Stephen Gowans (author of the banger 'Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom') made a blog post. I critiqued what was pretty stupid analysis of China ( see comments ) and in response he kind of said 'no, you're wrong' and then proved me right. Am I missing something? This feels very strange.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
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    2 years ago

    To be sure, the mechanisms of capitalist class influence that characterize US society hardly seem to characterize China. Lay aside the fact that China’s Communist party admits capitalists and boasts not a few billionaires. But is this so odd? China is a People’s Republic, not a Workers’ Republic. The Communist party’s main newspaper is the People’s Daily, not the Workers’ Daily. Capitalists and billionaires, if they’re Chinese, are thus part of the Chinese people, the basic unit of analysis for the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore have a role to play—indeed, the principal one—in China’s economic development under the capitalist path the party has chosen. The party does not set as its goal the elimination of the wage system, the emancipation of the proletariat from the capitalist yoke, or an end to the exploitation of humans by humans—historical goals of socialism. It sets instead as its aim the economic development of China.

    lmao. I guess Mao is not a socialist then because he didn't think to call modern China a Worker's Republic instead of a People's Republic.

    But China does make a pretense of being Communist, and certain “Marxist-Leninist” supporters believe that China is socialist. China is socialist so far as words can be made to mean anything one wants them to mean. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”—the qualification is a dead give-away that we’re talking about something other than socialism as it has been understood historically—is a capitalist society governed by the Communist Party of China (and ruled by capitalist imperatives), where the party’s principal goal is national rejuvenation through capitalist development, not the emancipation of the proletariat and elimination of class. This makes Communist China something like Japan under the Meiji emperor and Germany under Bismarck.

    Virgin "China is a capitalist country pretending to be socialist in order to fool a bunch of useless Western leftists" vs Chad "China is a socialist country pretending to be capitalist to attract FDI from Western capitalists"

    In general, Western analysis of China is almost completely worthless. I've read more compelling arguments about why China is capitalist from Global South entrepreneurs who want their countries to emulate capitalism with Chinese characteristics. He's literally just some random white dude from Canada apparently. Why would anyone takes his opinions on China seriously? At least those Global South entrepreneurs actually rubbed shoulders with Chinese people and don't live in a deeply Sinophobic society like Canada.

    • immi [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      He’s literally just some random white dude from Canada apparently. Why would anyone takes his opinions on China seriously? At least those Global South entrepreneurs actually rubbed shoulders with Chinese people and don’t live in a deeply Sinophobic society like Canada.

      I don't really get this criticism. Obviously there is value in having personal experience in the society you are analyzing, but not having that experience doesn't automatically mean an analysis is worthless. Enough information is out there about China that an outsider can make intelligent analyses of Chinese society.

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
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        2 years ago

        No, it's not just personal experience, but also mastery of the language, understanding the political system (both in terms of direct experience and impersonal analysis), knowing people who were born and raised in China, understanding Chinese philosophy, especially political philosophy, understanding Chinese history (and not just the brief decade of the GCPR, but all 5000 years of it), and so on. Not everything pertaining to Chinese society is going to be written in English. Most things, understandably, would be written or spoken exclusively in Chinese. And this is not getting into the poor state of English translations of Mao's works where they use some unholy union of half Gades-Wiles/half postal romanization to romanize Chinese words.

        The vast majority of Chinese people outside the diaspora would understand all this by virtue of receiving a Chinese education. Non-Chinese people who know what the fuck they're talking about tend to either spend significant amounts of time in China or are academics who specialize in Chinese studies. And I don't think Mr. Gowans is any of those things. He probably just read a few bad translations of Mao and briefly skimmed over The Governance of China to cherry-pick the parts where Xi sounds like a revisionist.

    • robinn [none/use name]
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      2 years ago

      lmao. I guess Mao is not a socialist then because he didn’t think to call modern China a Worker’s Republic instead of a People’s Republic.

      My exact point, he supports Mao as well so it's nonsense. I don't like the 'random white guy' comment, his book on the DPRK was very good and one of the best modern retellings of the Korean War. The fact that land cannot be privately owned but merely leased from the state might have been something to bring up if I cared to have an argument on SWCC but I just wanted to point out the "people vs worker" bs.

        • robinn [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Lenin also critiques the use of the term "people's state" for this reason though, "The 'free people's state' was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. this catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to “justify” its use “for a time” from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to something more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also a failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a 'special force' for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not 'free' and not a 'people's state'. Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies." ( The State and Revolution , p. 16). Lenin is saying the term people's state is ridiculous because the state is a machine for suppressing a certain class at the whim of the other, thus it cannot represent the whole of the people. That's why I included the Mao quote in the original comment, because that definition of the people is specific to SWCC. Can't find the quote from Lenin also but he defines the DOTP as a union between the petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry, and proletariat, with the latter at the head, for the purpose of suppressing the total bourgeois elements. Also in a lot of the Black Panther Party's rhetoric, speeches by leaders, and so on, they use the term "people" to mean proletariat.