My sources for the preamble come mostly from here, here, and here.
The thread image depicts Kenyan police, trained by the Zionist entity, in a meeting with President Ruto before being sent to Haiti, sourced from this article.
As has been planned for the last couple years, foreign police officers have been inside Haiti for a few months now. It will surprise nobody to learn that this has not gone very well. Gangs continue to control much of the country, and violence has continued in the form of massacres and forced relocations (approximately 1.3 million). Something like 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is under the control of one gang or another.
The aim by the US was to import 2500 police officers to Haiti from a wide variety of countries. One of those was Kenya; President Ruto had to fight his own country's courts to force this through, and ironically is now apparently considering withdrawing those officers once the UN mandate expires on October 2nd. The issue here is not only the limited manpower (Haiti has a population of 12 million), but also very pedestrian things, like the fact that the officers who arrive don't even speak the language.
The situation in Haiti appears to be a fairly standard operation of American national control, in which both battling sides are being supported by the US in order to create maximum disorganization and prevent a coherent political force from arising and thus threatening their Caribbean interests. While the US funds foreign forces to arrive in Haiti to "control the situation" or similar justifications, the Haitian gangs get their weapons smuggled in from the US itself. That this is happening alongside escalations against Venezuela is obviously not a coincidence - in a world in which American interests are being gradually shrugged off, and where the American state military is becoming rapidly more impotent and unable to dissuade and defeat even tiny states like Yemen, total imperial dominion of their immediate surrounding territory must be ensured by any means necessary.
The police and the gangs are likely designed to be mutually reinforcing, without even much kayfabe of fighting each other. As an example, once the Kenyan police arrived, they immediately began brutalizing anti-government protestors instead of focussing on gang activity. They were trained by the Zionist entity, after all.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Key details of China’s Unified National Market have finally been revealed. I will not go through the entire text here, you’re welcome to use machine translation to get a glimpse of the tedious details. I will highlight a few important paragraphs instead.
This is very likely to happen under the 15th Five Year Plan, as a push towards boosting domestic consumption and tackling the overcapacity problem through anti-involution policies.
The upshot is that government interference will now be minimized to allow the private market to dictate the investment and economic development. On the other hand, the government’s role will be reduced to ensuring fairness, transparency and openness.
Currently, China still regulates the flow of movement of labor (through the hukou system, which is being dismantled) and many local/municipal governments provide subsidies and through local protectionism, to attract investments to boost the local economy. The outcome is that every province wants to build new housing, every city wants to get on the train of green technology like EV and solar panels, etc. As a result, you end up with overcapacity issue because everyone invests in the same thing and caused intense and even bitter peer competition between cities and provinces, for everyone knows that when the consolidation of the industries finally arrives, some of them are going to be the losers.
Back in July, Xi Jinping gave an unusually harsh criticism against the local governments: “上项目，一说就是几样：人工智能、算力、新能源汽车，是不是全国各省份都要往这些方向去发展产业？” (“Every time a new project is mentioned, it’s always the familiar ones: artificial intelligence, computation, renewable energy cars, do every province across the country have to develop these same industries?”)
As such, the Unified Common Market will create a standardized market that will allow for the free flow of labor and capital. The governments can no longer intervene in where people can or should migrate to, nor can they interfere with the investments made by private capital. If the market believes that Anhui (as an example) should be the new biotech hub, then other cities are not allowed to intervene with the market force in any way. This will ensure the diversification of goods and services rather than the local governments all trying to invest in the same thing. Instead, the market will play a stronger role in deciding how the economy should be developed and diversified:
Translation: Balance the relationship between an efficient market and a responsible government: To achieve the basic requirements of “five unifications, one opening up”, the key is to correctly resolve the relationship between the government and the market. On one hand, to maximize the decisive role of the market in resource distribution, to enable market mechanisms to efficiently guide the logistics and allocation, to prevent the “visible hand” from intervening with the “invisible hand”; on the other hand, the government has to enact regulations for a unified market, ensure fair competition, to protect market order, and to provide high quality public services in order to promote a good environment for the market to operate. The government is to play a better role in macroeconomic policy adjustments, market regulation and public services, as well as to provide necessary interfere when the market is not operating as intended. Only with an organic combination between an efficient market and a responsible market, to allow “both hands” to work together, can we drive the development of a Unified National Market in a steady and long-lasting manner.
