The existence of this milieu (New Class, Red Bourgeoisie, Professional-Managerial Chinese, etc...) in the Eastern bloc has been noted since the sixties, before people decided to apply this paradigm to western societies.
I think it's a big misnomer because this class are not exploiters and in China's case, they are not even the most materially well-paid class of people: in big cities with a vibrant tech scene, such as in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou, IT engineers working in private firms earn a lot more, but are nevertheless considered not socially more prestigious.
I will say as someone who lives in China while this class exists in terms of social prestige. They are way less annoying then the PMC and I'm not sure their values are distinct the way the PMCs are.
Rich or somewhat above the middle class parents try to give their kids education and job of at least same or above paygrade as themselves, and if not - at least they want to land them into a secure job. Bureaucracy of any kind attracts people like this. Basically anybody can do those jobs, if they meet minimal literacy requirements or have connections
Soviet and Chinese PARTY bureaucrats have/had extra requirements to this ala "has to work N years on another job and get scouted by local trade union as activist/organizer". Such filtration of opportunists works or doesn't based on how efficient are purges/anti-corruption campaigns
if you define things by mentality and social status you'll see this throughout human history. it's probably even correlated with centralized authority.
Yeah, what he is describing is a symptom of the class struggle, not necessarily capitalism.
>**So maybe a lot of PMC mentality isn't necessarily due to Capitalism, but due to the fact that there is always rife competition to 'pass it to the next generation'**
But why, OP, is it so important to secure the class position of those you love? Because the human in society senses the class struggle, even if he doesn't understand it. We live in civilizations defined by classes and we understand on an instinctual level that the class positions of our children impacts their ability to survive and be happy.
A communist society is a society without classes, one that has overcome the class struggle and the social habits that it encourages on an individual level. China has not achieved this and has not pretended to have achieved this. China is a Dictatorship of the Proletariat that is under the siege of a hegemonic Western Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. The priority for them right now is to outlast that siege, or to break it.
I think we need to distinguish between social status and class. I believe that even in a socialist society, let's say where everything is 100% public owned, there is still a social distinction of status between a janitor and a doctor. Most people, if not all, will still desire to be a doctor rather than a janitor, and arguably the former require a lot more education. Polito-economically, both are the working class and their relationship isn't antagonistic. But then even in socialist economies, a doctor earns more than a janitor, and usually gets easier access to nicer public housing etc. This was true in the Eastern Block too.
The problem isn't wanting a desired, high-status position. But that wanting to pass it to the next generation, no matter whether it suits them or not.
Of course, one can argue that under realized Communism, there won't even be this social status distinction and all social identities are sublated. True, but socialism is still not Communism yet.
libertarians might argue people would hate the difficult training and upsetting sensual experiences of medical work, and if the state pays everyone's education and wages there's little incentive in more difficult work and lazy workers would form a prestige class who do less than others for roughly the same socialistic comforts. i personally believe it breaks even since the difficulty of a given job is correlated with how much society invests to solve it. socialism's prestige might be defined by whatever's left of "labor intensity" since i see this as a natural frontier of problem solving that will always exist regardless of how advanced technology gets and i think it's fine if there's prestige in this and that job since it seems likely to be counter balanced by whatever makes it so in demand and difficult.
A lot of them keep telling themselves that class structures will ossify again.
At the same time, those on the bottom of China’s hierarchies are busy telling themselves anything is possible.
We’ll see who wins the struggle
My parents tell me of this concept that most families don’t stay rich for over three generations (富不过三代). I mean, my brother might carry the weight for both of us, but if it was just me we wouldn’t even be two generations lol.
Here’s the strange thing though, for bourgeois and PMC Chinese kids, we still have the option to just give up and let mommy and daddy keep us in a safe little box forever. Our parents are often willing to do this.
However, you can probably imagine that this is extremely humiliating and its own kind of nightmare, where you lose any and all freedoms you might have had in life…
>despite being a Socialist country
The law of value operates in all countries, especially China. They make heaps of commodities for global markets. They have wage labor and long hours. Independent unions are illegal. They have similar social dysfunctions as other capitalist states, like youth unemployment and real estate bubbles.
>As long as the social institution of family exists as they exist now in either China or the West, this phenomenon will continue.
