When I wasn’t paying attention it seems old Red China stopped being communist? Do they still make any pretense or pretend to be communist any more? What form of government do they consider themselves to be?
China is still very much communist. After Tienanmen Square they instituted so-called free market reforms allowing their economy to flourish and reach the level it’s at today. primarily by having a huge, skilled, and by global standards incredibly cheap labor force. They also have zero labor union issues and almost zero environmental concerns. But they are still a one party system, even though they may have dialed down the dogma in lieu of their success.
For now everything works, but I’ve said before that capitalism is what creates a middle class, and a middle class will eventually demand democracy. Hopefully without a Red Chinese civil war, which would not be a good thing…
Where do you get the idea there are zero environmental concerns here? There are also labor problems. Another interesting thing is that China is now beginning to feel the effects of its own companies moving offshore to take advantage of–and I’m not kidding–cheap labor.
Ha ha - little fleas have lesser fleas…
If they have large scale private ownership of the means of production, which they do, and a high level of inequality, which they also do, and a largely free market, which they do to, then they’re not communist in any meaningful sense of the world. They are communist only in the same sense the French Socialist Party is socialist and the German Christian Democratic Party is Christian.
It’s possible on the other hand to have a largely market-based communist economy (Yugoslavia was one such). China is not that, however. Yugoslavia didn’t have private ownership of the means of production (they had a mixture of cooperatively worker-owned enterprises and state owned ones).
Also, the democracy advocates have been peddling the ‘china will become a democracy’ line for twenty-five years, and I don’t see any sign of it.
Reform and Opening started in 1979, 10 years before Tianamen, which was actually mostly a reaction to the problems that the mass privatizations and radical reforms of the early 80s caused - massive inflation, a real estate bubble, and a lot of economic uncertainty.
As long as China maintains complete control over communications and heavily censors whatever it disapproves of it needs to be considered a totalitarian government. Given the number and power of state-owned and state-run infrastructure, factories, transportation, and communications, the one-party commissariat system, as well as the size and strength of the military and local police forces directed inward, calling the government communist is the only logical step.
China is under enormous internal strains. It does have labor issues, from the pressures made by an internal migration of more people than live in the U.S. to their cities, people with few skills who are also trying to support families left behind, to a rising middle class who resent the barriers to improvement still in place. It does have environmental issues: huge ones, because people are literally dying from the air pollution that chokes almost every major eastern city, and the strip mining, coal burning, and dam building have ruined millions of acres of land. People are allowed to complain in China - up to a point, where they are shut down. That’s highly unstable. Economically, growth has slowed in percentage terms (it obviously had to, but this is more and faster than expected), the government wasted trillions in poorly-conceived city building, and the rest of Asia is competing in manufacturing. The U.S. is positively utopian compared to the challenges in China. But China’s advantage is its size: that middle class alone is larger than the whole U.S. population. That economic engine will either dominate (and reject the state-supplied inferior goods) or implode violently.
The odds of it dominating are far better. A middle-class economy is inherently capitalistic. Many reforms have already gone through. The ruling Communist class is hanging on by its fingertips. It may try to Putinize the country, and it may succeed - at a heavy price. But I still like the odds.
I kind of like calling it a one-party state.
Speaking of environmental issue awareness in China, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM&spfreload=10]this is a very good documentary in Chinese. Many people were surprised that the government here did not censor it.
There are protests in China. When I lived in Maoming, I saw no fewer than three protest marches in front of City Hall. Last year, there was a protest against the city government there green-lighting a factory to produce some kind of chemical. The government reaction wasn’t all that peaceful. I’m glad I wasn’t still living there at the time because the protest was right in front of my old school.
I’m hoping that it dominates. The real estate bubble bursting, though, might tip the scale in the other direction.
I’m with you. I think that, except for a few bits of “nostalgic reaction,” it looked like the new guy in charge might end up getting the country ready for a multi-party system.
Cite please. This will never happen with the current CCP in power and there is no example that I am aware of of any Chinese government peacefully giving up power.
A cite for “I think”?
OK. I think that Monty can think about issues and form opinions on them. You can quote me.
There has to be something that would make him think in a way that has no historical precedent or any chance of actually happening.
That is an example of the (unfortunately not uncommon) overuse of the word “totalitarian”. That word is not a synonym for “undemocratic” or “authoritarian”; it’s much more than that. It’s a type of dictatorship where the official ideology permeates into every part of society and influences and controls every part of people’s lives. In political science, the only regimes which are generally recognised as indisputably totalitarian are Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin (but not afterwards). There might be more, but I doubt that present-day China (as undemocratic as it certainly is) exercises the kind of control over Chinese society that would be characteristic of totalitarianism.