a couple other paragraphs
Translation: Eliminate local protectionism, and promote good business environment: To establish mechanisms for long-term clean-up, as well as to speed up the cleanup of regulations and practices that hinder unified market and fair competition. To eliminate the administrative barriers between regions. To strengthen the supervision and assessment of the local governments’ behavior, to enhance accountability mechanism, and to guide local governments to establish a correct concept of political performance. To promote the integration of inter-regional market rules and the integrated development of regional markets. To strengthen inter-regional cooperation and exchange, and to realize complementary advantages and mutually beneficial “win-win” cooperation through joint construction of industrial parks and cooperative development projects.
Translation: Improve the level of opening up internally and promote a high level of opening up externally: To establish the great internal circulation with minimal hindrance, to accelerate the cultivation of a complete domestic demand institution. To minimize barriers for export-to-domestic sales channel, to expand the support for fiscal, taxation and financial aspects. To promote the integrated development of domestic and foreign trade. To construct a high-standard market institution, to create a market-oriented, rule-based and internationalized first class business environment. To steadily expand the opening up of institutions, strengthen rules, regulations, management, standards and various other institutions. To adhere to win-win cooperation, and promote the high quality development of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Not sure how I think about it yet. A lot of it has to do with minimizing the role of the government (both central and local) for economic planning and let the market to decide where labor should migrate to, where and what investments should be made. Seems like giving a lot of power to private capital?
From reading analyses from others, this is a step forward for China to emulate the advanced economies in the West where the government gradually gives up its “visible hand” role and let the market dictate economic planning.
He's not going to press the button
Most likely China is trying to squeeze capitalism for all it's worth, until eventually this market-state hybrid form of capitalism also collapses under its own weight. The question is if the CPC will be bold enough to move towards real socialism or it will collapse into yet another USSR fiasco, this time without any major foreign hegemon in the horizon.
A possible charitable reading of it… in the US, local governments compete with each other for capital investment, creating a situation where “attracting” a business to your city ends up being a net negative. This creates unhelpful competition between states and even localities. In my home town, each small little municipality competes with each other over development, which ends up being a race to the bottom and the incentives given to the localities ends up costing more than the economic benefits could possibly be. If this is anything like what happens in China, it could be that Xi is just looking to reduce this sort of unhelpful competition between local governments, but this is me not knowing the situation in China and also being very credulous to Xi’s plans here.
Rebalancing the central and local governments, as well as curbing competition, are the right idea. However, you don’t need to yield to the “invisible hand” to do the job.
MMT still has the right idea: jobs guarantee by the government as a price anchor which controls inflation.
In this case, the government runs deficit to reduce unemployment through a jobs guarantee program, which paradoxically stabilizes the prices despite running large deficits and boosting consumption. (Stalin used a similar concept until Khrushchev undid everything).
In China, most of the money creation came from deposits created by commercial bank loans. This is why China’s M2 money supply has grown twice the size of the US money supply. This, together with export revenues (foreign currencies as assets), allowed the central government to keep its deficit spending below 3%.
So we are still back to China trying to balance the budget. I would much rather the government run large deficits than to yield more authority to private capital.
Yes, I believe we are on the same page vis-a-vis MMT. There are much better solutions out there for China to implement, and yet they seem to insist on sticking with neoliberalism for now. I am hopeful though that, even if some lessons will need to be learned the hard way, simply by seeking out practical solutions Chinese leadership will land on a better path. Said another way, I don’t think there necessarily needs to be some ideological shift within the CPC. Neoliberalism is failing across the globe; even in China eventually it’s going to come up against its limits. But the reason I am hopeful is that while the capitalist west has no solution for the end of neoliberalism, China has the toolkit (both practical and ideological) to move away from neoliberalism as it fails.
It may be neoliberal in some aspects but when all the land and natural resources are owned by the state, it isn't really neoliberalism. Until there is some talk to privatize the SOEs, TVEs, natural resources and land, it's hard to say China is truly following the neoliberal model. If anything they have adopted neo liberal accounting principles because they are primarily trading with neoliberal nations
This is quite literaly what top Chinese economists have been proposing in the recent years. Look at what someone some CPC economists themselves say.
