Thread by @panarin_misha

A socialist society doesn't *need* billionaires, of course.
Billionaires - although it's more accurate to point the lens at large businesspeople of any net worth - are a byproduct of the period of reform and opening up which allowed private property and foreign investment.

https://twitter.com/ClaraSorrenti/status/1220711266399981568

Why were these steps taken?

Because at the time of Mao's death, despite the monumental advances in income, length and quality of life, etc, China was still one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its GDP was about 2% of what it is today. Underdevelopment was rife.

How does a country as populous as China develop?

Above all, by developing infrastructure. Power generation and distribution, industry, basic services, transportation and so on. A lot of these things are costly and difficult to build at the scale China needs.

So foreign investment was allowed because it would inject direly-needed and very liquid money into the Chinese economy - and because the dominant mode of production in China was and remains socialist, the money is put to good use for the good of the people.

Multiple modes of production can coexist within a single social formation, and just like nationalized industries, social welfare and co-ops don't make Argentina socialist, private industry doesn't make China capitalist.

Cuba is a socialist country *despite* the cuentapropistas and private businesses (which include multimillionaire-owned luxury beach resorts) because, since we're not children, we look at relations of production and not at whether rich people even exist in the country.

So Chinese socialism, under the guidance of the CPC, very strictly regulates and curtails capitalist relations of production via different laws, rules and regulations while heavily punishing embezzling and corruption.

This is what allows China to do things capitalist countries cannot, such as be practically unaffected by the cyclic crises of capitalism and to maintain full employment -something capitalism cannot and will not allow because capitalism depends on the reserve army of labor

Through govt programs like spending billions to relocate workers who would normally be laid off by automation into service industry jobs in the more underdeveloped, western parts of China, the CPC helps guarantee full employment, to the detriment of capitalists.

(this is what makes China have some of the fastest rising wages in the entire developing world, with a very low cost of living on top of that - workers as a class have the kind of power that is unheard of in capitalist societies)

According to Chinese law, there is no private property of the land. Private parties can only lease land from the state, in highly unfavourable terms and VERY long leases. The land belongs to the people.

Of the 10 largest banks in China, 9 are state owned or with state shares representing the majority of share holdings in the institution.

Transportation is heavily centralized and public in China. As an example, of the aprox 100 railways in China only one is a private concession, the Luoding Railway.
Almost every single communication channel is publicly owned in China.

As opposed to the "anarchy of production" of capitalism, even privately owned firms have to abide by the five year plans set by the CPC in accordance to socialist development goals. The list goes ON.

So the bourgeoisie in China exists because at the time of the beginning of the reforms, the Party was single-mindedly concerned with laying out the groundwork for the prosperous socialist society of the future:

industry, production, etc, and the reason for this is the international context, a kind of internationalist thinking that many have trouble understanding: China *needed* to overcome the after-effects of colonialism as well as unequal and uneven development wrt developed countries

Even back in the 80s American businessmen were complaining about rising labor costs, prohibitive contracts, exorbitant rent, special taxes etc in China and this situation has only grown direr for them.

(compare to, say, Argentina, which gives them benefits and exemptions)

The US ruling class realizes the path China is in, which is why in the 90s, Washington threatened to close itself off to Chinese products, the economic equivalent of a nuclear weapon - objectively the death knell to the Chinese dream of development.

But BECAUSE China had managed to develop so rapidly in such a hostile environment, joining the WTO effectively neutralized this "nuclear weapon" and robbed the imperialist bourgeoisie of a weapon that would have signaled poverty and death for hundreds of millions.

The United States has some other weapons at its disposal. It is in the interests of the capitalist powers of the world to enjoy free markets (ripe for exploitation) everywhere, and China pushes back against this. But the US also knows China has to deal with dual inequalities:

Inequality with other countries, and inequality within China. The US says "If you want to alleviate the former (by gaining access to money, tech, etc) you have to worsen the latter (by gutting state enterprises, dismantling China's ability to intervene in less developed regions)

So couldn't China avoid such pressures and conditions by embarking on a more or less autarkic road of development, going it alone? In reality, as anyone who has read The Communist Manifesto (you *have* read it, haven't you?), economic and technological lag cannot be (cont.)

overcome in isolation from an ongoing process at a global level, which sees "old-established national industries" replaced by "new industries, whose introduction becomes a lief and death question for civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous (cont.)

raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe".

In other words, the development of a country that has made an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial revolution cannot happen (cont. if the country doesn't participate in a world market still largely controlled by the bourgeoisie.

Eight HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE escaping from absolute poverty could not have been achieved had China not defeated US plans for regime change and it could not have defeated these plans without highly developed productive forces.

Obviously there is a bourgeoisie in China, and like everywhere else, the contradiction between capital and labor leads to clashes, which in China aren't aimed at overthrowing the government, but rather at holding government accountable to its own laws.

Of course, anybody who'd actually studied the littlest bit of Chinese politics, history or economy would know the reform period has nothing to do with trickle down economics but I guess Clara here is too cool for school so lying about China it is (now *that's* some Reagan babey)

For some added reading, let's look at what Lenin himself has to say!

marxists.org/archive/lenin/…

Lenin says in no uncertain terms that the introduction of markets into the Soviet economy does nothing to change the proletarian nature of the Soviet state.

And in The Tax In Kind, we hear words similar to Deng Xiaoping's assurances that market socialism was essential for modernizing China's productive forces as a step in consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat.

When interviewed by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Deng gave this answer to the question of whether the thinking behind market socialism called communism into question. Do the words sound kinda familiar?

if they do it's because recognizing the stages through which socialist development occurs was already said by Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme.