The writer Andre Vltchek has observed the tendency in the Western media to portray China as “capitalist,” and concluded this about their motivations:
Why really lie about China ‘not being socialist’? The answer is simple: it is because most people associate words like ‘socialism’ and ‘Communism’ with hope. Yes, they do! At least subconsciously. Even after decades of brainwashing and smear campaigns! “Socialist China” means “China which brings optimism to its own people and humanity.” On the other hand, people on all continents associate ‘capitalism’ with something depressing, stale, and regressive. Therefore, call China ‘capitalist’, and it evokes feelings of gloominess and slump.
The connection of these misleading characterizations about China’s economic system to the current U.S. anti-Chinese cold war effort is therefore clear. If the Western propaganda machine can convince those dissatisfied with the current economic system that China represents a mirror image of the society we live in, they’ll be more inclined to believe false claims like “China is stifling democracy in Hong Kong” or “China has created an Orwellian social credit system.” This is how Sinophobia has become normalized on both the right and on the mainstream left.
The idea that China isn’t socialist, or that the Communist Party of China “betrayed” socialism after the Mao era, serves another purpose besides merely serving hybrid warfare propaganda: to make the left and the communist movement feel hopeless. If history’s largest attempt at building a Marxist society has turned into just another corporate oligarchy, the Marxist-Leninist principles that the People’s Republic of China are founded on can’t be trusted. So long as one wants to remain an anti-capitalist, there’s therefore no choice but to reject Marxism-Leninism in favor of anarchism, social democracy, Trotskyism, or whatever other left-leaning ideology that doesn’t align with the PRC.
The narratives about how the DPRK is an oppressive “monarchy,” or how Vietnam is “state capitalist,” serve the same purpose: to make people who are interested in socialism seek to distance themselves from socialist projects out of the belief that these projects are fraudulently socialist. What can help one see the flaw in this line of thinking is to realize that it relies on oversimplifications of how these socialist states function, and of why these states exist in their current forms.
Since China, the DPRK, and Vietnam are all Asian countries, Orientalism undoubtedly plays a role in this impulse to judge and oversimplify. The claim that Kim Jong Un is an all-powerful ruler who gained his position through inheritance comes from racist attitudes about Asian societies being backwards. The characterizations of the Communist Party of Vietnam as “state capitalist,” which ignore the more complex realities of how the party has navigated a capitalist-dominated global economy, also perpetuate the perception that the Asians have done socialism wrong. Both the charges of tyranny and of capitalist regression are used to attack China.
And given the prevalence of Orientalism within the U.S. and its loyalist countries, this tactic of vilifying China as a “totalitarian” country where socialism has “failed” is widely effective. Yet it relies on a perception of the country that’s detached from the material realities, and that can therefore easily crumble if challenged by a materialist analysis.
One of the ways to counter the idea that the Communist Party of China has abandoned Marxism in favor of corporate despotism is to point out the historical factors behind why China’s economy exists in its current form. Like how the DPRK’s detractors vilify the country for developing nuclear weapons even though this has been the country’s only way to prevent an imperialist invasion, idealistic Western leftists vilify the CPC for opening up China’s economy to business even though this has been the country’s only route for lifting itself out of poverty.
Columnist Yuen Yuen Ang wrote last year that according to an expert economic opinion, the much-maligned Deng reforms have undeniably been the source of China’s vast increases in living standards:
Over the last four decades, more than 850 million people in China have escaped poverty. As Peking University’s Yao Yang notes, this had “nothing to do with RCTs”, nor did it involve giving handouts to the poor. Instead, it was the result of rapid national development. Since Deng Xiaoping launched “reform and opening up” in 1978, China has pursued export-driven industrialisation, liberalised the private sector, welcomed foreign investment, and embraced global trade. As millions of farmers moved from fields to factories, they earned wages, saved, and sent their children to school.
China’s liberalization of the private sector and embrace of foreign trade have objectively given great material benefit to the country’s people, explaining why the overwhelming majority of Chinese people have a positive view of their government. And despite the claims from anti-CPC socialist organizations about this leading to a dismantling of China’s proletarian democracy and a Chinese embrace of imperialism, the nature of the Chinese state as a dictatorship of the proletariat hasn’t fundamentally changed since the Mao era.
As Marxist writer H Khoo has written in response to a 2006 International Marxist Tendency document which accused China of engaging in a “long march to capitalism”:
The fact is that Communist Party members or lower levels of the bureaucracy lead most workers’ struggles. This clearly reveals that the gulf between the classes is reflected inside the Communist Party and the state. The capitalist class is not a consolidated national political or economic force able to determine the direction of national policy. In order for it to assume power a decisive defeat of the working class and the Communist Party would be required. The position our tendency has adopted on China misreads the situation and misleads our movement into a sectarian positions vis-à-vis the Communist Party of China.
This reality-that China’s economic and political systems are driven by and to serve the proletariat-helps prove what I’ve made the case for in one past essay: that China doesn’t fit Lenin’s criteria for being an imperialist power. One of these criteria is that bank capital and industrial capital merge together to form a financial oligarchy, which clearly isn’t the case for China given the severe political limitations on the Chinese capitalist class that Khoo pointed out.
In addition to these flaws in the claims about China being controlled by the capitalist class, the extent to which private enterprise has gained a presence within the country is greatly exaggerated by the narratives about a “capitalist China.” Public ownership still dominates the country, and the state is in charge of the economy. It may be no ideal communist utopia, but it’s no cruel neoliberal society either. This reflects the economic model that’s been explained by Vice Chairman of Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee’s Commission Tran Dac Loi, whose party embraces a very similar economic approach to that of China’s:
The market is managed and regulated by the socialist state in order to utilise the positive sides, minimise the negative ones, and direct market activities into implementation of given comprehensive development goals… The state economic sector should play the dominating role in key areas essential to macro economy such as energy, finance, telecommunications, aviation, railways, maritime, public transportation, etc… The land and natural resources remain within all-people ownership under the state management.
Characterizing this model as an affront to socialism and evidence of a Chinese oligarchy is not a serious analysis of how China and its neighbor Vietnam have developed. It’s an act of Orientalism that serves a useful purpose for U.S. capitalism and imperialism: to convince the people of the neoliberal world that a working alternative to their system isn’t in existence. A Marxist analysis of these countries is able to put this false perception to rest.
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