This week’s Newsweek has an article about China ending the one-child policy, and there’s an offhand statement that the government provides “few state services”.
To my mind, the whole freaking point of communism is that the state gives everyone services and people live, in theory, in general equality. I know that doesn’t work out that well all the time, but if China doesn’t even have these things going for it, in what way, exactly, is China a communist country?
It’s possible to argue that true Communism has never really been tried.
After all, the Soviet Communist party leaders always gave themselves privileges and luxury.
Perhaps the nearest would be a kibbutz, where the accomodation + work is shared.
As for calling China communist - well if they want to use the word, they can. It probably suits some US politicians to have the threat of ‘Commies’, so they can demand money and power to guard against the ‘threat’.
I would call China a one party State (hard to differentiate that from a dictatorship, unless you consider a committee with total power different from one man with total power).
You could add the fact that a billionaire is member of the central comitee of the communist party. At this point it becomes farcical.
I don’t know how these guys can keep a straight face when they’re calling themselves communists.
Interesting you mention the one-child policy. Now, you are referring to the law which limits family’s from producing more than one child at a time correct? Wow, how the hell did they get so many people there? And why, even when their country is basically packed, would they end this policy? As crazy as this will sound, the first thing that jumped into my head was “they are probably going to need a refill for some reason”. I don’t know, but with all these fore casted future events the majority speaks of, that is all that makes sense to me, if you catch my drift.
And, they introduced this in 1979, when the population totaled roughly a billion people. As of now it’s around 1.3 billion. So it took 29 years to realize “well hey, these people have human rights”. Come on! That can’t be all there is to it.
Now, you can take this in however you want but recently there was a very awkward situation with my step-dad at work. We live in Hawaii, he is a surf instructor, and a lot of customers are Japanese, as well as the tourists. He has lately been learning bits of the Japanese language. One day while at work he had a Chinese couple and a Japanese couple in the van, whom he was dropping off at their hotel. While dropping off the Japanese customers he said “sayonara” or something, telling them good-bye. Immediately the Chinese woman got enraged, and said “in 2 years, the only language you Americans will be speaking is Chinese!” Now, this happened about 2 weeks ago. As far as who or who this woman was associated with, we don’t know, but this was by far the most bizarre statement I’ve ever heard come from someone’s mouth.
Umm, in that they say they are? It’s not as if there is an international committee of Truth in Naming who are going to pop round to arrest them. The old East Germany got away with calling themselves Deutsche Demokratische Republik for 41 years despite being not at all democratic. Ditto for the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, which shows no sign of being democratic or being run for/by the people - it’s just One Of Those Things That Make The World Shitty And Annoying.
Given the current structure of her population, in a relatively near future China will have to deal with the same problem western countries are currently facing : an aging population. Keeping such a policy won’t help.
So basically what you are saying is over the past 30 years everyone ages and there aren’t enough births to keep the population age-balanced. Makes sense.
So, these other Western countries, did they also adopt this policy, or was is there another reason why they are experiencing the same issue?
Much of the western world experienced a post-WWII baby boom. Combined with huge increases in life-expectancy, we now have to deal with a large population of aging freeloaders complaining about their lawns.
It’s “stage 5” of the natural/Malthusian/exponential population growth model- and the least known, since most of the developed world is just entering the leading edge of it. It doesn’t fit into Malthus’ formula, which predicts only 4 stages.
The simple version is that exponential growth in freely available contraception/ abortion (particularly in the West) has reduced the per capita birthrate sharply. Combined with improvements in healthcare, meaning people live that much longer, and the shift in the role of women in society (from mothers to workers who happen to have children, if you will), the net result is an increase in the mean age of a population. (European women had about 1.4 live births each in the 90s; you need more than 2 births per female just to maintain a 0% growth rate)
By chance, this all happens to have coincided with the (~1947 to ~1965) baby boom, which of course has made the age shift even more pronounced.
I would like to add that I learned all this about 15 years ago, so I may have forgotten one or two key points.
You could speculate that the US and others are somewhat protected from this phenomenon by immigration; few immigrants are older than 30.
Anyway, it looks as though we’re going to enter a slight upswing in fertility rates as infant mortality rates among older mothers drops; see here: Home - Office for National Statistics
Remember, I did say the simple version. Natural growth models don’t take into account outside influences such as war, severe famine, disease epidemics, and immigration, or localized influences such as unusual religious/social attitudes toward children, parenthood, or families in general.
There are always outliers, and yes, France is sort of a special case. They seem to have done things backwards; their population growth halted prior to WWII, as noted, but they experienced the same baby boom as everyone else after it.
Now the French fertility rate is among the highest in Europe, which is a bit odd.
Japan is another odd one; its population growth rate halted much earlier than other industrialized nations, possibly due to an agressive national family planning policy.
The ideology practiced in the traditional kibbutz scenerio is far closer to distributism, and really can’t be considered Communist in the Marxist/Bolshevik-Leninist /Maoist traditions (and certainly not hardcore Stalinist or KPC stylings of Communism). One could invoke similarities to the more moderate and less actively revolutionary conception fo Luxemburgism, but kibbitzes are really intended to be self-supporting without the larger goal of creating a national or international socialist movement.
