she said.

"And now China's government is acting on a sound plan to fully eradicate extreme domestic poverty by 2020," she said, adding that these are exciting developments for many people in the United States.



File photo taken on Sept. 6, 2017 shows that Pan Chengyue, a 4-year-old girl of Miao ethnic group, takes free lunch at the Kaihuai Community No. 13 Kindergarten, which was newly built for children relocated from poverty-stricken areas, in Kaili City, Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Qiandongnan, southwest China's Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Wu Jibin)

In contrast, Charlotte noted that conditions for low-income working people in the United States have declined with poverty on the rise, and that there are growing problems for those people with access to clean water, adequate food, medical care and steady full-time jobs.

China is also leading in a bold new approach to global sustainable development that promotes peace and inclusiveness rather than conflict and division, and China is reaching out to assist developing nations on all continents, said the expert from Oregon, a coastal state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.



A girl of Li ethnic group shows local snack of three-color rice in Xiaomei Village, Lingshui Li Autonomous County, south China's Hainan Province, Jan. 21, 2018. After local government's targeted measures in poverty alleviation work, the improved environment in Xiaomei Village, once an impoverished village, now attract more tourism business for local people. (Xinhua/Zhao Yingquan)

"China's foreign policy provides the world with another extraordinary example of how to make historic achievements in elevation of the lives and livelihoods of many millions of people worldwide," she said.

At the same time, she said, China is making new strides in policies and programs to restore, protect and manage its vast natural environmental resources.

Even though China's environment suffered as a result of carrying the burden of manufacturing products for the developed countries in the last quarter of the 20th century, it has decidedly reversed that trend, Charlotte said.

"China is becoming an 'Ecological Civilization' and now leads the world in environmental policies and practices," which are consistent with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development agreed upon by 193 countries, she said.



A black-headed gull takes food near the Dianchi Lake in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Feb. 21, 2018. Every year in autumn and winter, black-headed gulls flew to Kunming for warmer weather. (Xinhua/Hu Chao)

"Many of us in my home state of Oregon -- and throughout the U.S. -- respect China for her achievements of real-life solutions for working people and the environment," she noted.

She expressed her hope to promote mutually beneficial trade agreements, as well as cultural and educational exchanges between China and the State of Oregon on the sub-national level.

Oregon-China Sister State Relations Council is a non-profit organization dedicated to seeking opportunities to improve people-to-people exchanges, mutual respect and prosperity between Oregon and China.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-0 ... 009310.htm

[blindpig]

China’s super-rich lose political clout
Sharp drop in billionaires at parliamentary sessions as standing falls under Xi Jinping



Xi Jinping's campaign to eliminate poverty has left the wealthy less welcome in elite political circles © Reuters


Tom Mitchell in Beijing YESTERDAY 17

The political fortunes of China’s “super wealthy” have suffered a dramatic reversal with a much reduced presence at the country’s annual parliamentary session, reflecting the diminished standing of the country’s richest under President Xi Jinping.

According to the Hurun report, which tracks the fortunes of China’s wealthiest people, the number of renminbi billionaires who will be attending next week’s sessions of the country’s new parliament and a parallel advisory body has fallen to 153 from 209 at the 12th National People’s Congress, which sat from 2012 to 2017. Roughly 3,000 delegates sit in the NPC, and 2,200 in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress.

Delegates to the NPC and the CPPCC are selected every five years based on candidate lists drawn up by the Communist party. Those attending this month’s 13th NPC and CPPCC meetings will serve as delegates for the duration of Mr Xi’s second presidential term, which ends in 2023.

After private sector businesspeople were formally welcomed into the party in 2002, their representation in the NPC and CPPCC steadily increased.

But their presence has more recently been seen as an embarrassment in light of Mr Xi’s campaign to eliminate poverty and reduce China’s yawning wealth gap. Despite there being far fewer renminbi billionaires at this year’s NPC and CPPCC sessions, their collective wealth increased almost 20 per cent year-on-year to Rmb4.1tn ($646bn).

The two richest NPC delegates this year are Tencent founder Pony Ma, whose $47bn fortune makes him China’s richest man, and Li Shufu, the automotive tycoon who recently became Daimler’s largest shareholder.

This month the party’s Central Committee recommended that the constitutional two-term limit on the presidency and vice-presidency be rescinded, paving the way for Mr Xi to rule the world’s most populous country for life.

Delegates to the NPC, which opens on Monday, will vote on the amendment at the end of the body’s annual two-week session. While the rubber-stamp body does the party’s bidding without fail, Mr Xi could still be embarrassed by a sizeable number of No votes or abstentions when the amendment is put to a vote.

“Although [the number of people on] the rich list has more than doubled over the last five years, the fact that there are fewer rich-list members at the NPC and CPPCC is a sign that it is becoming much harder to join,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, Hurun founder.

In 2017, the final year of Mr Xi’s first term, the party launched a broad-based assault on China’s richest people, many of whom were accused of engaging in allegedly reckless financial engineering.

Xiao Jianhua and Wu Xiaohui, two prominent finance and insurance tycoons, were detained by Chinese authorities last year. Last week, China’s insurance regulator formally accused Mr Wu of “economic crimes” and took control of his Anbang insurance group, whose overseas assets include the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.

On Thursday, a prominent Chinese financial magazine reported that a low-key entrepreneur who recently agreed to pay $9bn for a 14 per cent stake in Russian oil company Rosneft had been detained by government investigators. 

Anbang was one of four privately-controlled groups — alongside HNA, Wanda and Fosun — whose overseas acquisitions were curtailed in 2017 as the Chinese government sought to rein in financial risks and curb capital flight.

Baoneng Group founder Yao Zhenhua, another prominent property-turned-finance tycoon, was banned from the insurance sector in February 2017 after his wealth soared nine-fold to $17bn in a single year, according to Hurun estimates. 

Like Anbang, Baoneng was identified by Chinese authorities as a dangerous “grey rhino” — a company whose highly leveraged business model threatens the stability of the country’s financial system.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.

https://www.ft.com/content/6e012f42-1da ... 74d7dabfb6

Bwahaha, the financial press is often a window into what the ruling class is really thinking about, the NYT being entirely a propaganda outlet.

They are tightening the leash and while we can expect resistance it seems that China is taking measures to prevent their billionaires from establishing substantial power base outside of the governments's reach. The argument of 'Chinese Imperialism' takes another blow....

[blindpig]

Chinese researchers discovered an agricultural miracle that could feed the planet without destroying it
A harvester reaps wheat crop in a field on the outskirts of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad March 24, 2015. India is the world's biggest wheat producer after China.


. (Reuters/Amit Dave)

WRITTEN BY
Chase Purdy
March 13, 2018

The study was mammoth. It cost $54 million, and involved some 1,000 researchers and 65,000 local bureaucrats. But academics around the globe are calling the results an agricultural miracle.

The project already saved Chinese farmers more than $12.2 billion over 10 years, and in the process may have unveiled a key to answering one of China’s biggest questions: With the global demand for food expected to double between 2005 and 2050, how will the world’s most populous nation figure out how to feed its people without inflicting serious damage to the environment?

From 2005 to 2015, researchers working under guidance from the China Agricultural University in Beijing conducted more than 13,000 on-the-ground field studies throughout China, taking note local farming practices. Following those studies, researchers developed geographically-specific advice for farmers growing rice, corn, and wheat. That advice emphasized the idea that a one-size-fits-all farming method isn’t as efficient as methods tailored for specific crops, regions, and weather conditions.


For instance, researchers advised rice growers in northeast China that they could reduce nitrogen-rich fertilizer use by an average of 20% if, rather than spreading it evenly on crops throughout year, they instead focused fertilizing efforts mostly in the late-spring growing season. They also suggested planting their seeds closer together.

“The [farmers] were skeptical, but we gained their trust, and then they depended on us—that was our greatest reward,” project leader Cui Zhenling wrote in the study.

Following researcher advice worked. The study, published this month the journal Nature, reports crop production for rice, corn, and wheat increased by an average of 11%, with a 15% drop in fertilizer use. In all, that stopped about 1.2 million tons of nitrogen from being introduced to the environment.

These are blockbuster findings because they offer hope that we can effectively feed a growing human population while also lowering our impact on climate. Compared to the rest of the world, Chinese farmers use about four times more nitrogen (305 kg per hectare, or nearly 175,000 lbs per square mile). When the land is overloaded with fertilizer, soil microbes then expel high levels of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas.


Nitrogen emissions are a problem everywhere, and play an outsized role in global climate change; the gas is more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Given that any farmer would be thrilled to see yield increases, these results should impact farming practices well beyond the border of China.

https://qz.com/1228061/chinas-agricultu ... roying-it/

Meeting human need is much more than the crude 'productionist' caricature depicted by anti-communists. It was a factor in early socialist construction, adopted to some degree simply because there was no 'handbook of socialist construction' and the pressing necessities of looming war. And of course the science has advanced greatly and if we ain't scientific then we ain't shit.

[blindpig]

The Myth of Chinese Capitalism
August 20, 2015 TGP STAFF
JEFF BROWN’S DISPATCH FROM Beijing
SPECIAL TO THE GREANVILLE POST pale blue horiz“Beijing is going in the opposite direction of Western colonialism, by rolling out a massive, nationwide social security and retirement program for anyone living here, even foreigners, if they pay payroll taxes…”

One of the great fabrications of Western mainstream media, among academics and on Wall Street is that China, starting in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, became a capitalist country. The favorite Western shibboleth bandied about is that, China’s authoritarian regime (it’s almost never called a government) runs a system of state capitalism. This is said with a genuflecting air of superiority and righteous consternation, because it’s not quite copacetic; it smells like warmed over chop suey.

