8 ms·

Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

69 points by ilamont 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago
One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and innovation? Or is all of this planning and adoption of market economies just a means to birth a socialist end state into existence? I also found the following portion chilling, as it has all the undertones of propaganda and the worst of the Cultural Revolution, except it’s all being admitted in the open: > Fifth, we must promote common prosperity in the spiritual [and moral] lives of the people. The promotion of common prosperity is highly integrated with the promotion of all-round human development. We must strengthen the guidance of the Socialist Core Values, and education on patriotism, collectivism and socialism. We must develop [our] public culture enterprise, improve the public culture service system, and continuously meet the diverse, multi-levelled, and multi-faceted spiritual, moral and cultural needs of the people. > We must strengthen public opinion guidance on driving common prosperity to provide a favourable public opinion environment. In doing so, we should clarify various fuzzy understandings, and guard against impatience and fear of difficulties.
- shadilay 5y ago
  'Common Prosperity' seems to mean that there are too many rich people in China that are giving too little money to the central government as their wealth usurps the power of the CCP.
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    Yeah, Tax the Rich. This essay could have come from any given Twitter "intelligentsia" in America today with only a select few terms changed.
    - m0zg 5y ago
      "Tax the rich" in the US is just a slogan. In 20+ years I've been in the US I've yet to see it actually yield anything concrete. Taxes on the middle class have grown substantially in the meanwhile (health insurance is 3x what it was 20 years ago, and it is a tax in all but name, real estate taxes are 4-5x, and you now pay local sales taxes on interstate online purchases, too).
      - _hilro 5y ago
        Surely it's more than that. /s I mean the NYTimes[0] gave a glowing interview to the creator/designer of AOC's 'Tax The Rich' on September 21 but never once mentioned that the designer owes a considerable amount in taxes in multiple states[1] which had been published 3 days prior by another newspaper. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/style/aoc-designer-tax-the-rich-dress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/style/aoc-designer-tax-th... [1] https://nypost.com/2021/09/18/aocs-tax-the-rich-dress-designer-aurora-james-is-a-tax-deadbeat/ https://nypost.com/2021/09/18/aocs-tax-the-rich-dress-design...
    - shadilay 5y ago
      It's more nuanced than that. In America calls for raising taxes are usually in the name of some public good, eg infrastructure. How true that is is up to personal interpretation. In China it's purely about power, namely removing any semblance of power held by non government entities.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        Well, no, in China it's in the name of socialism - of the prosperity and well-being of the less well off. How true that is is not really up for personal interpretation - it's just false. (Of course, one could argue the same about the US...)
- fenderbluesjr 5y ago
  Stephen Kotkin is an interesting historian that (I think) would argue that China's govt is still very much communist and perhaps that their adoption of capitalist ideas were a necessary compromise and not a rejection of their former ideals
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Well, the pure communism was leading to very slow development and many people still in poverty. Communism wasn't getting them to a socialist paradise. So they adopted capitalism to get their economy going, and that got people wanting capitalism and operating in a capitalist way and with a capitalist mindset. Now they want to keep the capitalist prosperity but have everyone want socialism, think socialism and do socialism. It remains to be seen whether that is possible; I suspect that the answer is "no". I suspect that they're going to kill the capitalist prosperity by this. But we'll see.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Communist ideals didn’t work because of free loaders. They had to adopt capitalism because they were starving to death by the millions. Eventually reasoned ideology bows to reality.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no longer want to be bound by the old morality, which they deem as intrusive or blocking them from realizing their happiness. In the beginning, they just want to be left alone to ignore the old morality. But then the liberalism turns into decadence -- they mock the old morality with increasing intensity. Then the mocking becomes stronger until the old morality is declared evil. As all of this is happening, people turn to hedonism. But the old morality was keeping the society together, and when it is gone, the society collapses, to be replaced by some new illiberal regime that enforces something else. That is basically the US right now -- we are undergoing social collapse, and everyone except Americans see the collapse happening. But the west had a strong strain of Christianity that withstood liberalism for a good 200-300 years before decadence really took hold in the lives of ordinary people. That coexistence with liberalism created enormous economic growth. China doesn't have 200 years because as a socialist revolutionary government, they already swept away a lot of the old accumulated cultural capital that allowed Chinese civilization to continue, and they didn't really have anything convincing to replace it with. Then they allowed liberalism in order to also benefit from economic growth. Now, they see the decadence starting to take root, and are really worried. Really all they