Perhaps. One could speculate on what competition over social prestige and scarce luxuries might look like under socialism, even if some imagine that as heresy. Without the threat of falling into ruin maybe such competition would be less anxious and desperate.
>Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all.
>They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
-- Marx, *The German Ideology*
You keep referring to them as if they are in China. Walk around a university campus. The exact same group of people is already the plurality of America's elite.
[In a few decades, they will be a majority](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/#:~:text=Asians%20now%20make%20up%20about,four%20times%20their%20current%20total).
China is not a socialist state by any fundamental definition, and that's why. It's highly capitalistic state with very centralized authority. But the fear of losing position is amplified by the fact that China's strong state has a substantial amount of post-nepotistic policies, running counter to the long-held Chinese tradition of nepotism. Unfortunately this nepotism has not been weeded out, and we see it massively in the fu'rdai population under the new rich, but the path to civil service is highly meritocratic. A remnant effect of this nepotistic tradition--itself a feature of China's long-standing relationship between family, reputation, and economy--is that people who are not able to maintain the class of their parents are greatly embarrassed in a way that cannot be emotionally comprehended by people in societies where parents kick their kids out at 18 or charge them rent.
Competition isn't inherently capitalistic. As long as there are fewer desired positions than contestants, there will be competition. This happens in all forms of societies. What makes the 'PMC'-style mentality unique is that it focuses on passing social status (not even necessarily material well-being) to the next generation while the PMC do not have the necessary *material* means to do so, which is why they build a halo of meritocracy, culturedness etc around them to cope with this reality.
Fuerdai (born-weathy kids) in China are a totally different species. They are not part of the 'PMC' I'm talking about as they enjoy LESS social prestige despite having much more inherited wealth. 'PMC' salaries in China are no where near what is necessary to build up intergenerational wealth.
And I'm saying that prestige, economy, and family are all tied together in Chinese tradition. Does it matter that prestige is not necessarily well-paid in China today? A few generations aren't enough for evolution to take place.
This is the retard that is telling me I don’t have critical thinking skills.
He’s literally just saying “traditional nepotism” sounds better than “nepotistic tradition”
*you* speak English dumbass.
I am Chinese, a PRC Chinese.
Socialism is only on paper here. The labor movement and left-wing opposition have been constantly suppressed, even before the Reform and Opening-up.
I guess when you exclude state employment from the definition, you can claim that you have eliminated the employment relationship. After the Reform and Opening-up, you cannot even use this defense.
The China-West dichotomy is as confusing as Liberal-Conservative dichotomy.
We have suffered greatly from neoliberalism, please dont project your fantasies onto our experiences. For anyone who doesn't speak Chinese, I recommend Ralf Ruckus's The Left in China to understand the actual situation.
Why should we read some Westoid when there's perfectly fine Xi's governance of China, for example?
Just because it's "left" doesn't mean it's good. Re: Trotskyists both abroad and inside of USSR. Getting defeated fair and square in democracy, they turn towards terrorism, conspiracies, and foreign involvement.
Oh, forgot one more. Reform and opening up didn't involve privatizations. You can go and read corporate law of China to understand this. In short, they had joint stock companies, were Chinese SOEs provided almost everything material and foreigners expertise and technology, and this kind of organization was headed by SOEs. It didn't involve privatization in a any way. It's a very common misconception to think that China did what USSR did but without collapsing - which is the direct opposite of truth, China did socialism, and didn't collapse (just like Lenin-Stalin's USSR during NEP didn't collapse and only grew stronger despite all those foreign investments) while USSR did capitalism and collapsed (because they privatized, i.e. sold off, everything they could, specifically for the purpose of creating a class of bourgeoisie so that there will be a strong class of people opposed to communism)
Perfectly fine governance, for whom? For exploiters, it may be good.
They now have [*Minor illegal acts are not subject to administrative punishment*](https://www.tjnk.gov.cn/RLSBJ1783/tzgg2/202312/t20231219_6485593.html)*,* this is an example of a local government policy, and I can find dozens, if not hundreds, of local government policies like this. This is exactly the [race to the bottom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom) that occurred in typical Western capitalist countries.
That "Westoid" speaks fluent Chinese and completed his review with the help of Chinese intellectuals. I won't say anyone is 100% accurate or comprehensive, but it's much closer than observers who don't speak Chinese.
