this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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That's because they found a way to voor communist thought to the most capitalist industry in the world.
Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.
(I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).
However, it's been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they've been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I'm wary of calling that Communism).
Are they even left of center nowadays? I don't know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what's done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.
I don't think they've yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they've kept the Authoritarianism going.
well i mean, in defense of this statement, mao was literally psychopathic. As far as i've read they basically dropped everything including food production to make a nuclear bomb. Coming from that to industrialization is only inevitably going to vastly increase your standard of living. We saw the same thing across the world, even in the soviet union.
also i definitely wouldn't call china center of left, unless we're specifically talking about economic policy, as china is extremely noteworthy for being pretty tyrannical in certain cases around certain things. the great firewall being a good example. Unless we're going with the modern american conservative definition of left, in which case, yeah that would be left.
Re-read my comments on this thread.
You're confusing the authoritarianism-libertarian axis with the left-right axis.
It's perfectly possible to be authoritarian in genuine pursuit of the "the greatest good for the greatest number" principle (the basis of all left-wing ideals) if one believes that only tight and centralized control can achieve a maximal balance of the welfare of people and the number of people getting the best possible welfare, and that individual freedom is not important enough for people's welfare compared to other things.
(Personally I don't agree, but my point is that it's not incompatible to have left-wing objectives and believe they're better reached via authoritarian methods).
Totally agree on Mao's character. IMHO what China achieved, it did in spite of Mao rather than due to him.
Further I would say that their long term strategy of becoming the workshop of the World seems to have worked as they're well in their way to become the next imperial power. It seems a blindness-driven-by-ideology to dismiss their economic rise and its reasonably even distribution across society as merely "inevitable", especially when there are countless examples that failed miserably to do so during that time, most notably next door India which did not manage anywhere near the same.
There are plenty of questions about the sustainability of their strategy as they become a medium wealth country, the Ecological consequences of it and of lots of the decisions they've made in the last decade or so, none of which deny the uniqueness - and hence merit, given that their only resource was people, not minerals and natural wealth like other countries many of which got nowhere near China in terms of speed of development - of what they did achieve so far.
If one takes off one's ideological blinkers (and me not being American, I couldn't care less if China replaces American or not as the top power since neither does anything in my interest or the interest of those I care about, so I have no knee-jerk "China Bad" reaction), China looks like a country which did a bunch of things well for a while but did others wrongly and had problem and isn't performing as well anymore.
well obviously, authoritarianism is a method of governance, you can have that mixed with literally anything. I just don't believe that china has generally social left leaning objectives, like i said, unless we're talking like classical liberalism or something, they're pretty socially conservative, and they're not super economically left either.
They're like a weird mix of ethno nationalist (china is not very diverse) and capitalist-authoritarian, combined with social conservatism.
I think if we're talking about general social status, china is probably doing something productive, though it's questionable how much longer that will run on for. But general social status is boring.
economically, china is experiencing quite a lot of pressure, as more authoritarian controlled economies tend to do. And this is historically aligned with how their society has gone throughout the years. Things get unstable, they vie for power as their influence starts to wane, and then it accelerates until social collapse and "rebirth" as is pretty typical for all human society, though most places don't really have the history to show it, so it's not unusual.
If they can make it out of this pressure, which is debatable, they'll do well, currently they're debt farming smaller countries in the hopes of gaining outside control of them through the debt. That could be a significant liability, they have quite a significant portion of debt wrapped up in simply building wealth, which is sketchy and can implode if not properly controlled, similar to the US, but perhaps without the sheer productive capability of the US.
if they can't make it out, they die and implode a horrible death rising from the ashes sometime later. Probably through a few rough leaderships along the way.
A big problem with poverty status in china lowering is that wages are rising, so china has to ship to a higher quality production base, which they have the capacity for, but the economic incentive to produce in china compared to somewhere onshore, or near shore drops off a cliff at that point. Especially when you factor in stuff like shipping. Ethical product sourcing, and all kinds of other stuff that's more socially acceptable now. People are generally willing to pay more for a more local service/good. Especially as economic status increases in the west as well. Though that might also be related to bad financials so.
Yeah the big question really is "were those gains sustainable?" which in turn links with "can they adapt to this new stage of their economic growth cycle?".
I don't think things are going anywhere as well now there as they did before (it's even unclear of the country is growing at all for the many) hence why I kept making an exception for "the last decade" in the comments I've been writing here about China.
We can come up with a thousand reasons why they'll have problems and a thousand ways in which they can succeed, but those "what ifs" are just a bit of informed fantasism so I'm refraining from such futurism as it's a practice riddled with wishful thinking, selective picking of what suits one's theories and building theories based on an information sparse basis that's somewhat poluted (as in, there's way more we don't know than there is that we do know especially at a detail level, and especially here in the West what we do know tends to be mostly the things that certain political forces believe will make us think bad of China).
It's hard enough to try and form a fair and honest opinion of present day China and doing futurism based on this shitty informational basis would just be building castles in the air, which there is no point in doing.
So I'm just acknowledging their past success, with the caveat that it's been a while since that achievement and it's unclear of late if they're even still going forward and if they're even still in practice left-of-center in what they're doing.
it also doesnt help that china hasn't released bad years of economic performance, so we don't actually know how they're doing, unless they've recently started reporting those again. But regardless, that still influences the worse times so.
My two bit variable analysis on china tells me they're likely to have a substantially more volatile economy, in part due to heavier regulations and restrictions, as well as the fact that free market entities are entirely self regulated and tend to balance to equilibrium very aggressively (removing outside influence of course) where as more centrally controlled economies, tend to be more problematic in this regard. China probably has a pretty good balance between the two going on, but it's questionable what that balance even is. Generally a pretty good indicator for the general productivity of a country is their military and it's equipment, the more advanced it is, the more money they're likely to put into it, the more quantity they have, the more manufacturing they dedicate towards it. The USSR primarily known for sheer quantity output, china has also been known for quantity, but it seems they're pushing for more advanced technology recently. The US, naturally, going for extreme technological advantage, and the potential for massive manufacturing bases, as evidenced by ww2. The sheer productive ability of the US matched with it's geography and natural resources is a massive benefit to something of that caliber. Especially when we include something like NATO.
China eliminated "absolute poverty" only as of 2020, I'm not sure if there's any comprehensive report on how the most recent 5 year plan (2020-2025) has succeeded or failed in improving the conditions of China's poor at large.