State capitalism is supposed to mean that China’s leaders, whom I collectively call Baba Beijing, map out grand national plans and mandate to China’s businesses what they are to do and not to do, whether they like it or not, markets be damned, and tax incentives and subsidies are offered to push them in the desired direction. This so called state capitalism is considered to be inherently unfair, since Western capitalism mythically only responds to the needs of “free markets” and the “free movement” of capital, investments and goods across our Planet, in search of profits.

The self-reassuring message is that China is fully in fold of Western capitalism, except Baba Beijing plays dirty, using its own set of rules. Keeping it in the rubric of capitalism justifies why China has become, in just one generation, the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP), eclipsing the United States for the first time since 1872, when America’s rapidly expanding colonial empire overtook China’s centuries-held #1 position. During the last generation, China has become the world’s #1 manufacturer, exporter and cross border trader, as well as Planet Earth’s largest creditor. During this time span, Baba Beijing’s policies have created the world’s largest and still fastest growing middle class, bringing a materialistic lifestyle to 1.3 billion citizens. This superficial image of the Chinese buying Stuff and Fluff, just like super-consuming Westerners, further gives outsiders the impression that China is just a copycat, eastern version of crass Americana.

Nothing of all this could be further from the truth. In 1949, China gained its liberation from Western and Japanese imperial subjugation and became history’s most successful socialist and communist country. From 1949-1978, the Mao Era, China’s GDP grew an average of 7% per annum. Mao sincerely wanted the Chinese to get rich, just that all that wealth must be distributed as equally as possible. This is reflected in China’s 1978 GINI coefficient being a very egalitarian 0.16. A GINI coefficient of zero means that all the income is evenly distributed to all citizens and a coefficient of one means one person has all the income and everybody else has nothing. As a comparison, Sweden’s is currently 0.25, the lowest in the world, China’s is 0.37, the US’s is 0.41 and for all of humanity, 0.65. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient


Billboard tribute to Deng Xiao ping (Shenzhen, China on a busy Saturday afternoon, Jan. 2010). The display reads: “Uphold the Party’s Fundamental Policies – Don’t Waver for One Hundred Years.”

During this same time frame, 1949-1978, the United States garnered 8% annual growth, just one percent more than the communist-socialist model. Given that the United States and its NATO supplicants successfully shut out China from international finance, investment and trade, until the mid-70s, the Mao Era economic statistics are truly remarkable. With the advent of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and opening up China’s economy to do battle with Western capitalism (the Deng Era, 1979-2012), China’s economy has grown an average of 10% per annum, while America’s growth averaged 6%. A not-well-known point of history is that many of Deng’s reforms were actually started by Mao, Deng and Zhou Enlai, going back into the 70s and 60s, which helps explain the Mao Era’s phenomenal socioeconomic achievements. These earlier reforms were cleverly rebranded as “new” by Deng. Western capitalists eagerly lapped it up, in their lustful pursuit of Chinese profits, starting in 1978.


Far left is Deng Xiaoping; to his left is Zhou Enlai and center stage is Mao Zedong. Many of Deng’s much ballyhooed socioeconomic reforms were actually begun by these three titans of Chinese communism, starting in the 1960s. (Image by baidu.com)


One of the greatest head fakes in geopolitical history: Deng Xiaoping giving eager Western capitalists the impression that China’s economic reforms would mean selling off state owned assets, preferably at fire sale prices. Pictured here is Deng on the left, absorbing Mao Zedong Thought from New China’s founder, the Chairman himself. (Image by baidu.com)

China’s amazing socio-economic success story during the Mao Era has been completely expunged behind the Great Western Firewall. http://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/06/1 ... -2015-5-1/ For Western colonialism, it must not become common currency that a once poor, technologically repressed country of China’s size, any size for that matter (think Cuba or Eritrea), can succeed economically and socially, under the banner of socialism and communism. It is for this reason that there is a relentless foghorn of Western propaganda to discredit any and all gains made by non-capitalist countries. The West’s owners surely don’t want free thinking people and their leaders in Africa, the Americas and Asia to get any radical ideas.

These imperial lies have continued into the Deng Era. China is still a communist and socialist country. Baba Beijing has simply used the West’s methods, markets, investment and technology to continue to advance the wellbeing of China’s people, within its non-capitalist economy. This is hard for most Westerners to wrap their heads around, that China has been and continues to be a communist and socialist country, till now, 2015, and will continue to be so as long as Baba Beijing is in power. This explains why the West has been relentlessly trying to overthrow the Communist Party of China (CPC), since liberation in 1949.

Like the United States, Russia and France, the People’s Republic of China was founded and hewn from revolution. China’s long history and vision for the future are clearly spelled out in its constitution. The most recent version is from 1982, when Deng Xiaoping was China’s paramount leader. Here is an excerpt from the constitution’s preamble, http://en.people.cn/constitution/constitution.html

After the founding of the People’s Republic, the transition of Chinese society from a new- democratic [Editor’s note: China’s first republican period, with Sun Yat-Sen, 1912-1949] to a socialist society was effected step by step. The socialist transformation of the private ownership of the means of production was completed, the system of exploitation of man by man eliminated and the socialist system established. The people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants, which is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat, has been consolidated and developed. The Chinese people and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have thwarted aggression, sabotage and armed provocations by imperialists and hegemonists, safeguarded China’s national independence and security and strengthened its national defense. Major successes have been achieved in economic development. An independent and fairly comprehensive socialist system of industry has in the main been established. There has been a marked increase in agricultural production. Significant progress has been made in educational, scientific, cultural and other undertakings, and socialist ideological education has yielded noteworthy results. The living standards of the people have improved considerably. Both the victory of China’s new-democratic revolution and the successes of its socialist cause have been achieved by the Chinese people of all nationalities under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and by upholding truth, correcting errors and overcoming numerous difficulties and hardships.

The basic task of the nation in the years to come is to concentrate its effort on socialist modernization. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the guidance of Marxism- Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the Chinese people of all nationalities will continue to adhere to the people’s democratic dictatorship and follow the socialist road, steadily improve socialist institutions, develop socialist democracy, improve the socialist legal system and work hard and self-reliantly to modernize industry, agriculture, national defense and science and technology step by step to turn China into a socialist country with a high level of culture and democracy. The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated in our country. However, class struggle will continue to exist within certain limits for a long time to come. The Chinese people must fight against those forces and elements, both at home and abroad, that are hostile to China’s socialist system and try to undermine it.


One of China’s fast trains. The nation’s infrastructure is being rapidly modernized, while in most of the West, especially in America, the ruling private sector neglects public works and investments that benefit the masses.

China’s constitution clearly states that the Chinese people will govern themselves via their people’s democratic dictatorship. This dictatorship will guarantee the integrity of the People’s Republic of China as a socialist state. This simply means that China’s citizens invest in the CPC to represent them and act on their behalf. Among the Chinese, this faith in their central government to do the right thing, protect the citizens, their livelihoods and the country’s borders, is called the Heavenly Mandate. The Heavenly Mandate is a unique, sociopolitical concept that includes all previous emperors and dynasties, going back 5,000 years. The Heavenly Mandate stipulates that if the current Baba Beijing does not take care of the people’s business, it will be replaced with a new one.

The other key philosophy stated in China’s constitution is that the CPC is authorized to use dictatorial powers to vanquish any anti-revolutionary imperialists and hegemonists (Westerners) and fight the exploiting classes (meaning capitalists), both inside China (fifth column compradors) and outside China (Western empire), who are all trying to overthrow the CPC (via Western international institutions, NGOs and internal and external psyops/blackops subversion).

This unique, overriding sociopolitical, communist-socialist mandate is still true today, in spite of the Deng Era reforms. There is widespread, willful propaganda behind the Great Western Firewall to deny this anti-capitalist reality. Deng was a wily, masterful politician and charmer, and his diminutive body size disarmed his Western opponents, making them feel over-confident. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear and the Western empire began sharpening its knives, waiting to carve up and exploit China, just like it did for 110 years, from the 1840s’ Opium Wars until liberation in 1949. This period is known to the Chinese as the century of humiliation. But the real truth of Baba Beijing’s intentions was expressed by Deng, in 1982 that,


Mao’s image still presiding on Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace)

Chairman Mao did very good things. Many times he saved the Party and the state from crisis. Without him the Chinese people would, at the very least, have spent much more time groping in the dark. Chairman Mao’s greatest contribution was that he applied the principles of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, pointing the way to victory. It should be said that before the sixties or the late fifties many of his ideas brought us victories, and the fundamental principles he advanced were quite correct. He creatively applied Marxism-Leninism to every aspect of the Chinese revolution, and he had creative views on philosophy, political science, military science, literature and art, and so on… We won great victories for the revolution precisely because we adhered to Mao Zedong Thought… We will reaffirm that his contributions are primary and his mistakes secondary. We will adopt a realistic approach towards the mistakes he made late in life. We will continue to adhere to Mao Zedong Thought, which represents the correct part of Chairman Mao’s life. Not only did Mao Zedong Thought lead us to victory in the revolution in the past; it is — and will continue to be — a treasured possession of the Chinese Communist Party and of our country. That is why we will forever keep Chairman Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen Gate as a symbol of our country, and we will always remember him as a founder of our Party and state. Moreover, we will adhere to Mao Zedong Thought. We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin.