This neoliberal garbage is what passes for mainstream economic discussion in some China circles.
You can find more if you care to actualy search for it.
I'm not going to pretend that one guy in a country of over a billion saying things is a sign of what is to come. It is no secret that there are libbed out Chinese people, even within the CPC. There has always been debate within the CPC across the whole spectrum of political thought, and when you are talking about the largest population in the world, you could surely find as many people with perspectives contrary to Zhou Tianyong as you can people who agree with him. When I say some talk, I mean the party itself, not one person. Even if his work is taken into consideration by the CPC in their planning, it will be considered along with the work of people of differing perspectives.
I am still waiting for anyone to give an explanation on why should China run an export-led growth economy by selling cheap goods to the West in exchange for accumulating financial assets that is not rooted in neoliberalism?
The exchange here is real goods and services made using Chinese labor and resources are exported to the wealthy Western (aka Global North) countries, while receiving a financial asset (foreign currency) in return that it cannot use. The only explanation one can have for this is to balance the budget. There is literally no other reason to accumulate $3.3T US dollars in your reserve. I would love to be enlightened though lol.
Also, you have to remember that any country only has to do austerity if they cannot earn enough export revenues to pay back their external debt, or to finance their own internal budget deficit (because of the need to balance the budget). This is what a lot of the post-Soviet Eastern European states faced when they opened up to liberal reforms.
A country like China with a huge labor pool easily out-competed all the other exporting countries since joining the WTO in the 2000s (remember the Four Asian Dragons?) and accumulated such a vast amount of dollars that it never had to run any austerity.
And the US was (and still is) happy to concentrate the world’s manufacturing capacity in China because it renders all the other exporting countries in the Global South vulnerable to US imperialism. Those are the countries who end up having to take IMF loans when their economies fail.
Most of the SOEs have already been privatized in the 1990s.
Remember the 5-6-7-8-9 rule of private sector. It’s very easy to remember.
Private enterprises contribute:
50% of the national tax revenue.
60% of GDP, fixed capital investment and external investment.
70% of high tech industries.
80% of urban employment, and
90% of new jobs creation
There are about 70 million people working in the public sector, and most people work for private companies. The other - the bottom 40% - most of whom living in the rural area, are screwed the worst though.
Ok, I'm actually confused now - knowing this fact - what leverage of the proletarian dictatorship does the party have over Capital to even register call it socialist, let alone communist nation-state? You know what - I may have to give BynarsAreOkay some credit I guess -
State-owned enterprises give very good benefits, although the jobs are limited. Ten years ago few people would want to join the SOEs because they are somewhat career limiting - you might be working the same job with little promotion for a couple decades for the rest of your adult life. These days, with an economic downturn, people compete to join SOEs because there is at least stability in employment and you get decent wages and benefits. Better to stay employed for the next 20 years doing a boring job than to get laid off in the private sector.
You can also join the civil servant, which requires you to take the national civil servant exam (考公). Once you are “in the system”, you will have stable employment for the rest of your life with decent benefits as well. However, the spots are extremely limited. In 2022, there were over 2 million people (!) competing for 30k spots - the intake ratio was 68-to-1.
I'm not arguing for or against the model I'm just saying the economy at large isn't neoliberal when land itself can't even be owned privately, all the natural resources are publicly owned, and the majority of the economy is publicly owned. That isn't what neoliberalism is. There may be a subsection of the economy that is running entirely on neoliberal principles in order to interact with a world economy that is neoliberal but that is not the same thing.
