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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

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.

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.