Best as I can tell, there is not much market oriented liberalism to tease out of Deng’s statement.

The world has now entered China’s third great modern era, President Xi Jinping’s, starting in 2013. Xi did not get a PhD in Marxism-Leninism, upon which is based Mao Zedong Thought, for nothing. He is mobilizing China’s people with his highly popular Chinese Dream, to achieve a moderately prosperous, socialist society, thereby rejecting mindless consumption. This is the antithesis of America’s gluttonous, greedy, self-centered me-ism.

The Chinese Dream also fully encompasses the goal of living in a clean and safe environment. Xi knows that all these capitalist adoptions in China have badly degraded the air, soil and water, as well as making it the world’s poster child for unsafe work conditions, as the Tianjin port explosion and numerous mining accidents can attest. Poll after poll shows that the people’s democratic dictatorship is clamoring for Green, Clean and Safe. If Baba Beijing does not address its citizens’ demands, it could quickly lose the Heavenly Mandate.



Tianjin port disaster

Baba Beijing will undoubtedly use the Tianjin port disaster as an administrative cudgel to push through more costly and stringent workplace safety legislation. The owners of the port storage company, Ruihai International Logistics, will surely face capital punishment or spend the rest of their lives behind bars. The fact that Ruihai is not a government owned company also gives Baba Beijing a powerful bully pulpit to tout the benefits of state owned enterprises, and they may use this tragedy to forcefully buy out privately held companies that are working in high risk fields.

A big sign that China is still communist-socialist is that Baba Beijing is going in the opposite direction of Western colonialism, by rolling out a massive, nationwide social security and retirement program for anyone living here, even foreigners, if they pay payroll taxes. This ambitious initiative also includes universal health care for everyone, especially children, the elderly and infirm. Meanwhile, the West is working furiously to dismantle its social and medical programs, or at the very least, making them much more expensive for its citizens, as well as looting many billions of dollars and euros from pension funds.

Xi Jinping and the CPC are also fully committed to bringing China’s 90 million poorest citizens out of extreme poverty, by 2030. This, while the West can’t defund and cancel fast enough what’s left of its sundered safety nets, for society’s most vulnerable. Xi is one of the world’s most powerful leaders. Yet, he regularly underscores this government mandate to the press and the people, even traveling to pockets of severe poverty, to drive home the point. The last US president who openly talked about poverty was Lyndon Johnson, and that was 50 years ago. As a country founded on communism and socialism, I’ve never heard a Chinese citizen complain about the less privileged taking what they should rightfully keep as “their own”. The idea that China’s worst off are economic leeches sucking off “hard working citizens” is unimaginable and repugnant here.

China is still very much communist, because every square meter of this country is owned collectively by the Chinese people, via the state. No one can buy the dirt under any piece of property. All one can do is have a long term lease, which by legislation, cannot exceed 70 years. For foreign businesses, this is quite acceptable, since there are very few capital investments, if any, that are not fully depreciated off the books in less than 50 years, most in 5-20 years.

Anybody on Planet Earth can invest in China’s real estate, but if you wish to keep it longer than 70 years, you will have to renew your lease contract and pay its going market value, to do so. This is what China’s constitution means that, “The socialist transformation of the private ownership of the means of production was completed”, meaning the entire country’s landmass was nationalized. Baba Beijing is continuing to try different ways of making the country’s land more productive, via creative laws and regulations, but it is still all collectively owned, every square millimeter.

The fact that China’s lands are collectively owned is suppressed behind the Great Western Firewall, because it is inconvenient that such an incredible, communist-socialist economic success story, is a proven fact. Only “private ownership” can assure the happiness and wellbeing of the people, or so goes the myth of Western capitalism, as peddled by Adam Smith and Francis Bacon. In reality, Smith and Bacon were only concerned with the prerogatives of the elite one percent.

China’s state sector, meaning government owned businesses, dominates the national economy, and its presence is being felt, more and more, across our Pale Blue Dot. There are 155,000 state owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, in every imaginable sector and industry. Their book value is US$17.4 trillion, more than America’s annual GDP. Since the 1990s, China has been and continues to adopt capitalist practices to make its SOEs perform better and be more transparent. A number of them are selling a portion of their ownership to the public, by listing shares on Chinese stock markets, keeping the vast majority of ownership in government hands, usually up to a 70% government-30% stock split. This sort of shareholder accountability has improved the performance of China’s SOEs, which is Baba Beijing’s goal.

Some of the bigger SOEs are splitting off sector specific businesses and then selling minority stakes in them on the stock market, to allow these new entities to focus their specialized energies, compete on the national and world stage. Conversely, other SOEs are being consolidated to become planet conquering giants, in the energy, commodities, transportation, infrastructure and communication sectors. Thirdly, SOEs are spending billions of dollars and euros all over the world, buying outright or investing in stock traded companies, to add to their bottom line, ironically now making them government owned under the SOE rubric.


China’s people’s democratic dictatorship owns US$17.4 trillion in assets, more than the United States’ annual GDP. Not being able to plunder and pillage all these resources causes Western capitalists and the political leaders they own, to foam at the mouth with covetous rage. Image by baidu.com)

The bigger they are, the more profitable they tend to be. On the capitalist sacred list, Fortune’s Global 500 Companies, http://fortune.com/global500/ China’s socialist behemoths are more and more competing head to head with the West’s most successful, stockholder corporations. In 2000, China only had 10 companies listed on this capitalist Holy Grail. By 2010, the count was up to 46 and this year, 99. Only 22 of these nearly 100 Chinese companies are majority shareholder owned. All the others are proudly flying the flag of China’s people’s democratic dictatorship.

How profitable are China’s government owned corporations? Last year, China’s 12 biggest SOEs on the Global 500 list made a combined total profit of US$201 billion. http://fortune.com/2015/07/22/china-glo ... ent-owned/ China’s democratic dictatorship owns the world’s largest petroleum company (SINOPEC- bigger than ExxonMobil, BP and Shell), the largest bank (ICBC- bigger than Citibank, HSBC and Bank of America), the largest utility business (State Grid- bigger than E.On and Eléctricité de France), the largest construction engineering firm (China State Construction Engineering- bigger than Bechtel and KBR), the largest railroad business (China Railway Engineering), the third largest telecomm outfit (China Telecommunications), the sixth biggest insurance group (China Life Insurance) and the tenth largest automobile manufacturer (SAIC). The Chinese people own four of the world’s Top Ten banks and two of the five largest petroleum concerns.


In 2014, US$201 billion in profits came from China’s 12 biggest state owned enterprises. China’s communist-socialist economic model scares the hell out of Western empire, since it offers an attractive and successful alternative to the West’s 1%-99% capitalist system of colonial exploitation and resource extraction. (Image by FRS)

The largest of these publicly owned SOEs are managed by the world’s wealthiest sovereign asset organization, China’s State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC). SASAC answers directly to the highest levels in Baba Beijing’s hierarchy, the State Council, which is headed by China’s Premier, Li Keqiang (#2, behind Xi Jinping). He is imminently qualified, having earned a law degree and a PhD in economics. SASAC keeps tabs on what are considered strategic sectors, which include aerospace, airlines, aluminum, architecture & design, automotive, aviation, banking, chemicals, coal, cotton, electronics, engineering, forestry, heavy equipment, gold, grain, heavy machinery, intelligence services, iron, materials, metallurgy, mining, non-ferrous metals, nuclear energy, ocean shipping, oil, pharmaceuticals, postal services, rail, salt, science and technology research, ship building, silk, steel, telecoms, travel and utilities. Most of these sectors are state monopolies or nearly so. http://www.sasac.gov.cn/

Other sectors that are state monopolies or dominated by SOEs are airports, arms and weapons, banks, dams/hydroelectricity, insurance, ports, tobacco, solar and wind power and toll roads and bridges.


The economic model that the West cannot bring itself to admit is truly succeeding. The hen on the left is state owned assets. China’s SOEs are represented by a successful boy, who is handing state income eggs to the country and its commonwealth: the people’s democratic dictatorship. (Image by cnsphoto.com).


The Western empire’s utter denial and arrogance towards China’s communist-socialist economic model were embarrassingly revealed recently, by a World Bank China Assessment report. In it, a couple of graphs were presented, showing that China’s FIRE sectors (finance-insurance-real estate) are essentially state monopolies. This admonition was termed as an insulting threat to Baba Beijing, as if China’s leaders and people don’t know what’s best for them. It stated that if China does not reform its financial sector, whose Western definition means selling off all state owned FIRE assets to the West, then trouble could lie ahead. It also derisively commented that all this state control is “making [China] an outlier by international standards”. http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newsbusin ... ina-report

Well, I should hope so, because China’s economy is communist-socialist, and not at all capitalist. This World Bank gaff of conceit was extirpated from the report a couple of weeks later, with the lame excuse that it had not been “adequately reviewed” before publication. The fact of the matter is, this was a classic Freudian slip, which accurately mirrors Western Empire’s true fears. Why? Because China’s economic performance has, since 1949, beaten the pants off of “unfettered, free market” America – by a long shot – and China’s superior communist-socialist model will increasingly outpace Western colonialism, as it slowly collapses into irrelevance.

This is what truly frightens Western colonialism to the quick. With the advent of China’s communism-socialism rising up as an alternative to the West’s 1%-99% system of exploitation and resource extraction, imperial propaganda has been relentless in brainwashing its citizens, to deny this model’s existence and discredit its many successful examples around the world.

