While I agree that yes clearly by a lot of metrics life has gotten better for a lot of people in China, this premise supposes that life was not getting better in the Maoist system too. The economy was growing at a very steady rate (outside of the idiocy of the Great Leap anyway), services were slowly expanding, infrastructure was being built, life expectancy getting longer etc. The point is not to compare Maoist China to a China today where it followed the Korean model of basically opening up aspects of the country's market and labor force open to foreign players thus creating huge growth, but to other countries in the Global South ie India. India was more developed in 1950 than China, but by the end of the decade was far outstripped, let alone by the end of the 70s.
So the question is would these successes have continued? People make the point that living standards in other socialist countries stopped getting better but China had something they didn't - a massive population and internal market that, coupled with total state control over land, could really keep growth peddling along. No doubt that without Dengism you wouldn't have had huge growth, but we have to remember the maxim of capitalism: growth and development in one place means the underdevelopment and exploitation of another. Lots of coastal provinces and cities got incredibly rich off of poor nongmin from places like Anhui or Gansu. 400 million peasants became proletarianized, and essentially because of the way the hukou restricts access to services they are also second class citizens and are told as much too with the whole suzhi discourse.
So yes I think we can say in some respects that sure the jury is out on whether or not poverty in socialism versus riches in temporary capitalism is better or not, but this also presumes that the CCP is absolutely acting in good faith when it says it is moving to somewhere else. You mention the healthcare system but even the current five year plan says very little about nationalizing care, so much as they are hoping for a hodge podge of private and public care. Let alone the fact that yes, much of the country's culture has changed. Becoming rich is more important in a lot of circles than being active in society or politics. Hell, most people have no relation to politics in anyway. Politics is reserved for the technocrats who run things - not the masses. Mao's genius was understanding that orthodox MLism will always degrade into some sort of weird personality based organization or sheer bureaucratism without the mass line and people's input in daily politics. There is no such input now, and the class character of the CCP because of how rich sectors of the country have gotten is entirely different than 1949. How can we really know that socialism is still the goal? Are there any real movements to decommodification, work place democracy, economic equality, ending the surveillance state, reforming prisons and penal laws, empowering progressive cultural movements etc? As someone who deeply loves China from the language to the cultures, I can't really see any of that.
So what you have is then, okay, a country that is willing to rein in capital's excesses, sometimes by force if it needs to for the nationalist interest, but ultimately has no stake in fueling class war (one thing that I am always reminded of when visiting the country - even the phrase class conflict is barely used anymore, in favor of the language of peace and compromise in the workplace etc), is thoroughly depoliticized, and frankly growing increasingly chauvinist. That does not strike me as very different than South Korean managerial capitalism, save for the obvious exception that one country is an opponent of the US and one is not. But I am also reminded always of the fact that many leftists, particularly leftists of color, believed that the Japanese Empire would wind up becoming a progressive force because of its economic hostility to the United States and liberalism. The CCP is of course different, but it really remains to be seen what they will do to help working people imo
While I agree that yes clearly by a lot of metrics life has gotten better for a lot of people in China, this premise supposes that life was not getting better in the Maoist system too. The economy was growing at a very steady rate (outside of the idiocy of the Great Leap anyway), services were slowly expanding, infrastructure was being built, life expectancy getting longer etc. The point is not to compare Maoist China to a China today where it followed the Korean model of basically opening up aspects of the country's market and labor force open to foreign players thus creating huge growth, but to other countries in the Global South ie India. India was more developed in 1950 than China, but by the end of the decade was far outstripped, let alone by the end of the 70s.
So the question is would these successes have continued? People make the point that living standards in other socialist countries stopped getting better but China had something they didn't - a massive population and internal market that, coupled with total state control over land, could really keep growth peddling along. No doubt that without Dengism you wouldn't have had huge growth, but we have to remember the maxim of capitalism: growth and development in one place means the underdevelopment and exploitation of another. Lots of coastal provinces and cities got incredibly rich off of poor nongmin from places like Anhui or Gansu. 400 million peasants became proletarianized, and essentially because of the way the hukou restricts access to services they are also second class citizens and are told as much too with the whole suzhi discourse.
So yes I think we can say in some respects that sure the jury is out on whether or not poverty in socialism versus riches in temporary capitalism is better or not, but this also presumes that the CCP is absolutely acting in good faith when it says it is moving to somewhere else. You mention the healthcare system but even the current five year plan says very little about nationalizing care, so much as they are hoping for a hodge podge of private and public care. Let alone the fact that yes, much of the country's culture has changed. Becoming rich is more important in a lot of circles than being active in society or politics. Hell, most people have no relation to politics in anyway. Politics is reserved for the technocrats who run things - not the masses. Mao's genius was understanding that orthodox MLism will always degrade into some sort of weird personality based organization or sheer bureaucratism without the mass line and people's input in daily politics. There is no such input now, and the class character of the CCP because of how rich sectors of the country have gotten is entirely different than 1949. How can we really know that socialism is still the goal? Are there any real movements to decommodification, work place democracy, economic equality, ending the surveillance state, reforming prisons and penal laws, empowering progressive cultural movements etc? As someone who deeply loves China from the language to the cultures, I can't really see any of that.
So what you have is then, okay, a country that is willing to rein in capital's excesses, sometimes by force if it needs to for the nationalist interest, but ultimately has no stake in fueling class war (one thing that I am always reminded of when visiting the country - even the phrase class conflict is barely used anymore, in favor of the language of peace and compromise in the workplace etc), is thoroughly depoliticized, and frankly growing increasingly chauvinist. That does not strike me as very different than South Korean managerial capitalism, save for the obvious exception that one country is an opponent of the US and one is not. But I am also reminded always of the fact that many leftists, particularly leftists of color, believed that the Japanese Empire would wind up becoming a progressive force because of its economic hostility to the United States and liberalism. The CCP is of course different, but it really remains to be seen what they will do to help working people imo