Other than a strict authoritarian government, in what ways is China still communist?

Factual Questions
21

I think it’s part of a broader difference. In a democratic country, it’s not enough for the government to just decide it wants to do something. It has to devote time and energy to convincing the public that its idea is a good idea.

So democracies suffer in comparison to dictatorships because they have the added cost of building this consensus on top of the cost of the actual project.

But here’s where democracies have an advantage; not all ideas are good ideas. Some ideas are really bad. And the fact that the government has to sell its ideas to the public before implementing them acts as a screening process; good ideas are a lot easier to sell than bad ideas.

So democracies take longer than dictatorships to get somewhere. But they’re more like to get to the right place.

22

A few other interesting facts about China:

There is no private land ownership in China. All land in China is state property. People who want use a piece of property must negotiate a lease with the government. This obviously gives the government leverage over people and companies; if they argue with the government, the government can threaten to evict them.

The Chinese government does not have any military forces. Obviously, the People’s Liberation Army exists (and is the largest military force in the world). But it is not subject to the government. The PLA is the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

China is not technically a one party state. The Chinese government is run by a United Front of nine legally authorized parties. Of course, one of the nine parties is the Chinese Communist Party and the members of that party hold all of the important offices in the government (as well as controlling the army as described above). Members of the other eight minor parties are given a few token positions to maintain the illusion that China has a multi-party system.

23

Is “imminent domain” a typo or a clever phrase? It certainly describes the Chinese method of public works.

24

Remember Deng Xiaoping? When he started steering China away from Maoism, he used a typically gnomic figure of speech of the sort Mao liked to use to signal changes in economic policy: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

25

I lived in China about six years ago. There was a new and growing middle class that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. Also, there was an explosion of car ownership; the first time I went to Beijing a few years earlier, bicycles outnumbered cars. Boy, those were the days! By 2016, parking was difficult even in mid-level cities. Enterprising Chinese can get very wealthy; I knew a bar owner who also owned an after-school academy. Sidewalk grills with skewer food were quite common.

How is it still Communist? The party selects all political office holders, elections are still unknown. Medicine is heavily socialized and not in a good way; you go to a hospital, you will wait 45 minutes to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes. Medicine is cheap and affordable. Salaries for foreign teachers are in lockstep, going to a different school will get you essentially the same pay. Consumer goods are priced by some means other than supply and demand, which is great if you’re buying penicillin but not so great if you’re buying Cognac or Scotch. That’s awfully Marx-y.

26

I wonder if it’s worth differentiating centralization from communism? On the axis of individual rights vs state power, China definitely leans more towards centralized authoritarianism. It’s fascist, really: the iron-handed mobilization of the population towards ultranationalist, militarized, statist goals. There is no meaningful exercise of democracy or of collective worker power, only the pretense of such, kinda like North Korea. Socialism has always been a great dog-whistle for dictators.

Meanwhile, on the axis of wealth concentration, China’s wealth and resource distribution is not meaningfully more equitable than that of, say, the United States’s. On the Gini index (where 100 is completely inequality), China is a 38.6 and the USA is 41.5; compare that to Norway & Finland’s 27 or most of Africa’s mid-to-high 50s.

I always thought the overriding tenet of communism/socialism is to do for the economy what democracy is supposed to have done for political power: give it back to the people. Is that not true?

In that sense, China is not any more communist than it is, say, a people’s republic. It’s a capitalist fascist ultranationalist state whose rapid industrialization, built on top of mass oppression and centralized economic planning (despite the corruption) allowed it to build up infrastructure and services dramatically quickly – yes, perhaps with questionable wisdom and quality, and with great inequality, but nonetheless.