Instead of America and the West being looked up to and admired as the model to adopt, China is rapidly taking center stage, to offer the world a different vision: revolutionary red communism-socialism. In fact, it is already happening. SOEs are popping up all across the world economy. In 2014, 23% of the Global 500 companies were SOEs, compared to only nine percent in 2005. This trend should continue into the 21st century, since China has shown that its economic model is clearly superior to Western colonialism. If Baba Beijing can bring the Chinese Dream to full fruition, by the stated goal of Year 2050, humanity just might have a chance to survive after all.

The next time someone starts regurgitating Randian, Chicago School, jungle capitalism tripe, hit back with the facts in this article and share its link We owe it to future generatons to bring down the Great Western Firewall and speak truth to power.


Going into the 21st century, the West’s colonial-imperial economic model is going to be seriously challenged by China’s model of communist-socialist state-owned enterprises (SOEs). (Image by infographic.com)

http://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/08/2 ... italism-2/

[blindpig]

The Class Nature of the Chinese State A critique of “China’s Long March to Capitalism”.
The Class Nature of the Chinese State

A critique of “China’s Long March to Capitalism”.


By H Khoo August 2008


In 1949 the Chinese revolution led to the formation of a workers state, which abolished landlordism and capitalism and established a planned economy that transformed the living conditions of the masses. Since 1978 the Chinese Communist Party adopted economic methods not used on a large scale since Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union. This policy fostered exploitation, created inequality and class polarization, but also led to the development of the productive forces and the working class.

China’s urban working class grew from 95 million in 1978 to 283 million in 2006, and the rural working class grew from 28 million to 173 million,[a] an overall rise of new workers of 333 million in 28 years. To put this in perspective; the working population of Europe is 219 million[1] and that of USA 145 million.[2] The formation of new class relations created both capitalists and workers, but it has been driven by the state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy.

Until the restoration of the capitalist economy and state in the 1990s Marxists characterized the Soviet Union as a ‘transitional society’. The victory of a series of counter-revolutions in democratic or nationalist garb in the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1989 onwards, made the question of ‘transitional’ societies less central to Marxist discussion. The issue appeared to have been settled by events.

China’s trajectory took a different path after the defeat of the Tiananmen Square movement in 1989, and the Chinese Communist Party remained firmly in command of society. Private and foreign owned sectors of the economy expanded steadily, billionaires formed at one pole of society and a slave trade at the other; this gave the appearance of the victory of primitive capitalism. Against this background the World Congress of the International Marxist Tendency approved a document titled ‘China’s Long March to Capitalism’. (CLMC) Normally national sections write their own analysis of perspectives, but in the absence of an affiliated group in China, the International Secretariat prepared this position paper on China for the World Congress.

Emphasis on the negative tendencies in China’s development and the apparent victory of the market, led many Marxists to overlook or minimize the relevance of conflicting processes. The contradictory and positive trends include; rising living standards for the majority, rising productivity and expansion of the means of production in the state sector, the increasing size, influence and strength of the working class, and 30 years of the fastest economic growth of any major country in world history.

CLMC correctly states that, “If we want to enter into a dialogue with workers, students, honest Communist Party members in China, we must make sure that our analysis corresponds to the real concrete situation. Therefore we must study all aspects of Chinese economy, society and politics.” (CLMC p25)

I have studied and written on Chinese affairs from a Marxist perspective for our tendency since 1989. From this I know that there are sufficient English language sources to produce accurate material that will enable us to enter into a dialogue with English speakers from China and participate in the debates taking place inside China. In the two years since CLMC was adopted, articles on China on Marxist.com based on the ideas proposed in CLMC have covered a range of topics including the Chinese Communist Party, Tibet, Chinese foreign economic investments and other issues. These articles led me to become more and more alarmed at the consequences of CLMC’s theses. I am now convinced that CLMC is an impediment to our influence in China and to the development of Marxist forces there.

China’s Long March to Capitalism claims that China is a capitalist economy and state. It is supposed to have arrived at this condition by gradual transformation from a planned economy and a bureaucratic workers state. It is asserted that the transformation was intelligently guided by the Communist Party leadership in a fashion similar to the way that the rulers of feudal Japan and Germany introduced capitalism at the turn of the 20th century. This is said to be why China has not suffered a collapse like that experienced in the USSR. According to this view China is a capitalist country ruled by a ruthless Communist Party. These ideas conveniently allow us to share and repeat the same views as mainstream intellectual opinion, China is capitalist, China is imperialist, China is a dictatorship, etc. but this does not result in accurate analysis.


This reply is divided into several parts, unfortunately CLMC contains so many errors, of fact, of logic, distortions of fact, conflicting and contradictory conceptual frames and errors of theoretical interpretation and perspectives that the reply is as long as the original and still only covers some of the problems.

This article will show:

1. That CLMC was poorly researched and contains elementary factual errors.

2. That misinformation forms the basis of CLMC’s arguments and theoretical system.

3. That the Chinese Communist Party and the ruling bureaucracy remain in essence a ruling caste i.e. the bureaucracy has not changed itself into a capitalist class.

4. That a creeping counter-revolution in property relations has not fundamentally changed the class character of the state.

5. That the Communist Party, the wider bureaucracy, and the army remain welded to state ownership of the means of production.

6. That the Chinese bourgeoisie is weak and is primarily composed of small sized petty bourgeois enterprises.

7. That the commanding heights of the economy and the banks remain in state hands.

8. That the balance of class forces is shifting towards the working class.

9. That the bureaucracy is splitting more and more into pro-capitalist or pro-worker and peasant.

10. That the new balance of class forces altered the repressive state apparatus providing greater opportunity for the workers and peasants to organize struggle.

11. That a significant section of the bureaucracy and the Communist Party are opposed to the threat of capitalist counter-revolution.

12. That increasing social differentiation is fostering militant and revolutionary movements, led by lower level cadres, many of whom will be open to the ideas and methods of Marxism.

No doubt some may think that dissecting the errors in CLMC is pedantry; capitalism’s victory in China seems to be self evident, China is dominated by markets, Chinese goods are for sale everywhere, almost every journalist, in print, radio, TV or on the Internet thinks China is capitalist, and ‘what is the main direction that China is heading?’ They ask.

The central question however, is not where China appears to be heading, (I shall show this is by no means as clear as it seems) but what are the main contradictions in its development? What is the relation of forces between the classes, castes and groups, how do these contradictions express themselves in the struggle of living forces? Has there been a counter-revolution that changed the class character of the Chinese state?

False analysis of China means incorrect analysis of the world. CLMC overturned the position that our tendency held on China for 57 years. CLMC provided evidence showing that capitalism conquered China and was accepted on that basis. Therefore I consider it expedient to prove that the evidence presented for CLMC fails to prove its case. Thus I hope that Marxists look again at the question of the class nature of the Chinese state, and study what is and where it is going, by investigating the dynamics and contradictions governing the fate of Chinese society. In this way we can enhance our understanding of the struggle for socialism and facilitate an informed dialogue with revolutionaries in China.

Some simple errors?
The misinformation in CLMC starts with the identification of the causes of the Chinese Revolution, it reads,
“The main reason why the Chinese Revolution took the form that it did was first of all the inability of US imperialism to intervene.” (My emphasis CLMC p1)

This is a most peculiar argument. US Imperialism backed China’s Nationalist forces and intervened with arms and support, a fact that Ted Grant specifically noted. “The American Imperialists intervened with huge supplies of arms, money and munitions, to aid the corrupt gang of Chiang Kai Shek”[3] It is true that US intervention was limited by the world situation, in particular the conflict with the USSR in Germany and Europe.[c] US General Marshall speculated that a complete colonial administration would have been the only way for the US to keep Mao’s army at bay in China.[d] However CLMC’s inverts the truth, the ‘main reason’ for the ‘form’ of the Chinese revolution was not external to China but internal, i.e. the strength of support for Mao’s Peoples’ Liberation Army and the weakness of Chinese capitalism. Here we have an error of fact and logic, alas it is not a lonely example in CLMC.

On p22 we read “ In 1991, 80,000 workers were killed in work accidents. By 2003 that figure had shot up to 440,000” Where is the source for the figure of 440,000 workplace deaths in 2003? In 2004 in an article on Marxist.com titled Capitalism means War on the Working Class the official figures on workplace deaths are provided, “79,422 workers were killed in 1991, 136,340 in 2003”,[4] The reference source for the figures that I provided was China Daily, unfortunately they misleadingly represented “industrial accidents” so as to include in this category, those killed in traffic accidents. The actual figures for industrial deaths are a small percentage of this. “More than 101,400 people died in workplace and transportation accidents last year, down 10 percent on 2006.”[5] Nobody claims that 440,000 workers were killed in China in 2003. Perhaps the authors confused the death figures with injury figures? If so, this just requires a simple correction with an explanation in brackets on Marxist.com.

A similar numerical error is found on p24, “In 2004 China received $54 Trillion in foreign investment.” This figure is nearly equal to Global GNP! This is so obviously false that no explanation is needed when amending trillion to billion.

As a minimum one would expect the editor of Marxist.com for the sake of accuracy to correct these errors forthwith, and to be honest with readers that these statements were simple errors of fact. Hopefully by the time you read this, this will have been done. Unfortunately there seems to be an inexplicable unwillingness to correct elementary errors when it comes to articles on China.[e] It is my belief that such a cavalier attitude to facts is damaging to the influence of the International Marxist Tendency.