Except for the countries taking loans from China instead of IMF. there are many talks on youtube from people who negotiated directly with China for their own nations like Gyude Moore, Yanis Varoufakis, and others giving insight about how they were able to get better arrangements via China, the first avenue to circumvent IMF and World Bank that has been available in the modern era. Let us not pretend that before reform and opening up the global south was not vulnerable to US imperialism, and it was China's economic model that made them vulnerable suddenly. Framing things in this way seems knowingly misleading to me. China is not responsible for US imperialism, and China's model is the only one that has offered an alternative since the fall of the USSR, which they have only been able to do at the scale they have because of their economic model. It is obvious that China has built up their own productive capacity to the point that they have been able to spread that around to dozens of other nations.
and yet over half the economy is still SOEs, not even counting TVEs. The majority of the economy is publicly owned. That's simply not neoliberalism. There is no argument that can say that a majority publicly owned economy is neoliberalism. It is literally antithetical to neoliberalism to have a majority publicly owned economy. On top of that, all the major private companies have CPC bodies within them monitoring and guiding their decision making. This is again, antithetical to neoliberalism.
and most Chinese private companies have less than 10 employees. Let us not pretend that this is some neoliberal model. Does every wet market, street vendor, and house cleaner need to be publicly owned? Does it make sense right now for every city to directly control how many bowls of noodles get sold on the street corner? The idea that "most people work in the private sector" is a very specific way of phrasing this, it alludes to a false notion that a capitalist class is controlling the workers, instead of some mom and pop shop mostly staffed by people who are related to each other or live in the same neighborhood. In the very beginning of socialist transition, I don't think a bunch of Chinese people having small businesses in their local communities is a warning sign that China is slipping into neoliberalism, into an economic model that is driven entirely by private interests for the purpose of profit seeking above all else.
A lot of unsubstantiated claims but you still haven’t answered the main question:
Why should China run a huge trade surplus economy just to accumulate financial assets (e.g. dollars) that they cannot use? What is the point of that, if not a neoliberal economic model?
Why is it NOT neoliberalism when there is a net flow of actual goods and services (made by Chinese labor and resources that should have been used to improve the lives of the people domestically) to the Global North countries over decades? Think in real terms of trade!
Why does the Chinese government have to balance the budget? Why can’t it directly run the deficit to directly raise the income of the working people so they actually have money to spend? Why can’t it provide jobs guarantee to the high rate of youth unemployment right now? Again, think in real terms of the economy.
You can say all you want about public vs private sector and how many mom and pop shops there are in China (again, lots of misinformation there) but you still haven’t gotten to the core of the issues that truly reflect the economic policies being run in China today (e.g. why is there “overcapacity”? why is there deflation? why are people reluctant to spend money?). You need to answer those questions in order to argue that this is not an economic model rooted in neoliberal thinking.
Please explain how are these countries going to earn the RMB to pay back to the Chinese creditors if China is running a trade surplus against them? China has been reducing its net import (domestic consumption is low), which means there are even less RMB out there for countries to earn from.
Yes, they are getting better terms from the Chinese creditors, but they still have to sell to wealthy Western countries to pay back their Chinese creditors.
If the loan was dollar-denominated, then they will have to earn USD or exchange whatever currencies they earned for USD in the first place.
I can see why they would want to minimise local government involvement, after the debt problems, corruption, and protectionism. It is broadly speaking inefficient for every province to be investing in the same industries. But it seems to me that the problem is in the incentive, not in the local government power itself. I remember in another post you said local officials wanted to pump up GDP numbers in order to get promotions. It seems like they should be reforming the internal party reward structures / targets as a priority.
Overall markets are an efficient way to distribute goods. I don't think there's a huge problem with allowing more internal market forces inherently, as long as the government retains political power over them, continues to control key national industries and services, and reins in financial speculation.
There are legitimate frictions caused by the inter-regional market obstacles right now, because local governments put up protectionist policies to prevent companies from other cities from expanding into their cities.
There are two sides to this: for one, you prevent your domestic industries from being out-competed by the larger companies from the other wealthier cities, but at the same time, it makes the market less efficient and successful companies difficult to gain traction nationally. You have many companies investing in the same thing and end up in a situation where you have to kill off your competitors.
So I think the unified market can boost consumption, but it does so in a way that yields power to the “invisible hand”.
I’d much rather the government runs large deficits to give people the money to spend (such as through a jobs guarantee program that would eliminate unemployment), rather than relying on the wisdom of the private sector. But this would not allow the government to balance the budget, so they are ideologically constrained from doing so.
What do you think the effects on the RMB’s value will be? Do you think they are finally allowing some appreciation?
