Literally communism.
This thing they call “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has as much in common with Marx and Engels’ idea of Communism as a Big Mac has with a plate of hummus.
Edit: western dengists, man.
While this is true it is not because China has deviated from socialist theory, including that of Marx and Enfels. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat as described by Marx and Engels as the necessary precursor to communism. It is also taking a very specific strategy towards imperialism that involves special economic zones, or capitalism zones, in order to build productive forces while also coupling the well-being of imperialist countries to China’s ability to produce.
Communism will never be achieved by a state and no state has ever expected to do so. The idea that any country ever could use a category error, it means a person doesn’t understand the term at all as used by Marx a d Engels. It is, by definition, stateless, and could only happen after all states are eventually abolished. But again, being practical people, they expected this to happen through a long process of struggle with dictatorships of the proletariat being what socialists first formed and could use to overturn the capitalist order
Western ultra-leftists, man, an infantile disorder. They fear the scroll.
My favorite trope has to be western leftists confidently talking nonsense about China.
Wrong.
Is China State Capitalist?
- The backbone of the economy is state ownership and socialist planning. 24 / 25 of the top revenue companies are state-owned and planned. 70% of the top 500 companies are State-owned. 1, 2 The largest bank, construction, electricity, and energy companies in the world, are CPC controlled entities, subject to the 5 year plans laid out by the central committee.
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- Is modern day china communist? Is it staying true to communist values?
- Didn’t China go Capitalist with Deng Xiaoping? Didn’t it liberalize its economy? Is China’s drastic decrease in poverty a result of the increase in free market capitalist policies?
- Is the CPC committed to communism?
- The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
- The myth of Chinese state capitalism. Did Deng really betray Chinese socialism?
- Tsinghua University- Is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics real socialism, or is it state Capitalism?
- Isn’t China revisionist for having a capitalist sector of the economy, and working with capitalists? Why isn’t it fully planned like the USSR was?
- Castro on why both China and Vietnam are socialist countries.
- Roderic Day - China has billionaires.
- What is socialism with Chinese characteristics (SWCC)?
- How is SWCC not revisionist? How is it any different from Gorbachev’s market reforms?, 2
- Domenico Losurdo - is China state capitalist?, 2
The workers dont own the means of production. Its not communism
Not communist obviously, since there’s still very much a state and class division. But socialist because the state primarily serves the workers, with the stated goal of striving towards communism.
Now whether it’ll stay that way or not, we’ll see. Deng’s reforms have given liberals too much power after all; there seems to be an active class war happening in the Chinese state.
Not communist obviously
I find it’s useful to select more descriptive terms than use the literal dozens of varying definitions of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. The terms by themselves can be so vague that I can truthfully state this - “communism is the goal of communism!” A communist society, for example, is different from a communist party or a communist state (aka. Marxist–Leninist state), which are only parts of the communist movement and the communist school of thought. Obviously no-one looks at the PRC and sees a stateless, classless society, but that’s an understandable (albeit condescending) interpretation of when people say “China is communist”.
(Pinging @xnx@slrpnk.net as I’m also replying to their comment)
Workers own the means of production through the state, it’s on its way to communism in a step later described as socialism after Marx and Engels deaths.
Not even after their deaths, Marx already acknowledged dictatorship of the proletariat as the practical way after first proletarian revolution, Paris Commune experiences.
Wrong, and it’s clear you read none of the links above. Especially this one: https://archive.ph/DwD1n
And when was a requirement for communism?
A stateless, classless, moneyless society. How can a class own something then?
Absolute nonsense.
Communism is from each according to their ability, to each according to their want.
And it’s a centuries long process.
Communism is from each according to their ability, to each according to their want.
I thought it was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”?
Wants and needs are often conflated but the outcomes of each phase would likely look incredibly different.
They literally don’t have free healthcare or schools. I have a very close friend from China. It’s a very capitalistic and conservative society from what I hear. Monopolies and conglomerates are rife.
This is completely false. If you’re uninsured, a visit is less than ~5 USD per doctors visit, and about ~20 USD for a specialist visit.. If you’re insured, as 95% of the population in China is, then visits are free. It also has a very low cost per capita, since public health is socialized, not privatized.
Primary school is completely free, and college has tuition fees just like any other country.
Got any more of “I heard it from a friend?”, that people can upvote to affirm their racist biases?
Lord of Lemmy, what makes you think I am racist?
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The white mans burden lies heavy on the redditors.
sure man, the world’s largest Marxist party, led by a man with a doctorate in Marxist studies, has abandoned Marxism. That’s SO true boss.