In the past factual errors in a newspaper article were soon forgotten, but errors on the Internet remain until corrected. It is obvious that we cannot maintain such false information on our web site, facts aren’t changed by congress votes or editors scissors. Such errors make us look foolish; in the eyes of anyone who bothers to verify factual information by a search on the Internet, and ignorant; to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the history of the Chinese revolution or China today.

The State Apparatus and the Mandarins
“The Chinese state started off from the very first day that the Communist Party came to power as a deformed workers’ state. In actual fact the Communist Party inherited the old Mandarin state apparatus” (p20 CLMC)
No evidence is given for this statement and instead of proof we are given assertion and analogy. We are told that many Tsarist cadres were employed by the Soviet state, “especially in a backward country, the new state had to count on many of the old officials,” “In Russia” the document continues, the Soviets could “curb the conservative tendencies of this stratum. But in China that was not the case.” (p20 CLMC) In other words the document is stating that the Mandarin Bureaucracy asserted powerful influence in China immediately after Liberation in 1949. Some historians have tried to draw parallels with the style of Mao’s rule and that of the Mandarins; none have claimed that the apparatus of bureaucratic power was ‘inherited’ from the Mandarins. In a document adopted by the International one expects more respect for facts.

The Communist Party did not ‘inherit’ the Mandarin state apparatus; it created an entirely new state apparatus. The leading cadre of this state apparatus, formed during the Chinese Civil War, remained in control of the fate of China until the death of Deng Xiaoping. Of course as in Russia there were some people from the old state apparatus in positions of power for a time, but that has nothing to do with the formula ‘the Communist Party inherited the old Mandarin state apparatus’. Such statements will give readers the impression that the IMT has no knowledge of Chinese history. The Mandarin bureaucracy existed in China from 605 AD until 1905, during this time the selection of bureaucrats was based on imperial examinations. This no longer existed at the time of the Chinese revolution.

“The examination system was finally abolished in 1905 by the Qing dynasty in the midst of modernization attempts. The whole civil-service system as it had previously existed was overthrown along with the dynasty in 1911/12.”[6]

Even the administrative cadres of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Guomindang government left China en masse in 1948-9, over 2 million refugees left the Peoples Republic coming mainly from the business and administrative sectors of society. This republican bureaucracy abandoned the field and fled, due to their role in the civil war or their collaboration with the Japanese. The Maoists created their own national state apparatus because there was none. However this was not simply a replica of Russia, the Maoists had been in power of occupied zones for 22 years in advance of the seizure of national state power.

“Mao Zedong and the Chinese Stalinists formed a state in China in the image of Stalinist Russia - a monstrous bureaucratic caricature of a workers' state and therefore the Chinese Revolution of 1949 began where the Russian Revolution ended.” (p1 CLMC)


Although the Maoist state did take on the essential formations of Stalinist Russia there were important differences between the Chinese bureaucratic state and the Soviet one. The Maoists had an independent base having administered power over tens of millions of people in the “liberated zones” between 1929 and 1949. Whilst the basic characteristics of the Chinese bureaucracy were Stalinist, the differences have influenced the present divergent paths. It is essential to study these differences as well as the similarities in order to scientifically analyze the laws of motion of China’s economy, society and state.

A general formula that was essentially correct in the widest sense until the 1970s, in outlining the basic patterns of Stalinist development, becomes wrong when mechanically imposed on historical details and changing realities. After the USSR collapsed and China’s regime continued, did everything fit into formulas already worked out for the USSR? This is self evidently absurd as a method for studying China and even useless for a tiny island of Stalinism like Cuba.

Comrades do not start documents on Cuba with the formula ‘Castro formed the state in Cuba in the image of Stalinist Russia -a monstrous bureaucratic caricature of a workers’ state.’ We all know such an approach would be pure sectarianism and that our tendency would lose all influence in Cuba, surely it is just as damaging to deal with the Chinese revolution in such a fashion?


The Anatomy of the Chinese Bureaucracy.

Liu Bin Yan, former reporter for the People’s Daily wrote about the formation of the state from the pre-Liberation era. “The first order of business for the military was to gain an understanding of the situation in the new area and determine who were its potential enemies; to do this it was necessary to reorganise the people’s lives and issue new government decrees. In as much as officials of the previous regime were not to be trusted, activists willing to work for the new regime came to the assistance of the military and the party, and the most loyal and competent among them were recommended or appointed by military or party officials as local officials... the Chinese party established a system of control over a nation of one billion people based upon its experiences in military control, in which a given area might be abandoned at any time. It is not a complex system: political loyalty to the party is the prime consideration in appointing an official, far more important than abilities or cultural level; the reinstatement, promotion or demotion of an individual is invariably determined by how an official higher up feels about him, rather than by his character, morals, abilities, or achievements or by how the masses feel about him. The bureaucrats’ children often intermarry, establishing a blood relationship or what is called a kinship relationship. School ties and such things as the place of birth unite the bureaucracy together. If one man commits a crime, the network is mobilised to form a protective cloak around him; it is very effective. In 1957 Mao revealed that ‘there were at the time 1.8 million officials throughout China.’ There are now 27 million.” [7]

By 2007 the national bureaucracy of China was made up of some 40 million cadres, they are in charge of all aspects of the state bureaucratic machinery and administration. The broader ruling caste is composed of the following hierarchal command structure:

a. 2500 Ministers or above

b. 39,000 Prefecture Bureau chiefs

c. 466,000 leading cadres at county/division chief level or above

d. 15.3 million CCP cadres below county/division chief level--24.3 million non-CCP cadres below county/division chief level

e. 45.2 million rank and file party members[8]

The state apparatus at each level in the pyramid of power requires, the approval of those above, the acquiescence of those below, and the active support of lower level cadres. The entire apparatus requires the approval or at least acquiescence of the 45 million party rank and file. The majority of members of the CCP are normal workers and peasants holding no bureaucratic power or authority.

CLMC dedicates considerable space to the process that is supposed to have led to ‘capitalist restoration’. A potted history is presented that claims that the Deng faction of the bureaucracy were ‘capitalist roaders’ waiting in the wings under Mao. According to CLMC they gradually created the conditions and then the fact of a capitalist economy and society. The bureaucracy “never took a step backwards” and when “faced with moments of instability the process was slowed down but never reversed” (p12 CLMC)

In fact there were a series of zig-zags between 1989 and today. This is the ‘normal’ form of motion generated by contradictions in transitional societies - deformed workers states governed by a ruling bureaucracy. Immediately after Tiananmen there was a sharp reaction against capitalist penetration of the party, which was reversed after the Southern Tour by Deng Xiaoping in 1992, the trajectory continued in the rightward direction but at an even pace until the ascendancy of Hu Jintao in 2003. The leadership of the party has shifted to the left since 2003 under pressure from the underlying discontent amongst workers, peasants and lower levels of the bureaucracy.

CLMC claims that after the Tiananmen Square movement and the collapse of Stalinism elsewhere, “the Communist Party leadership decided to accelerate the process of ‘market reform’. They began to see capitalist restoration as the solution to their own crisis, but they were determined that the process would take place under the firm control of the bureaucracy. In essence this meant that the bureaucracy was preparing the ground to transform itself into a new capitalist class.” (my emphasis p13 CLMC)

This is the first time we encounter the central contention in CLMC that China’s bureaucracy is becoming a ‘new capitalist class’ through metamorphosis. This formulation is strikingly similar to the old theory of State Capitalism developed by Tony Cliff, whereby the bureaucracy of the USSR transformed “itself into a new capitalist class” in 1928. Ted Grant answered these theories clearly and succinctly:

“The state is the instrument of class rule, of coercion, a glorified policeman. But the policeman is not the ruling class. The policeman can become unbridled, can become bandits, but that does not convert them into a capitalist, feudal or slave-owning class” ... “the state is the apparatus of rule: it cannot itself be the class that rules”.[9]

As these texts are well known to us all, we can assume that the authors did not mean what they said, perhaps they meant that sections of the bureaucracy transformed themselves into capitalists, and that the bureaucracy has transformed itself into a capitalist bureaucracy. This will have required the transformation of the class foundations of the state apparatus.

The People’s Liberation Army as an Agency of the State Capitalist Bureaucracy

The “evidence” for the theory of State Capitalism by Tony Cliff was that economic changes in USSR in the 1920s brought huge inequality and increased the wealth of bureaucrats, “the army began to change fundamentally. From a workers’ army with bureaucratic deformations it became the armed body of the bureaucracy as a ruling class…”[10]

Unfortunately we encounter essentially the same argument in CLMC. “Today many of the sons and daughters of the bureaucrats have been transformed into owners of the means of production. Among this layer there is no desire to return to a nationalized planned economy. There is no material base for them to wish do so. They would resist any attempt to turn the clock back, and they would have the backing of the state. It is also worth noting that the tops of the army have also been transformed into owners of property. Thus the officer caste within ‘the armed bodies of men’ also has a material interest in the new property relations that have been established.” (my emphasis p20 CLMC)

There is no doubt that it is very significant and alarming that ‘many of the sons and daughters of the bureaucrats’ have become owners of means of production, and this is important for the formation of capitalist forces and the increasing class differentiation within the Chinese bureaucracy. However this fact, prepares the ground for the claim that the core of the state apparatus itself, i.e. the army officer caste, is now a capitalist officer caste, that the “tops of the army have also been transformed into property owners.”

If the tops of the army were capitalists this would certainly be powerful evidence that the Chinese state is capitalist. One wonders why such information is merely ‘worth noting’, surely it is decisive evidence for the capitalist bureaucracy case? But as in so many cases in CLMC no evidence is provided because none exists.