If allowed to float, the RMB will appreciate to reflect the true scale of China’s economy, as it should be.
A Hexbear quote in 2025. How can anyone believe this? Even at face value by the time you take all the measure necessary for a "fair" market for all participants i.e the population it is no longer a "market" but some sort of BS distribution system with shit incentives and an absurd number of strings attached that only functions out of a sunk cost fallacy because the people in charge don't want to try any other alternative.
This is just a flavor of ultra-marxism, railing against markets as such with no regard for their function. Saying that markets are efficient says nothing about them being the most efficient all the time, but it in a specific context. China still benefits from organizing things using markets because they are efficient in their current stage and due to the relationships they have to hold with their external context (a largely capitalist-run world).
Of course we all understand limitaitons of markets, and Xi likely understands it very well. But it helps nobody to just rail against them generally as if its some principle of marxism that markets are inherently bad
Indeed, an actual Marxist interpretation understands that there are always aspects of the previous economic formation within the emerging formation, especially early in the transition. China is in the very infancy of socialist transition in an otherwise still hyper capitalist world. ultras have a similar view as anarchists, expecting a much more advanced form of communism than the material conditions demand, and anything less than this ideal is an enemy. somehow they end up spending all their energy criticizing the enemies of capitalists on the internet and never really organizing
It is quite silly how people on Hexbear can both claim to be against capitalism, but also to claim that restoring capitalists as a class, and giving them more and more power is actually somehow good, and that everybody who agrees with people like Stalin on economics is an 'ultra' and bad.
I wish people had a better understanding of the effect the presence of the profit motive has an economy, compared to maintaining a planned economy.
Yeah, overall markets are not efficient, and allowing the free movement of labor between provinces creates problems.
With free movement of labor, people are going to migrate from low wage regions to high wage regions, creating labor oversupply in some places and undersupply in others.
And obviously markets, oof. We don't need to pretend as if dengists are 100% correct about everything. Economic planning is provably superior to markets. This has been a known result since at least the 1930s with kantorovitch and leontieff.
A market mechanism is like a stochastic gradient descent through commodity space, while economic planning simply computes the commodity space in advance and aims towards the optimal point.
There is actually a meme in China about high-speed rails, which goes something like how those high speed rails have connected small provincial towns that should have stimulated their growth, but instead it became a one-way ticket for the rural youth to easily flee to the big cities.
We have a lot of beautiful provincial towns and villages, nice infrastructure development, with high speed rail stations (some even have two!!) but… they have no economy. As a result, the youth simply left for the large cities for job opportunities, which adds to the churn of the already intense competition in the urban regions. It’s sad to see but that’s already a reality for many small towns.
So, it’s already happening over the past few years.
Sad to see. It's similar to the hollowing out of rural regions in developed countries too. If you treat people as a mere input for the process of labor and accumulation, then you lose community in the long run. China may very well be at the point where it could very seriously impose limits to work hours similar to Western Nations and begin distributing labor more equitably among the population. I don't know the internal state of development in China as well as those living there, but maybe even Jason Hickle and Kohei Saito's ideas about Degrowth should begin guiding policy in some areas.
Limiting work hours is good and very necessary - but it has to be compensated in wages and ensure that the income level of the working class does not fall. Otherwise you’re introducing more problems to the system. But yes, agree with your ideas.
That's what I mean. Definition of the work week as 40 hours maximum. Other over-developed areas are flirting with the idea of even less, as low as 25. Guaranteeing that a full time job entails a full-time wage and benefits would be part of this new arrangement. It's the sort of thing that was discussed pragmatically as part of The New Deal in America and FDR's Economic Bill of Rights. Of course we might be able to see such protections are temporary in the long-term as Capital will try to claw back concessions to sustain the rate of profit, but perhaps such a transition could be managed better by a committed communist party still firmly in control of the levers of power. We joke about the communism button, but after such an extended period of marketization China will surely have to transition over time to a more planned endeavor, and part of that means making sure that economic benefits are spread among the population more evenly.