have to keep the society together is national pride and a quest for making money. They have tried to do things like revive an interest in Confucius, for example, but they can't seriously be trying to resurrect that old civilization. So China's morality is extremely weak, and isn't in a position to hold out as long as the west did against decadence, so they are really in a lot of trouble. Thus China is fighting like mad -- e.g banning effeminate men on TV, trying to ban excess consumption and put a lid on consumer culture, maintaing strict control of media to ensure patriotic content and limit ironic/satiric portrayals of cherished values, etc. It does not want to allow the cultural shift that happened in the 60s in the west to happen in China. Basically, China is fighting the kulturkampf that Bismark fought in Germany. And just like that cultural war, China is trying to strengthen the social safety net to make sure that everyone has a place in their society, in order to inculcate loyalty to the system and extinguish the "outerclass" consisting of those who are enemies of the current morality. The carrot is a stronger safety net, the stick is pretty strong, too -- public figures are being dissappeared not because they openly opposed CCP rule, but because they embody decadent values. Note that this is a chronic problem for communist regimes or any regime that takes hold after a leftist revolt, and the USSR had the same problem. Once you destroy a thousand years of what kept the society together, what new glue can you use to keep the society together? It's something Marx discounted because of his robotic materialism -- to him man was a stomach with legs -- it was all a battle about material means, and burning down all the churches and rewriting history a small price to pay in order win the battle of economic distribution. Until you are actually in charge of the society and realize that all those churches were really important, and you can't just ginny up a fake state pseudo-religion that actually has the strength of Christianity to keep the society together. By not taking religion seriously, they just assumed they could replace it, and it was only too late that they realized that this isn't something you can just cook up when needed. The state insta-morality is paper thin. Remember the USSR fell apart not because it was bankrupt, but because the elite didn't believe in it anymore. It became the butt of jokes. People were tired of it and mocked it. Whereas Christianity kept society together for over 1000 years, communism was an effective glue for about 40. So China is scrambling to avoid that fate, trying to defend the paper-thin "socialist core values" that it sees as the glue holding society together. Of course almost no one believes in socialist core values, not in a way anyone is loyal to, so what Xi ends up doing in practice is arresting boy bands. Now, with this perspective in mind, if you re-read the statement, it should make a lot more sense.
- prewett 5y ago
  If you think that’s chilling, read the essay “Engineering the Human Soul” (https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in), by a long-time Australian China-watcher. He asserts that Xi Jinping though follows in a direct line from Stalin and Mao.
  - everybodyknows 5y ago
    "though" -> thought >a speech he gave at an internal Australian government seminar in August 2017. So, a bit dated, but lays out cultural history in amazing detail.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      CCP proposes to think on the 50 year scale, so this is last week for them :)
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    To the rest of us, "follows in a direct line from Stalin" is not a recommendation...
- refurb 5y ago
  An interesting contrast is Vietnam. On the surface it looks like they’ve gone full Gordon Gekko capitalism. But the party is managing everything in the background. They are happy to let foreign investment flow in and Vietnamese get rich…to a point. Think of it like this: 1) we’ll extract as much value from the capitalist model, 2) but strip any power capitalists might gain from their business dealings. Anyone who gains enough economic power to threaten the party will be squashed. This is all about winding in the heads that got too big. Think of people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They would never be tolerated in China unless they were firmly in the camp of the CCP.
  - ahepp 5y ago
    Look at what happened to Jack Ma. He made some measured but pointed criticism of the party's banking regulations and disappeared for a month. His IPOs got shut down and a host of new regulations were added that basically kill his ambitions in banking. Vs in the USA, Zuck attempted to create his own currency.
- tabtab 5y ago
  > One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Like any politician, they talk out of both sides of their mouth: promising the "best of both worlds" to try to make both sides happy. Dare I say it? "Synergy"...ugh, I need marketing shower now.
danrocks 5y ago
"Common Prosperity" is a marketing label to try to legitimize persecution of high tech billionaires who own platforms whose success/failure could destabilize the government. All of the major Chinese tech companies have created "Common Prosperity" funds now, which are essentially direct money transfers to the CCP for it to implement whatever agenda they have at the moment.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  "persecution of billionaires whose success/failure could destabilize the government" sounds like a very reasonable policy to me. After all, isn't the promise of triple down effects to share the prosperity to all one of the core ideas of why society as a whole accepts the existence of billionaires? At the very least, they shouldn't make things worse.
  - pydry 5y ago