On the 2 July 1998 under Jiang Zemin the PLA was compelled to divest itself of participation in business. The Chinese Communist Party leaders knew that the commercial operations of the PLA from 1978 to 1998 spread corruption and capitalistic values and interests inside the army. If the PLA officer caste were to transform themselves into owners of the means of production this would jeopardize the rule of the Communist Party and the bureaucracy. At the Politburo on 22 July 1998 Jiang Zemin is reported to have said, “the military cannot run business any more or the tool of the proletarian dictatorship would be lost and the red colour of the socialist land would change”.[11]

Divestment was precisely intended to prevent the PLA officer caste from becoming instruments of capitalist interests after a series of high profile corruption cases were exposed. The process of divestment was supported by the leadership of the PLA and the party, and was largely completed by the year 2001. Neither military units nor individuals inside the military were allowed to hold onto enterprises, employees in military businesses had to leave the military to remain at work. Whilst there are some companies still operated by the PLA they are either in sensitive military sectors or involve subsistence activities.[12] The situation is the opposite of that described in CLMC. These matters are well documented, so this reveals that the evidence presented in CLMC was very poorly researched, furthermore our Congress has been misled into voting to accept the false argument that China’s military tops are now capitalists.


Following the severance of Soviet aid to Cuba the Cuban army studied PLA economic activities and emulated western business models, in fact the much of the Cuban economy is run by the Cuban Army. “According to an estimate cited from Cuban sources, by 1999 military enterprises accounted for ‘89 percent of exports, 59 percent of tourism revenue, 24 percent of productive service income, 60 percent of hard currency wholesale transactions, 66 percent of hard currency retail sales, and employ 20 percent of state workers.’”[13]

Military companies run luxury hotels, dominate foreign currency wholesale and retail transactions, which is at the very core of societal corruption in all Stalinist countries with non convertible currencies. This military involvement in economic activity certainly poses as much danger to the Cuban revolution as it used to in China![14] The forcible divestment of the military in China was a correct measure to take against the threat of counter-revolution. I assume that Marxists in Cuba would support similar divestment to ensure the army does not become the instrument of counter-revolution.

The Chinese State as the Mother of the Weak Bourgeoisie (Metamorphosis and other stories)

Having alleged that the bureaucracy was transforming “itself into a new capitalist class” the position shifts, and the state is portrayed as tenderly nurturing a bourgeois baby. Thus we read that, “in the process of capitalist transformation they haven’t yet developed a bourgeoisie that is capable of running major corporations on the scale of some of the American and Japanese multinationals, without the help of the state. The state will continue to play a key role for some time, but eventually a powerful bourgeoisie will emerge.” (p14 CLMC) No longer is the bureaucracy turning itself into a capitalist class, now the state is protecting and nurturing a weak capitalist class in a state capitalist incubator in preparation for fully grown adulthood when “a powerful bourgeoisie will emerge.” In CLMC this underdeveloped capitalist class is said to be controlling the direction of state policy, the tail is wagging the dog.

The idea proposed is that the CCP leaders are preparing the largest state industries to be handed over to the bourgeoisie at a later date. However here we return to a future tense in describing the present governing class formation, the bourgeoisie is presented as too weak to manage major companies. Surely if the bourgeoisie is too weak to manage a few companies, then taking hold of the Chinese state, an organization of far greater size, scope and influence, which includes the management of all major companies is an even bigger and more distant task?

The Chinese bureaucracy is presently in charge of companies like:

PetroChina 2nd World Market Capitalization

China Mobile 5th World Market Capitalization

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 6th World Market Capitalization[15]


If the bureaucracy was preparing in the 1990s to ‘transform itself into a new capitalist class’ why had this process not been completed 15 years later? There were clearly social forces and interests powerful enough to oppose ‘full’ capitalist restoration throughout this period. These forces have been able to limit the power of the capitalists on the one side, and capitalist forces have been insufficiently powerful to seize state power on the other.

If the state bureaucracy that runs the major corporations has transformed itself into a capitalists state, why should they be incapable of running these same major corporations as capitalist companies? Why does (or would?) a ‘powerful bourgeoisie’ need the Communist Party in power and a Stalinist state?

It is the contradiction in the balance of forces between the size, specific weight and influence of the proletariat and discontented peasants, on the one hand, and the interests, aspirations and weakness of the bourgeoisie on the other hand, that gives rise to the present structure of power, i.e. to the present balance of forces inside the party, bureaucracy and society.

Which class does the state represent now? CLMC states that the Chinese bourgeoisie is weak and thus the Stalinist state is needed to help it to grow strong, so that a powerful bourgeoisie will take control of the helm at some stage in the future, but surely this means that the bourgeoisie is not in control of the state now?

Again in relation to the assumption of ownership of Township Village Enterprises we are told “This is a perfect example of how old state-owned enterprises and the state-owned sector now serve the interests of capitalism in China, by nurturing and supporting the nascent bourgeois elements of society until they can assume ownership directly.” (p15 CLMC)

CLMC is actually saying that even in the villages, where petty production forms dominate, nascent bourgeois elements have not yet assumed ‘ownership directly’. It is therefore clear that the document proves the opposite of its intention; it shows the Chinese bourgeoisie is weak, so weak it cannot possibly manage the state or challenge the power of the Communist Party or the State bureaucracy.

“The bureaucracy in China does not want to become prey to imperialist domination. And they are not going to allow that to happen. They know they must maintain a strong Chinese capitalist sector and they are doing that by building up and actually strengthening some of the state companies. They have huge amounts of capital available. The state banks are being used to pump money into these state corporations.” (p15 CLMC)

This is an extraordinarily confused statement. In order to ‘maintain a strong private sector’, the state invests in…the state sector! And state banks lend almost exclusively to the state sector, presumably this is a cunning plot to make the ‘strong Chinese capitalist sector’ stronger by starving them of funds, after all you have to be cruel to be kind! If the state wants to strengthen the private sector why don’t state banks lend them money? These are facts that international capitalist advisors have harped on about for twenty years. The author of CLMC has the solution for these advisors; the state sector is in fact the private sector in metamorphosis. State banks, state industry, the Chinese Communist Party, the bureaucracy and the army are actually just the outer shell of a transparent pupa barely concealing ‘a strong private sector’ inside.

China’s State Owned Enterprises are not capitalist companies they are part of the public sector of the economy, even in capitalist countries there are such sectors. In any transitional society between Capitalism and Socialism, the instruments, forces and tendencies of the publicly owned sector of the economy do battle with the forces, instruments and tendencies of the individual, cooperative, private and foreign capitalist tendencies in economy.

This will be unavoidable even in transitional societies emerging from an advanced industrialized base. The poorer and more backward the starting point of the transitional economy the more protracted and dangerous the process of socialist accumulation is. The need for this struggle is not abolished even by complete nationalization such as was carried out in some former Stalinist states. In these countries the battle reflects itself in the black market, corruption and nepotism inherent in an economy governed by bureaucratic fiat in prices and dictat in planning.

If and when the Chinese SOEs, which own and control the commanding heights of the economy were privatized we could call them capitalist entities, but that is not the case now and there is no indication that it is the ‘intention’ of the bureaucracy that they will be privatized! The bureaucracy has been well served by living off the state; their material interests are bound up with the public ownership and control of the commanding heights. There have been privatizations of small and medium sized SOEs but the largest enterprises controlling the commanding heights of the economy remain in public hands. How are workers supposed to mobilize to defend state property behind a tendency that says that state firms are already capitalist?

The old forms of operation of SOEs have changed significantly, many of the benefits offered to the workers have been undermined but others have been enhanced. Wages and conditions in SOEs and the state sector as a whole have steadily improved. Wages in the state sector are equal to, or have outstripped those in the private sector,[16] when one takes welfare benefits, housing, pensions and social security into account, the total wage is far higher than in any of the private sectors.

We are told that these state companies are competing “on a capitalist basis.” In a capitalist world market how would a mobile phone company of a genuine workers’ state compete with the US and the Japanese etc. if not on a capitalist basis? Is there some sort of socialist technique for China Mobile to compete with the USA or Japan? If so, what is it? In the transitional epoch between capitalism and socialism, state companies inevitably compete “on a capitalist basis” in the world market, buying and selling on markets with the aim of increasing the wealth of the state sector, its technology, means of production, influence, market share and the productivity of labour.


In 1932 Trotsky explained the role of the market in a transitional society succinctly:

“The innumerable living participants in the economy, state and private, collective and individual, must serve notice of their needs and of their relative strength not only through the statistical determinations of plan commissions but by the direct pressure of supply and demand. The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realised through the market. The regulation of the market itself must depend upon the tendencies that are brought out through its mechanism. The blueprints produced by the departments must demonstrate their economic efficacy through commercial calculation. The system of the transitional economy is unthinkable without the control of the rouble. This presupposes, in its turn, that the rouble is at par. Without a firm monetary unit, commercial accounting can only increase the chaos.”[17]


Under Socialism governance by workers’ councils instead of the bureaucracy, determines what is done with the companies and their revenues, but where they sell on the market they sell “on a capitalist basis” i.e. on the basis of the socially necessary labour time determining the price. Although the state intervenes in the market to amend the influence of the law of value, the law of value is not abolished and neither are markets for goods and services. One of the main reasons for the sudden collapse of Eastern European economies was the non-convertibility of the currency, the miniscule participation on the world market and the lack of markets for goods and services. Of course under a transitional regime some barter arrangements might be made such as Cuba and Venezuela have implemented with the health and education for oil programs, but these arrangements are a sign of the weakness of Cuba not of its socialist nature.