But it’s not like socialism precludes the existence of markets until the end stage. China isn’t really close to the point at which it can transition to abolishing markets, but the state does at least have control of key industries and public services. As for the labour market, of course it would be better for the government to guarantee employment as xhs says. But in the absence of that, millions of Chinese people already migrate to seek work in higher wage areas, hukou system or no. This seems like they are trying to formalise and regulate the market that already exists.
I agree that more market forces are inherently counterproductive in the long run. I just see this as more of an attempt by the state to correct the inefficiencies that have sprung up under current conditions. Maybe it’s a bad move to open up this can of worms, maybe they really are trapped in a neoliberal mind prison and don’t see an alternative.
There is a difference between commodity production and capitalism that is frequently missing from these discussions.
Commodity production is production for exchange. This implies the existence of money, and a market.
However, capitalism requires the existence of capital, a type of force that seeks profits, thereby distorting a country's investments, prices and economic development.
Just because a country has markets doesn't mean that it needs to do so in a capitalistic manner. The more that commodity production is performed in a capitalistic form, the worse off the country's development is.
This separation is the reason why controlled markets work better than free markets.
Not to mention, nationalisation of urban industry is something that can be done safely at any stage of socialism.
Many should not be so surprised Dengist free market policies are continuing
A chapter in The Governance of China, Volume 1 is titled Reform and Opening Up Is Always Ongoing and Will Never End
https://en.qstheory.cn/2020-10/09/c_1004933.htm
This sounds like absolute dogshit. Anarcho-capitalism by 2050?
Wait and see what it looks like first. The unified national market has been proposed and drafted since 2022 (at least when I first heard about it), but it is only this month that clearer details about the implementation are being revealed.
I'm surprised you're the optimist here lol. Still, even if this eliminates redundancies in the operation of local governments and sets free labor and capital to migrate to other spheres, giving power to the fucking porkies in any way is a huge step back. What China needs right now, which is only logical considering everything happening in the west, is of course further centralization, in the hands of the government as the supreme organizational body, not further decentralization in the hands of corporations, domestic or foreign alike. The talking points honestly remind me of local stormfronters thinking that free trade is by itself a goal, and not an economic mechanism.
But what is most troubling is this "opening up" to me. Can't help but feel they have at least given consideration to bringing down the firewall, and letting the western tech incels run wild. Now of course, if this included WeChat for the american market, maybe China could flip the tables, but you just know the burgerlanders will absolutely never allow that.
I think the difference for me is that the government in China still has the agency to decide whether it’s going to open up or close off. They have the ability to think long term and act deliberately. If this movement works out poorly they can always change track later. That’s much more reassuring than the subjugation of Western governments to capital and US imperialism.
Of course, for now, but giving more power to capital is indeed a gateway into submission. Maybe it will be reversed before it becomes too late, who knows. But ultimately, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence, especially regarding the rhetoric in the text above.
Probably the worst thing Stalin did was the abandonment of democratic centralism and with it, the vanguard. Sure, the purges were supposed to be a self-correction mechanism, but this is like saying that the crisis of capitalism are supposed to perform a similar function. Ultimately, what should have been done, is putting a hard cap on party membership relative to population. Separate the professional revolutionaries from the technocrats and careerists. The CPC has 100 million fucking members. Assuming that even 0.1% of those people have genuinely read and understood theory is already a stretch.
This...is an upshot for you? Fascinating. Private markets dictating economic development has historically worked so well for the humans that are forced to live in those markets
??? Upshot means like a summary/short conclusion. It has nothing to do with what I think.
I have literally never heard it used in this context
Then what context have you ever heard it used in? Because that's the definition
It's a thing in burgerland, it often has a positive connotation.
Are you thinking upside?
you're not crazy, I also almost solely hear upshot used with a positive-connotation and would have been confused by this.
Wiktionary lists it as a US English thing. Maybe its regional within the US, even, idk.
“Upshot” is a synonym of outcome or result, not “upside” which means something positive.
Wat. I have literally never heard it used in that context
Yeah, it has had that meaning since the 1600s. It was originally a term from archery meaning the last, final shot in an archery competition, so from there it came to mean the result of something. Shakespeare used it in Hamlet, and people keep using it this way 400 years later, but it’s understandable that it could be confused with “upside”.
ahahahaha