To argue that the failure of Communism is that is has never really been tried is a contemptible imposture. To be certain, no genuine attempt at the imposition of a pure communist government has been sustained over a decade or more, usually degenerating from an initially and ostensibly benevolent oligarchy (although most Communist regimes have resorted to mass terror as an instrument of public policy very early on) into a totalitarian autocracy typically maintained by a cult of personality and stringent control of the military and production complexes via purges and broad security measures (i.e. secret police. However, most major Communist regimes have gone through a period of a genuine attempt to enforce Communist economic and political controls, for instance the Bolshevik Initial Decrees and GOELRO in the early days of the Soviet Union, and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in the Peoples Republic of China. These were, needless to say, unmitigated disasters in both economic and humanitarian terms, and were rapidly replaced with market reforms that moved away from Marxist tenets and into a more market driven system with private or quasi-private collective holdings which buoyed the economies against the failures of centralized planning. (The “Year Zero” plan in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea is an extreme and inhumanely brutal implementation of Communist concepts and shouldn’t be taken as representative of Marxist ideals, though it does illustrate the essential lack of consideration for human rights in Marxist political thought.)
Both China and the Soviet Union eventually implemented market reforms that brought them further toward economic market socialism while maintaining strictly authoritarian and politically repressive regimes. While its true that the successive leaders of both nations came to surround themselves with the trappings of luxury, this alone cannot be considered the essential failure of the ideology. Its miscarriage, rather, is twofold: economically it failed to provide adequate agricultural and industrial resources to support an expanding population in competition with democratic free and mixed market regimes; and politically to engender public support, particularly from the proletariat which by Marxist doctrine is the backbone of a true Communist society as bourgeoisie and landowners who would diminish in power as the proletariat gain control of the means of production The most historically successful Communist regimes (Cuba, Yugoslavia, Viet Nam) implemented mixed market economies early one and established definitive tiers of economic opportunity, i.e. institutionalizing a industrial/agrarian proletariat and a privileged upper economic and political class with greater fiscal and intellectual opportunities. Since this is an indefinite, if not permanent, stratification of these societies they can hardly be regarded as in conformance with Marxist doctrine, and rather fall under the banner of non-democratic market socialism, which thrive by competitively providing goods and services on the international free market.
So I don’t think it is fair to say that Communism has never been tried, but rather that it has been repeatedly attempted and failed in every occasion, achieving a measure of functionality only when it abandoned strict doctrine in favor of a mixed-market socialist economy. Democracy, on the other hand, while never implemented on a national scale in its “pure” (i.e. direct or Athenian) form, has functioned with a reasonable degree of success, or at least a lack of utter failure, most of the situations when it has been implemented in a representative or proportional form. The inherent inefficiencies and problems of democratic forms of government are far outweighed by the autocratic and suppressive tendencies of non-democratic socialist regimes, and while government regulation of monetary policy, trade, et cetera serves as a reasonable (if often backward) check against the dangers of unchecked laissez-faire capitalism (i.e. greed is not always good), centralized planned economies have universally failed when implemented on national levels in every case that they were attempted, often with disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences.
The modern Peoples Republic of China is Communist in name only; in reality it is an technocratic oligarchy with strongly capitalist economic polices (albeit strictly regulated by the government) and has been so ever since Deng Xiaoping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” reforms in the 'Eighties. Subsequent market reforms by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have driven the PRC further from Marxist and Maoist doctrine and into a relatively free market competitive relationship with the rest of the world, while offering only marginal increases in political and personal liberties. As clairobscur notes, what exists today is really a farce of Maoist doctrine, ironically presented with Orwellian distortions of language to make it seem in conformance with previous dictates while actually completely opposite of what Marx or Mao would have foreseen. Mao ruled the nation in peasant pyjamas and wrote aphorisms in his Little Red Book; today’s PRC leaders wear tailored silk suits and power ties, and issue press releases quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Monty Python has nothing on these guys.
And much of Asia (specifically India and Pakistan) experienced a “Green Revolution” baby boom and now present burgeoning populations that strain agricultural, energy and fresh water resources, especially as the expectation for standards of living increases. The issue of narrowing population age distribution basis is a nominal problem, though increasing industrialization can provide for the production of real goods even with a proportionally smaller workforce, and economic restructuring may be able to cope with a greater leisure/retired population, but the true bottleneck is resources themselves; if a population is demanding resources beyond sustainable levels no degree of fiddling with the numbers will offer relief.
I can’t bring a cite, but if I remember it right, the one child policy was being obeyed by the people who were most “valuable” like the educated/skilled urban workers while it was being ignored by the rural peasants. The urban folks have better incomes and more economic security, so they don’t have as much need for children to support them in old age. So the policy was worsening the ratio of educated people that China wants more of.
It makes sense to say “it’s never been tried” in the sense that the totalitarian autocracy and even benevolent oligarchy are merely precursor systems to true Communism according to Marx’ theories.
The revolutionary governments were only supposed to be around long enough to dismantle the existing power structure; afterward the machinery of the State was supposed to wither away, leaving behind a shiny matrix of self-adjusting social services and benevolent industries, etc.