    It's historically sound. The US and Japan followed a variant of this policy in the 1950s and it led to an explosion of growth.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  Fundamentally, that seems like common sense. Government's utility and legitimacy is powered by its own mass and influence in society. Many states have done a very poor job of securing that position. If you start to get individuals and businesses so wealthy or influential that they can make the state quiver, eventually the government's mandates are at risk. Can it effectively regulate businesses that are too big to fail? Does it maintain the monopoly on violence if the wealthy can DoS the legal system to escape prosecution for their wrongdoings?
gattopalla 5y ago
ching cheng hanji
denton-scratch 5y ago
TL;DR. Is there an executive summary?
- m0llusk 5y ago
  Here is an attempt: We have work to do in order to achieve common prosperity. Hard work should be the means to prosperity and there should be no excessively rich people or people being allowed to give up and "lie flat". Communist economics will remain the backbone with the state owning all and allowing people and companies to lease, allocate, and trade properties only for constructive operations. Economic growth should be scientifically optimized for the whole population, not leaving anyone behind while also not promising too much or allowing plentiful welfare to make people lazy. China must commit to long term growth with a heavily managed economy and a focus on special economic zones and six principles: 1. Development must be smooth and even with companies of all sizes 2. Middle class people are happier and less trouble than extreme rich and poor. Increasing educated professionals will help with this and the government will hire many and pay them well. 3. Everyone should have access to good quality basic services like health care 4. Get rid of extreme wealth with taxation, confiscation, incarceration 5. Increase spiritual well being 6. Improve rural stagnation and poverty
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Thank you! Sounds like it's mainly about soaking the rich, with a bit of "spiritual well being" goop thrown in. > with the state owning all and allowing people and companies to lease, allocate, and trade properties Well, that's how it is in the UK - all land is ultimately owned by the queen. The rest of us are all vassals. I thought there was something similar in US land-ownership law. But we're not communist.
    - m0llusk 5y ago
      Some analysis: The first major business cycle ever is hitting modern China hard an has people seriously freaked out. The price of houses never goes down some still say. Sure, so then your currency takes the hit. This is going to be rough, and combined with damage from tragic natural disasters there is the possibility of unrest and change in China. The references to avoid too much welfare, laziness, and lying flat show the government is seriously freaked out by the young generation simply not working with the same frenetic pacing and lack of restraint that used to be present broadly in Chinese labor. Emphasizing Communist Party ownership of property and management of the economy and riches means a heavy hand will be used whenever deemed necessary. It is also worth pointing out that this endorses health care access and improvement of rural areas but has not particular way of accomplishing this. Also, the heavy hand and emphasis on hard work is arguably in opposition to calls for innovation which is often driven by people taking risks in order to achieve great wealth both of which are now strongly discouraged.
timster3001 5y ago
I think this is a very thoughtful long term strategy for a country as big and as globally relevant as china. Looking at the US and the decline of the middle class and the rise of the donor class shows where a country is headed when inequality gets out of hand. Right now the US is arguably not a democracy anymore but an oligarchy - that the Party looks to avoid going down the same road is of course out of self-protection. But it is also the very interest of the hundrets of millions who were left out of the distribution of the dividend of "opening" the economy. So - compared to a descend into a potentially fascist donor-run society it might be a better strategy to simply distribute the wealth more aggressively.
dirtyid 5y ago
Speculative but tangential news on potential education reforms informed by common prosperity. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449798894708305922.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449798894708305922.html My 2C is Xi's diagnosis is basically correct. This paragraph in particular: >We must plan, and navigate between needs and possibilities. We must base the protection and improvement of the livelihood of the people on economic development and financial sustainability rather than unrealistic pursuits and expectations, and promises that cannot be fulfilled. The government cannot take care of everything. Its focus should be on strengthening the construction of people’s livelihood guarantees that are fundamental and universal. Even if we reach a higher level of development and acquire stronger financial resources in the future, we should not set aims that are excessively high, and/or provide excessive guarantees. We must resolutely prevent [ourselves] from falling into the trap of nurturing lazy people through “welfarism.” PRC won't reach west's living standards any time soon. Trying to build culture for generating "strong men" in anticipation for increasingly "hard times" because "good times" will never be that good for majority of people. This was always reality, PRC has too many people to uplift, and difficult external conditions. Simply not enough resources in world to propel 1.4B to western living standards, not even considering geopolitics of securing that much resources. This is PRC planning to crush gilded age, proposing a New Deal and attempting to nurthure greatest generation.

