The China Politics Thread - Page 3

On May 18 2022 05:42 maybenexttime wrote:

The party calls itself communist (and North Korea calls itself "democratic", by the way), but neither China nor the USSR ever claimed to be communist, afaik. They only tell their people that they're striving to one day become a communist society.

f you mean to say that China is not a communist country because it has not achieved a "Communist" stage of economic development, then you are not only correct, but the Chinese Communist Party itself agrees with you.

In the west, the term "Communist" in the context of countries is used to refer primarily to Marxist-Leninist states. Most famously these would be the Soviet Union and China, which were both headed by Communist Parties. The thing is, even though every one of these countries followed Communist ideology, none of them ever claimed to be Communist. If you read Russian or Chinese texts you will notice that they always mention "Socialism" and claim to be "Socialist countries".

This is because in the Communist idea of historic dialectic set out by Marx and Engels, the human stages of economic development go in the following order: Feudalism > Capitalism > Socialism > Communism . In other words, Communism was the "end goal" that all the Marxists (traditional Communists) set out to achieve.

However, if you look at Russian and Chinese history you will notice that they attempted to go from semi-feudal agrarian societies to jump directly into the "Socialism" stage without going through the capitalism stage. This turned out to be a mistake, since market capitalism was much more capable of providing surplus than socialist state run economies. This is where the stereotypes of constant food and commodity shortages of the Eastern bloc originate from.

It was from this context that China in the 1970s began to switch gears to a more market driven "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" under Deng Xiaoping. Market reforms were introduced, moving China away from the stereotypical Marxist-Leninist "Communist" type of state run economy. This may seem to many like an admission that Communism is flawed, but in fact, it is almost the opposite.

Deng Xiaoping was a staunch communist, and his shift towards market capitalism was in fact an attempt to drive China back into the "correct" communist path. So instead of going Feudalism > Socialism > Communism, and skipping capitalism, he would put the "Capitalism" stage back in, as Marx had originally envisioned. The idea is to let the nation become wealthy with surplus first, before reigning it back in under the state.

To this day, this remains under this ideology of having communism as the end goal, and the Chinese Communist Party retains heavy "socialist" economic policies - All major banks continue to be state run, funded by the central bank, and major companies are all either directly run by or heavily influenced by the Party, even when in the eyes of western economic analysts it would be far more efficient to further implement market reforms. In fact, these days the Communist party is starting to go in the opposite direction, as it is attempting to bring back the influence of the state run economy, which they believe has run too far from the proper "Communist" way.

In other words, China was never a Communist country. But Communism remains the goal of the leaders of China. And in the west, where Communism is not well understood, a country with Communism as the end goal is considered a Communist country. In this regards, China is just as Communist as it was under Chairman Mao, it's just much richer while doing it. No country was ever Communist. But if any country could be called "Communist", it would be China.

TL/DR: "Communists" are those who consider "Communism" to be the end goal. The Chinese Government considers "Communism" to be the end goal. Therefore China is "Communist".