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blindpig
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:03 pm

Reading Guide on China

The Nature of China
China: Capitalist or Socialist?
“Chapter 2: What is a Socialist Society”, Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union by Albert Szymanski, pages 13-35.
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/n ... d-flag.pdf
Chinese Revolution: Evaluating the 60 Years
http://www.cpim.org/content/chinese-rev ... g-60-years
Lessons of Chinese Revolution
http://cpim.org/content/lessons-chinese-revolution
Socialist Democracy with Chinese Characteristics
http://crisiscritique.org/wp-content/up ... ialism.pdf
Is China Communist?
https://philosophersforchange.org/2014/ ... communist/
“Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” by Domenico Losurdo, International Critical Thought, 2017, Volume 7, Issue Number 1, pages 15–31
https://twin.sci-hub.io/900db8f82416671 ... do2017.pdf
[Interview includes excerpts on China] Domenico Losurdo: ‘Liberalism, the fiercest enemy to our right to live free from want’
http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article2337
China 2013
https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/
Fidel Castro speaks about socialism and China in an interview, dated 2 January 1994, with the Italian newspaper, La Stampa
http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/ ... 40105.html
The above source is poorly formatted; the relevant excerpt can also be found here: http://not-a-dinner-party.blogspot.ca/2 ... alist.html
China’s path to a socialist democracy
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2012-10 ... 776253.htm
China: A Revolutionary Present
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opini ... -0015.html
China & Market Socialism: A Question of State & Revolution
https://return2source.wordpress.com/201 ... evolution/
From the Chinese Marxist viewpoint: an interview with Professor Deng Chundong
http://www.invent-the-future.org/2016/1 ... -chundong/
A Theory of China’s ‘Miracle’: Eight Principles of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy
https://monthlyreview.org/2017/01/01/a- ... s-miracle/
Is China Socialist?
https://communistuniversity.wordpress.c ... ociaslist/
For the Defense of China Against Counterrevolution, Imperialist Intervention and Dismemberment
http://liberationschool.org/for-the-def ... emberment/
Chinese Socialism and the Legacy of Maoism
https://lonelyhourreflections.wordpress ... of-maoism/
“So Called” Communist China
http://www.allchinareview.com/so-called ... ist-china/
Why China may not be ‘capitalist’: the Role of the State in Chinese Economic Development
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-chin ... 2012/05/31
The Myth of Chinese Capitalism
http://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/08/2 ... italism-2/
The Class Nature of the Chinese State A critique of “China’s Long March to Capitalism”
http://chinareporting.blogspot.ca/2009/ ... ue_26.html
Why China is not a capitalist country
https://sites.google.com/a/karlmarx.net ... istcountry
China: a weird beast
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/ ... ird-beast/
Chauvinism of Western Left towards China
It’s not China that should be feared, it’s the West
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/05/it-is ... he-west-3/
The Irrational, Racist Fear of China
https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/04 ... -of-china/
Before October: The Unbearable Romanticism of Western Marxism
https://mronline.org/2011/10/08/before- ... n-marxism/
Counterpoint: Debunking Myths About China
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/opini ... dli19.html
The role of the state in China

What is a socialist society?
“Chapter 2: What is a Socialist Society”, Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union by Albert Szymanski, pages 13-35.
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/n ... d-flag.pdf

The socialist state’s control over “bourgeois elements”
Held Hostage: Entrepreneurs Uneasy Over Chinese Government Inaction
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mitchfree/ ... 8020263de4
Why Do Chinese Billionaires Keep Ending Up in Prison?
https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... on/272633/
Some of China's richest and most powerful men have mysteriously vanished
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-china-bill ... story.html
Chinese entrepreneurs, unsettled, speak out for reform
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as ... c45981e9a8
China sends its billionaires a chilling message
https://www.ft.com/content/4335d364-e7d ... 2c54a7f539
Chinese billionaires and CEOs keep disappearing in ‘state-sanctioned abductions’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/busin ... 64896.html

State-owned enterprises
China state-owned enterprises chiefs face 50% salary cuts
http://www.ibtimes.com/china-state-owne ... rm-1664810
China’s state enterprises are not retreating but advancing
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/ ... -advancing
Reform of China’s ailing state-owned firms is emboldening them
https://www.economist.com/news/finance- ... re-overall
China’s Communist party writes itself into company law
https://www.ft.com/content/a4b28218-80d ... b903247afd
China’s Communist party seeks company control before reform
https://www.ft.com/content/31407684-810 ... b2513cb3ff
Communist Party asserts control over China Inc.
https://www.ft.com/content/29ee1750-a42 ... 5e6a7c98a2

Relationship with private corporations
China’s Special Economic Zones
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/nation/txt/2 ... 197576.htm
American genius is under attack from China
https://www.ft.com/content/e283773a-801 ... b903247afd
In China, Public-Private Partnerships are really Public-Public
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... lic-public
Nationalizing China
http://business.financialpost.com/opini ... 81dfde010f
China bans for-profit private schools in compulsory education program
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016- ... 811758.htm
Communist Party asserts control over China Inc.
https://www.ft.com/content/29ee1750-a42 ... 5e6a7c98a2

Control over foreign trade
China’s crackdown on its own companies has nothing to do with their financial health, economist says
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/01/china-i ... -says.html
Chinese crackdown on dealmakers reflects Xi power play
https://www.ft.com/content/ed900da6-769 ... a9d1bc9691
American genius under attack from China
https://www.ft.com/content/e283773a-801 ... b903247afd
China codifies crackdown on ‘irrational’ outbound investment
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... educe-risk
China to curb ‘irrational’ overseas Belt and Road investment
https://in.reuters.com/article/china-ec ... NKCN1AY1UF
Xi Jinping to China’s Private Sector: Go Home, The New Silk Road Is Not For You
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepar ... 22abf117fb

Relationship with NGOs
China’s NGO Law: Countering Western Soft Power and Subversion
https://journal-neo.org/2015/07/25/chin ... ubversion/
International NGOs' China operations hit by registration delays under new law
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china ... SKBN19S00V
Comparisons between China and capitalist states
Comparison with formerly socialist countries
Following overthrow of socialism in eastern Europe and central Asia, capitalism was restored which lead to millions of premature deaths due to the severe drop in living standards. If capitalism was indeed restored in China, we would expect to see a similar phenomenon. How does China compare with the regions that formerly part of the Soviet Union?
Eastern Europe has the largest population loss in modern history
http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2016/05/27/e ... n-history/
Full text: China's Progress in Poverty Reduction and Human Rights
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china ... 0210_2.htm
China’s achievement is literally the greatest in world economic history
http://ablog.typepad.com/keytrendsinglo ... ement.html

Comparison with India
India and China share similar histories of imperialist oppression and underdevelopment, population size, and conditions. India won its independence in 1947 and has pursued capitalist development; the People's Republic of China was established in 1949 and has pursued socialist development. Given the similarities between these two countries, it is illustrative to examine how they compare:
India and China: Rivals or potential partners in liberation?
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opini ... -0015.html
Quality of life: India vs. China
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/05 ... -vs-china/
China and India - 13 charts that show how the countries compare
https://www.theguardian.com/news/databl ... es-compare
World Bank: Poverty and Equity - India
http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/IND
World Bank: Poverty and Equity - China
http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/CHN

Economic growth and development
China’s socialist model outperforms capitalism
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1002098.shtml
Data shows China's 'socialist development model' outperformed capitalist development strategies
http://ablog.typepad.com/keytrendsinglo ... egies.html
Why did China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia grow so fast?
http://ablog.typepad.com/keytrendsinglo ... -fast.html
China is leaving Donald Trump’s America behind
https://www.ft.com/content/1ac0337c-947 ... 624cccbabe
China spends more on infrastructure than U.S. and Europe combined
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... e-combined
Visiting China shattered my biases about developing nations
https://qz.com/1036479/visiting-china-u ... countries/
What China can teach developing nations about building power
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/opin ... rises.html

Environment
China, U.S., and Global Warming (Four Part Series)
Part 1: Global warming, nuclear power and China
http://www.workers.org/2015/10/26/globa ... XUcUtPytsM
Part 2: China moves decisively on global warming
http://www.workers.org/2015/11/02/china ... XUczdPytsM
Part 3: Coal miners in crisis
http://www.workers.org/2016/03/21/china ... XUcN9PytsM
Part 4: What can be done about rising sea levels
http://www.workers.org/2016/04/12/what- ... XUcWtPytsM
Global Warming, Trump and China
http://www.workers.org/2017/01/11/globa ... XPe7tPytsP
European smog could be 27 times more toxic than air pollution in China
http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 72051.html
Renewable energy employment: How China and the U.S. measure up [infographic]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccar ... 455e042679
One city in China has more electric buses than all of America’s biggest cities have buses
https://qz.com/1169690/shenzhen-in-chin ... bus-fleet/

Quality of life and social services
U.S. vs. China: Whose income inequality is worse?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usa-china- ... -research/
China bans for-profit private schools in compulsory education program
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016- ... 811758.htm
China says health care access is a “basic human right”
https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... -0003.html
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017- ... 647997.htm

Police and prisons
China encourages civilians to film police to curb abuses
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/C ... -0009.html
Incarceration: U.S. incarcerates 5.87 times more people than China; U.S. prison population, (2.217 million) is over 500,000 greater than China’s which is (1.657 million), despite China having a total population over 5 times greater than the U.S.
2016 World Prison Population List, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, University of London:
http://prisonstudies.org/sites/default/ ... tion_0.pdf

Human rights
China issues report on US human rights
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1036861.shtml

Popularity of government and economic system
http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/05/23/cha ... onditions/
Highlights:
85% satisfied with direction of country (31% satisfied in U.S.)
88% think current economic situation is good (33% in U.S.)
82% say children will be better off than parents (33% in U.S.)
China leads world in optimism [87% see country headed in right direction]
In U.S. only 43% see country headed in right direction
Other nations view China more favorably than the U.S., survey shows
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/28/other-n ... shows.html

(& so on, plenty more at link)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16iw ... Coe6c/edit#
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 27, 2018 3:16 pm

HOME >> CHINA
Trial regulation urges workplaces to set Party branches
By Cao Siqi Source:Global Times Published: 2018/11/26 22:38:40

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Lu Zhengrong, Party chief of the CPC branch in Yaozhuang township, Zhejiang Province, organizes members to study the new CPC Constitution. Photo: IC
China has released a trial regulation requiring workplaces and farmers' organizations to establish branches of the Communist Party of China (CPC) as part of efforts to consolidate the organizational foundation of the Party's long-term governance.

The regulation was reviewed by the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in September and recently distributed to local governments.

The regulation states that enterprises, villages, government institutions, schools, research institutes, communities, social organizations, and other grass-roots units should establish a Party branch if they have more than three CPC members.

It also requires promoting a wider coverage of Party organizations and work. For example, it asks large-scale and cross-regional farmers' organizations, markets, commercial districts and commercial buildings to establish a Party branch.

The formulation and implementation of the regulations is very important for promoting the strict management of the Party in the grass-roots, strengthening the political function of the Party branch, and consolidating the organizational foundation of the Party's long-term governance.

"The regulation aims to help Party members find the organization whenever they switch jobs or places," Cai Zhiqiang, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee in Beijing, told the Global Times on Monday.

Establishing a Party branch in economic sectors such as workplaces or farmers' organizations is not meant to interfere in economic activities or their management structures, but to help convey and implement the central government's policies, Cai stressed.

Businesses with different types of ownership are also an important part of the socialist economy and Party members, whose stricter disciplinary requirements and advanced nature, could better help build the enterprise culture, he said.

The regulation said that Party branches in different fields, in light of actual conditions, each bear different priorities.

The Party branches of State-owned enterprises and collective enterprises shall supervise the implementation of Party and government policies, participate in the decision-making of major issues of enterprises and build corporate culture to create high performance.

Party branches in non-public economic organizations shall guide and supervise the enterprises to strictly abide by national laws and regulations, unite the staff members, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of all parties and build an advanced culture to promote the sound development of enterprises.

In rural areas, Party branches will play an important role in uniting all resources to help local people break out of poverty, Cai noted.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/11291 ... yE.twitter
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 06, 2018 2:47 pm

China & Market Socialism: A Question of State & Revolution
MAY 20

Posted by vincesherman

Deng Xiaoping: A People's Hero
Image

After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the socialist countries tragically fell to the onslaught of Western imperialism. Among the horrific blows dealt to the international communist movement, five socialist states resisted the tide of counterrevolution and, against all odds, maintain actually existing socialism in the 21st century.

Though each face very specific obstacles in building socialism, these five countries–the Republic of Cuba, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the People’s Republic of China–stand as a challenge to the goliath of Western imperialist hegemony. Among them, however, China stands unique as a socialist country whose economic growth continues to supersede even the most powerful imperialist countries.

Though an embarrassing number of Western “left” groups challenge the designation of any of these five countries as socialist, no country raises greater opposition than China. Many Western “left” groups claim that modern China is a full-fledged capitalist country. Owing their ideological heritage to bogus theoreticians like Leon Trotsky, Tony Cliffe, and Hal Draper, some groups argue that China was never a socialist country, claiming instead that the Chinese state is and has been state capitalist.

