So I recently joined a socialist org (Eur*pe), been participating in some cool anti-imperialist protests and anti-fascist local struggle.
The topic of China’s socialism came up in conversation, and I naturally said that China is socialist. They looked at me as if I were nuts, and a discussion ensued about China not being socialist.
Their points are that it’s not expanding worldwide socialism, that it’s engaging in imperialism in Africa, that it’s only shifting to renewables because it’s profitable for them, and the classic “but they have rich capitalist owners and the Chinese workers are exploited”.
Doesn’t matter that their capitalists don’t control the media and state apparatus (which they somehow disagree with), that they’re the only country capable of fighting the fossil fuel lobby, that they’ve uplifted 800mn people from poverty in 30 years, that they deindustrialized NATO, that they support Iran and are creating the possibility of a multipolar world, that most investments in Africa are in electric infrastructure, that Chinese people overwhelmingly say that they live in a democracy and support their socialist government, that housing is not only not prohibitively expensive but actually prices are going down, that food is incredibly affordable, that they don’t engage in imperialist war… Nothing is good enough, they’re capitalists because they conform to capitalist mode of production (which isn’t even true because like half their economy is state-owned). And they have the guts to tell ME I’m being dogmatic and only seeing black and white, because I dare speak about a model of socialism that doesn’t conform to their narrow views.
I swear it’s impossible to find socialists in Eur*pe who aren’t patronizing, condescending, and honestly fucking racist to global south socialist movements. They literally told me that Cuba “should have industrialized”. Like, god fucking damn it, do you SERIOUSLY believe you know better about the possibilities of the economy of Cuba than the people devoting their entire lives to it in the country, supporting and maintaining the revolution throughout the 70 years of murderous embargo? Like, how do you believe you can thoroughly industrialize a 10mn inhabitant island entirely cut from trade with the rest of the world? The Eastern Block could only do this because it had like a fucking third the landmass of Earth and some 400mn inhabitants, and even then they suffered limitations such as lack of access to critical semiconductor technology due to embargo. But no, Cuba is not socialist because it has private hotels for tourists, as if they had any other way to get foreign currency to purchase high-tech medical diagnosis machines and critical energy resources. Fucking bunch of idealist, anti-materialist, condescending pieces of shit!
Edit: not disagreeing here, just elaborating ig
Asking if China is on the path to communism is only a rephrasing of the question. The more important questions are what is currently reproducing capitalism as a global system? what concrete steps can be taken to undermine that reproduction? which entities in the world have the capacity to enact those steps?
It’s not a question of whether China “is” socialist or “on the path to” any statically defined state of being. Nor it is a question whether China has a bourgeoisie. It definitively does. But how does one characterize the whole of China as a process, as a changing system in motion. What is the nature of this bourgeoisie, does their power grow over time and undermine the people’s power held by the party? What is the nature of China’s foreign policy and international investment, does it have an imperial character equal to the western countries or is it different? I think the CPC has a pretty good grasp of these dynamics. Not to say it’s perfect; there are neoliberal elements in Chinese politics too. But the fact that these questions can be practically pondered at all puts China far ahead of any western, so-called socialists.