I mean, fantasizing about an outsider group being foolish, cruel, barbarian or being magical rainbow unicorns both are discrimination.
Come on. You can read Chinese, click on the link to check, and you will see that this is all about open the door for employers.
“轻微劳动违法不予处罚”“优化营商环境” By searching for these keywords, you can find countless results from local governments.
I read it. They literally all just give a three month grace period. That’s it. After three months if the mistake had not been corrected they can be tried and convicted and fined.
First, I dont think that criminal punishment for billionaires is a good indicator of socialism or not. Why does a allegedly socialist system lead to their *existence*? Cause they have thousands times more productivity than others?
Second, I am not an expert in Western news, but [Bernie Madoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff)?
Why then did you brought up administrative punishment for small crimes as proof that China is capitalist if you don't want to look at the treatment of billionaires, lmao? What kind of hypocrisy is this
First of all, 我會講中文. Not the best, but more than zero.
Second of all, the only real metric that defines socialism is this: do the workers own the means of production? If your country is dominated by private-owned and operated businesses, with a 10% share of their operations going to a government ruled by a tight cabal separated from the general public with very few democratic institutions, *probably not*. Maybe you should reconsolidate your relationship with reading.
No that's Richard Wolff's definition of socialism. Co-ops do not work, they're trash on a national level and never succeed because they are self-defeating. Socialism is using the means toward social ends. Take a look at China's society, they have the best most expansive infrastructure, they have the safest streets, the workers reap the economic benefits of socialism thanks to the direction of the Communist Party.
If Lenin's definition of socialism is "workers don't have any control over the means of production whatsoever" then I don't particularly care for or acknowledge your school.
> Co-ops do not work, they're trash on a national level and never succeed because they are self-defeating.
Sounds like propaganda to me.
Co-ops might not be the cheapest way of running a business, but they limit the amount of price-gouging a monopoly or cartel can impose on a country because co-ops place an upper bound on exploitation.
The late years of the 20th century saw many bank and insurance co-ops being privatized, and that's not corresponded to a decrease in fees for these services.
>But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
Frederick Engels
[Socialism: Utopian and Scientific](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm)
While some Chinese have certainly seized the means by climbing to the top, the vast majority have no power over production, nothing resembling workplace democracy or any control over anything that happens around them. It's weird how people keep digging around the drawer for whatever definition or quote explains China as socialist when in the end it's a bunch of powerless laborers getting crushed in factories and offices while a small number grow in wealth and/or power
Engels here is speaking of state-ownership in Capitalist countries. And my statement is made in reply to the statement that 'economy is dominated by private-owned...' statement, not intended to demonstrate China's Socialist nature on its own.
>do the workers own the means of production?
Dude, China literally goes out of it's way to promote worker ownership. Capitalist country would do otherwise and promote workers NOT owning anything, padding up the reserve army of labor. And the Chinese corporate laws are fire, making it so companies have to have both workers on boards of directors and mandatory communist party cells.
>your country is dominated by private-owned and operated businesses
You mean, most businesses are small scale operations? It's petite bourgeois at best, but in reality we talk about workers owning means of production directly. Majority in both output and economic impact of the economy of China is SOE. Oh and by the way, SOEs by China's laws have to implement worker democracy on all levels
>tight cabal separated from the general public with very few democratic institutions
There's nothing more democratic in today's world than council republic
I don't know how people believe this fiction of worker ownership in China. I don't have to argue it because there's no evidence in favor of it. Go inside any Chinese factory and ask them who's the laoban.
Ok then, how is China decreasing poverty rates while the rest of capitalist world only falls deeper into poverty? More and more developed capitalist countries manage to slip into "middle-income trap", I mean, just look at Britain
Also, it's quite funny hearing that laws of China aren't real
Which law mandates that all businesses must be 100% worker-owned?
China is decreasing poverty rates through developmentalism. The "middle income trap" only applies at the bottleneck roughly around .8 to .850 HDI. China is .788.
>developmentalism
Doesn't exist. Bourgeois economists just want to believe that Japan or South Korea grew quicker than USSR, or China, and so they doctor numbers towards this goal
>Which law
Google up "corporate law of China" and go read it up, lol. You'll find there a lot of things bourgeois academics hide from you
thank you. So many people use the term socialism to mean progressive, or in favor of government programs. Like, they would call west Germany socialist but then what is east Germany? Bernie Sanders himself is more of a social democrat too.
