I think most of your (real) questions would be answered if you read Lenin and Chairman Mao and did some research on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the socialist market economy alongside the realities of the socialist transitionary period where many of the contradictions of capitalism remain as they are slowly synthesised and worked through. You’re clearly running on vibes for now and it’s leading you to not grasp the situation at hand properly.
China isn’t capitalist. Socialism isn’t measured by what Apple pays a worker in Shenzhen. It’s measured by who holds state power and where the economy is heading. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is just Marxism applied to the actual conditions China faced: a revolution that succeeded in a country with underdeveloped productive forces. You can’t skip stages by decree. You have to develop the forces of production under proletarian control. The market is a tool. It has no class character of its own. What matters is who wields it. In China, the market runs inside a framework where public ownership dominates the strategic sectors and the state (the tool used by the masses to exert class power) can steer investment, fix imbalances, and put social stability ahead of capital accumulation.
The socialist market economy isn’t drifting toward capitalism. Market mechanisms allocate resources in many sectors, but the commanding heights remain under public control. The state doesn’t try to set every price. That mechanical approach caused problems before. So now it uses macro-control, industrial policy, credit guidance, and ownership stakes to keep development aligned with people’s needs. But it also steps in at the micro level when necessary. When Ant Financial tried to bring in klarna style micro loans, the state reined it in. When platform companies threatened data security or labour rights, regulations followed. That’s the system working. SOEs hold the vast majority of assets in energy, finance, telecoms, aviation, rail, heavy industry. They aren’t passive. They’re the levers of power. High-speed rail built in a decade. Rural electrification and broadband rolled out nationwide. Capital directed into renewables and chips even when monetary profits didn’t justify it. That’s socialism in motion.
Socialism is the transition. Communism isn’t a switch you flip. It’s the result of transforming the economic base and the social superstructure over time. Contradictions don’t vanish. You have to work through them. Urban-rural gaps, efficiency versus equity, opening to global capital while defending sovereignty, individual incentive alongside collective welfare. These are the substance of the transition. Dialectics is a method. You find the principal contradiction at a given stage, mobilise to resolve it, and that creates the basis for the next step. That’s why there’s no calendar date for “end-stage communism”. Asking for one while imperialism still sets the terms of the global economy, while finance and tech leverage sit in a few capitalist hands, is ultra leftist infantilism. It repeats the error of those who called the NEP a betrayal. The transition ends when the material and ideological conditions for communism are achieved globally. Not when a deadline arrives.
Public ownership of the commanding heights is the foundation. The biggest enterprises in China are state-owned or state-controlled. Ownership shapes control, and control shapes purpose. An SOE in China isn’t a private firm with a government investor. It’s an instrument of the people’s democratic dictatorship. The state isn’t neutral. It’s the organised form of proletarian class power, exercised through the CPC and the mass line. When credit flows to strategic sectors, when prices on essentials are capped in a crisis, when resources mobilise for poverty alleviation that lifted nearly a billion out of absolute deprivation, that’s class power doing work. Foreign capital operates in China under strict rules. Controlled engagement accelerates the development of productive forces, which strengthens the material basis for socialism. The risk of capitalist restoration is however real. That’s why the Party pushes ideological struggle, anti-corruption, and working-class leadership. The risk is known and accounted for.
On Apple wages: workers in export zones earn less than in the US. That’s not hidden. It’s part of how global capitalism works: core states extract surplus from the periphery through unequal exchange. China’s strategy has been to climb the value chain, not stay subordinate. The surplus from export manufacturing funds education, infrastructure, tech upgrading. Labour laws have tightened. Social insurance has expanded. Unionisation has support. Flexibility remains because competition is real. But the goal isn’t to please foreign capital. It’s to use globalisation’s openings to build an independent, advanced, socialist economy. Judging China’s socialism by a foreign corporation’s wage sheet misses the point. The question isn’t whether exploitation exists in the global system. It does. The question is whether state power exists to limit it, learn from it, and move beyond it. In China, that power exists. It’s being used. And the results speak for themselves.
The nets were at foxconn in capitalist occupied Taiwan. You clearly have never been to China or researched China beyond just absorbing western headlines with no scepticism.
Yeah, I mixed up the location of the foxconn factory fair catch. Doesn’t change the core point though.