69 points by ilamont 5y ago

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and innovation? Or is all of this planning and adoption of market economies just a means to birth a socialist end state into existence? I also found the following portion chilling, as it has all the undertones of propaganda and the worst of the Cultural Revolution, except it’s all being admitted in the open: > Fifth, we must promote common prosperity in the spiritual [and moral] lives of the people. The promotion of common prosperity is highly integrated with the promotion of all-round human development. We must strengthen the guidance of the Socialist Core Values, and education on patriotism, collectivism and socialism. We must develop [our] public culture enterprise, improve the public culture service system, and continuously meet the diverse, multi-levelled, and multi-faceted spiritual, moral and cultural needs of the people. > We must strengthen public opinion guidance on driving common prosperity to provide a favourable public opinion environment. In doing so, we should clarify various fuzzy understandings, and guard against impatience and fear of difficulties.

shadilay 5y ago
'Common Prosperity' seems to mean that there are too many rich people in China that are giving too little money to the central government as their wealth usurps the power of the CCP.
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  Yeah, Tax the Rich. This essay could have come from any given Twitter "intelligentsia" in America today with only a select few terms changed.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    "Tax the rich" in the US is just a slogan. In 20+ years I've been in the US I've yet to see it actually yield anything concrete. Taxes on the middle class have grown substantially in the meanwhile (health insurance is 3x what it was 20 years ago, and it is a tax in all but name, real estate taxes are 4-5x, and you now pay local sales taxes on interstate online purchases, too).
    - _hilro 5y ago
      Surely it's more than that. /s I mean the NYTimes[0] gave a glowing interview to the creator/designer of AOC's 'Tax The Rich' on September 21 but never once mentioned that the designer owes a considerable amount in taxes in multiple states[1] which had been published 3 days prior by another newspaper. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/style/aoc-designer-tax-the-rich-dress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/style/aoc-designer-tax-th... [1] https://nypost.com/2021/09/18/aocs-tax-the-rich-dress-designer-aurora-james-is-a-tax-deadbeat/ https://nypost.com/2021/09/18/aocs-tax-the-rich-dress-design...
  - shadilay 5y ago
    It's more nuanced than that. In America calls for raising taxes are usually in the name of some public good, eg infrastructure. How true that is is up to personal interpretation. In China it's purely about power, namely removing any semblance of power held by non government entities.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      Well, no, in China it's in the name of socialism - of the prosperity and well-being of the less well off. How true that is is not really up for personal interpretation - it's just false. (Of course, one could argue the same about the US...)
fenderbluesjr 5y ago
Stephen Kotkin is an interesting historian that (I think) would argue that China's govt is still very much communist and perhaps that their adoption of capitalist ideas were a necessary compromise and not a rejection of their former ideals
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Well, the pure communism was leading to very slow development and many people still in poverty. Communism wasn't getting them to a socialist paradise. So they adopted capitalism to get their economy going, and that got people wanting capitalism and operating in a capitalist way and with a capitalist mindset. Now they want to keep the capitalist prosperity but have everyone want socialism, think socialism and do socialism. It remains to be seen whether that is possible; I suspect that the answer is "no". I suspect that they're going to kill the capitalist prosperity by this. But we'll see.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Communist ideals didn’t work because of free loaders. They had to adopt capitalism because they were starving to death by the millions. Eventually reasoned ideology bows to reality.
rsj_hn 5y ago
I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no longer want to be bound by the old morality, which they deem as intrusive or blocking them from realizing their happiness. In the beginning, they just want to be left alone to ignore the old morality. But then the liberalism turns into decadence -- they mock the old morality with increasing intensity. Then the mocking becomes stronger until the old morality is declared evil. As all of this is happening, people turn to hedonism. But the old morality was keeping the society together, and when it is gone, the society collapses, to be replaced by some new illiberal regime that enforces something else. That is basically the US right now -- we are undergoing social collapse, and everyone except Americans see the collapse happening. But the west had a strong strain of Christianity that withstood liberalism for a good 200-300 years before decadence really took hold in the lives of ordinary people. That coexistence with liberalism created enormous economic growth. China doesn't have 200 years because as a socialist revolutionary government, they already swept away a lot of the old accumulated cultural capital that allowed Chinese civilization to continue, and they didn't really have anything convincing to replace it with. Then they allowed liberalism in order to also benefit from economic growth. Now, they see the decadence starting to take root, and are really worried. Really all they have to keep the society together is national pride and a quest for making money. They have tried to do things like revive an interest in Confucius, for example, but they can't seriously be trying to resurrect that old civilization. So China's morality is extremely weak, and isn't in a position to hold out as long as the west did against