I counter their outrageous reactionary assertions with six theses:

First, Chinese market socialism is a method of resolving the primary contradiction facing socialist construction in China: backwards productive forces.

Second, market socialism in China is a Marxist-Leninist tool that is important to socialist construction.

Third, the Chinese Communist Party’s continued leadership and control of China’s market economy is central to Chinese socialism.

Fourth, Chinese socialism has catapulted a workers state to previously unknown economic heights.

Fifth, the successful elevation of China as a modern industrial economy has laid the basis for ‘higher’ forms of socialist economic organization.

And sixth, China applies market socialism to its relations with the Third World and plays a major role in the fight against imperialism.

From these six theses, I draw the conclusion that Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century should rigorously study the successes of Chinese socialism. After all, if China is a socialist country, its ascension as the premiere world economic power demands the attention of every serious revolutionary, especially insofar as the daunting task of socialist construction in the Third World is concerned.

Market socialism is a method of resolving the primary contradiction facing socialist construction in China: backwards productive forces.


Comrade Deng Xiaoping

The Chinese revolution in 1949 was a tremendous achievement for the international communist movement. Led by Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) immediately charted a course of socialist reconstruction in an economy ravaged by centuries of dynastic feudalism and imperial subjugation from both Europe and Japan. The CCP launched incredible campaigns designed at engaging the masses in constructing socialism and building an economy that could meet the needs of China’s giant population. One can never overstate the incredible achievements of the Chinese masses during this period, in which the average life expectancy in China rose from 35 years in 1949 to 63 years by Mao’s death in 1976. (1)

Despite the vast social benefits brought about by the revolution, China’s productive forces remained grossly underdeveloped and left the country vulnerable to famines and other natural disasters. Uneven development persisted between the countryside and the cities, and the Sino-Soviet split cut China off from the rest of the socialist bloc. These serious obstacles led the CCP, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm, to identify China’s underdeveloped productive forces as the primary contradiction facing socialist construction. In a March 1979 speech at a CCP forum entitled “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles,” Deng outlines the two features of this contradiction:

First, we are starting from a weak base. The damage inflicted over a long period by the forces of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism reduced China to a state of poverty and backwardness. (2)

While he grants that “since the founding of the People’s Republic we have achieved signal successes in economic construction, established a fairly comprehensive industrial system,” Deng reiterates that China is nevertheless “one of the world’s poor countries.” (2)

The second feature of this contradiction is that China has “a large population but not enough arable land.” Deng explains the severity of this contradiction:

When production is insufficiently developed, it poses serious problems with regard to food, education and employment. We must greatly increase our efforts in family planning; but even if the population does not grow for a number of years, we will still have a population problem for a certain period. Our vast territory and rich natural resources are big assets. But many of these resources have not yet been surveyed and exploited, so they do not constitute actual means of production. Despite China’s vast territory, the amount of arable land is limited, and neither this fact nor the fact that we have a large, mostly peasant population can be easily changed. (2)

Unlike industrialized Western countries, the primary contradiction facing China was not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie–the proletariat and its party had already overthrown the bourgeoisie in the 1949 revolution–but rather between China’s enormous population and its underdeveloped productive forces. While well-intended and ambitious, campaigns like the Great Leap Forward would continue to fall short of raising the Chinese masses out of poverty without revolutionizing the country’s productive forces.

From this contradiction, Deng proposed a policy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or market socialism.

After Mao’s death in 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution a year later, the CCP ,under the leadership of Chairman Deng Xiaoping, launched an aggressive campaign of modernizing the underdeveloped productive forces in China. Known as the four modernizations–economic, agricultural, scientific & technological, and defensive–the CCP began experimenting with models for achieving these revolutionary changes.

Modernization wasn’t something extraneous to socialist construction in China. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward and the turbulent unrest of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP understood that building lasting socialism required a modernized industrial base. Without such a base, the Chinese masses would continue to live at the mercy of natural disasters and imperialist manipulation. Deng outlined this goal in an October 1978 speech before the Ninth National Congress of Chinese Trade Unions:

The Central Committee points out that this is a great revolution in which China’s economic and technological backwardness will be overcome and the dictatorship of the proletariat further consolidated. (3)

Deng continues by describing the necessity of re-examining China’s method of economic organization:

Since its goal is to transform the present backward state of our productive forces, it inevitably entails many changes in the relations of production, the superstructure and the forms of management in industrial and agricultural enterprises, as well as changes in the state administration over these enterprises so as to meet the needs of modern large-scale production. To accelerate economic growth it is essential to increase the degree of specialization of enterprises, to raise the technical level of all personnel significantly and train and evaluate them carefully, to greatly improve economic accounting in the enterprises, and to raise labour productivity and rates of profit to much higher levels.

Therefore, it is essential to carry out major reforms in the various branches of the economy with respect to their structure and organization as well as to their technology. The long-term interests of the whole nation hinge on these reforms, without which we cannot overcome the present backwardness of our production technology and management. (3)

These proposed reforms launched market socialism in China. Beginning with the division of the Great Leap Forward-era People’s Communes into smaller private plots of land, market socialism was first applied to China’s agricultural sector to boost food production. From the 1980s to around 1992, the Chinese state delegated greater authority to local governments and converted some small and medium sized industries into businesses, who were subject to regulations and direction from the CCP.

Since the implementation of market socialism, China has experienced unprecedented economic expansion, growing faster than every other economy in the world. Deng’s market socialism decisively lifted the Chinese masses out of systemic poverty and established the country as an economic giant whose power arguably exceeds the largest imperialist economies of the West.

Market socialism in China is a Marxist-Leninist tool that is important to socialist construction.

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Lenin's New Economic Policy has a lot in common with Deng's market socialism

While Deng’s concept and implementation of market socialism is a significant contribution to Marxism-Leninism, it’s not without precedent. Proletarian revolution has historically broken out in the countries where the chains of imperialism are the weakest. One of the uniting characteristics of these countries is backwards productive forces; underdeveloped because of decades of colonial and imperial subjugation. Far from the first instance of communists using markets to lay an industrial foundation for socialism, China’s market socialism has its roots in the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the Bolsheviks.

Facing similar levels of underdevelopment and social unrest, the Bolsheviks implemented the NEP, which allowed small business owners and peasants to sell commodities on a limited market. Designed and implemented by Lenin in 1921, the NEP was the successor to Trotsky’s policy of war communism, which prioritized militarizing agricultural and industrial production to combat the reactionary White forces. Because of their economically backward material conditions, peasants overwhelmingly resisted war communism, which resulted in food shortages for the Red Army. Correctly perceiving the importance of forging a strong alliance between the peasantry and the urban working class, Lenin crafted the NEP as a means of modernizing Russia’s rural countryside through market mechanisms.

In a piece explaining the role of trade unions in the NEP, Lenin succinctly describes the essence of the concept that Deng would later call ‘market socialism’:

The New Economic Policy introduces a number of important changes in the position of the proletariat and, consequently, in that of the trade unions. The great bulk of the means of production in industry and the transport system remains in the hands of the proletarian state. This, together with the nationalisation of the land, shows that the New Economic Policy does not change the nature of the workers’ state, although it does substantially alter the methods and forms of socialist development for it permits of economic rivalry between socialism, which is now being built, and capitalism, which is trying to revive by supplying the needs of the vast masses of the peasantry through the medium of the market. (4)

Do not neglect the gravity of Lenin’s words in this passage. He acknowledges that the introduction of markets into the Soviet economy does nothing to fundamentally alter the proletarian character of the state. More provocatively, however, is his characterization of the Soviet economy as an “economic rivalry between socialism, which is now being built, and capitalism.” (4) According to Lenin, capitalist relations of production can exist within and compete with socialism without changing the class orientation of a proletarian state.

Recall that Deng argued that market socialism was essential to modernizing China’s productive forces and consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin would have agreed wholeheartedly with Deng’s assessment, as articulated in an April 1921 article entitled “The Tax in Kind.” Lenin writes:

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries). (5)

The ideological roots of Deng’s market socialism go back farther than Lenin, however. In an August 1980 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, she asks Deng if market reforms in rural areas “put in discussion communism itself?” Deng responds:

According to Marx, socialism is the first stage of communism and it covers a very long historical period in which we must practise the principle “to each according to his work” and combine the interests of the state, the collective and the individual, for only thus can we arouse people’s enthusiasm for labour and develop socialist production. At the higher stage of communism, when the productive forces will be greatly developed and the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” will be practised, personal interests will be acknowledged still more and more personal needs will be satisfied. (6)

Deng’s answer is a reference to Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx describes the process of socialist construction in terms of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ stages:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it.



But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. (7)

Agree with market socialism or don’t, but the facts are in:

Fact: Market socialism is in accordance with Marxism-Leninism.

Fact: Lenin’s view is that markets and some capitalist relations of production do not fundamentally alter the proletarian class character of a socialist state.

Fact: Lenin believed that countries could build socialism through the use of markets.

Fact: The principle that informs Deng’s market socialism–“to each according to his work”–comes directly from Marx.

The Chinese Communist Party’s continued leadership and control of China’s market economy is central to Chinese socialism.

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The 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

Western commentators have predicted that China’s market reforms would lead to the downfall of the CCP since Deng announced market socialism in the late 1970s. These same commentators have repeated this claim for the last 30 years and are constantly proven wrong as China lifts itself out of poverty with the CCP at the helm. Market reforms have not altered the fundamental socialist underpinnings of Chinese society because the masses and their party continue to rule China.

The so-called ‘privatization’ of small and medium-sized state industries in the mid-1990s and early 2000’s provoked an outcry from Western ‘leftists’, claiming that this represented the final victory of capitalism in China. But since ‘left’ groups are so often subject to bickering over obscure definitions and irrelevant (but no less verbose!) debates about distant historical questions, let’s see what the capitalists themselves have to say about ‘privatization’ in China. In a May 2009, Derrick Scissors of the Heritage Foundation lays the issue to rest in an article called “Liberalization in Reverse.” He writes:

Examining what companies are truly private is important because privatization is often confused with the spreading out of shareholding and the sale of minority stakes. In China, 100 percent state ownership is often diluted by the division of ownership into shares, some of which are made available to nonstate actors, such as foreign companies or other private investors. Nearly two-thirds of the state-owned enterprises and subsidiaries in China have undertaken such changes, leading some foreign observers to relabel these firms as “nonstate” or even “private.” But this reclassification is incorrect. The sale of stock does nothing by itself to alter state control: dozens of enterprises are no less state controlled simply because they are listed on foreign stock exchanges. As a practical matter, three-quarters of the roughly 1,500 companies listed as domestic stocks are still state owned. (8)

While the so-called ‘privatization’ process of allows some private ownership, whether domestic or foreign, Scissors makes clear that this is a far cry from real privatization, as occurs in the United States and other capitalist countries. The state, headed by the CCP, retains a majority stake in the company and guides the company’s path.

More striking are the industries that remain firmly under state control, which are those industries most essential to the welfare of the Chinese masses. Scissors continues:

No matter their shareholding structure, all national corporations in the sectors that make up the core of the Chinese economy are required by law to be owned or controlled by the state. These sectors include power generation and distribution; oil, coal, petrochemicals, and natural gas; telecommunications; armaments; Aviation and shipping; machinery and automobile production; information technologies; construction; and the production of iron, steel, and nonferrous metals. The railroads, grain distribution, and insurance are also dominated by the state, even if no official edict says so. (8)

No capitalist country in the history of the world has ever had state control over all of these industries. In countries like the United States or France, certain industries like railroads and health insurance may have state ownership, but it falls drastically short of dominating the industry. The importance of this widespread state ownership is that the essential aspects of the Chinese economy are run by the state headed by a party whose orientation is towards the working class and peasantry.

Particularly damaging to the China-as-state-capitalist argument is the status of banks and the Chinese financial system. Scissors elaborates:

the state exercises control over most of the rest of the economy through the financial system, especially the banks. By the end of 2008, outstanding loans amounted to almost $5 trillion, and annual loan growth was almost 19 percent and accelerating; lending, in other words, is probably China’s principal economic force. The Chinese state owns all the large financial institutions, the People’s Bank of China assigns them loan quotas every year, and lending is directed according to the state’s priorities. (8)

The People’s Bank of China (PBC) highlights one of the most important ways in which the CCP uses the market system to control private capital and subordinate it to socialism. Far from functioning as a capitalist national bank, which prioritizes facilitating the accumulation of capital by the bourgeoisie, “this system frustrates private borrowers.” (8) The CCP floods the market with public bonds, which has a crowding-out effect on private corporate bonds that firms use to raise independent capital. By harnessing supply and demand in the bond market, the PBC prevents private firms, domestic or foreign, from accumulating capital independently of socialist management.