Those nets were a Foxconn-specific response to a cluster of suicides at one company, not a national symbol of “China.” If you actually look at the data, China’s suicide rate is 8.9 per 100k, ranking around 65th globally. That’s lower than the US (15.6), Canada (9.4), Australia (13.1), UK (9.5), Japan (14.7), South Korea (20.6) and much of mainland Europe.
China makes everything from cheap trinkets to (most likely) the phone you’re typing this on. It’s not a monolith. Yes, working conditions were harsh during the early offshoring boom, that was the brutal calculus of catching up. But that strategy lifted nearly a billion people out of absolute poverty. China now has the world’s largest high-speed rail network, metro systems that dwarf most Western cities, and excess overtime has been explicitly ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, with enforcement ramping up.
On the system itself: China is in the socialist transitional period. Contradictions remain because capitalism is still hegemonic globally, but the commanding heights (finance, energy, telecoms, heavy industry) are publicly owned. The state isn’t a neutral arbiter; it’s the tool through which the dominant class enforces it’s power, in China that is the masses (the proletariat). Harvard’s Ash Center has tracked Chinese public opinion since 2003 and consistently finds approval of the central government above 90%. Chinese people don’t view their system through a Western liberal lens, they see democracy as whole-process people’s democracy: elections, consultation, grassroots feedback, policy adjustment, all integrated. The NPC has nearly 3,000 deputies, including representatives from all 55 minority groups, hundreds of frontline workers (manual labourers) and farmers, and workers from every sector. That’s structural representation. You can critique labor issues without falling back on orientalist tropes that flatten 1.4 billion people into a caricature.
You’ve got a video clip and a worldview that fits on a bumper sticker, congrats. You don’t actually care about Chinese workers; you just need us to be miserable props in your moral drama so you can feel superior. When reality doesn’t match the trope, you double down instead of asking questions. Best of luck to you, I hope you overcome your orientalism.
China is capitalist in all ways that matter.
Have you considered doing research and applying analysis before just saying things?
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Production is not capitalism.
So you haven’t. I would recommend it. It’ll help you void these vibes based politics errors.
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I think most of your (real) questions would be answered if you read Lenin and Chairman Mao and did some research on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the socialist market economy alongside the realities of the socialist transitionary period where many of the contradictions of capitalism remain as they are slowly synthesised and worked through. You’re clearly running on vibes for now and it’s leading you to not grasp the situation at hand properly.
Removed by mod
China isn’t capitalist. Socialism isn’t measured by what Apple pays a worker in Shenzhen. It’s measured by who holds state power and where the economy is heading. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is just Marxism applied to the actual conditions China faced: a revolution that succeeded in a country with underdeveloped productive forces. You can’t skip stages by decree. You have to develop the forces of production under proletarian control. The market is a tool. It has no class character of its own. What matters is who wields it. In China, the market runs inside a framework where public ownership dominates the strategic sectors and the state (the tool used by the masses to exert class power) can steer investment, fix imbalances, and put social stability ahead of capital accumulation.
The socialist market economy isn’t drifting toward capitalism. Market mechanisms allocate resources in many sectors, but the commanding heights remain under public control. The state doesn’t try to set every price. That mechanical approach caused problems before. So now it uses macro-control, industrial policy, credit guidance, and ownership stakes to keep development aligned with people’s needs. But it also steps in at the micro level when necessary. When Ant Financial tried to bring in klarna style micro loans, the state reined it in. When platform companies threatened data security or labour rights, regulations followed. That’s the system working. SOEs hold the vast majority of assets in energy, finance, telecoms, aviation, rail, heavy industry. They aren’t passive. They’re the levers of power. High-speed rail built in a decade. Rural electrification and broadband rolled out nationwide. Capital directed into renewables and chips even when monetary profits didn’t justify it. That’s socialism in motion.