The CCP was certainly totalitarian during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. They can be again because its the same party.
Forgot to add that Khmer Rouge Cambodia was most certainly totalitarian.
The first sentence, arguably. The second sentence is a non sequitur. Just because China is still governed by the same party doesn’t mean it still has to be totalitarian. The Soviet Union was certainly totalitarian in the 1930s and certainly not in the 1980s, even though the ruling party was still the same.
I’m going by what a number of my Chinese friends say about his “rule of law” campaign. Of course they don’t see it as happening any time soon.
Ah, but it is it really “the same party” as it was back then?
[QUOTE=Hector_St_Clare]
If they have large scale private ownership of the means of production, which they do, and a high level of inequality, which they also do, and a largely free market, which they do to, then they’re not communist in any meaningful sense of the world.
[/QUOTE]
Since this is GQ and all, can you site evidence for any of this, or at least define what you mean by ‘largely’? If you mean ‘non-zero’ then, ok, I accept some of this, but if you mean ‘largely’ as in the majority of their actions then I’m going to need some serious cite here. Large scale private ownership of the means of production? Largely ‘free market’??? And they are not ‘communist in any meaningful sense’ of the word (I assume that’s what you meant anyway)??? I’ll buy ‘high level of inequality’ so don’t really need a cite for that, though you seem to think that this is some sort of feature of capitalist systems. 
Well, you know, that could be because the communist party is actually a bit more meaningful and real than you seem to be understanding.
An item I read said the Chinese government essentially solved the Tienamen problem (if solved is the right word) with a simple “bargain” - they would provide the people with prosperity if the people left the government to them. The biggest fear of the central government is that the economic engine grinds to a halt and the people become restive. The second biggest fear is that corruption triggers riots that get out of hand. Every level of government, from what I read, suffers from corruption problems - but woe the official that pushes the public too far. Executions are common. Even top level bureaucrats are liable to be arrested.
There were frequent riots and demonstrations over the government taking people’s land or forcing them to sell (Making them offers they can’t refuse). If the government had to send in higher level forces to quell unrest, the guy who triggered it was sure to be screwed. Plus, the average Chinese urbanite is now equipped with pretty good cellphone technology, triggering the same police brutality problems, photos going viral, as we’ve been seeing in the USA. I recall a year or two ago a photo sequence about the beating and killing of a bunch of police auxiliary (aka undercover thugs) who had mistreated and killed some demonstrators and made the mistake of being caught alone by the crowd.
So it’s not totalitarian as in every aspect of life is tightly controlled; but the people who do attract too much attention from the authorities will regret it. They have a “great firewall” to keep things away from the attention of the masses, but inevitably they can’t keep everything out.
Economically it’s a mix. Apparently there are still “iron rice bowl” industries, that live by the old communist maxim “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. Because of circumstances, the party is hesitant to basically fire millions of state workers. However, private industry flourishes along side - keeping in mind that like in the west, business is as much about connections as ability to produce. The difference is that these government connections like to be rewarded. Also, the private prosperity provides the money to prop up the old government industries - so far.
I’m not an expert, I had one tourist visit to China. Since I’d lived in northern Canada for a while, my first question on getting off the plane in Xian was “is there a forest fire nearby?” We realized it was pollution; even 30km outside the city, at the terracotta warriors museum site, the air was thick enough with pollution that it seemed to be a heavy fog; visibility a few hundred yards. We’d not realized that in Shanghai because it rained, so the haze did not creep in until the last day there. Beijing and even the Great Wall 100km away were enveloped in haze; the morning after a rainstorm we realized you could see mountains from Beijing. The tap water was not drinkable.
However, I noted that a significant number of scooters in Beijing are now electric. Still, they’ve got a long way to go. I passed large piles of pressed coal or charcoal briquettes for sale on the sidewalk near modern hi-rises, so presumably coal is still a major cooking fuel used on open grills. It’s instructive to see what the west would look like without the environmental movement.
In basically every sense it is now a Fascist nation. It’s just that people stopped calling things Fascist after WWII and, similar to how Socialism has been watered down over the ages, so has it.
But basically fascism believes that the Nation, the Party, and the nation’s businesses are all one and must work hand-in-hand for the good of the people. Fascists believe that the overall good of the people is so important that anything which could possibly harm it must be violently suppressed. And of course, the Party knows how best to accomplish all of this.
Some parts from the Fascist recipe which have been dropped over time are things like violent xenophobia, contempt for the weak, and an epic story and goals for the nation. Instead, they are more isolationist and focused on creating a mild, bland, internal utopia that would rather the rest of the world goes away.
China is basically following the course forged by Singapore and Japan, though they’ve kept a bit more of the “violent suppression” than the other two and are less concerned with being isolationist.