It’s a fascinating examination of the ability of centralized states to get shit done, but it’s not really an earnest reflection of communism, is it? All sorts of countries like to throw words like “democracy” or “republic” or “socialist” or “communist” into their propaganda, but very few actually strive for any of those ideals…

An interesting question, IMHO, is how far any country is from actually being able to move to that sort of society. Would would it take China, or the DPRK, or the USA, or Finland, or Venezuela, to become actually socialist? Who controls their capital and infrastructure, and how hard would it be to nationalize/municipalize/place it under public ownership? What are the pathways to political power in that country, and are there any means aside from terrorism and revolution for the average working-class person to exercise it?

If the answer to both those questions is effectively, “ha ha, dream on,” then that country is not meaningfully democratic or communistic, no matter what they call themselves. In the West, there is at least an imaginable pathway to social change through the exercise of mass electoral power, flawed and corrupt though it may be. In China any such resistance, as in Hong Kong, is quashed much more brutally. Change only happens top-down (normally) through Party whims, or bottoms-up through violent revolution. The workers are still oppressed, the peasants still have no power. It’s the same in most countries in the world, just a matter of degree, no matter the labels. Heck, by that token, I’d argue San Francisco and Portland are actually more communist than China, despite operating under a capitalist framework, because at least the average person there can exercise control over their governments and economies at the city and state levels (federal is a whole different ballgame). It’s meaningless to talk about communism without talking about working-class power…

27
28

thats-the-joke.gif :wink:

29

It’s a matter of differing definitions. The typical western definition of democracy is a government in which the people rule. The communist definition of democracy is a government which serves the people.

So a communist regime can sincerely claim to be democratic - by its definition of the word. They’ll argue that their government is set up to serve the entire population unlike a capitalist regime where everyone is expected to look out for themselves and is in a competition against everyone else.

And to a communist, a socialist economy is a natural facet of true democratic politics. Government control of the economy allows the government to steer it so it serves the population as a whole rather than private owners.

As for giving the people political power, the communists see that as an ideal. But it’s not one that the people are ready for yet. Right now, only a minority of people - a vanguard - understands how communism works. So they need to run things for everyone else’s sake. Most people are still stuck with the mistaken ideas that the old regime imposed on them. They need to be educated up to the point where they can run things for themselves in an ideal communist way.

It’s like parents raising children; you love your kids and you’re doing what’s best for them. And that means you often make decisions for them, including ones which they disagree with. But your goal is for them to grow up and become responsible adults who can run their own lives.

It’s important to realize that communists don’t see themselves as evil. They believe they’re doing good. And even if you don’t agree with their ideology (I don’t) it’s good to try to understand what it is.

30

There were homeless in the USSR.

and many men in the gulags.

31

Very doubtful as the slaveowners used their slaves rarely for “skilled” trades. This sounds like more Southern apology.

32

My source was history class. Yes, taught in a university in the south but after the year 2000.
Here’s an article, written by MacArthur fellow, on this irony. This isn’t an apology for slavery, more showing that the Jim Crowe era was in some ways worse.

How, exactly? “Comrade you appear to be shiftless and idle. Come, we have <penal duties> for you to perform”.

33

Its more Soviet propaganda:

*SOVIET officials have long boasted that there are no homeless people in the Soviet Union, thanks to a constitutional right to housing.'' To give the boast bite, Soviet newspapers and magazines often print photos of homeless people in the West. In fact, there are homeless people in the USSR. They can be found in abandoned houses, cellars, coal bins, and garbage dumps, around railway stations, or in special detention centers run by the uniformed police of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). Here they are held for a month while their identities are checked and attempts are made to find them a job and a place to live. These attempts are seldom successful...The official fiction that there are no homeless people in the USSR has fallen victim to glasnost. In May 1986, Literaturnaya Gazeta published an article about homeless people and vagrants in the Kazakh Republic. The author, Anatoly Sterlikov, did not estimate the number of homeless people in the USSR; he did say, however, that they have already begun to stand out against the background of contemporary life.'In February 1987, the popular weekly magazine Ogonyok printed what is still the most vivid piece of reporting on homeless people in the USSR. The author, provincial journalist Alexei Lebedev, wanted to experience life among the homeless firsthand. So he hid his internal passport and other documents, donned an old overcoat, and, with three rubles in his pocket, descended for six months into the lower depths of Soviet society.