Although modern China has an expansive market system, the CCP uses the market to both secure and advance socialism. Rather than privatizing major industries, as is often alleged by detractors, the state maintains a vibrant system of socialist public ownership that prevents the rise of an independent bourgeoisie. Deng talked specifically about this very deliberate system in the same interview with Fallaci:

No matter to what degree we open up to the outside world and admit foreign capital, its relative magnitude will be small and it can’t affect our system of socialist public ownership of the means of production. Absorbing foreign capital and technology and even allowing foreigners to construct plants in China can only play a complementary role to our effort to develop the productive forces in a socialist society. (6)

Western analysts seem to believe that the CCP has accomplished this goal. The capitalist Australia-based Center for Independent Studies (CIS) published a July 2008 article that says that those who think that China is becoming a capitalist country “misunderstand the structure of the Chinese economy, which largely remains a state-dominated system rather than a free-market one.” (9) The article elaborates:

By strategically controlling economic resources and remaining the primary dispenser of economic opportunity and success in Chinese society, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is building institutions and supporters that seem to be entrenching the Party’s monopoly on power. Indeed, in many ways, reforms and the country’s economic growth have actually enhanced the CCP’s ability to remain in power. Rather than being swept away by change, the CCP is in many ways its agent and beneficiary. (9)

While the CIS goes on to cry crocodile tears about the lack of economic and political freedoms in China, Marxist-Leninists read between the lines and know the truth: China isn’t capitalist, the CCP isn’t pursuing capitalist development, and market socialism has succeeded in laying the material foundation for ‘higher socialism’.

Chinese socialism has catapulted a workers state to previously unknown economic heights.



While the Great Leap Forward was an ambitious attempt at laying the industrial foundation necessary to build socialism, the facts are in: China’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1960, after the GLF, was $68.371 billion. (10) In 2009, China’s GDP sits just under $5 trillion, making it the second largest economy in the world. (11) In other words, the modern Chinese economy is about 73 times the size of its economy following the Great Leap Forward, which was previously the largest socialist economic overhaul in Chinese history.

The cruel irony of Chinese socialism is that the bulk of its international admirers are not ‘leftists’, but rather capitalists. Far from approving of socialism, these capitalists are in awe of China’s manipulation of markets to build a thriving modern society without resorting to free markets. They hate China’s accomplishments and its socialist path, but they cannot deny its thriving success. Even Scissors acknowledges in the same Heritage Foundation article that, “between June 2002 and June 2008, China’s GDP more than tripled and its exports more than quadrupled.” (8)

China’s incredible GDP growth is of vital importance to socialism. Scissors continues:

This rapid GDP growth has created jobs: by the end of June 2008, the unemployment rate among registered urban voters was a mere four percent — even lower than the government’s ambitious target of 4.5 percent. That figure may understate true joblessness by ignoring rural and unregistered urban employment, but it accurately reflects trends in the broader job situation. So many migrant workers from rural areas were absorbed into the urban labor force that the 20 million such workers reported to have lost their jobs in late 2008 still left well over 100 million rural migrants with jobs in cities. (8)

That China can essentially guarantee full employment for workers highlights another way in which the CCP uses markets to advance socialism. In addition to achieving de facto full employment, “Urban wages have climbed significantly, by 18 percent between 2007 and 2008,” representing serious material gains for the Chinese working class. (8)

Unlike the dispossessed masses of capitalist countries, the Chinese masses are consistently more satisfied with and favorable to their own nation’s economy. A July 2008 study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project polled a diverse cross section of people in 24 developed countries, including China prior to the Beijing Olympics. Pew’s findings confirm the popularity of market socialism among the Chinese masses:

“As they eagerly await the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese people express extraordinary levels of satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation’s economy. With more than eight-in-ten having a positive view of both, China ranks number one among 24 countries on both measures in the 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project.” (12)

Incidentally, Pew finds that “Chinese satisfaction with these aspects of life has improved only modestly over the past six years, despite the dramatic increase in positive ratings of national conditions and the economy.” (12) While the Chinese masses celebrate the recent dramatic increase in the nation’s standard of living, the longevity of their satisfaction reflects a deeper relationship with the state.

Among Pew’s most interesting findings was the level of people in China concerned with growing income inequality. While inequality is a chief concern for the dispossessed masses in capitalist countries, the wealthy are not concerned with income inequality at all, as it constitutes the cornerstone of their class. The Chinese masses, however, respond to this critical concern very differently. Pew finds:

“About nine-in-ten (89%) identify the gap between rich and poor as a major problem and 41% cite it as a very big problem. Worries about inequality are common among rich and poor, old and young, and men and women, as well as the college-educated and those with less education. In that regard, despite economic growth, concerns about unemployment and conditions for workers are extensive, with 68% and 56% reporting these as big problems, respectively.” (12)

The universality of concerns about income inequality, concerning even wealthier citizens, demonstrates the continued supremacy of socialist values in China. Cultural norms and values arise from the material conditions and relations of production. If China was a capitalist country, the widespread prevalence of socialist values–cutting across income levels–would not exist. To contend otherwise is to abandon a materialist analysis of culture.

The successful elevation of China as a modern industrial economy has laid the basis for ‘higher’ forms of socialist economic organization.


Chinese workers standing up for socialism and striking at a Toyota factory

The market is not a mode of production; rather, the market is a form of economic organization. Deng explains this distinction well in a lecture series he gave in 1992. He states:

The proportion of planning to market forces is not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too. Planning and market forces are both means of controlling economic activity. (13)

Markets are neither capitalist nor socialist, just as economic planning is neither capitalist nor socialist. Both of these forms of economic organization are just tools in the toolbox, and in some situations, markets are a useful tool for socialist construction.

For 30 years, the CCP has successfully used markets as a tool for revolutionizing the country’s productive forces. Precisely because of this success, the state is rapidly moving towards more advanced forms of socialist industrial organization to replace the market mechanism.

Market socialism was first implemented in the agricultural industry with the same aim as Lenin’s NEP: to aggressively expand and modernize food production. However, the CCP introduced markets as a tool to build socialism, rather than as a permanent functioning mode of economic organization. This is a very important distinction because it means that Deng and the CCP viewed market reforms as a transient form of ‘lower socialism’, to borrow a term from Marx, that they would replace with collectivized agriculture after the material conditions changed. Deng explains this in a talk delivered to the Central Committee in May 1980. Entitled “On Questions of Rural Policy,” Deng addresses concerns about contemporary market reforms to the agricultural sector:

It is certain that as long as production expands, division of labour increases and the commodity economy develops, lower forms of collectivization in the countryside will develop into higher forms and the collective economy will acquire a firmer basis. The key task is to expand the productive forces and thereby create conditions for the further development of collectivization. (14)

Deng understood that building a socialist agricultural economy capable of meeting the needs of China’s enormous population required developing the productive forces in the countryside, which markets could accomplish. Only after revolutionizing the productive forces of the entire country could the material basis for a full-scale collective economy–‘higher socialism’–exist.

Mao said that “Practice is the criterion of truth,” and after 30 years of practice, Deng’s statements have come true. In 2006, the CCP announced a revolutionary overhaul of the Chinese countryside and pledged to use China’s newly acquired wealth to transform rural areas into what President Hu Jintao calls a “new socialist countryside.” (15) Even today, most of China’s population remains in rural sections of the country, but the application of modern farming techniques and mechanized agricultural practices have generated a net surplus of grain production in China. Among this new policy’s many provisions, China’s new rural policy promises “sustained increases in farmers’ incomes, more industrial support for agriculture and faster development of public services.” (15) Additional provisions allow peasant students to “receive free textbooks and boarding subsidies,” and the state will “increase subsidies for rural health cooperatives.” (15)

Massive state investment in agricultural infrastructure is “a significant shift away from the previous focus on economic development.” (15) Because of the success of modernization, “greater weight will be given to the redistribution of resources and a rebalancing of income.” (15) Instead of viewing market socialism as an end in itself, the CCP has harnessed the market as a means to generating an industrial base sufficient to build ‘higher socialism’. China’s extraordinary GDP growth and technological development via market socialism makes it possible to implement these sweeping revolutionary changes.

On health care, Austin Ramzy of TIME Magazine reported in April 2009 that “China is laying out plans to dramatically reform its health care system by expanding coverage for hundreds of millions of farmers, migrant workers and city residents.” (16) These plans consist of spending “$125 billion over the next three years building thousands of clinics and hospitals and expanding basic health care coverage to 90% of the population.” (16) Rather than a reversal of the Deng-era reforms, China’s move back towards public health care is the logical progression of the more modernized and expansive health care system achieved through 30 years of market socialism.

As foreign capital entered China, the corporations of imperialist countries–attracted by China’s vast labor pool–exploited some Chinese workers through capitalist relations of production. The exploitative behavior of foreign corporations constitutes a major contradiction in the Chinese economy that the CCP has taken concerted steps towards resolving. While all people in China retain access to essential goods and services like food and health care, the CCP places restrictions on foreign corporations’ ability to operate in China that severely curtail their politico-economic power in China.

Far from abandoning Chinese workers in the pursuit of modernization, the CCP announced the Draft Labor Contract Law in 2006 to protect the rights of workers employed by foreign corporations by ensuring severance pay and outlawing the non-contract labor that makes sweatshops possible. Viciously opposed by Wal-Mart and other Western companies, “foreign corporations are attacking the legislation not because it provides workers too little protection but because it provides them too much.” (17) Nevertheless, the Draft Labor Contract Law, which “required employers to contribute to their employees’ social security accounts and set wage standards for workers on probation and overtime,” was enacted in January 2008. (18)

The recent series of labor disputes between Chinese workers and foreign corporations testify to the working class orientation of the Chinese state. In response to widespread strikes at Western factories and manufacturing plants, the CCP undertook an aggressive policy of empowering Chinese workers and backing their demands for higher wages. Beijing’s regional government raised the minimum wage twice in six months, including a 21% increase in late 2010. (19) In April of this year, the CCP announced annualized 15% wage increases with “promises to double workers’ wages during the 12th five-year plan that lasts from 2011 to 2015.” (20)

Dramatic increases in wages and benefits for Chinese workers, particularly migrant workers, is a serious blow to foreign corporations and makes China a decisively less attractive hub of cheap labor for foreign investors. (21) Contrary to the actions of a capitalist state in the face of labor unrest, which generally consists of petty reforms or brutal repression, China’s response is to launch an offensive against the hoarding of wealth by foreign corporations by forcing them to pay substantially higher wages.

The state is an instrument of class oppression. Bourgeois states reluctantly give the working class reforms, like minimum wage, when no other course of action is possible. Their orientation is towards improving conditions for the bourgeoisie and subordinating labor to capital. Proletarian states boldly support and immediately respond to the collective demands of the workers because they constitute the ruling class in the society. Greater willingness by the CCP to confront and attack foreign capital in the interests of the working class is the deliberate product of market socialism’s success in developing China’s productive forces. Having resolved the primary contradiction–backwards productive forces–the CCP is breaking ground on the contradiction between foreign capital and labor.

Turning to the macroeconomic situation, China’s application of market socialism has led to serious disparities in income. While undoubtedly a defect of ‘lower socialism’, the Chinese state takes this contradiction very seriously and announced an unprecedented government spending campaign in March 2011 aimed at closing the income gap. (22) By increasing public spending by 12.5% in the next year, the CCP will allocate enormous government resources “for education, job creation, low-income housing, health care, and pensions and other social insurance.” (22) Far from a move designed to placate any social unrest, this monumental boost in social spending demonstrates the Chinese state’s continued proletarian and peasant class orientation.

A correct position on China requires above all else a holistic examination of the country’s economy placed within the context of the CCP’s path towards modernization. Focusing too narrowly on China’s market economy and its defects clouds the most important facts, which is that the working class and peasantry still rule China through the CCP and the success of modernization via the market economy has paved the way for ‘higher socialism’.

China applies market socialism to its relations with the Third World and plays a major role in the fight against imperialism.

Image
Hu Jintao, the General Secretary of the CCP, meets with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

Understanding that markets are a neutral tool–non-intrinsic to capitalism and usable by both capitalist and socialist states–is paramount to correctly analyzing China’s international position. Unlike the features of imperialism–colonialism, neocolonialism, superexploitation, nurturing dependency–China’s market socialism fosters cooperation, collective advancement, independence, and social development. (23)

Though bourgeois news sources decry China’s economic relationship with Africa as ‘imperialist’, this is a reflection of the Western trade mentality that cannot understand any economic relations in terms other than ruthless exploitation. Premier Wen Jiabao said at a 2006 summit in Cairo that Chinese-African trade relations are designed to “help African countries develop by themselves and offer training for African professionals.” (24) The focus of the summit, according to Wen, is “reducing and remitting debts, economic assistance, personnel training and investment by enterprises.” (24) Wen continues:

“On the political front, China will not interfere in internal affairs of African countries. We believe that African countries have the right and capability to solve their own problems.” (24)

This is not the attitude of imperialism. Wen’s declaration here doesn’t even reflect the rhetoric of imperialism. The US and its allies in Europe constantly uphold their right to pursue their own interests in other nations, specifically those nations that have received substantial Western capital. China’s approach is markedly different, as it uses trade as a means of developing African social infrastructure–underdeveloped because of centuries of Western colonial oppression–and functions chiefly on a policy of non-intervention. This reflects the CCP’s commitment to the Marxist-Leninist understanding of national self-determination.