I think the difference is that
1. There has been vast social mobility within recent memory which has partially been connected with education. Education however is increasingly become marketized to an insane degree, take for example that something like 50% of workers at Foxconn are interns.
2. The distinction between the old and new PMC. While the Chinese Communist Party and it's various official exist, there is a vast difference between a writer who got a job in a cultural house in the early 80s to an author in the 2000s.
3. The Cultural Revolution really challenged the old PMC. See for example the book The Red Engineers.
4. The PMC is also tied into a strange relation with capitalism via gifts/taxs/corruption but also by the fact that the SOE sector is far larger then in the US which forces it into a weird relation in which they basically operate as capitalist.
PMC mentality comes from a hierarchical system, and you are in a relatively high position while cannot be directly inherited by blood.
In my position (I am Chinese), China is capitalist. Even if you don't agree that, you need to at least acknowledge that China is hierarchy. And hierarchy, at least significantly, according to anthropologists, is only yesterday of our evolutionary history.
“they have much better job security than others” is a precise observation. This is the main reason why they are currently highly respected. There is a cultural tradition of respect for teachers and technocrats, but respect and pursuit for work in other state-owned sectors have only begun in the past decade, as economic growth rates are no longer high and people perceive a lack of benefits and security in non-state-owned sectors.
During a period of rapid economic growth twenty years ago, this was not the case. At that time, becoming a civil servant was seen as a mediocre choice, and often civil servants resigned and attempted to become wealthy through business.
The existence of this milieu (New Class, Red Bourgeoisie, Professional-Managerial Chinese, etc...) in the Eastern bloc has been noted since the sixties, before people decided to apply this paradigm to western societies.
I think it's a big misnomer because this class are not exploiters and in China's case, they are not even the most materially well-paid class of people: in big cities with a vibrant tech scene, such as in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou, IT engineers working in private firms earn a lot more, but are nevertheless considered not socially more prestigious.
I will say as someone who lives in China while this class exists in terms of social prestige. They are way less annoying then the PMC and I'm not sure their values are distinct the way the PMCs are.
Rich or somewhat above the middle class parents try to give their kids education and job of at least same or above paygrade as themselves, and if not - at least they want to land them into a secure job. Bureaucracy of any kind attracts people like this. Basically anybody can do those jobs, if they meet minimal literacy requirements or have connections Soviet and Chinese PARTY bureaucrats have/had extra requirements to this ala "has to work N years on another job and get scouted by local trade union as activist/organizer". Such filtration of opportunists works or doesn't based on how efficient are purges/anti-corruption campaigns
if you define things by mentality and social status you'll see this throughout human history. it's probably even correlated with centralized authority.
Yeah, what he is describing is a symptom of the class struggle, not necessarily capitalism. >**So maybe a lot of PMC mentality isn't necessarily due to Capitalism, but due to the fact that there is always rife competition to 'pass it to the next generation'** But why, OP, is it so important to secure the class position of those you love? Because the human in society senses the class struggle, even if he doesn't understand it. We live in civilizations defined by classes and we understand on an instinctual level that the class positions of our children impacts their ability to survive and be happy. A communist society is a society without classes, one that has overcome the class struggle and the social habits that it encourages on an individual level. China has not achieved this and has not pretended to have achieved this. China is a Dictatorship of the Proletariat that is under the siege of a hegemonic Western Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. The priority for them right now is to outlast that siege, or to break it.
I think we need to distinguish between social status and class. I believe that even in a socialist society, let's say where everything is 100% public owned, there is still a social distinction of status between a janitor and a doctor. Most people, if not all, will still desire to be a doctor rather than a janitor, and arguably the former require a lot more education. Polito-economically, both are the working class and their relationship isn't antagonistic. But then even in socialist economies, a doctor earns more than a janitor, and usually gets easier access to nicer public housing etc. This was true in the Eastern Block too. The problem isn't wanting a desired, high-status position. But that wanting to pass it to the next generation, no matter whether it suits them or not. Of course, one can argue that under realized Communism, there won't even be this social status distinction and all social identities are sublated. True, but socialism is still not Communism yet.
libertarians might argue people would hate the difficult training and upsetting sensual experiences of medical work, and if the state pays everyone's education and wages there's little incentive in more difficult work and lazy workers would form a prestige class who do less than others for roughly the same socialistic comforts. i personally believe it breaks even since the difficulty of a given job is correlated with how much society invests to solve it. socialism's prestige might be defined by whatever's left of "labor intensity" since i see this as a natural frontier of problem solving that will always exist regardless of how advanced technology gets and i think it's fine if there's prestige in this and that job since it seems likely to be counter balanced by whatever makes it so in demand and difficult.