decadence, so they are really in a lot of trouble. Thus China is fighting like mad -- e.g banning effeminate men on TV, trying to ban excess consumption and put a lid on consumer culture, maintaing strict control of media to ensure patriotic content and limit ironic/satiric portrayals of cherished values, etc. It does not want to allow the cultural shift that happened in the 60s in the west to happen in China. Basically, China is fighting the kulturkampf that Bismark fought in Germany. And just like that cultural war, China is trying to strengthen the social safety net to make sure that everyone has a place in their society, in order to inculcate loyalty to the system and extinguish the "outerclass" consisting of those who are enemies of the current morality. The carrot is a stronger safety net, the stick is pretty strong, too -- public figures are being dissappeared not because they openly opposed CCP rule, but because they embody decadent values. Note that this is a chronic problem for communist regimes or any regime that takes hold after a leftist revolt, and the USSR had the same problem. Once you destroy a thousand years of what kept the society together, what new glue can you use to keep the society together? It's something Marx discounted because of his robotic materialism -- to him man was a stomach with legs -- it was all a battle about material means, and burning down all the churches and rewriting history a small price to pay in order win the battle of economic distribution. Until you are actually in charge of the society and realize that all those churches were really important, and you can't just ginny up a fake state pseudo-religion that actually has the strength of Christianity to keep the society together. By not taking religion seriously, they just assumed they could replace it, and it was only too late that they realized that this isn't something you can just cook up when needed. The state insta-morality is paper thin. Remember the USSR fell apart not because it was bankrupt, but because the elite didn't believe in it anymore. It became the butt of jokes. People were tired of it and mocked it. Whereas Christianity kept society together for over 1000 years, communism was an effective glue for about 40. So China is scrambling to avoid that fate, trying to defend the paper-thin "socialist core values" that it sees as the glue holding society together. Of course almost no one believes in socialist core values, not in a way anyone is loyal to, so what Xi ends up doing in practice is arresting boy bands. Now, with this perspective in mind, if you re-read the statement, it should make a lot more sense.
prewett 5y ago
If you think that’s chilling, read the essay “Engineering the Human Soul” (https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in), by a long-time Australian China-watcher. He asserts that Xi Jinping though follows in a direct line from Stalin and Mao.
- everybodyknows 5y ago
  "though" -> thought >a speech he gave at an internal Australian government seminar in August 2017. So, a bit dated, but lays out cultural history in amazing detail.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    CCP proposes to think on the 50 year scale, so this is last week for them :)
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  To the rest of us, "follows in a direct line from Stalin" is not a recommendation...
refurb 5y ago
An interesting contrast is Vietnam. On the surface it looks like they’ve gone full Gordon Gekko capitalism. But the party is managing everything in the background. They are happy to let foreign investment flow in and Vietnamese get rich…to a point. Think of it like this: 1) we’ll extract as much value from the capitalist model, 2) but strip any power capitalists might gain from their business dealings. Anyone who gains enough economic power to threaten the party will be squashed. This is all about winding in the heads that got too big. Think of people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They would never be tolerated in China unless they were firmly in the camp of the CCP.
- ahepp 5y ago
  Look at what happened to Jack Ma. He made some measured but pointed criticism of the party's banking regulations and disappeared for a month. His IPOs got shut down and a host of new regulations were added that basically kill his ambitions in banking. Vs in the USA, Zuck attempted to create his own currency.
tabtab 5y ago
> One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Like any politician, they talk out of both sides of their mouth: promising the "best of both worlds" to try to make both sides happy. Dare I say it? "Synergy"...ugh, I need marketing shower now.

danrocks 5y ago

"Common Prosperity" is a marketing label to try to legitimize persecution of high tech billionaires who own platforms whose success/failure could destabilize the government. All of the major Chinese tech companies have created "Common Prosperity" funds now, which are essentially direct money transfers to the CCP for it to implement whatever agenda they have at the moment.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fxtentacle 5y ago
"persecution of billionaires whose success/failure could destabilize the government" sounds like a very reasonable policy to me. After all, isn't the promise of triple down effects to share the prosperity to all one of the core ideas of why society as a whole accepts the existence of billionaires? At the very least, they shouldn't make things worse.
- pydry 5y ago
  It's historically sound. The US and Japan followed a variant of this policy in the 1950s and it led to an explosion of growth.
hakfoo 5y ago
Fundamentally, that seems like common sense. Government's utility and legitimacy is powered by its own mass and influence in society. Many states have done a very poor job of securing that position. If you start to get individuals and businesses so wealthy or influential that they can make the state quiver, eventually the government's mandates are at risk. Can it effectively regulate businesses that are too big to fail? Does it maintain the monopoly on violence if the wealthy can DoS the legal system to escape prosecution for their wrongdoings?