China’s relationship with Africa reflects these principles in practice. In November 2009, China pledged $10 billion in “preferential loans directed towards infrastructure and social programmes” to the entire African continent. (25) In addition to providing the resources for infrastructural development, “the financing would go to cancelling debts” and “helping states cope with climate change.” (25) These new loans represent a 79% increase in Chinese direct investment, which has mostly come in the form of “Chinese companies building roads, ports, railways, housing and oil pipelines.” (25)

Geopolitically, China offers an entirely separate international camp for nations at odds with US imperialism. As the US ratchets up tensions with Pakistan and continues to violate its national sovereignty in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, China announced on May 19, 2011 that it would remain an “all-weather partner” for Pakistan. (26) Premier Wen added, “Pakistan’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.” (26) Coupled with an editorial published the same day in China Daily, the official state newspaper of China, entitled “US actions violate international law,” one can easily see the mammoth discrepancies between the imperialist camp and China. (27) These positions are virtually identical to the minority of left academics in the US, like Noam Chomsky, and contrast sharply with any mainstream account of US military involvement in Pakistan.

China has continually acted as a bulwark against US aggression towards other socialist countries, like the DPRK and Cuba. (28) (29) In neighboring Nepal and India, China has provided geopolitical support for the two communist insurgencies during their respective periods of people’s war. (30) (31) After the Nepalese Maoists overwhelmingly won the country’s parliamentary elections, Chairman Prachanda visited China immediately after he was sworn in as Prime Minister. (32) Even in Latin America, China forged deep economic and military ties with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, as the country continues to move forward in resisting US imperialism and advancing towards socialism. (33)

While China has its shortcomings in terms of foreign relations, particularly its refusal to veto the UN Security Council resolution against Libya, it pursues a qualitatively different foreign policy from any capitalist countries. In terms of trade, China promotes independence and self-determination, where the West promotes dependence, exploitation, and subjugation. Geopolitically, it supports genuine people’s movements against imperialism and provides support to the other existing socialist countries. This is a foreign policy of cooperation deeply influenced by Marxism-Leninism.

Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century should rigorously study the successes of Chinese socialism.

Image
Chinese workers striking outside of a Panasonic factory

Those countries that resisted the onslaught of counterrevolution after the fall of the Soviet Union demand rigorous study by Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century. Each of the five socialist countries pursued different paths of survival that offer lessons, but China has indisputably enjoyed the greatest success.

Rather than echoing the counterrevolutionary lies of Trotskyite and left-communist groups about China’s lack of commitment to their abstract and utopian definitions of ‘socialism’, Marxist-Leninists should embrace China as a model of successful socialism whose economic power outstrips that of the greatest imperialist countries. At the core of these Trotskyite/left-communist falsehoods is a chronic pessimism about socialism that reflects the capitalistic cynicism towards proletarian revolution. China’s socialist economy is thriving and more than 1/5 of the worlds population were lifted out of poverty, and their silly irrelevant faction isn’t in power yet! According to them, China must be doing something wrong!

Of course, Marxist-Leninists know otherwise. China is a socialist country and is arguably the most economically successful in history. That realization carries tremendous magnitude and should push Marxist-Leninists to seriously study the model and the works of Deng Xiaoping. Even today, other socialist countries are experimenting with variations of China’s model and see similar successes. If Deng’s concept of market socialism is a correct policy for proletarian states facing severely underdeveloped productive forces, then revolutionaries must recognize him as a significant contributor to Marxism-Leninism.

As China ascends into building ‘higher socialism’, revolutionaries across the world should look East for inspiration as they struggle to throw off the chains of imperialism and actualize people’s democracy.

Long live the universal contributions of Deng Xiaoping to Marxism-Leninism!

Stand with the Chinese masses, and their party, in the exciting process of socialist construction!

Swift victory to the international proletarian revolution!

——-

Endnotes

(1) Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao & The Cultural Revolution, Pluto Press, 2008, pg. 10

(2) Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles”, March 30, 1979, http://bit.ly/iwhKsE

(3) Deng Xiaoping, “The Working Class Should Make Outstanding Contributions to the Four Modernizations,” October 11, 1978, http://bit.ly/ijepY4

(4) V.I. Lenin, “Role and Function of Trade Unions Under the New Economic Policy,” December 30, 1921 – January 4, 1922, http://bit.ly/mu8hhg

(5) V.I. Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” April 21, 1921, http://bit.ly/frx9dW

(6) Deng Xiaoping, “Answers to the Italian Journalist Orianna Fallaci,” August 21 and 23, 1980, http://bit.ly/mtccjD

(7) Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” Part I, May 1875, http://bit.ly/m4HR2o

(8) Derek Scissors, Ph.D. “Liberalization in Reverse,” May 4, 2009, Published by The Heritage Foundation, http://bit.ly/jkSBcR

(9) John Lee, “Putting Democracy in China on Hold,” May 28, 2008, Published by The Center for Independent Studies, http://bit.ly/mLqeM1

(10) World Bank, World Development Indicators, Gross Domestic Product, Accessed through Google, http://bit.ly/g6QkN0

(11) Justin McCurry, Julia Kollewe, “China overtakes Japan as world’s second largest economy,” February 14, 2011, Published in The Guardian, http://bit.ly/eySIQ4

(12) Pew Global Attitudes Project, “The Chinese Celebrate Their Roaring Economy as They Struggle with its Costs,” July 22, 2008, Published by The Pew Research Center, http://bit.ly/9nNJC9

(13) Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai,” January 18 – February 21, 1992, http://bit.ly/lTgK64

(14) Deng Xiaoping, “On Questions of Rural Policy,” May 31, 1980, http://bit.ly/kSLYnM

(15) Jonathan Watts, “China vows to create a ‘new socialist countryside’ for millions of farmers,” February 22, 2006, Published in The Guardian, http://bit.ly/mjO6Ki

(16) Austin Ramzy, “China’s New Healthcare Could Cover Millions More,” April 9, 2009, Published in TIME Magazine, http://ti.me/2xdi0

(17) Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, Brendan Smith, “Labor Rights in China,” December 19, 2006, Published by Foreign Policy in Focus, http://bit.ly/ck9lVy

(18) Xinhua, “New labor contract law changes employment landscape,” January 2, 2008, Published in People’s Daily Online, http://bit.ly/mA7wJm

(19) Jamil Anderlini, Rahul Jacob, “Beijing city to raise minimum wage 21%,” December 28, 2010, Published by Financial Times, http://on.ft.com/l0uPu3

(20) Caijing, “China Targets at Annualized Wage Rise of 15Pct,” April 19, 2011, http://bit.ly/ery12l

(21) Zheng Caixiong, “Wage hike to benefit migrant laborers,” March 3, 2011, Published on China Daily, http://bit.ly/dYsLls

(22) Charles Hutzler, “China will boost spending, try to close income gap,” March 6, 2011, Associated Press, Published on boston.com, http://bit.ly/kTH80G

(23) Dr. Armen Baghdoyan, “Part 1: The Relevance of Marx’s Das Kapital To the Contemporary Chinese Market Economy,” April 26, 2011, Published on Nor Khosq, http://bit.ly/leZKrX

(24) Xinhua, “Chinese premier hails Sino-African ties of cooperation,” June 18, 2006, Published on China View, http://bit.ly/mL3RVo

(25) Mike Pflanz, “China’s $10 billion loan for African development ‘motivated by business not aid’,” November 8, 2009, Published by The Telegraph, http://bit.ly/3KjLPr

(26) Li Xiaokun, Li Lianxiag, “Pakistan assured of firm support,” May 19, 2011, Published by China Daily, http://bit.ly/izgWyQ

(27) Pan Guoping, “US action violates international law,” May 19, 2011, Published by China Daily, http://bit.ly/m68qwV

(28) Andrew Salmon, “China’s support for North Korea grounded in centuries of conflict,” November 26, 2010, Published by CNN, http://bit.ly/dYbxHm

(29) Reuters, “China restructures Cuban debt, backs reform,” December 23, 2010, http://reut.rs/jwO09l

(30) M.D. Nalapat, “China support spurs power grab by Maoists,” May 4, 2009, Published by United Press International, http://bit.ly/l2HALo

(31) RSN Singh, “Maoists: China’s Proxy Soldiers,” July – September 2010, Published in the Indian Defence Review, Vol. 25, Issue 3, http://bit.ly/cXIgOv

(32) The Times of India, “After Maoists, China woos Nepal’s communists,” April 16, 2009, http://bit.ly/iXvo1Q

(33) Simon Romero, “Chávez Says China to Lend Venezuela $20 Billion,” April 18, 2010, Published in The New York Times, http://nyti.ms/bfg1gg

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 07, 2018 2:35 pm

Deng Xiaoping: Basic principles of international engagement
6 december, 2018 by stalinsmoustache, posted in china, socialism in power
In the context of the 1978 launch the ‘four modernisations’ (agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defence), Deng Xiaoping made the following remarks relating to China’s international engagement:

At present, we are still a relatively poor nation. It is impossible for us to undertake many international proletarian obligations, so our contributions remain small. However, once we have accomplished the four modernizations and the national economy has expanded, our contributions to mankind, and especially to the Third World, will be greater. As a socialist country, China shall always belong to the Third World and shall never seek hegemony. This idea is understandable because China is still quite poor, and is therefore a Third World country in the real sense of the term. The question is whether or not China will practise hegemony when it becomes more developed in the future. My friends, you are younger than I, so you will be able to see for yourselves what happens at that time. If it remains a socialist country, China will not practise hegemony and it will still belong to the Third World. Should China become arrogant, however, act like an overlord and give orders to the world, it would no longer be considered a Third World country. Indeed, it would cease to be a socialist country. I first addressed these points in a speech delivered at the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. The current foreign policy, which was formulated by Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, will be passed on to our descendants (Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 123).

Fast forward to 2017 and the official launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, where Xi Jinping reiterated the five core principles of peaceful coexistence, which date back to 1954:

China will enhance friendship and cooperation with all countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence. We are ready to share practices of development with other countries, but we have no intention to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, export our own social system and model of development, or impose our own will on others. In pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative, we will not resort to outdated geopolitical maneuvering. What we hope to achieve is a new model of win-win cooperation.

In light of Deng Xiaoping’s comments, China is obviously still a socialist country, if not even more so today.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 12, 2018 12:11 pm

US Fueling Terrorism in China
Column: Politics Region: Eastern Asia Country: China
CHUS793523

The West’s human rights racket has once again mobilized – this time supposedly in support of China’s Uyghur minority centered primarily in the nation’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, China.

Headlines and reports have been published claiming that up to a million mostly Uyghurs have been detained in what the West is claiming are “internment camps.” As others have pointed out, it is impossible to independently verify these claims as no evidence is provided and organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Uyghur-specific organizations like the World Uyghur Congress lack all credibility and have been repeatedly exposed leveraging rights advocacy to advance the agenda of Western special interests.

Articles like the BBC’s, “China Uighurs: One million held in political camps, UN told,” claim (emphasis added):

Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have submitted reports to the UN committee documenting claims of mass imprisonment, in camps where inmates are forced to swear loyalty to China’s President Xi Jinping.

The World Uyghur Congress said in its report that detainees are held indefinitely without charge, and forced to shout Communist Party slogans.

Nowhere in the BBC’s article is evidence presented to verify these claims. The BBC also fails to mention that groups like the World Uyghur Congress are funded by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and has an office in Washington D.C. The NED is a US front dedicated specifically to political meddling worldwide and has played a role in US-backed regime change everywhere from South America and Eastern Europe to Africa and all across Asia.

What China Admits

According to the South China Morning Post in an article titled, “China changes law to recognise ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang,” China does indeed maintain educational and vocational training centers. The article claims:

China’s far-western Xinjiang region has revised its legislation to allow local governments to “educate and transform” people influenced by extremism at “vocational training centres” – a term used by the government to describe a network of internment facilities known as “re-education camps”.

The article also claims, echoing the BBC and other Western media fronts:
The change to the law, which took effect on Tuesday, comes amid an international outcry about the secretive camps in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

But observers said writing the facilities into law did not address global criticism of China’s systematic detention and enforced political education of up to 1 million ethnic Uygurs and other Muslims in the area.

Again, the “1 million” number is never verified with evidence, nor does the article, or others like it spreading across the Western media address the fact that China’s Uyghur population is a target of foreign efforts to radicalize and recruit militants to fight proxy wars both across the globe, and within China itself.

Also omitted is any mention of systematic terrorism both inside China and abroad carried out by radicalized Uyghur militants. With this information intentionally and repeatedly omitted, Chinese efforts to confront and contain rampant extremism are easily depicted as “repressive.”

Uyghur Terrorism is Real, So Says the Western Media Itself

Within China, Uyghur militants have carried out serial terrorist attacks. This includes a wave of attacks in 2014 which left nearly 100 dead and hundreds more injured. The Guardian in a 2014 article titled, “Xinjiang attack leaves at least 15 dead,” would admit:

An attack in China’s western region of Xinjiang left 15 people dead and 14 injured.

