Beire wrote:Czechoslovakia and Zakarpatia wrote:Just to let you know, you are standing side by side with a neoliberal oligarchy that has abandoned socialism and communism several decades ago when it passed Deng's reformd and is now paying lip service at best to Marxism. Even Maoists are so disgusted with the current state of affairs that they regularly criticize the regime on a constant basis.
It's a good thing I'm not a Maoist then. I am critical of certain aspects of China's reforms, but ultimately they remain on a socialist path.
They remain on a socialist path how, exactly? Their labour conditions are quite frankly abhorrent, there are widespread disparities of income, especially between regions, their healthcare system has been gradually privatized, worker control over the means of production is nonexistent, and foreign corporations can look forward to one of the cheapest labour forces in the world, in addition to China having more billionaires than the United States of America, the homeland of capitalism. And the consensus is clear that China
is a state capitalist economy:
Current forms in the 21st century"State capitalism is distinguished from capitalist mixed economies where the state intervenes in markets to correct market failures or to establish social regulation or social welfare provisions in the following way: the state operates businesses for the purpose of accumulating capital and directing investment in the framework of either a free market or a mixed-market economy. In such a system, governmental functions and public services are often organized as corporations, companies or business enterprises.
Mainland ChinaMany analysts assert that China is one of the main examples of state capitalism in the 21st century.[65][66][67] In his book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations, political scientist Ian Bremmer describes China as the primary driver for the rise of state capitalism as a challenge to the free market economies of the developed world, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–2008.[68] Bremmer draws a broad definition of state capitalism as such:[69]
"In this system, governments use various kinds of state-owned companies to manage the exploitation of resources that they consider the state's crown jewels and to create and maintain large numbers of jobs. They use select privately owned companies to dominate certain economic sectors.
They use so-called sovereign wealth funds to invest their extra cash in ways that maximize the state's profits. In all three cases, the state is using markets to create wealth that can be directed as political officials see fit. And in all three cases, the ultimate motive is not economic (maximizing growth) but political (maximizing the state's power and the leadership's chances of survival). This is a form of capitalism but one in which the state acts as the dominant economic player and uses markets primarily for political gain."
Following on Bremmer, Aligica, and Tarko[70] further develop the theory that state capitalism in countries like modern day China and Russia is an example of a rent-seeking society. They argue that following the realization that the centrally planned socialist systems could not effectively compete with capitalist economies, formerly Communist Party political elites are trying to engineer a limited form of economic liberalization that increases efficiency while still allowing them to maintain political control and power.
In his article "We're All State Capitalists Now", British historian and Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University Niall Ferguson warns against "an unhelpful oversimplification to divide the world into 'market capitalist' and 'state capitalist' camps. The reality is that most countries are arranged along a spectrum where both the intent and the extent of state intervention in the economy vary".[69] He then notes:[69]
"The real contest of our time is not between a state-capitalist China and a market-capitalist America, with Europe somewhere in the middle. It is a contest that goes on within all three regions as we all struggle to strike the right balance between the economic institutions that generate wealth and the political institutions that regulate and redistribute it."
In the common program set up by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 1949, in effect the country’s interim constitution, state capitalism meant an economic system of corporatism. It provided that:[71]
"Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism."
Analysis of the "Chinese model" by the economists Julan Du and Chenggang Xu finds that the contemporary economic system of the People's Republic of China represents a state capitalist system as opposed to a market socialist system. The reason for this categorization is the existence of financial markets in the Chinese economic system, which are absent in the market socialist literature and in the classic models of market socialism; and that state profits are retained by enterprises rather than being equitably distributed among the population in a basic income/social dividend or similar scheme, which are major features in the market socialist literature. They conclude that China is neither a form of market socialism nor a stable form of capitalism.[72]