No you don’t get it, 99 million members of the Communist Party of China don’t actually understand Marxism. A guy who’s lived his whole life under the dictatorship of capital is the only true arbiter of what real Marxism looks like.
errrrmm, actually all 1.4 billion citizens of the PRC are brainwashed and can’t think for themselves. ever think about that, you dumb commie???
Most party members are in it for the money and power lol
China understander has logged on lol
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[Citation needed]
I have connections in the CCP
This is like saying that Iran is following the exact system envisioned by Mohammad because Khamenei is a scholar or whatever.
Edit: western dengists, man.
Western maoists, every time… smh my head
It’s funny when the western supremacists themselves try to claim that supporting communist countries is a uniquely western phenomenon, when its the opposite, it’s the US and its vassals demonizing Cuba, China, and the USSR.
The CPC has over 90 million members, every socialist country like Cuba and nearly every communist party on the planet supports and looks up to the CPC as a model for the 21st century. Even most non-communist global south countries look up to it.
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They don’t need it though, China already had a very robust traditional passenger rail network which is the primary reason many of these high speed lines are hemorrhaging money: people aren’t willing to pay the increased cost for a high speed ticket
Hemorrhaging money 😂 These high speed lines are owned by the state, which has infinite money. It can charge as much or as little as it pleases.
Infinite money? Is that why the factory workers are all paid great salaries and have the best working conditions?
Do you think you’re being clever?
Do you think you’re proving they have infinite money or great working conditions?
As someone who loves trains I find this truly impressive and I wish my country cared half as much about trains as China does
China’s population density in its eastern half is an order of magnitude higher than pretty much every country, which really changes the transportation calculation. It’d be impossible for them to build enough roads to effectively transport their population around the country
You don’t even need that many people before cars become impractical.
You don’t need many to become impractical. But you need China levels for it to become geometrically impossible.
you could force everyone to drive. itd be terrible, but that hasnt stopped cities like LA (a more population dense city) from doing what theyre doing.
LA is the second biggest city in the US and it’d be like 15th biggest in China. Los Angeles is also the 308th most dense city in the continental US, and not even on the radar internationally for density
Seeing my country of residence change for the better during my lifetime is a completely alien concept to me.
I thought that flag was an emoji kek.
Only on Hexbear.
This is 6 years ago. Is there a more recent map?
Yes
May we see it?
No
:(
For a more detailed view at all rail infrastructure the transport layer on osm is nice: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=7/29.845/113.676&layers=T
All the dark black lines should be train lines. This shows all types tho, not just the high speed ones. But honestly for general commercial and social prosperity, the regional lines are probably more important than the high speed long distance ones. If you go over to Europe while using this layer, it will get very dense.
Edit: this ones is a bit more nuanced http://cnrail.geogv.org/enus/about
Parenti quote
If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard.
By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.
If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology.
If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom.
A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained.
What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
No no no. This is Whataboutism. It doesn’t count.
Banger thread on the other side of the defederation barrier.
70% of Chinese Millennials are homeowners
@Alsephina @Juice Isn’t their bigger problem having too many unfinished apartments? Many more than are needed.
(And are those rates including those who own apartments that will never be completed?)
It’s true there’s a lot of unfinished apartments, and imo it’s true that’s a big problem (or a symptom of a larger issue). But I don’t think it’s unfinished apartments are a bigger problem than lack of home ownership in the West
@OsrsNeedsF2P I meant a bigger problem in China
Nobody can buy land in china, it is only leased from the government for up to 70 years for residential usage (less for other purposes). Calling the tofu-dreg building on top of this “owning a home” is disingenuous at best and deceitful at worst. Why do people buy homes anyway instead of renting? Because all other options to invest are even worse and it is literally their only option.
I hope you don’t tolerate how mega corps “sell” you shit like digital media or IoT devices only to later change the terms of sale and steal it back from you, because you never really owned it. Don’t tolerate the same shit if a government does it to you.
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Let’s not pertend that this is because China has socialized housing. They used to do decades ago, but it has been abolished for a long time. Although they do have affordable housing program like most of the city in the U.S.
In fact, China has one of the highest home price to income ratio (ratio of median apartment prices to median familial disposable income, expressed as years of income) in the world: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp . Chinese people will need 30 years of disposible income to purchase an apartment; compare to 3 in the U.S., 7 in Netherland, 11 in France, and 9 in U.K.
Apartments in Beijing can easily cost double than a major U.S. city, while people in Beijing earn half as much. Here is a popular real estate website listing the previously-owned property (2bedroom between 90-120 m²) on the market in Beijing: https://m.ke.com/bj/ershoufang/l2a4 most of them are around 5000k RMB, which translates to 700k USD for 2b apartments. On the other hand, Beijing median monthly salary is 1548 USD (https://teamedupchina.com/average-salary-in-beijing/#Beijing_Salary_Data_Zhilian_Zhaopin), which translates to 10$ per hour assuming a 5 day work week and 4 week work month.