The official Xinhua news agency said the attack took place on Friday on a “food street” in Shache county, where state media said a series of attacks in July left 96 people dead, including 59 assailants.

Abroad, Uyghur-linked terrorists are believed to be responsible for the 2015 Bangkok bombing which targeted mainly Chinese tourists and left 20 dead. The bombing followed Bangkok’s decision to send Uyghur terror suspects back to China to face justice – defying US demands that the suspects be allowed to travel onward to Turkey.

In Turkey, they were to cross the border into Syria where they would train, be armed, and join terrorists including Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in the West’s proxy war against Damascus and its allies.

AP in its article, “AP Exclusive: Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China,” would admit:

Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters as the six-year conflict nears its endgame.

But the end of Syria’s war may be the beginning of China’s worst fears.

The article implicates the Turkish government’s involvement in facilitating the movement of Uyghurs through its territory and into Syria. Another AP article claims that up to 5,000 Uyghur terrorists are currently in Syria, mainly in the north near the Turkish border.

The Western media – not Beijing – admits that China’s Xinjiang province has a problem with extremism and terrorism. The Western media – not Beijing – admits that Uyghur militants are being recruited, moved into Syria, funded, and armed to fight the West’s proxy war in Syria. And the Western media – not Beijing – admits that battle-hardened Uyghur terrorists seek to return to China to carry out violence there.

Thus it is clear that Beijing – as a matter of national security – must confront extremism in Xinjiang. It is undeniable that extremism is taking root there, and it is undeniable that China has both the right and a duty to confront, contain, and overcome it. It is also clear that the West and its allies have played a central role in creating Uyghur militancy – and through feigned human rights concerns – is attempting to undermine Beijing’s efforts to confront that militancy.

US Supports Uyghur Separatism, Militancy

The US National Endowment for Democracy’s own website admits to meddling all across China and does so so extensively that it felt the necessity to break down its targeting of China into several regions including mainland, Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang/East Turkistan.

It is important to understand that “East Turkistan” is what Uyghur militants and separatists refer to Xinjiang as. Beijing does not recognize this name. NED – by recognizing the term “East Turkistan” – is implicitly admitting that it supports separatism in western China, even as the US decries separatists and alleged annexations in places like Donbass, Ukraine and Russian Crimea.

And more than just implicitly admitting so, US NED money is admittedly provided to the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) which exclusively refers to China’s Xinjiang province as “East Turkistan” and refers to China’s administration of Xinjiang as the “Chinese occupation of East Turkistan.” On WUC’s website, articles like, “Op-ed: A Profile of Rebiya Kadeer, Fearless Uyghur Independence Activist,” admits that WUC leader Rebiya Kadeer seeks “Uyghur independence” from China.

It is the WUC and other Washington-based Uyghur fronts who are repeatedly cited by the Western media and faux human rights advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International regarding allegations of “1 million” Uyghurs being placed into “internment camps,” as illustrated in the above mentioned BBC article.

By omitting the very real terrorist problem facing China in Xinjiang as well as elsewhere around the world where state-sponsored Uyghur terrorists are deployed and fighting, and by depicting China’s campaign to confront extremism as “repression,” the West aims at further inflaming violent conflict in Xinjiang and jeopardizing human life – not protecting it.

Where Uyghur terrorists are being trafficked through on their way to foreign battlefields, Beijing-friendly governments like Bangkok are sending suspects back to face justice in China. In nations like Malaysia where US-backed opposition has recently come to power, Uyghur terror suspects are being allowed to proceed onward to Turkey.

Al Jazeera’s recent article, “Malaysia ignores China’s request; frees 11 ethnic Uighurs,” would report:

Malaysia has freed 11 ethnic Uighurs detained last year after they broke out of prison in Thailand and crossed the border, despite a request from Beijing for the men to be returned to China.

Prosecutors dropped immigration charges against the group on humanitarian grounds and they flew out of Kuala Lumpur to Turkey on Tuesday, according to their lawyer Fahmi Moin.

Al Jazeera would also make sure to mention:

The decision may further strain ties with China, which has been accused of cracking down on the minority Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang. Since returning as prime minister following a stunning election victory in May, Mahathir Mohamad has already cancelled projects worth more than US$20bn that had been awarded to Chinese companies.

This point makes it abundantly clear that Uyghur extremism has become a central component in Washington’s struggle with Beijing over influence in Asia and in a much wider sense, globally. Geopolitical expert F. William Engdahl in his recent article, “China’s Uyghur Problem – The Unmentioned Part” concluded that:

The escalating trade war against China, threats of sanctions over allegations of Uyghur detention camps in Xinjiang, threats of sanctions if China buys Russian defense equipment, all is aimed at disruption of the sole emerging threat to a Washington global order, one that is not based on freedom or justice but rather on fear and tyranny. How China’s authorities are trying to deal with this full assault is another issue. The context of events in Xinjiang however needs to be made clear. The West and especially Washington is engaged in full-scale irregular war against the stability of China.

It is difficult to argue with this conclusion – as the US has already openly wielded terrorism as a geopolitical tool everywhere from Libya where the nation was divided and destroyed by NATO-led military operations in the air and terrorist-led troops on the ground, to Syria where the US is all but openly aiding and abetting Al Qaeda and its affiliates cornered in the northern governorate of Idlib, and even in Yemen where another AP investigation revealed the US and its allies were cutting deals with Al Qaeda militants to augment Western and Persian Gulf ground-fighting capacity.

It is important to understand the full context of the West’s accusations against China and to note the media and supposed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others involved in propaganda aimed at protecting terrorists and promoting militancy inside of China.

These same media groups and faux-NGOs will turn up elsewhere along not only China’s peripheries across Southeast, South, and Central Asia, but also within and along the borders of nations like Russia and Iran.

Exposing and confronting these appendages of Western geopolitics, and the Western corporate-financier interests themselves directing their collective agenda is key to diminishing the dangerous influence they have and all the violence, conflict, division, and destruction they seek to employ as they have already done in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
https://journal-neo.org/2018/10/24/us-f ... -in-china/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 02, 2019 8:11 pm

China's first law on soil pollution takes effect

2019-01-01 22:06 GMT+8

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To better protect and improve the living and ecological environment, a law on soil pollution was passed last August and has taken effect on Tuesday.

The law, named Soil Pollution Prevention and Control Law of the People's Republic of China, is the country's first law targeting soil pollution.

According to the law, national standards for soil pollution risk control will be set by the environmental authority of the State Council based on soil contamination status, public health risks and ecological risks, among others.

The law also states that a nationwide soil condition census should be conducted at least once every 10 years.

A network of monitoring stations should be established nationwide, with data and other information collected shared among authorities in environmental, agricultural, natural resources, housing, water resources, health and forestry and grassland sectors, it said.

Environmental and health authorities of the State Council are required to conduct screening and evaluation of toxic and harmful substances in the soil and make public a list of them.

The central and provincial-level governments should establish funds to prevent and control soil pollution, according to the law.

The new law has strengthened the responsibilities of governments and polluters in controlling and correcting soil pollution.

Farmlands polluters are required to make rehabilitation plans, put them on government record, and carry out the plans. Upon completion, polluters should entrust professional institutions to evaluate the effects and report the results to local governments.

Environmental departments of governments at or above the provincial level should summon leading officials at or above the municipal level for admonitory talks on problems in their jurisdiction, such as serious soil pollution, inadequate prevention and control measures, and strong public discontent over pollution.

The legislation on soil protection is of great significance, and has provided a legal guarantee for the country's fight for clean soil, said Zhang Guilong, deputy director of the Office for Administrative Law of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee.

China has escalated its fight against pollution through legislation. The NPC revised the law on air pollution in 2015 and the law on water pollution in 2017, restricting various sources of pollution and making environmental data more transparent.

(Top image via VCG)

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674d314d ... are_p.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 07, 2019 9:26 pm

The US war on China’s economic model
The growing hostility of Western governments to China is more about the interests of Western investors than legitimate security fears

December 30, 2018

By Stephen Gowans

The United States stations 320,000 troops in the vicinity of China [1], maintains a continuous B-52 bomber presence in the region, including over waters claimed by the East Asian giant, [2] and has sent its “most advanced warfighting platforms to the region, including multi-mission ballistic missile defense-capable ships, submarines, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft.” [3] The 2018 US National Defense Strategy lists China first among the United States’s “five central external threats” including “Russia, North Korea, Iran, and terrorist groups with global reach.” [4] The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has called China the “great threat for the U.S. in the long term.” [5] According to The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, the Trump administration considers China “the real enemy.” [6]

What has China done to make successive US administrations see it as a major external threat and the real enemy? The answer is that China has developed a state-led economic model that limits the profit-making opportunities of US investors and challenges their control of high-technology sectors, including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, essential to US military supremacy. Washington is engaged in a multi-faceted war “to prevent Beijing from advancing with plans … to become a global leader in 10 broad areas of technology, including information technology, aerospace and electric vehicles.” [7] Washington aims to “hobble China’s plans to develop advanced technology” [8] and to “force China to allow American companies to sell their goods and operate freely” in China, under conditions conducive to maintaining US economic and military supremacy. [9]

For its part, China seeks to alter a global economic system in which it is allowed only “to produce T-shirts” while the United States produces high-tech, according to Yang Weimin, a senior economic adviser to China’s president Xi Jinping. [10] Xi is “determined that China master its own microchips, operating systems and other core technologies” [11] in order to become “technologically self-reliant.” [12] But self-reliance in industries like aerospace, telecommunications, robotics, and AI means removing China, a large market, from the ambit of US high-tech firms. [13] Moreover, since Western military supremacy has always relied on Western technological superiority, Chinese efforts to challenge the Western monopoly on high-tech translates directly into an effort to challenge Washington’s ability to use the Pentagon as an instrument for obtaining investment and trade advantages for US investors.

China’s economic model

China’s economic model is often called “state capitalist” or “market socialist.” Both terms refer to two important elements of the Chinese model: the presence of markets, for materials, products and labor, and a role for the state, through industrial planning and ownership of enterprises. [14]

The “mainstay of the economy” [15] is China’s over 100,000 state owned enterprises. [16] The state has a strong presence in the commanding heights of the economy. “Key sectors such as banking are…dominated by state-controlled companies.” [17] State-owned enterprises “account for about 96% of China’s telecom industry, 92% of power and 74% of autos.” [18] Beijing “is the biggest shareholder in the country’s 150 biggest companies.” [19] The combined profit of state-owned “China Petroleum & Chemical and China Mobile in 2009 alone was greater than all the profit of China’s 500 largest private firms.” [20]

Industrial planning is carried out by the National Development and Reform Commission. The commission uses various means to incubate Chinese industry in key sectors [21] and drafts plans “to give preferential treatment” to Chinese firms in strategic areas. [22]

Beijing is counting on state owned firms “to become global leaders in semiconductors, electric vehicles, robotics and other high-technology sectors and is funding them through subsidies and financing from state banks.” [23] The planning commission also guides the development of steel, photovoltaics, high-speed trains, and other critical industries. [24]

Beijing has closed sectors it considers strategic or vital to national security to foreign ownership. These include “finance, defense, energy, telecommunications, railways and ports” [25] as well as steel. All steel industry firms are state-owned and all are financed by state-owned banks. [26] In total, “China … has restricted or closed off 63 sectors of its own economy to foreign investors, such as stem-cell research, satellites, exploration and exploitation of numerous minerals and media, as well as humanities and social-sciences research institutes.” [27]
China also relies heavily on joint venture arrangements to acquire Western technology and know-how. This idea was initially introduced to China by General Motors, which proposed a joint venture in 1978 with the Chinese car industry. GM’s idea was to trade off its technology and know-how for access to a vast market and low-wage labor. [28]

Chinese leaders saw joint ventures as a way “to propel its industries up the value chain into more sophisticated sectors and the country into rich-nation ranks.” [29] Technology acquired from Western partnerships diffused into the Chinese economy, allowing Chinese firms to become competitors of the Western companies. [30] For example, Chinese rail companies used technology acquired through joint ventures with Japanese and European firms to become giants in high-speed rail. [31]

China seeks to achieve self-sufficiency in high-tech by 2025 under a plan called Made in China 2025. The idea is to vault into the top ranks of high-tech, matching and eventually overtaking the West. Xi has complained that Chinese “technology still generally lags that of developed countries” and that China must “catch up and overtake” the West in “core technological fields.” [32] To help achieve this goal, Beijing plans to “spend billions in the coming years to make the country the world’s leader in A.I,” [33] among other areas.

China’s economic model is not new. According to the economist, Chang Ha-joon:

“In a way, what it is doing is actually not that different from what the more advanced countries were doing in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Many countries, including Japan and Germany, like China today, were using state-owned enterprises to develop their strategic industries. You can say that China is going through what all the other economically advanced countries have been through, and examples range from the U.S. in the mid-19th century to South Korea in the 1970s and 80s.”[34]

US objections

Countries which dominated the globe economically, politically, and militarily have always been the great champions of free trade. The United States had no use for free trade until it became the dominant economic power in the wake of the Second World War. Until the end of WWII, US tariffs were among the world’s highest. Emerging from the war as the planet’s strongest economic power, the United States did all it could to impose free trade, free markets and US free enterprise on as much of the world as it could, and wasn’t shy about using economic warfare, the CIA, and military force to accomplish its goal.

