Western coverage of events in China is highlighting a lurch leftwards by Xi Jinping. But this misunderstands Beijing’s approach and is fuelled by dismay that Xi has not followed the path that the West wanted him to.
Do you understand even remotely the inequality of development in 1970's China? By absolute standards? I'm guessing you don't appreciate the magnitude of that. It's the contradiction that Mao couldn't figure out how to bridge. Western powers had developed some industry before the CPC took charge. But large swathes of the country were stuck in roughly medieval peasantry. Mao was able to spread wealth in an egalitarian way but not actually realize sufficient growth to survive western imperialism. There is essentially no reduction in global poverty over the last several decades without china taking large fractions of their alienated labor product and investing it in rural areas. Marx's ideas about socialism were written under the assumption of wide spread industrialism -- existing capitalist production. The peasants seizing there farms can produce a rural communalism at best, but you simply can't reach abundance that way.
Do you understand even remotely the inequality of development in 1970's China? By absolute standards? I'm guessing you don't appreciate the magnitude of that. It's the contradiction that Mao couldn't figure out how to bridge. Western powers had developed some industry before the CPC took charge. But large swathes of the country were stuck in roughly medieval peasantry. Mao was able to spread wealth in an egalitarian way but not actually realize sufficient growth to survive western imperialism. There is essentially no reduction in global poverty over the last several decades without china taking large fractions of their alienated labor product and investing it in rural areas. Marx's ideas about socialism were written under the assumption of wide spread industrialism -- existing capitalist production. The peasants seizing there farms can produce a rural communalism at best, but you simply can't reach abundance that way.