Mr. Lebedev’s exploit seems to be a first for Soviet journalism. He described in detail the special detention centers for vagrants that can be found in every large Soviet city and railway station, the places where homeless people find shelter, the temporary jobs they take to survive, and the fine distinctions between different classes of vagrants, from hopeless alcoholics to quasi-professional drifters.*

34

So they tried to do everything I just said but were ineffective at it. Part of the reason for the ineffectiveness is that a corporation, when it fails to do something, doesn’t make as many sales as the companies that succeed. Unfortunately governments are all monopolies by their very nature, so if a local government in a particular part of the USSR fails to accomplish something, it stays unaccomplished.

35

They say they tried, yes.

36

And they say they tried to not melt down a nuclear reactor (if you count all their various incidents they failed many times) and they tried to go to the Moon and they tried to make cars and so on. I didn’t say Communism worked. Just, as a system, the state is nominally taking responsibility for everyone.

Hence I was wondering what, exactly, China is nominally doing for it’s people.

37

I’ve not heard this “differing definitions of democracy” before. Do you have a cite? I don’t necessarily doubt you, just would like to understand it better.

But China… it is neither a government in which people rule, nor a government which “serves the people,” unless a sizable portion of “the people” can be ideologically otherized and disposed.

I don’t think anyone here is making the argument that “China knows best, therefore it’s all OK… growing pains on the way to a better world.” But more that modern China never really tried, and is not truly seeking to become, an actual socialist state or communist post-state society; they are merely paying lip service to those ideals to get the populace on board with their programs, the same way any other nation has always used internal propaganda to stir up obedience, nationalistic frenzies, and xenophobia in their laborers.

38

Not necessarily. In many governments, you have political parties/factions all vying to replace each other to become “the government” in order to control and distribute resources for a while… that happens at the scale of Somalian warlords all the way up to the United Nations. No government is static for long.

There are also conflicts between different governments within a system, such as our incredibly complicated federation in the USA. Who should arrest this person? Who should investigate this crime? Who should manage this park? Who should build this ship? Who should research nuclear fusion? Who should regulate the climate? Who should interpret ambiguous laws left by dead white people? These are all intra-government competitions, with different branches, departments, states, municipalities, agencies, teams, people – egos – all vying for supremacy over limited taxation/labor income. The ones that stay too terrible for too long are eventually conquered or overthrown, through ballot boxes or violence.

Even in the dictatorial so-called “communist” states of today, there are always attempts at coups, juntas, party splits, consolidations, compromises, what-have-you, as factions vie for power. China is not immune to this either, certainly not at the local levels with corrupt bureaucrats, and not even at the national level with inner-party politics at the top.

39

I first encountered this while reading a book about the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in WWII. Britain and America got the Soviet Union to promise that there would be democratic governments in Eastern Europe. But the two sides were agreeing to two different things. So later on, when the Soviet Union established communist satellite regimes in Eastern European countries, they was an argument over whether or not they had broken the agreement. The Soviets insisted they had done what they promised because the regimes they had installed were democratic. And America and Britain insisted these regimes were not democratic so the Soviets had reneged on the agreement they had made.

40

The Soviets said similar things. That they don’t fit the ideal of a utopian communist state (no one ever will) does not mean they are not Communist.

Not punished? Not for having money. If the rich are on the wrong side of a power battle, or open their mouths in the wrong way, then they get punished.

Which means that under the pressure of the government companies can get forced into bad investments, like the many ghost cities. Plus a lot of companies have silent or not so silent partners aligned with party leaders or the relatives of party leaders. And the party gets very upset when this is pointed out.

Much easier to do if you don’t have to worry about pesky elections.