Today, Washington objects strenuously to the Chinese economic model, to the point that it’s willing to use economic warfare, military intimidation, and perhaps even outright war (see below) to impede it. Access to Chinese markets and low-wage labor is highly valued by the US state, but Washington resents access being made contingent on joint venture arrangements which allow US technology to be absorbed by Chinese businesses. The United States demands that US investors be freed from such conditions, that US corporations be granted unfettered access to all Chinese markets, and that US firms be allowed to compete with Chinese enterprises on equal terms, without favor for Chinese companies. There are two reasons Washington makes these demands: to maximize the profit-making opportunities available to US investors in China and to prevent Beijing from building ‘national champions’ able to compete with US corporations. [35]

The US economic elite has for years expressed its grievances over China’s state owned enterprises. It complains that it is “denied lucrative government business, which goes instead to the state champions.” [36] US business people grouse that “In the past few years, China has significantly increased the government’s role in the economy, pumping up the state sector and crowding out private and foreign businesses.” [37] And they lament that the “heavily protected and subsidized Chinese state-owned enterprises … are pounding U.S. companies not just in China but in competition globally.” [38] In response to these grievances, Washington is pushing for “reducing the role of state-owned firms in China’s economy.” [39]
Made in China 2025 is a significant irritant to Washington. Peter Navarro, US president Donald Trump’s trade adviser, denounces it as “economic aggression” because it “threatens the U.S. technology sector.” [40] US vice-president Mike Pence calls it Beijing’s master plan to bring “90% of the world’s most advanced industries” under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. [41] An emblematic US media description of the Chinese plan is: “Made in China 2025 is Beijing’s plan to dominate global markets in a wide range of high-tech products. China’s strategy is to give large government subsidies to state-owned companies and supplement their research with technology” acquired from Chinese partnerships with, or purchase of, US firms. [42] The description contains within it a diagnosis and implied US treatment plan: Compel Beijing to a) end subsidies to state-owned enterprises; b) lift joint venture conditions which allow Chinese firms to acquire US technology; and c) prevent Chinese companies from buying Western firms as a means of acquiring Western technology.

The New York Times has reported that the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer “wants China to reduce subsidies and other aid to Chinese firms competing internationally in advanced technology” [43] and that one US “demand is for China to halt its subsidies for its ‘Made in China 2025’ program aimed at giving its companies a foothold in aircraft, robotics and other areas of advanced manufacturing.” [44]

“Beijing believes in state-driven research to help state-owned industries,” observes The Wall Street Journal, “while the U.S. depends on the private sector, along with a healthy dose of government-funded basic research.” [45] That’s not entirely true. The privately-owned Chinese telecom equipment maker, Huawei, spent “$13 billion last year … developing its own technologies, outpacing Intel Corp. and spending almost as much as Google parent Alphabet Inc.” [46] And corporate America’s reliance on government-funded R&D is far greater than usually acknowledged.

Washington started investing heavily in R&D after the allegedly innovation-stifling Soviet economy allowed the USSR to beat the United States into space, and then chalk up a series of other firsts: the first animal in orbit, first human in orbit, first woman in orbit, first spacewalk, first moon impact, first image of the far side of the moon, first unmanned lunar soft landing, first space rover, first space station and first interplanetary probe. Beat by the Russians, the United States was galvanized to take a leaf from the Soviet book. Just as the Soviets were doing, Washington would use public funds to power research into innovations. This would be done through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The DARPA would channel public money to scientists and engineers for military, space and other research. Many of the innovations to come out of the DARPA pipeline would eventually make their way to private investors, who would use them for private profit. [47] In this way, private investors were spared the trouble of risking their own capital, as free enterprise mythology would have us believe they do. In this myth, far-seeing and bold capitalists reap handsome profits as a reward for risking their capital on research that might never pay-off. Except this is not how it works. It is far better for investors to invest their capital in ventures with less risk and quicker returns, while allowing the public to shoulder the burden of funding R&D with its many risks and uncertainties. Using their wealth, influence and connections, investors have successfully pressed politicians into putting this pleasing arrangement in place. Free enterprise reality, then, is based on the sucker system: Risk is “socialized” (i.e., borne by the public, the suckers) while benefits are “privatized” (by investors who have manipulated politicians into shifting to the public the burden of funding R&D.)

A study by Block and Keller [48] found that between 1971 and 2006, 77 out of R&D Magazine’s top 88 innovations had been fully funded by the US government. Summarizing research by economist Mariana Mazzucato, former Guardian columnist Seumas Milne pointed out that the

[a]lgorithms that underpinned Google’s success were funded by the public sector. The technology in the Apple iPhone was invented in the public sector. In both the US and Britain it was the state, not big pharma, that funded most groundbreaking ‘new molecular entity’ drugs, with the private sector then developing slight variations. And in Finland, it was the public sector that funded the early development of Nokia – and made a return on its investment. [49]

Nuclear power, satellite and rocket technology, the internet and self-driving cars are other examples of innovations that were produced with public money, and have since been used for private profit. When he was US president, Barack Obama acknowledged the nature of the swindle in his 2011 State of the Nation Address. “Our free-enterprise system,” began the president, “is what drives innovation.” However, he immediately contradicted himself by saying, “But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout history our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need.”

Today, the United States “is spending roughly $1 billion to $2 billion annually, much of it federal funds, to build the first ‘exascale’ supercomputer—capable of a quintillion calculations a second, which is at least 100 times faster than today’s champion. Such a machine would help in everything from designing futuristic weapons to investigating brain science.” [50] The US government is also “boosting spending in semiconductor research, an area of intense Chinese interest.” [51] Meanwhile, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is funding research on “quantum mechanics to eventually make computers and communications operate at speeds and efficiency well beyond anything possible today.” [52] And on top of these public R&D expenditures, the DARPA continues to fund advanced research, including on A.I. [53] Simultaneously, Washington is demanding that China halt its own R&D spending in the same areas.

All of this points to a number of important facts. (1) The United States kick-started innovation in its own economy by emulating the Soviet model of state-directed research because free enterprise was not up to the task. (2) Rather than emulate the Soviet model for public benefit, the United States channels public money into R&D for private profit. (3) US high technology supremacy relies significantly on public funding, yet (or rather because of this) Washington demands that China forbear from its own public funding of innovation research. Washington will only tolerate public funding of basic research that benefits US investors.

Explaining US hostility to China

Understanding the economic and political organization of the United States helps understand why Washington is antagonistic to China’s economic model. The following explains the US political elite’s hostility, currently expressed in the declaration of China as the United States’ top external threat; in the US-instigated trade war against China; in the blocking of Chinese purchases of US companies; and in the exclusion of, or threat to exclude, such Chinese corporations as Huawei and ZTE from Western markets.

The US political elite is interlocked with the community of major US investors. US administrations, the US senate, and the top strata of the US bureaucracy, are mainly staffed by wealthy individuals whose wealth derives from investment income. Additionally, organized business groups and major corporations exert significant influence on the political elite through lobbying, via the funding of policy formation think-tanks, and by ownership of the mass media. In their 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page demonstrated that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” [54] Accordingly, US foreign policy defines external threats as threats to the interests of US “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests”—the very same community which dominates the formulation of public policy.
The US National Defense Strategy does not define China as a threat to the United States but as threat to US interests. Unlike the United States, which has a significant military presence in the air, sea and land around China, the East Asian giant does not have a military presence in the Western hemisphere, and is not currently capable of projecting force into it. China does not therefore constitute a military threat to the United States. What, then, are the US interests that China’s threatens? Consistent with the interlocked nature of the US political and economic elites, US interests refer to the profit-making interests of US investors.

China’s economic model threatens the profit-making interests of US economic elites and organized business groups in the following ways.

• State-owned enterprises are closed to US investors and compete against US investment.
• Protected sectors deny US investors profit-making opportunities.
• Joint venture requirements limit US investment and are used to acquire technology to develop enterprises which become capable of competing with US firms.
• State incubation of national champions develops competitors to US investment.
• Made in China 2025 locks US investment out of Chinese high-tech markets, competes against US high-tech investment globally, allows China to contest US military supremacy, and undermines US capabilities to use force to obtain trade and investment opportunities under favorable conditions.

China’s economic model also threatens US (investor) interests by offering an exemplar for other countries to follow, which, if followed, would reduce US profit-making opportunities even more significantly. The Chinese model has had undoubted success in lifting China from poverty. In 1984, three-quarters of the Chinese population still lived in extreme poverty. By 2018, extreme poverty had fallen to less than one percent. [55] And China is poised to challenge the West’s technological supremacy. These extraordinary accomplishments were not the product of Beijing following Washington’s economic advice; they are “due to planning in a socialist market, not conventional capitalism,” observes Robert C. Allen, a specialist in economic development. [55] Even The Wall Street Journal acknowledges that China’s “rapid economic development” is due to “state enterprises operating under an industrial plan.” [57] Washington cannot allow such a model to take hold and spread, for if it does, the profit-making opportunities on which US investors depend will shrink. US free enterprise, from Washington’s point of view, must be welcomed everywhere—and the division of the world between exploiting countries and exploited ones must continue ad infinitum.

Time and again, underdeveloped countries have implemented economic models at the core of which have been state-owned enterprises and industrial planning. In almost every case, Washington has used sanctions, the CIA, or the Pentagon, or all three, to put a stop to this threat to the profit-making interests of the United States’s ‘substantial’ citizens. Today, the US elite is agreed that China must be ‘contained’, even if there is no agreement on how. The think-tank, the RAND Corporation, funded by the US government, US corporations, and US investors, has even contemplated open war as a solution, in a 2016 study titled War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. [58]

The words of Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon who served in Mao’s Eighth Route Army, come to mind.

“Behind all stands that terrible, implacable God of Business and Blood, whose name is Profit. Money, like an insatiable Molloch, demands its interest, its return, and will stop at nothing, not even the murder of millions, to satisfy its greed. Behind the army stands the militarists. Behind the militarists stands finance capital, and the capitalists. Brothers in blood; companions in crime.” [59]

1. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Words and deeds show focus of the American military on Asia”, The New York Times, September 10, 2012.

2. Jeremy Page and Gordon Lubold, “U.S. bomber flies over waters claimed by China,” The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2015.

3. Trefor Moss and Jeremy Page, “U.S. stationing warplanes in Philippines amid South China Sea tensions,” The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2016.

4. National Defense Strategy, 2018, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/IN10855.pdf.

5. Steven Erlanger, “Tillerson’s ouster has allies hoping for coherence, but fearing the worst,” The New York Times, March 14, 2018.

6. Bob Woodward. Fear: Trump in the White House, (Simon & Schuster, 2018), 298.

7. Bob Davis, “Trade rift within Trump administration sends stocks on wild ride,” The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2018.

8. Bob Davis, Vivian Salama and Lingling Wei, “China issues retaliatory tariffs as trade fight heats up,” The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2018.

9. Neil Irwin, “The Trump trade strategy is coming into focus. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will work.” The New York Times, October 6, 2018.

10. Lingling Wei, “US and China dive in for prolonged trade talks,” The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2018.

11. Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur, “What keeps Xi Jinping awake at night,” The New York Times, May 11, 2018.

12. Ibid.

13. Adam Segal, “Why does everyone hate Made in China 2025?” Council on Foreign Relations blog, March 28, 2018.

14. Robert C. Allen, The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford University Press, 2017), 126.

15. James T. Areddy, “Xi Jinping aims to rebrand China—as an importer,” The Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2018.

16. New York Times, June 3, 2009.

17. The Globe and Mail, October 17, 2008.

18. John Bussey, “Tackling the many dangers of China’s state capitalism”, The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2012.

19. “The rise of state capitalism”, The Economist, January 21, 2012.

20. Bussey, September 27, 2012.

21. Allen, 126.

22. Michael Wines, “China takes a loss to get ahead in the business of fresh water”, The New York Times, October 25, 2011.

23. Bob Davis, “When the world opened the gates of China,” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2019.

24. Allen, 127.

25. Michael Wines, “China fortifies state businesses to fuel growth”, The New York Times, August 29, 2010.

26. Allen, 126.

27. Steven Chase and Robert Fife, “CSIS report warns of Chinese interference in New Zealand,” The Globe and Mail, May 30, 2018.

28. Lingling Wei and Bob Davis, “How China systematically pries technology from US companies,” The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2018.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Carlos Tejada, “Beg, borrow or steal: How Trump says China takes technology,” The New York Times, March 22, 2018.

32. Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur, “What keeps Xi Jinping awake at night,” The New York Times, May 11, 2018.

33. Cade Metz, “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the feud over killer robots,” the New York Times, June 9, 2018.