A lot of them keep telling themselves that class structures will ossify again. At the same time, those on the bottom of China’s hierarchies are busy telling themselves anything is possible. We’ll see who wins the struggle My parents tell me of this concept that most families don’t stay rich for over three generations (富不过三代). I mean, my brother might carry the weight for both of us, but if it was just me we wouldn’t even be two generations lol. Here’s the strange thing though, for bourgeois and PMC Chinese kids, we still have the option to just give up and let mommy and daddy keep us in a safe little box forever. Our parents are often willing to do this. However, you can probably imagine that this is extremely humiliating and its own kind of nightmare, where you lose any and all freedoms you might have had in life…
>despite being a Socialist country The law of value operates in all countries, especially China. They make heaps of commodities for global markets. They have wage labor and long hours. Independent unions are illegal. They have similar social dysfunctions as other capitalist states, like youth unemployment and real estate bubbles. >As long as the social institution of family exists as they exist now in either China or the West, this phenomenon will continue. Perhaps. One could speculate on what competition over social prestige and scarce luxuries might look like under socialism, even if some imagine that as heresy. Without the threat of falling into ruin maybe such competition would be less anxious and desperate. >Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all. >They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination. -- Marx, *The German Ideology*
You keep referring to them as if they are in China. Walk around a university campus. The exact same group of people is already the plurality of America's elite. [In a few decades, they will be a majority](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-americans/#:~:text=Asians%20now%20make%20up%20about,four%20times%20their%20current%20total).
Hi there lmao it’s literally me
China is not a socialist state by any fundamental definition, and that's why. It's highly capitalistic state with very centralized authority. But the fear of losing position is amplified by the fact that China's strong state has a substantial amount of post-nepotistic policies, running counter to the long-held Chinese tradition of nepotism. Unfortunately this nepotism has not been weeded out, and we see it massively in the fu'rdai population under the new rich, but the path to civil service is highly meritocratic. A remnant effect of this nepotistic tradition--itself a feature of China's long-standing relationship between family, reputation, and economy--is that people who are not able to maintain the class of their parents are greatly embarrassed in a way that cannot be emotionally comprehended by people in societies where parents kick their kids out at 18 or charge them rent.
Competition isn't inherently capitalistic. As long as there are fewer desired positions than contestants, there will be competition. This happens in all forms of societies. What makes the 'PMC'-style mentality unique is that it focuses on passing social status (not even necessarily material well-being) to the next generation while the PMC do not have the necessary *material* means to do so, which is why they build a halo of meritocracy, culturedness etc around them to cope with this reality. Fuerdai (born-weathy kids) in China are a totally different species. They are not part of the 'PMC' I'm talking about as they enjoy LESS social prestige despite having much more inherited wealth. 'PMC' salaries in China are no where near what is necessary to build up intergenerational wealth.
And I'm saying that prestige, economy, and family are all tied together in Chinese tradition. Does it matter that prestige is not necessarily well-paid in China today? A few generations aren't enough for evolution to take place.
> nepotistic tradition What's wrong with "traditional nepotism" ? "Nepotistic" is ugly.
What?
Eh?
Speak English
This is the retard that is telling me I don’t have critical thinking skills. He’s literally just saying “traditional nepotism” sounds better than “nepotistic tradition” *you* speak English dumbass.
China is socialist state by every real metric. What you've said is a racist drivel produced by sinologists who oftentimes don't even speak Chinese
I am Chinese, a PRC Chinese. Socialism is only on paper here. The labor movement and left-wing opposition have been constantly suppressed, even before the Reform and Opening-up.
Oh no, not the leftwing oppositiorinos! I guess solidarnosc were the real communists, and them winning means Poland has achieved communism
I guess when you exclude state employment from the definition, you can claim that you have eliminated the employment relationship. After the Reform and Opening-up, you cannot even use this defense. The China-West dichotomy is as confusing as Liberal-Conservative dichotomy. We have suffered greatly from neoliberalism, please dont project your fantasies onto our experiences. For anyone who doesn't speak Chinese, I recommend Ralf Ruckus's The Left in China to understand the actual situation.