Property Ownership and Production by the State

Bourgeois economists are very astute in pinpointing many failings of the Chinese economy, everything would be far better they say, if the Chinese Communist Party were to call elections and enact laws to adequately protect property. The dynamism of private entrepreneurs would reduce the inefficiency and wastage inherent in the one party dictatorship and presumably the economy under full blown capitalism, freed from all these constraints, would expand 5% or 10% more than now, at perhaps 20% a year or more!

With the collapse of Stalinism internationally from 1989 a caste of economists, consultants and advisors were engaged by universities, governments, companies, etc. to theorize the “transition to capitalism”. Their ideological foundation was the ‘Property Rights Theory’ whereby ownership is supposed to equate with efficiency and growth. However empirical evidence in China revealed that the theory that the establishment of clear ‘private property rights’ boosts economic expansion did not match the facts. Many of the economically successful mutations from SOEs and TVEs do not have clear property rights and leave ownership and control effectively in the hands of the state, city or township government. Nevertheless this ‘theory’ underpins almost every article, book, report, or analysis by journalists and academics about the ‘transition’ from around the world. Property Rights theorists remain uneasy with China’s transition precisely because there are no clearly anchored capitalist property relations, and state institutions for the defence, protection and expansion of capital accumulation remain weak.

Most experts agree that the Stalinist system that abolished private ownership of the banks, land, trade, services and industry, and operated under a centralized plan of production and distribution was socialism. For many the buying and selling of goods on the market constitutes capitalism. Thus China’s adoption of the market as the dominant means of distribution of goods and services is taken to mean China is making good headway in moving towards capitalism. In fact this corresponds with Trotsky’s concept of a transitional economy where: ‘The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realised through the market’. This was the dominant view of the Left Opposition to the Stalinist system of the centralized bureaucratic plan and to bureaucratic determination of prices and currency exchange. Of course having a market does not equal socialism, but equally a transitional society that abolishes the market is not socialism.

Thus one is confronted by a mass of literature and studies on China whose entire basis has a misleading foundation. Unfortunately Chinese Communist Party sources do not resolve matters as they often conceal more than they reveal, reflecting the conflict of tendencies inside the CCP and the Chinese state. In order to attract foreign investment the Chinese state organs have encouraged the view that they are open to capitalism, that they want a market economy, that they have all the legal guarantees you need to protect investments and so on. They have a stock market, shops full of goods, and all the trappings of normal capitalist countries. The logic of the majority of economists and experts is that China is capitalist - after all “if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and acts like a duck, it probably is a duck.” Marxists understand that if things are simply as they appear there would be no need for science. In the case of studying China this is an apposite dictum.

The Commanding Heights of the Economy - how large is the State Sector?

The role of China’s state owned enterprises causes confusion amongst pro-capitalist commentators. Most exaggerate the scale of the private sector. They say it is capitalism that is driving China’s economic growth; but the reality is that China expanded the production and productivity of its SOEs which remain at the core of the economy. This is in direct contradiction to Western economic theory, that only private ownership can foster rapid economic growth.


Total state employment expanded from 80 million in 1980 to 112 million in 1995, thereafter; state employment fell back to 76 million in 2001. Within state employment, SOEs reduced their staff levels dramatically from 76 million in 1995, to 39 million in 2001. However employment in state owned corporate units, rose by 12 million in the same period.[18] In 2006 the number of urban employees of the state was 64.3 million with an additional 19.2 million employed in Limited Liability Corporations, 7.4 million in State Holding Companies and 0.45 million in Joint Ventures which are all state owned and controlled units by another name. Taking these into consideration we arrive at a figure for urban employment in the public sector of 91.3 million, [19]a decline of over 20 million compared to 1995 but an increase relative to the 1980s.


SOEs and state owned units serve as the backbone, which allows the government’s to realize its economic development plans. Local governments administer 90% of SOEs, (157,000 in 2001) the State Council administers the remaining 10% of SOEs (17,000 in 2001) for the central government. Large SOEs themselves govern a myriad of subsidiaries. Local governments instruct SOEs directly or through industrial corporations. Since May 2003 the overall management of SOEs is under the State owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) and at national and local levels they are responsible for supervision and management of State Assets.[20] Enterprise groups were created in the 1990s spanning several industries and localities, “to supply key products, facilitate specialization in production, and to help coordinate economic activities among regions.”[21] Giant conglomerates were created by the central state and its agencies, 147 (2005) such SOE groups dominate the national economy.


CLMC relies heavily on a book called China’s Ownership Transformation for information on restoration; it provides figures to show “that already in 1988 the state controlled sector was down to 41% of GDP.” “But if we look at the overall Non-State sector, in 2003 it accounted for 66% of GDP” And the document concludes, "the private sector is now the dominant sector of the Chinese economy". It continues, "the share of the private sector is even larger if we take into account that a significant percentage of the collective farms are in effect privately controlled and that the private sector is in general more productive than the other sectors of the economy."

(CLMC p15)

Does this mean CLMC agrees with this assessment that the private sector is generally more productive than the other sectors of the economy? One would assume that no Marxist document would make such a statement without the qualification of explaining the distinction between the overall benefit to society of state owned enterprises, and the individual interests of capitalist enterprise owners. However a little later we read:


“We have to take this state sector into account, but we have to understand that now the private sector is the most dynamic part of the economy and the move towards capitalism has been consolidated.” (CLMC p23)


Why the private sector is the most ‘dynamic part’ of the economy is not explained? Let me assist, most private companies employ less than 10 workers; of course such tiny companies are more ‘dynamic’ than state owned companies that employ tens of thousands of workers. Such language as, ‘the private sector is the most dynamic part of the economy’ has no place in Marxist documents. To add to the confusion created by CLMC we read:


“China exports more than 50% of its GDP. It has very cheap labour costs and very modern means of production - i.e. very high levels of productivity.” (CLMC p23)


Does cheap labour and modern mean of production equal ‘very high levels of productivity’? Surely cheap labour is required to compete against countries whose productivity of labour is higher than China’s? If China has very high levels of productivity in general why are the majority of the toiling masses peasants? A few companies in China have ‘very high levels of productivity’ but overall China’s national average rate of productivity is very low, far, far behind advanced capitalist countries.


State owned units account for 32 per cent of urban employment, in the North East of China they account for 70 per cent of GDP. Heavy industry is dominated by state owned enterprises and the bulk of technology is concentrated in these enterprises.[f] Much of the decline of SOEs is due to their transformation in form. The state sector includes many shareholding companies, joint ownership companies, limited liability companies, foreign funded enterprises, collectives and township and village enterprises. In total state owned enterprises account for over half of industrial output. [g]

Private investment and thus private capitalists would exist in any healthy transitional society. Mixed enterprise formations are valuable means of exploiting capitalism to provide capital, technology and know-how for the state sector. This is how the matter was approached in the early years of the USSR under the New Economic Policy. This method of developing a transitional economy has been carried further in China and this experience holds valuable practical lessons both positive and negative for anyone serious about the problem of how a transitional society will develop towards Socialism in Africa, Latin America and most of Asia. The problem may be summarized as the economic exploitation of the capitalist sectors of the economy by the socialist sectors within the planned economy.[h]

If China were a healthy workers democracy the control of corruption and nepotism through the democratic supervision of management and administration would act as a constant check on the threat posed by these bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces to the workers’ state. In the absence of democratic control by the masses the bureaucracy reacts to threats posed by bourgeois forces, both inside and outside its ranks, by sharp turns, purges, arrests, executions etc. in order to preserve the rule of the bureaucracy as a whole. On the other side bourgeois forces penetrate the bureaucracy and gain powerful positions within the economy. This poses the danger that the bourgeoisie will seize control of the state and establish a society in its own image. It is my contention that China is not a capitalist state and capitalism has not yet been restored. However Chinese Communists are confronted by the real and growing threat of capitalist restoration. They would to well to heed Samuel Johnson’s maxim, ‘when you’re dining with the devil you need a long spoon’.

Social Welfare in SOEs today.


Large scale SOEs in China were like mini-states, enclosed cities or communities of their own. In the past they provided their staff with everything; from food to childcare, healthcare to housing, and even entertainment. You never needed to leave the SOE compound.


The 1980s was a period in which the ‘iron rice bowl’, universal provision by the SOE, was to be smashed and Western corporate structures emulated, the intention was that SOEs would become more productive and profitable.

Surplus workers were to be shifted off the books and employment found elsewhere, the revitalized SOEs were to expand their scale and penetration of the national and world market. This was to be carried out on the basis of importing technology and know-how from advanced capitalist corporations and by continued support from the government to ensure that local and national objectives of the state plan were met.


However, rather than eliminate the welfare system in the SOEs there has actually been an increase in spending on wages and welfare services such as housing, health, education for children and subsidized food for employees during the reform era. An OECD estimate in 2000 calculated 30 per cent of payroll costs were for welfare. SOEs provide free health care, run their own hospitals, provide free medicine, doctors visits and hospital care to employees, their children and retired workers. SOEs are liable for retired workers’ pensions and care, this bill normally constitutes the largest proportion of their social welfare budget.