The high home ownership rate is likely due to a mix of false report and saving culture. In China, parents typically have a good amount of saving to provide their child (singleton because one-child policy) a home upon their marriage etc. This also explains why Beijing rent price is much lower than major cities in the U.S., despite its high housing price.
Chinese people will need 30 years of disposible income to purchase an apartment; compare to 3 in the U.S.
Who can afford a condo with 3 years disposable income in the US? My spouse and I make above average money in a below average cost city and we couldn’t afford a condo here.
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likely means the wage that reaches your bank account, i.e. wage - 401k, insurance etc
Well ain’t that a shit definition then
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Honestly, I am quite surprised how low tankies are willing to go to defend China. As a Chinese, it is very disheartening to me that people have never experienced or seen the suffering of living under an authoritarian government, are more willing to blindly defend it
There are literally some “tankies” on hexbear that are in China and posting from China right now. @Flyberius@hexbear.net. There are some users here who are Chinese and grew up there (not sure if they’d want to be tagged though). There are journalists who decided to go live there in part because of how much more freedom they are afforded there, people like Ben Norton, who you would probably also label a “tankie.” All of whom can attest to how baseless and sinophobic all the fabricated “suffering of living under an authoritarian government” stories really are. We aren’t all just clueless westerners, but your assumption that we are is also telling.
I’m eating breakfast in Chengdu. I’m so oppressed right now.
There are certainly different people with different preferences, and most Chinese people are indeed fine with CCP. A dictatorship has an obvious need to maintain many nationalist, so it is not surprising that you can find Chinese who loves CCP.
Many people are more than willing to turn a blind eye on all the artists, journalist, and lawyer, who were arrested, since it has nothing to do when them. This is a emotional topics for me, because one of my highschool classmate has been seperated from her father, for he was advocating more transparent laws and enforcement.
There are plenty of Chinese mastodon instance, like https://douchi.space/explore, https://mstdn.moe/about, https://m.cmx.im/explore. Go there talk to them and see what they think.
Of course, you don’t need to believe me, or people on mastodon, or journalist from all “mainstream media”; and just trust people on hexbear. But that will likely be no different from people who only believe fox news and infowars.
Honestly, I am quite surprised how low tankies are willing to go to defend China. As a Chinese, it is very disheartening to me that people have never experienced or seen the suffering of living under an authoritarian government, are more willing to blindly defend it, than having a intellectual discussion.
Compare the prison population of the US to China’s lol.
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Also a housing bubble and real estate being one of the few investment vehicles available to regular chinese.
Wbat’s saddest of all is that the US is a one-party state in all the worst ways and a democracy in many of the wrong ways.
A huge W for public transport. I assume the PRC already owning the land is significantly decreasing bureaucratic cost / time, allowing for such fast advances.
In sharp contrast the US (and some European countries) keep running after tech bro “innovations” like the hyperloop rather than sticking to actually working systems. Most of them will never see a real purpose because they were never realisable in the first place or will be slimmed down to a point where conventional public transport would have been the better option. And tbh, most of them are really just bait to keep those countries in a state of “looking for alternatives” whilst their current infrastructure is rotting away. And with especially the US being a nation centered around individual transport the vision for public transport is imo clearly lacking.
Europe in general isn’t hit by that as much, seeing the benefits of current public transport solutions (at least nowadays… the 90’ and 00’ were different thanks to neoliberalism and making short term profits instead of doing long term investments), but it is hindered by the clusterfuck of nations / different railway standards. The EU is trying to manage some of it (with ETCS / ERTMS) as well as the new coupling standard (DAC) and track gauges slowly but steadily going towards 1435mm but there are still a lot of things to do such as a transition towards a standard current or even more important: unified train registration (atm a train/carriage needs to be registered for each country separately which leads to unnecessary train switches at border crossings). For example Italy requires carriages to have a fire extinguishing system whilst some other EU countries don’t or some mountainous countries require specific braking tests. Having unified safety standards would make things a lot easier.
But at the upside at least some European railway companies do have a vision. For example, the ÖBB (Austrian federal railways) plans to have high speed rail connecting the main cities as well as European alpine corridors like the Brenner, Koralm and Semmering, regional trains for distances covering abt 200km and are reachable in abt 2 to 3 hours and (sub-) urban rail for metropolitan areas. In bigger cities, they want to provide bike sharing at the stations whilst they want to make car sharing available in rural areas to help cover the last few kilometres through the mountains/woods/fields, where busses only go on a daily basis if you are lucky and the bus driver doesn’t skip your stop and take a shortcut because they believe nobody will be waiting there anyways and they might reach said vision in the next upcoming years and likely less than a decade.