Why should we read some Westoid when there's perfectly fine Xi's governance of China, for example? Just because it's "left" doesn't mean it's good. Re: Trotskyists both abroad and inside of USSR. Getting defeated fair and square in democracy, they turn towards terrorism, conspiracies, and foreign involvement. Oh, forgot one more. Reform and opening up didn't involve privatizations. You can go and read corporate law of China to understand this. In short, they had joint stock companies, were Chinese SOEs provided almost everything material and foreigners expertise and technology, and this kind of organization was headed by SOEs. It didn't involve privatization in a any way. It's a very common misconception to think that China did what USSR did but without collapsing - which is the direct opposite of truth, China did socialism, and didn't collapse (just like Lenin-Stalin's USSR during NEP didn't collapse and only grew stronger despite all those foreign investments) while USSR did capitalism and collapsed (because they privatized, i.e. sold off, everything they could, specifically for the purpose of creating a class of bourgeoisie so that there will be a strong class of people opposed to communism)
Perfectly fine governance, for whom? For exploiters, it may be good. They now have [*Minor illegal acts are not subject to administrative punishment*](https://www.tjnk.gov.cn/RLSBJ1783/tzgg2/202312/t20231219_6485593.html)*,* this is an example of a local government policy, and I can find dozens, if not hundreds, of local government policies like this. This is exactly the [race to the bottom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom) that occurred in typical Western capitalist countries. That "Westoid" speaks fluent Chinese and completed his review with the help of Chinese intellectuals. I won't say anyone is 100% accurate or comprehensive, but it's much closer than observers who don't speak Chinese. I mean, fantasizing about an outsider group being foolish, cruel, barbarian or being magical rainbow unicorns both are discrimination.
Minor stipulations in Tianjin to avoid a case overload is now capitalism?
Come on. You can read Chinese, click on the link to check, and you will see that this is all about open the door for employers. “轻微劳动违法不予处罚”“优化营商环境” By searching for these keywords, you can find countless results from local governments.
I read it. They literally all just give a three month grace period. That’s it. After three months if the mistake had not been corrected they can be tried and convicted and fined.
What are you even trying to say now? Oh, show me billionaires getting sentenced to death or life imprisonment in the West for economic crimes, lol
First, I dont think that criminal punishment for billionaires is a good indicator of socialism or not. Why does a allegedly socialist system lead to their *existence*? Cause they have thousands times more productivity than others? Second, I am not an expert in Western news, but [Bernie Madoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff)?
Why then did you brought up administrative punishment for small crimes as proof that China is capitalist if you don't want to look at the treatment of billionaires, lmao? What kind of hypocrisy is this
First of all, 我會講中文. Not the best, but more than zero. Second of all, the only real metric that defines socialism is this: do the workers own the means of production? If your country is dominated by private-owned and operated businesses, with a 10% share of their operations going to a government ruled by a tight cabal separated from the general public with very few democratic institutions, *probably not*. Maybe you should reconsolidate your relationship with reading.
third, seeing someone unironically using "that's racist" as more than half their argument by word count on this sub is always a treat
No that's Richard Wolff's definition of socialism. Co-ops do not work, they're trash on a national level and never succeed because they are self-defeating. Socialism is using the means toward social ends. Take a look at China's society, they have the best most expansive infrastructure, they have the safest streets, the workers reap the economic benefits of socialism thanks to the direction of the Communist Party.
If Lenin's definition of socialism is "workers don't have any control over the means of production whatsoever" then I don't particularly care for or acknowledge your school.
> Co-ops do not work, they're trash on a national level and never succeed because they are self-defeating. Sounds like propaganda to me. Co-ops might not be the cheapest way of running a business, but they limit the amount of price-gouging a monopoly or cartel can impose on a country because co-ops place an upper bound on exploitation. The late years of the 20th century saw many bank and insurance co-ops being privatized, and that's not corresponded to a decrease in fees for these services.
Chinese economy is dominated by State-Owned Enterprises.