These services continue to function within the SOEs with only minor tinkering in individual SOEs, i.e. some SOEs allow their hospitals or schools to provide services to the wider community or sell houses to employees at reduced prices. Housing provision by SOEs remains a central benefit for most state employees. Since 2001 the market has limited provision of new housing, building private housing aimed at the rich or the overseas market not at the masses. Home mortgages constitute only around 10 per cent of outstanding bank loans, thus a market collapse in housing can only have a limited impact on banking solvency.[22]


State Ownership of the Banks

In China three quarters of all bank loans go to SOEs,[23] and state owned banks or other publicly owned credit sources own over 98 per cent of the assets in the Chinese banking system.[24] The state banks offer cheap credit to the state sector and hardly any to the private sector, using the financial system as a means of controlling the capitalist sector of the economy. Most capitalist companies raise money from outside the banking system.

“The Chinese banking system, in effect acts as a giant redistributive mechanism to transfer savings from the private sector to finance the investment and social obligations of the state sector”[25]

Central government determination for bank funding of SOEs was replaced by bank based determination of funding in 1996, in addition equity markets were used as a means of raising revenue by selling minority stakes in SOEs to domestic and foreign investors. These investors are naturally not keen on high welfare budgets, but as they don’t control or own the companies they are made to ‘suffer’ if the company prioritizes welfare or state objectives rather than investors’ interests which is the rule rather than the exception. SOE managers treat bank loans as an automatic right not a commercial agreement, the state owns the banks, the Communist Party controls the banks and the SOEs, little or nothing has changed in the way banks fund SOEs.


The Communist Party uses the banks to ensure they serve the ‘Plan for National Economic and Social Development’ (currently the 11th Five-Year 2006-2010). As long as a manager does not steal funds, SOEs are allowed to accumulate unsustainable debts and managers are not removed when they arrange this. Managers bear no personal risk for borrowing and banks determine lending on advice of Government departments. These are hardly the characteristics of capitalist banks or companies. Bank lending in China resembles the European concept of grant funding rather than “normal” capitalist commercial operations.[26]


The Township Village Enterprises.


Rural Enterprises in China are composed of four forms of ownership: township, village, groups of households (in cooperatives or partnerships) and private, (employing no more than 8 people). The township and village enterprises TVEs are normally industrial businesses owned by the township (composed of about 3500 households) or the villages (about 200 households) - each community normally has several TVEs. The community government controls the enterprises.

During the Great Leap Forward the rural communes created enterprises to industrialize the countryside, in the 1970s agricultural mechanization saw such enterprises reemerge as repair shops, food processors, and sub-contractors to urban SOEs. During the Cultural Revolution township level collective companies, brigades or communes, traded or bartered sales and purchases, these were the embryos of the present Township Village Enterprises. In the 1980s TVEs were public sector companies that plugged a market gap to provide goods or services to needs outside of the urban planned sector of the economy. Village and township officials mobilized resources on a localized basis to meet rural demand.

This collectively owned sector grew rapidly - in 1978 there were 1.5 million such enterprises, by 1995 there were 22 million. In 1978 they employed 28 million people, by 1995 128 million. [27]TVEs account for nearly half of China’s exports.[28]

An estimated 800,000 TVEs had been privatized by 2002, free market enthusiasts trumpet this, as numerically it represents more than all rest of the world’s privatizations.[29] But this is hardly the victory for capitalism that is claimed, as the average size of a TVE is six people.[30] Ownership restructuring, as in SOEs has been implemented with workers, managers, townships and collectives all owning stakes in these enterprises. There is nothing in this that would be taboo in principle, even in a genuinely democratic transitional socialist state.


The legal status of TVE is defined as follows: “The assets of TVEs are the collective property of the rural residents of the township or village which runs the enterprise; the ownership rights over the enterprise assets should be exercised by the rural residents meeting (or congress) or a collective economic organization that represents the whole of rural residents of the township or village”[31]


From the 1990s TVEs began to change, from being collective or township property used for the development of local communities; some were simply ‘wearing a red hat’ using a collective legal status to gain preferential state benefits, loans etc, others were fully private companies. The ‘red hat’ was also used as protection in case the political climate changed. Private entrepreneurs appear to be far less confident of the CCP’s dedication to nurturing capitalists than the authors of CLMC.

“The International Finance Corporation (the private sector arm of the world bank) estimates that nearly half of the companies that call themselves collective should in fact be called private.”[32] There are no accurate up to date figures on the privatization of TVEs, power in the villages is in flux and property rights are insecure. Generally privatization means a mixture of ownership in which the township, village, manager and workers all own shares.

Private Companies in China


In the 1980s the private sector of the economy was restricted to individually owned enterprises, street vendors and very small-scale firms. These enterprises, known as getihu, were limited to a maximum of 8 workers including the boss, from 1988 more than 8 employees were allowed, but to this day the average workforce is only 10.


Unlike in the former USSR and Eastern Europe the private sector did not emerge from the privatization of the state sector of the economy, rather the private sector emerged from foreign investment and new start-ups. Private funds were raised almost entirely from outside the banking system and private sector savings enter the coffers of the state banks. Members of the Communist Party and the state bureaucracy who became private capitalists are not dominant, even though their theft and acquisition of state assets puts them in command of many of the most lucrative sectors of the private sector economy. They remain numerically and politically weak, and live in fear that their wealth will be challenged as criminally acquired property.


The private sector is dominated by small sized enterprises, only 5 per cent of private enterprises employ more than 500 and only 2% more than 1000 workers. Contrast this with the state sector where 80% of workers work in companies employing over 500 workers. The number of private companies rose from 90,000 in 1989 employing 1.4 million workers, to 3.6 million companies in 2004 employing 40 million workers. 74% of private companies originated as new start ups, 7% are privatized state owned companies, 8% are privatized rural collectives and 11% are privatized urban collectives. The average income of an entrepreneur is $6600 US per year (2002 figures) this gives an idea of the small scale of the overwhelming majority of private sector enterprises in China.[33]


Estimates of the size of the private sector vary enormously,

“A Beijing think tank reckons that the private sector contributes just over 60 per cent of GDP, counting TVEs and businesses with foreign investors (worth about 15 per cent). Yet the World Bank report in January 2003 put the share as low as a third.”[34] According to the OECD the private sector now generates between 57 per cent and 65 per cent of non farm GDP, depending on how it is measured.[35]

When dealing with China one has to recognize the vast discrepancies in the data which reflect the differing interpretations of the meaning ‘private’,’ state’ and ‘non-state’. The actual scale of the private sector is an issue of dispute.[j]

However this much is clear: the key industries and banks, which constitute the backbone of the economy are state owned, the commanding heights of the economy are in state hands. If the small and medium sized enterprises were state owned - and the largest companies and banks were privately owned, and the banks lent almost exclusively to large private companies - it is quite clear that China would be a capitalist economy even if the majority of workers worked in state owned companies. But this is the opposite of that which exists in China.

https://chinareporting.blogspot.com/200 ... ue_26.html

Much more to this

This is a pretty good piece despite the back-loading of Trotsky theory upon reality. In fact much here demolishes the obfuscations of present day neo-Trotskyists.

[blindpig]

Chinese bots target western spies in Asia
by Beria|Published April 13, 2018


Chinese bots target western spies in Asia. A most interesting development has occurred in the world of Western spies in Asia. The Chinese have outed 100’s possibly thousands of them via twitter bot attack.

Highly targeted, extremely accurate. They are all either gone protected or blocking bots 24/7.

In an unprecedented onslaught, regime changers have been targeted by bots marking them out as spies and sending them into a collective panic.

They know that this is them being marked out as spies at scale by a significant & capable opponent & they are scared witless with good reason. So it distracts them, unnerves them, marks them out but is their something more? Why is the PRC “open sourcing” their intel now?

Is it a message to the various Governments to up their game?

To clean up their patch or China will do it for them?

Or a retaliation by PRC for the resumed US/PRC hacking now that the truce has collapsed?

Chinese bots target western spies in Asia

Trade war related?

Either way, we doubt it will be the last move in this dance.

Assets active in subversion in the following countries and territories have been targeted.

Hong Kong
Singapore
Indonesia
Vietnam
Cambodia
Myanmar
Taiwan
Thailand
Malaysia
(We are still following up on reports from Philippines)

What is noticeable is the following, the scale, reach, breadth and accuracy.

Obviously there has been quite a bit of interest among foreigners who live and have businesses here.

We’ve canvassed around the media and tech and can’t find any false positives.

It’s a very specific cohort, being friendly with them doesn’t get you targeted, following them doesn’t get you targeted, nobody that supports Vietnam or those that stay well out of politics has had a beed put on them.

Only the particular assets involved in cut-out funding, propaganda, providing support for terrorism and subversion.



Can OSINT alone explain it? We think not.
Does the OPM breech or similar, perhaps at NED or Radio Free Asia have a role to play in this?

We think it may well do.

Why now? What’s next?
This is one of the question we will be trying to answer. How are the dynamics changing?

I wouldn’t like to have 1.3bn pissed off Chinese folk paint a crosshair on my back.

How do the new players and replenished federal funding affect the situation?

The US far right & European liberals work hand in hand here in regime change terrorism. Charles Murray & Steve Bannon alongside Tony Blair & Katrina Ven Den Heuvel. No left or right, just imperialism, eugenics & slaughter.

New Naratif is the latest 5Eyes regime change cover outfit in the region. They are linked to the terrorist Viet Tan group. Calvin Godfrey is involved. Illegal funding from UK spooks & 1%. Targets are Singapore & Indonesia among others. Keep an eye on them.

We will flesh this story out over the next week as we find out more.

https://revolutionaryintelligence.org/c ... s-in-asia/