Socialism is the transition. Communism isn’t a switch you flip. It’s the result of transforming the economic base and the social superstructure over time. Contradictions don’t vanish. You have to work through them. Urban-rural gaps, efficiency versus equity, opening to global capital while defending sovereignty, individual incentive alongside collective welfare. These are the substance of the transition. Dialectics is a method. You find the principal contradiction at a given stage, mobilise to resolve it, and that creates the basis for the next step. That’s why there’s no calendar date for “end-stage communism”. Asking for one while imperialism still sets the terms of the global economy, while finance and tech leverage sit in a few capitalist hands, is ultra leftist infantilism. It repeats the error of those who called the NEP a betrayal. The transition ends when the material and ideological conditions for communism are achieved globally. Not when a deadline arrives.
Public ownership of the commanding heights is the foundation. The biggest enterprises in China are state-owned or state-controlled. Ownership shapes control, and control shapes purpose. An SOE in China isn’t a private firm with a government investor. It’s an instrument of the people’s democratic dictatorship. The state isn’t neutral. It’s the organised form of proletarian class power, exercised through the CPC and the mass line. When credit flows to strategic sectors, when prices on essentials are capped in a crisis, when resources mobilise for poverty alleviation that lifted nearly a billion out of absolute deprivation, that’s class power doing work. Foreign capital operates in China under strict rules. Controlled engagement accelerates the development of productive forces, which strengthens the material basis for socialism. The risk of capitalist restoration is however real. That’s why the Party pushes ideological struggle, anti-corruption, and working-class leadership. The risk is known and accounted for.
On Apple wages: workers in export zones earn less than in the US. That’s not hidden. It’s part of how global capitalism works: core states extract surplus from the periphery through unequal exchange. China’s strategy has been to climb the value chain, not stay subordinate. The surplus from export manufacturing funds education, infrastructure, tech upgrading. Labour laws have tightened. Social insurance has expanded. Unionisation has support. Flexibility remains because competition is real. But the goal isn’t to please foreign capital. It’s to use globalisation’s openings to build an independent, advanced, socialist economy. Judging China’s socialism by a foreign corporation’s wage sheet misses the point. The question isn’t whether exploitation exists in the global system. It does. The question is whether state power exists to limit it, learn from it, and move beyond it. In China, that power exists. It’s being used. And the results speak for themselves.
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So the answer to their question is “no”.
That’s a cute opinion. Did Epstein give it to you?
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The nets were at foxconn
in capitalist occupied Taiwan. You clearly have never been to China or researched China beyond just absorbing western headlines with no scepticism.Removed by mod
Yeah, I mixed up the location of the foxconn factory fair catch. Doesn’t change the core point though.
Those nets were a Foxconn-specific response to a cluster of suicides at one company, not a national symbol of “China.” If you actually look at the data, China’s suicide rate is 8.9 per 100k, ranking around 65th globally. That’s lower than the US (15.6), Canada (9.4), Australia (13.1), UK (9.5), Japan (14.7), South Korea (20.6) and much of mainland Europe.
China makes everything from cheap trinkets to (most likely) the phone you’re typing this on. It’s not a monolith. Yes, working conditions were harsh during the early offshoring boom, that was the brutal calculus of catching up. But that strategy lifted nearly a billion people out of absolute poverty. China now has the world’s largest high-speed rail network, metro systems that dwarf most Western cities, and excess overtime has been explicitly ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, with enforcement ramping up.
On the system itself: China is in the socialist transitional period. Contradictions remain because capitalism is still hegemonic globally, but the commanding heights (finance, energy, telecoms, heavy industry) are publicly owned. The state isn’t a neutral arbiter; it’s the tool through which the dominant class enforces it’s power, in China that is the masses (the proletariat). Harvard’s Ash Center has tracked Chinese public opinion since 2003 and consistently finds approval of the central government above 90%. Chinese people don’t view their system through a Western liberal lens, they see democracy as whole-process people’s democracy: elections, consultation, grassroots feedback, policy adjustment, all integrated. The NPC has nearly 3,000 deputies, including representatives from all 55 minority groups, hundreds of frontline workers (manual labourers) and farmers, and workers from every sector. That’s structural representation. You can critique labor issues without falling back on orientalist tropes that flatten 1.4 billion people into a caricature.
Removed by mod
You’ve got a video clip and a worldview that fits on a bumper sticker, congrats. You don’t actually care about Chinese workers; you just need us to be miserable props in your moral drama so you can feel superior. When reality doesn’t match the trope, you double down instead of asking questions. Best of luck to you, I hope you overcome your orientalism.
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