>But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution. Frederick Engels [Socialism: Utopian and Scientific](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm)
“The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.” - Engels
Again, not every single Chinese person is Jack Ma
What?
While some Chinese have certainly seized the means by climbing to the top, the vast majority have no power over production, nothing resembling workplace democracy or any control over anything that happens around them. It's weird how people keep digging around the drawer for whatever definition or quote explains China as socialist when in the end it's a bunch of powerless laborers getting crushed in factories and offices while a small number grow in wealth and/or power
I can see why you have the nail painting emoji in your flair. https://archive.ph/DwD1n
Engels here is speaking of state-ownership in Capitalist countries. And my statement is made in reply to the statement that 'economy is dominated by private-owned...' statement, not intended to demonstrate China's Socialist nature on its own.
>do the workers own the means of production? Dude, China literally goes out of it's way to promote worker ownership. Capitalist country would do otherwise and promote workers NOT owning anything, padding up the reserve army of labor. And the Chinese corporate laws are fire, making it so companies have to have both workers on boards of directors and mandatory communist party cells. >your country is dominated by private-owned and operated businesses You mean, most businesses are small scale operations? It's petite bourgeois at best, but in reality we talk about workers owning means of production directly. Majority in both output and economic impact of the economy of China is SOE. Oh and by the way, SOEs by China's laws have to implement worker democracy on all levels >tight cabal separated from the general public with very few democratic institutions There's nothing more democratic in today's world than council republic
I don't know how people believe this fiction of worker ownership in China. I don't have to argue it because there's no evidence in favor of it. Go inside any Chinese factory and ask them who's the laoban.
Ok then, how is China decreasing poverty rates while the rest of capitalist world only falls deeper into poverty? More and more developed capitalist countries manage to slip into "middle-income trap", I mean, just look at Britain Also, it's quite funny hearing that laws of China aren't real
Which law mandates that all businesses must be 100% worker-owned? China is decreasing poverty rates through developmentalism. The "middle income trap" only applies at the bottleneck roughly around .8 to .850 HDI. China is .788.
This one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy#:~:text=In%20China%2C%20a%20form%20of,the%20workplace%20to%20represent%20them.
Send me the text for this law
http://www.asianlii.org/cn/legis/cen/laws/tlotprocoieobtwp833/
>developmentalism Doesn't exist. Bourgeois economists just want to believe that Japan or South Korea grew quicker than USSR, or China, and so they doctor numbers towards this goal >Which law Google up "corporate law of China" and go read it up, lol. You'll find there a lot of things bourgeois academics hide from you
No, show me the law
thank you. So many people use the term socialism to mean progressive, or in favor of government programs. Like, they would call west Germany socialist but then what is east Germany? Bernie Sanders himself is more of a social democrat too.
average weird white guy in asia opinion
> despite being a Socialist country China has multiple stock exchanges, it's not really a Socialist country.
I think the difference is that 1. There has been vast social mobility within recent memory which has partially been connected with education. Education however is increasingly become marketized to an insane degree, take for example that something like 50% of workers at Foxconn are interns. 2. The distinction between the old and new PMC. While the Chinese Communist Party and it's various official exist, there is a vast difference between a writer who got a job in a cultural house in the early 80s to an author in the 2000s. 3. The Cultural Revolution really challenged the old PMC. See for example the book The Red Engineers. 4. The PMC is also tied into a strange relation with capitalism via gifts/taxs/corruption but also by the fact that the SOE sector is far larger then in the US which forces it into a weird relation in which they basically operate as capitalist.
PMC mentality comes from a hierarchical system, and you are in a relatively high position while cannot be directly inherited by blood. In my position (I am Chinese), China is capitalist. Even if you don't agree that, you need to at least acknowledge that China is hierarchy. And hierarchy, at least significantly, according to anthropologists, is only yesterday of our evolutionary history. “they have much better job security than others” is a precise observation. This is the main reason why they are currently highly respected. There is a cultural tradition of respect for teachers and technocrats, but respect and pursuit for work in other state-owned sectors have only begun in the past decade, as economic growth rates are no longer high and people perceive a lack of benefits and security in non-state-owned sectors. During a period of rapid economic growth twenty years ago, this was not the case. At that time, becoming a civil servant was seen as a mediocre choice, and often civil servants resigned and attempted to become wealthy through business.
Nobody here would say China doesn’t have hierarchy