34. Seung-yoon Lee, “Ha-Joon Chang: Economics Is A Political Argument,” World Post, June 4, 2014.

35. Yoko Kubota, “Trade war punctures China’s price in its technology,’ The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2018.

36. John Bussey, “Tackling the many dangers of China’s state capitalism”, The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2012.

37. Lingling Wei and Bob Davis, “China prepares policy to increase access for foreign companies,” The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2018.

38. John Bussey, “U.S. attacks China Inc.”, The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2012.

39. Bob Davis, “US tariffs on China aren’t a short-term strategy,” The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2018.

40. Michael C. Bender, Gordon Lubold, Kate O’Keeffe and Jeremy Page, “US edges toward new Cold-War era with China,” The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2019.

41. Martin Feldstein, “Tariffs should target Chinese lawlessness, not the trade deficit,” the Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2018.

42. Ibid.

43. Bob Davis, Peter Nicholas and Lingling Wei, “”Get moving’: How Trump ratcheted up the trade battle with China,” The New York Times, June 7, 2018.

44. Neil Irwin, “The Trump trade strategy is coming into focus. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will work.” The New York Times, October 6, 2018.

45. Bob Davis, “The country’s R&D agenda could use a shake-up, scientists say,” The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2018.

46. Dan Strumpf, Min Jung Kim and Yifan Wang, “How Huawei took over the world,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2018.
47. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, Demos, 2011,
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Entreprene ... 1310116014).

48. Fred Block and Matthew R. Keller, “Where do innovations come from? Transformations in the U.S. national innovation system, 1970-2006,” Technology and Innovation Foundation, July 2008.
http://www.itif.org/files/Where_do_inno ... e_from.pdf

49. Seumas Milne, “Budget 2012: George Osborne is stuck in a failed economic model, circa 1979,” The Guardian (UK), March 20, 2012.

50. Bob Davis, “The country’s R&D agenda could use a shake-up, scientists say,” The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2018.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, Fall 2014.

55. Phillip P. Pan, “The West was sure the Chinese approach would not work. It just had to wait. It’s still waiting.” The New York Times, November 18, 2018.

56. Allen, 127.

57. Andrew Browne, “China builds bridges and highways while the US mouths slogans,” The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2018.

58. David C. Gompert, Astrid Stuth Cevallos, and Cristina L. Garafola, War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable, The Rand Corporation, 2016.https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/p ... RR1140.pdf

59. Norman Bethune, “Wounds,” in Roderick Stewart, The Mind of Norman Bethune, (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2002), 183-186.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 15, 2019 2:23 pm

A Chinese ‘re-education’
Muhammad Amir RanaJanuary 13, 2019 Facebook Count

IN an interview with a Turkish television channel, Prime Minister Imran Khan completely sidestepped a question about the condition of Uighur Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang province. He admitted that he knew little about the issue, and, instead, preferred to focus on and highlight Chinese financial assistance and investment in Pakistan.

China is under stiff criticism for its alleged persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, especially Uighur Muslims. Freedom House’s 2018 country report on China classified it as ‘religiously-not-free’ on its freedom index. China is seriously concerned about this growing perception that hurts its efforts to promote a ‘soft image’ of China for a successful execution of its Belt and Road Initiative and other global commercial and strategic projects. Last week, China said that it welcomed UN officials to visit Xinjiang provided that they stay out of its internal affairs.

Pakistan usually avoids commenting on China’s internal affairs. But many Pakistani men, married to Chinese Uighur women, claim their spouses are being held in so-called re-education camps and are demanding their release. The issue has put Pakistan in a difficult position, mainly due to China’s huge investment in the country, as well as the extreme sensitivity of Chinese authorities to discussions on the subject.

Mystery continues to shroud the nature of the camps in Xinjiang.

Mystery continues to shroud China’s re-education camps, with authorities least interested in opening them up to independent observers. However, Chinese scholars claim that they are a part of the country’s countering violent extremism strategy, which was not built in isolation from rest of the world. They assert that China has designed its re-education strategy after carefully examining CVE approaches in practice in the West and Muslim world, which also employ similar community engagement programmes. Though they tend to justify their muscular approach by quoting examples from the Gulf, and South and Southeast Asian Muslim nations, the Chinese CVE strategy still appears highly politicised and opaque to Western practitioners and policymakers.

Much of the information about China’s re-education centres comes from West. Though the criticism has forced Chinese authorities to ‘release’ some information, it is insufficient to make a proper assessment. Last year, a state-run news agency published an interview of Shohrat Zakir, the Xinjiang governor, describing the camps as “professional vocational training institutions” for people influenced by terrorism and extremism who have not committed an offence warranting criminal punishment.

Similarly, in a seminar in China last November, local scholars explained China’s CVE approaches. Alluding to diverse and disparate CVE practices in different countries, they tended to conclude that no uniform or global CVE programme exists. One Chinese scholar presented a four-layered model based on the four principles of breaking, establishing, preventing and developing. ‘Breaking’ referred to isolating individuals from an extremist environment; ‘establishing’ meant introducing them to the true spiritual values of religion; ‘preventing’ was seen as educating; and ‘developing’ was interpreted as a skill development programme.

However, one of the best works available on the subject of China’s CVE strategy is by Zunyou Zhou, a Germany-based Chinese scholar. In a paper published in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence in 2017, he noted that the Chinese CVE strategy is based on multiple approaches and, interestingly, that they consulted Western CVE and deradicalisation approaches extensively and then built their own, more muscular model. The approaches include ‘five keys’, ‘four prongs’, ‘three contingents’, ‘two hands’ and ‘one rule’. Viewed together, these approaches point to legal, religious, cultural, ideological, and scientific aspects of the deradicalisation effort, implemented by governmental agencies, public institutions and non-governmental organisations in the region.

The Xinjiang government has developed several programmes to target different groups of people, including those who are ‘radicalised’ as well as those who are not but considered vulnerable to recruitment. The ‘five keys’ — ideological, cultural, customary, religious and legal — give a long-sustaining solution to terrorism. The ‘four prongs’ refer to a combination of four methods: ‘squeezing by correct faith’; ‘counteracting by culture’; ‘controlling by law’; and ‘popularising science’. ‘Squeezing by correct faith’ refers to clarifying people’s understanding of Islam while ‘counteracting by culture’ means seeking effective and practical solutions to thwart extremism and guiding people towards secularisation and modernisation. The ‘three contingents’ refer to the policy of reinforcing three main groups of people the government can count on to maintain stability and security. The ‘two hands’ refer to the one ‘firm hand’ that cracks down on terrorists, and the other ‘firm hand’ that educates and guides Uighur people, and the ‘one rule’ means the policy of ruling Xinjiang according to the law.

The author also provides historical background on the evolution of the Chinese CVE strategy and mentions that it materialised in a policy document entitled Several Guiding Opinions on Further Suppressing Illegal Religious Activities and Combating the Infiltration of Religious Extremism in Accordance with Law, issued by Xinjiang’s CCP Committee in May 2013. The policy document was also referred to as ‘No. 11 Document’, and described the borders between ethnic customs, normal religious practices and extremist manifestations.

For the CVE strategy’s smooth implementation, the Xinjiang authorities have introduced new legal regimes, and the latest amendment (titled ‘Regulation on Anti-Extremism’) was introduced in April 2017 to ban a wide range of extremist behaviours. Under the new legal framework, authorities have launched many programmes including deradicalisation for prisoners, and social programmes for those who have engaged in terrorism or extremism but do not deserve criminal punishment.

The re-education camps — or ‘rehabilitation centres’ — have been created as a part of China’s social programming. These centres run through civil society groups in Xinjiang or through ‘Fang Hui Ju’ working groups, dispatched by the regional government, comprising practitioners tasked with winning the hearts and minds of the people.

For CVE practitioners, the Chinese model may have a lot of substance to learn from. But the Uighur problem is more complex than religious extremism, as it has added dimensions of ethnic, cultural and political rights. For Pakistan, the Chinese CVE model offers nothing to learn from except to find a way of resolving the issue of Pakistani citizens’ spouses held in these camps.

The writer is a security analyst.

Published in Dawn, January 13th, 2019

https://www.dawn.com/news/1457202

Not the friendliest of articles but not Western propaganda either. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced in time of war. It's always war if capitalism exists. One thing for sure, the propaganda shit storm (spit on Koran, etc..) is pure crap.

As with Russia we see the effect of multi-generational propaganda, it is so much easier to whip up once the 'basics' have been adsorbed into 'common knowledge'. Is it possible to be a (N)ihilists in the Age of Internets?
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 20, 2019 12:21 pm

China Cancels Cameroon’s Debts 9 Days After Biya’s Active Economic Engagement Promise
JANUARY 19, 2019
Cameroon (National Times)-The Chinese Government has announced the cancellation of debts owed her by the Government of Cameroon amounting to FCFA thousands of billions.

Yang Jiechi, special envoy of Chinese President XI Jing Ping, disclosed the decision to President Biya, Friday January 18, during an audience at the unity palace.

The decision comes exactly nine days after President Paul Biya announced his intentions to engage an active policy of economic engagement with China.

It was one of the key pronouncements which Biya made to the diplomatic world on January 9, while receiving New Year wishes.

Image

“We will pursue an active policy of economic cooperation with China where I visited last March on a State visit and in September to attend the Sino-African Cooperation Forum. This visits have confirmed the important participation of this great friendly country in our development,” Biya told diplomats.

Yang Jiechi, senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, touched down on Cameroonian soil in the early hours of Friday. In the afternoon of same day, he we was received at the unity palace where the debt cancellation was announced.

The former Chinese diplomat had exchanges with President Paul Biya for close to 75 minutes.

Thereafter, the Prime Minister and Head of Government Chief Dr Joseph Dion Ngute offered a diner in honour of the Chinese official in the evening hours at the Hilton Hotel Yaoundé.

Yang Jiechi left Cameroon early Saturday on board a private plane after the end of his two days mission to Cameroon. China in recent years has been imposing herself as Cameroon’s top business partner. In 2016, bilateral trade between the two countries hit FCFA 1510 billion.

https://natimesnews.com/2019/01/19/came ... nvoy-of-c/

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 22, 2019 2:28 pm

Anti-Trump: Xi Jinping's thinking on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era
Posted on 10 January 2019by Editorial
Faced with the crisis of imperialist globalization.

Anti-Trump: Xi Jinping's thinking on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era

Image

by Andrea Catone

Director of the MarxVentuno magazine

Urged by a series of questions postemi in an interview during the IX World Socialism Forum - an annual event organized in the autumn in Beijing by the World Socialism Research Justify at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and other political organizations and Cultural Heritage of the PRC - I propose the following reflections on Xi Jinping's thinking about the entrance of Chinese socialism into a new era.

The thinking of the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has a strategic value not only for China - and this in itself, given the size of the territory, the Chinese population and economy, impacts on the rest of the world - but also for the Communist and workers' parties, for anti-imperialist struggle movements and against neocolonialism, for all the authentic democratic and progressive forces of the world.

"New era" implies that we leave behind an "old era", that we enter a new phase in the history of China and the world: not only of China, but of all humanity. And this not only because the history of China can not but affect the destinies of the world, but also because, as Xi writes, the destinies of China and the world are interconnected: "We in China believe that China will do well only when the world good, and vice versa " [1 ] .

The era we enter is new to both China and the world.



The new era for China
What is new and changes for China?

Forty years after the start of the reform and opening policy, the face of China has profoundly changed. The PRC has made an extraordinary leap forward in the development of the productive forces. From the economic-social point of view, it was the greatest transformation that the history of mankind has ever known, happened in extremely short time from the point of view of history, which measures the great transformations in terms of centuries and not of years or decades. . A transformation that involved a billion and 300 million people, which brought the vast majority of the Chinese population out of poverty and brought hundreds and hundreds of millions of farmers to urbanize quickly. Looked with the eyes of the historian, it was an extraordinary undertaking, of which perhaps we do not yet fully realize. Like all major transformations, it not only embraces economic data and an extraordinary uninterrupted GDP growth of around 10% on average per year. The great Chinese transformation embraces all the fields: social, cultural, political, of the collective mentality ...

We can observe another extraordinary characteristic of this great transformation: the compactness, the wisdom, the ability to correct errors, of the Chinese "ruling class", that is, of the Chinese Communist Party. When I say this, I do not ignore the moments of tension and even acute struggle that have manifested themselves within the Chinese leadership group on the lines to be followed; this is part of history and life, which develops through contradictions. But the Chinese leadership has had the wisdom and the ability to positively overcome the contradictions, to firmly maintain the unity of the party, to widen the base of the members, to extend its influence in society. And he did this by keeping firmly the roots of his own history and his foundations,

The CCP studied the experience of Soviet socialism very closely and drew lessons from the dissolution of the USSR and popular democracies in Central-Eastern and Balkan Europe between 1989 and 1991. (Among the many studies, I would like to mention the international conference promoted by CASS in 2011, the acts of which were published by Li Shenming [2] ). Among the different and complex causes that lead to the disaster of 1989-91, a decisive role is played by the political, ideological, organizational collapse of the CPSU, which should have played the leading role in the socialist transition process.