gattopalla 5y ago

ching cheng hanji

denton-scratch 5y ago

TL;DR. Is there an executive summary?

m0llusk 5y ago
Here is an attempt: We have work to do in order to achieve common prosperity. Hard work should be the means to prosperity and there should be no excessively rich people or people being allowed to give up and "lie flat". Communist economics will remain the backbone with the state owning all and allowing people and companies to lease, allocate, and trade properties only for constructive operations. Economic growth should be scientifically optimized for the whole population, not leaving anyone behind while also not promising too much or allowing plentiful welfare to make people lazy. China must commit to long term growth with a heavily managed economy and a focus on special economic zones and six principles: 1. Development must be smooth and even with companies of all sizes 2. Middle class people are happier and less trouble than extreme rich and poor. Increasing educated professionals will help with this and the government will hire many and pay them well. 3. Everyone should have access to good quality basic services like health care 4. Get rid of extreme wealth with taxation, confiscation, incarceration 5. Increase spiritual well being 6. Improve rural stagnation and poverty
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Thank you! Sounds like it's mainly about soaking the rich, with a bit of "spiritual well being" goop thrown in. > with the state owning all and allowing people and companies to lease, allocate, and trade properties Well, that's how it is in the UK - all land is ultimately owned by the queen. The rest of us are all vassals. I thought there was something similar in US land-ownership law. But we're not communist.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    Some analysis: The first major business cycle ever is hitting modern China hard an has people seriously freaked out. The price of houses never goes down some still say. Sure, so then your currency takes the hit. This is going to be rough, and combined with damage from tragic natural disasters there is the possibility of unrest and change in China. The references to avoid too much welfare, laziness, and lying flat show the government is seriously freaked out by the young generation simply not working with the same frenetic pacing and lack of restraint that used to be present broadly in Chinese labor. Emphasizing Communist Party ownership of property and management of the economy and riches means a heavy hand will be used whenever deemed necessary. It is also worth pointing out that this endorses health care access and improvement of rural areas but has not particular way of accomplishing this. Also, the heavy hand and emphasis on hard work is arguably in opposition to calls for innovation which is often driven by people taking risks in order to achieve great wealth both of which are now strongly discouraged.

timster3001 5y ago

I think this is a very thoughtful long term strategy for a country as big and as globally relevant as china. Looking at the US and the decline of the middle class and the rise of the donor class shows where a country is headed when inequality gets out of hand. Right now the US is arguably not a democracy anymore but an oligarchy - that the Party looks to avoid going down the same road is of course out of self-protection. But it is also the very interest of the hundrets of millions who were left out of the distribution of the dividend of "opening" the economy. So - compared to a descend into a potentially fascist donor-run society it might be a better strategy to simply distribute the wealth more aggressively.

dirtyid 5y ago

Speculative but tangential news on potential education reforms informed by common prosperity. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449798894708305922.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449798894708305922.html My 2C is Xi's diagnosis is basically correct. This paragraph in particular: >We must plan, and navigate between needs and possibilities. We must base the protection and improvement of the livelihood of the people on economic development and financial sustainability rather than unrealistic pursuits and expectations, and promises that cannot be fulfilled. The government cannot take care of everything. Its focus should be on strengthening the construction of people’s livelihood guarantees that are fundamental and universal. Even if we reach a higher level of development and acquire stronger financial resources in the future, we should not set aims that are excessively high, and/or provide excessive guarantees. We must resolutely prevent [ourselves] from falling into the trap of nurturing lazy people through “welfarism.” PRC won't reach west's living standards any time soon. Trying to build culture for generating "strong men" in anticipation for increasingly "hard times" because "good times" will never be that good for majority of people. This was always reality, PRC has too many people to uplift, and difficult external conditions. Simply not enough resources in world to propel 1.4B to western living standards, not even considering geopolitics of securing that much resources. This is PRC planning to crush gilded age, proposing a New Deal and attempting to nurthure greatest generation.