So TL;DR the PRC is profiting off of their property law, their ability to centralize standards and them going the (at the moment) optimum way instead of hoping for innovation from tech bros with fancy power point presentations and zero knowledge of physics, Europe is doing alright but is a bit of a decentralised mess and the US is getting a bit distracted by “innovations” and their mantra of individual transport.
(My experience in the area mainly comes from working at a state-owned railway company and being interested in the matter in general. If there is anything to add or if I have gotten something wrong, feel free to comment.) ^-^
Spain and France especially seem to be doing a good job building high speed rail:
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For context, the total length of high speed rail in the world is 59,000km. So China, which makes up 17% of the world’s population contains 2/3 of the world’s high speed rail.
The closest comparison would be Europe, which has about the same land mass and half the population of China has around 11,000km of big speed rail.
It’d be hard to quantify, but I’m sure some statistics person could compare transportation methods, that includes speed, distance, energy usage, population, capacity, and probably a few more, per capita.
You could isolate it to a country’s top X biggest cities, and how traveling between them compares in all those metrics.
It’s just a pity that renfe’s new high speed trains built by Talgo seem to be a shaky and noisy experience as highlighted here:
The hyperloop really encapsulates how car brained and isolated Americans are - even public transit should be individuals in a car alone one at a time.
I got a bunch of the new Toyota ad during my podcast today and the entire thing was a guy going on about how much he fucking loves traffic and rush hour now so he can hang out in his Toyota even longer.
FML.
Since Lemmy.world friends can’t see the Lemmygrad and Hexbear comments, it’s really weird to see the pro-commie takes not get downvoted and debated to oblivion
Where are the pro-communist takes? I just see a bunch of pro-authoritarian takes lapping up PRC koolaid.
pro-authoritarian takes lapping up PRC koolaid
Koolaid is when you spend 16 years building trains.
Truth and Liberty is when your roads are falling apart faster than you can resurface them.
Love trains
Have the new rail lines reduced automobile traffic? Or are they adding lines in anticipation of future traffic?
The PRC doesn’t have an already-built-up car-focused infrastructure like the US does for example, so they get to do it right from scratch. It becomes very difficult to get rid of that once it’s built, so its best to do it right from the start.
They’re trying to account for current and future needs for city-to-city travel.
They also have and still invest in decarbonizing with electric vehicles with battery swaps as well
Pure speculation on my part: The average Chinese citizen now has a higher standard of living, so the need for mobility increases. You’ll have both more car owners and the need for railways, which does help reduce the need for cars, but they also don’t fully overlap in use cases. You aren’t just going from people swapping their car for taking a train, but also giving many people that had no car to start with the option to choose between getting one or using trains for their travels. Which is good, but in absolute numbers you still see more cars.
Similar to how China is adding both a massive amount of renewable energy and at the same time still building coal power plants, simply because the overall need for energy is still growing.
Bloody hell, Dessalines posted
Hot take: Japan invented the bullet train, but China perfected it.
@HiddenLayer555 @dessalines There isn’t much lacking in the Japanese network.
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Now they are tunneling below the Japanese Alps to build a maglev connecting Tokyo to Osaka, the Tokaido Shinkansen is at capacity running 17 trains an hour during rush hours.
If perfected means they put it even where probably there wasn’t a need for it, then yes. HSR is fantastic for connecting big cities, but it’s also very expensive and sometimes China has prioritized HSR rather than regular rail, even though there wasn’t a strict need for very fast expensive trains. Sometimes slower, more frequent and cheaper low speed rail can make more sense.
It’s not bad per se, but it’s money that could be used for better purposes.
Counterpoint: HSR is far more energy efficient than air travel, which would otherwise be the preferred option because regular trains are just not fast enough for country as big as China. Even when the electricity is generated from coal, the simple physics of not needing to literally defy gravity significantly reduces the carbon footprint of the trip.
How big is this area compared to the US? Would be cool to see the areas superimposed
Here you go. Looks like it’d be about the eastern third to one half of the country getting high speed rail in just 10 years. That’s amazing.
to be fair the US is a relatively small economy that doesn’t have resources to pull this off once you subtract the money needed to topple elected governments and bomb brown kids overseas, while militarizing the police to crack down on the melanin epidemic in house.
That is pretty nuts
Thats so awesome!
And realistically, there are no good reasons America couldn’t have a decent high speed rail system across the eastern seaboard and maybe the western seaboard with a couple connecting links between them where the population supports it.
The US can’t even build high speed rail from LA to San Francisco, and they’re no closer to even starting it than they were when they started talking about it 20 years ago. It’s cooked.
The True Size Of is pretty useful for this