The Thought of Xi devotes particular attention and attention to the communist party, from every point of view: reminds every member of the party, and in particular the leaders, that party rules and discipline must be strictly observed [3] , that in a communist party there must be no room for corruption, which must be fought with extreme vigor [4] ; calls for daily work for an ever closer relationship between the communist party and the masses [5] . Furthermore, Xi reconfirms the fundamentality of Marxism: "We must never forget our origins and must remain committed to our mission. Chinese Communism has its origins in adhering to Marxism, communism and socialism in China and in fidelity to the Party and to the people " [6]. Xi Jinping works for the study and development of Marxism, giving impetus to the schools of Marxism that spread to the institutes and universities of all of China.

The extraordinary advance, in the economic, social, political, of China in the last decades, has allowed to reach a determined stage in the development of the productive forces. The path of this extraordinary advance has been marked - as always happens in every complex historical process - by contradictions: between social classes, between city and countryside, between areas of the coast and the interior, between more and less advanced regions. In Xi Jinping's report to the 19th Congress of the CCP (October 2017) they were condensed into the formula of "unbalanced and inadequate development". The quality and effectiveness of development are not as they should be, the defense of the environment is inadequate, there are still great disparities in the distribution of income, in the development of urban and rural areas and between the different regions of the great country; the level ofwelfare is still inadequate. The CCP, which was formed on the study and the concrete analysis of contradictions (I remember the famous writings of Mao Sulla contradiction , 1937, On the right solution of the contradictions within the people , 1957), caught the character of the contradictions with the XIX congress and the change of the main contradiction:

The main problem is that our development is unbalanced and inadequate. This has become the most serious limiting factor in meeting the growing needs of the people for a better life. We must recognize that the evolution of the main contradiction that afflicts Chinese society represents a historical change that affects the entire landscape and poses many new demands for the work of the Party and the country. Based on ongoing efforts to support development, we need to devote great energy to addressing imbalances and inadequacies in development and pushing hard to improve the quality and effects of development. With this, we will be in a better position to meet the ever-increasing economic, political and cultural needs,

The new era for China is therefore constituted by the overcoming of the unbalanced and inadequate development and by the transition to a harmonious development, respectful of man and the environment, environmentally friendly, which places the qualitative rather than quantitative growth in the first place. The modern construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics is divided into three phases: by 2020 it aims to complete the creation of a society with a level of widespread wellbeing; from 2020 to 2035 it aims to realize the foundations of socialist modernization, while from 2035 to the middle of the century it intends to transform China into a modern socialist country based on harmony, beauty and democratic civilization.

In his report at the XIXth Congress Xi listed 14 points:

party leadership on all aspects of society;
politics must be centered on people;
deepen the reform as a whole;
a new concept of development (innovation, coordination, green economy , openness and sharing);
the people are the master of the country;
adhere to the rule of law, govern the country as a whole according to the law;
develop a system of socialist values ​​and trust in one's own culture;
to support and improve people's livelihood;
harmonious coexistence of man and nature (ecological civilization);
national security;
full leadership of the Party on the army;
"One country, two systems": promote reunification with Taiwan;
fighting for an international community of a shared future for all humanity (this has been included in the new CCP charter);
to govern the party in a complete and rigorous manner.


The new era for the world
The new era is not just about China, but the whole world. What was coming to an end and what is it to start? What is the character of the new era?

About 30 years ago, after 1989-91, which led to the end of the USSR and the popular democracies in Europe, imperialist globalization, led by the USA, took off in the world and presented itself as the absolute winners of the Cold War.

That globalization, carried out with war wars, has upset important regions of the planet, the area of ​​the MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa); led to the absorption in NATO and in the EU, under the control of Western capital, of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans and some former Soviet republics; has upset the economies of the African countries.

But the advance of imperialist globalization has stopped at the resistance of Russia, which since 1999 has fired El'cin and was governed under the direction of Putin; nor has it managed to cope with the growing contradictions within the capitalist system. The crisis started in the US in 2007-2008 (financial bubble following an indiscriminate expansion of credit - subprime mortgages - to dope an insufficient demand) has been discharged on the EU economies, whose internal order inspired by German "ordoliberism" has allowed some stronger countries - first and foremost Germany - to in turn unload the crisis on the most fragile countries, the so-called PIIGS, forced to adopt austerity, reduction or cancellation policies.welfare , lowering of wages. This has aggravated the crisis in these countries, with a fall in domestic demand and GDP in a recessionary spiral. This in turn produced a vertical drop in consensus with the political parties that ruled during the crisis, with an exponential growth of populist and "sovereign" movements, which proclaim the only possible solution in the breakup of the EU.

Liberal globalization has also affected the economic structure of the US, which has become increasingly financialized, focusing on the issue of dollars, whose world weight as a reserve currency and the denomination of international prices of raw materials, starting from oil, is supported by military force (the US spends alone on arms almost as much as the rest of the world put together). Despite the enormous military force, however, the US has had to deal with the resistance of the occupied countries, which the US and its most loyal allies, the United Kingdom, have failed to normalize. So they replaced the "strategy of chaos" (adopted by Obama and Hillary Clinton), which was no longer normalizing, for the objective of normalization and pacification of these countries under direct or indirect control of the USA. but to make a crucial area of ​​the world ungovernable in order to prevent other countries from benefiting from it. It is a desperate strategy, which has affected the internal consensusUS establishment . Trump's electoral victory was the response to the American internal malaise [7] . Trump now tries another way, including the commercial war to recover the US primacy ("America first").

Both the rise of Trump to the US presidency and the advance of populist forces in Europe and not only are a response to the hegemonic crisis of the ruling classes of the West, which had focused entirely on imperialist globalization and the unipolarity of the US and his NATO armed wing. This response does not have a progressive but regressive character: compared to an increasingly interconnected world and the possible construction of a community of destiny shared by humanity, Trump and the populist-sovereignists propose a protectionist closure in their own internal courtyard, the top priority of his own state in opposition to the others (Donald Trump: "America first"; Matteo Salvini: "first the Italians"). Faced with the crisis of liberal democracies, a return to populist demagogy is proposed, which characterized the fascism in the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century. Even in the twentieth century, with the First World War, a first cycle of globalization ended, of what Marx defined the tendency inherent in bourgeois development to the realization of a world market. The first globalization at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had two answers: a progressive, socialist and internationalist one, represented by the USSR; a reactionary, represented by fascism and Nazism. A century later, we find ourselves - made all the due differences - in a similar situation: on the one hand, the crisis of imperialist globalization, its false internationalism, which in the name of human rights has bombed Serbia and Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya , and promoted colorful revolutions from Georgia to Ukraine, also attempting to attack Hong Kong;Both these positions - imperialist globalization and populist sovereignism - are reactionary and wrong for the peoples and the development of the planet.



China and the world in the new era
In the face of the structural crisis - economic, political and cultural - of imperialist globalization we have seen in the last decades the extraordinary growth of China - and of other countries in which the revolution led by communist parties, such as Vietnam, has won.

The reform and opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 meant opening up China to the world market; but this opening was not indiscriminate, but it was directed and controlled by the CCP, which had its own clear strategic project of development of productive forces. While US-led globalization has been characterized by imperialism, and so it was, as economist Chossudovski wrote, the "globalization of poverty" [8] , China's openness to the global market can be called an "anti-imperialist globalization". in the sense that China has adopted strategies and methods which, by opening regions and sectors of its economy to world capital, have directed it to the internal development of the country.

In the three decades after 1978, up until the eighteenth congress of the CCP (2012), China tried to maintain a low profile at an international level, it carefully avoided being a protagonist, while weaving - the Shanghai forum, the BRICS - an important network of links with other countries. This was a wise choice, which enabled China to focus on internal development issues, and to provide itself with an economic basis for a further successive leap forward. The development of the Chinese productive forces has been the main concern, and to it - as in the days of the anti-Japanese united front - everything had to be subordinated. But as after the defeat of the Japanese, the CCP has resumed its strategic objectives of the Chinese revolution, so, once an adequate level of development has been achieved,

This is where the Chinese program of a non-imperialist "new globalization" intervenes, as opposed to the unsuccessful "US globalization". The founding idea of ​​this "new globalization" is innervated and articulated in a grandiose initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative, the new Silk Road. It is a concrete initiative of development for China and the world, and at the same time also a cultural proposal, closely connected to the new internationalism of China, to the struggle to build a community of destiny shared for all of humanity.

China is today the only country in the world that proposes to the whole world, to all humanity, a project of extraordinary human development, which can become a hegemon, a key idea accepted and shared by the peoples of the world.

We are facing a crossroads. The old road - which despite the smoke of novelty is also that of the "America first" of Trump - is precluded, is bankruptcy. Both imperialist globalization and sovereign and excluding protectionism are unsuccessful: they are two mirror-reactionary forms.

Xi proposes a "new globalization". It is a project that is not only economic, but cultural, of concrete universalism in the recognition of diversity and in the proposal to fight for the construction of a community of destiny shared for humanity. It is the strategic vision of the future of the whole world as an increasingly interconnected world, which requires a new kind of globalization, quite different from that led by the United States and Western countries, which has been in place since 1991. Relations between countries all over the world must rely on win-win reciprocity. In this sense the thought of Xi Jinping is the opposite of Trump's thought of "America first": Xi thinks of the community of common destiny of humanity, not just the destiny of his nation. Xi's thinking is universalistic, not particularistic. This universalism is not, however, an abstract universalism, but a concrete universalism, which considers the concrete economic and social conditions, the contradictions between social classes and states.

In his speech to the UN for the 70th, on 28 September 2015 Xi Jinping said:

We must increase exchanges between civilizations to promote harmony, inclusion and respect for differences. The world is more colorful because of its cultural diversity. Diversity generates exchanges, exchanges create integration and integration makes progress possible.

In their interactions, civilizations must accept their differences. Only through mutual respect, mutual learning and harmonious coexistence can the world maintain its diversity and prosper. Every civilization represents the vision and the unique contribution of its people, and no civilization is superior to the others. Different civilizations should have dialogue and exchanges instead of trying to exclude or substitute each other. The history of humanity is a process of active exchanges, interactions and integration between different civilizations. We should respect all civilizations and treat each other as equals. We should draw inspiration from each other to stimulate the creative development of human civilization [9] .

For China, Xi's thinking is an innovation and at the same time is in continuity with the thought of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and the other Chinese socialist leaders and theorists. The continuity is in a vision of China as a developing country that needs a relatively long period to develop the productive forces and must focus on this enormous goal: here China has achieved many successes in a few decades and is now the second the world's most important economy and is developing more and more. But the change that Xi has made is no less important, because, considering the level of development of the Chinese productive forces, Xi indicates that China has entered a new phase, which needs a new globalization. The Belt and Road Initiative is not just a concrete proposal for the countries of Asia, Europe, Africa; it is also the metaphor of the idea of ​​projection of China in the world. It is the idea of ​​the new globalization that Xi has exposed in many speeches against the protectionist politics of the Trump administration.

In short, we can say that today in the world there are two opposite conceptions about the future, and consequently two opposing policies: the new globalization proposed by China and an exclusivist nationalism, which is a real regression for humanity.

Xi's internationalist conception is not the erasing of China's national interests and socialism with Chinese characteristics; on the contrary, it is the recognition that these interests can develop better in an interconnected world. It is the dialectic of universal and particular, national and international.

In the "new era" the new phase of the development of China is met, aimed at overcoming its current main contradiction, as indicated by the XIXth Congress of the CCP, and the proposal to the peoples of the world, the labor movement and all authentically democratic forces and progressives of a forward (and not reactionary and regressive) exit to the crisis of imperialist globalization.

To the communist and workers' parties of the world, the authentically democratic and progressive forces are tasked with taking up the strategic challenge that Xi's thinking proposes.

[1] Xi Jinping, The governance of China , vol. II, Foreign Languages ​​Press, Beijing 2017, p. 597.

[2] See Nad etim razmyšljaet istorija. Zametki k 20-tiletiju s momenta razvala SSSR [This is what the story is about. Notes for the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR], Social Sciences Academy Press, Beijing, 2013.

[3] Xi Jinping, The governance of China , vol. II, op. cit., pp. 164-170.

[4] Xi Jinping, The governance of China , vol. II, op. cit., pp. 176-184, and several other writings and speeches.

[5] Xi Jinping, The governance of China , vol. II, op. cit., pp. 456-478.

[6] Xi Jinping, The governance of China , vol. II, op. cit., p. 355.

[7] I would like to refer to my "Changes in the World Framework. The international politics of Donald Trump, the EU, Italy ", in MarxVentuno n. 1-2 / 2018 , also available https://www.marx21books.com/mutamenti-n ... e-litalia/ or http: // www .marx21.it / documents / catone_mutamentinelquadromondiale.pdf .

[8] The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order , Global Research, 2003.

[9] See "A New Partnership of Mutual Benefit and a Community of Shared Future", in The governance of China , vol. II, p. 573.

https://www.marx21books.com/lanti-trump ... nuova-era/

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