How China is Socialist

You are familiar with the slogan "seize the means of production," correct?

That is the plan and tactics that we typically think of when working towards socialism/communism in the west, because we live in places that have already had an industrial revolution where the machines and facilities needed to provide a modern standard of living already exist. So in theory our primary task would be to march into our places of employment and administer them in our own interests, and put an end to the capitalist arrangement where our labor is organized by the capital owning class for the benefit of the capital owning class.

However, in the manifesto Marx states that the strategy and tactics for achieving the liberation of the working class will look different in different places according to the concrete conditions present at a given time and place. So if you consider the conditions present in China over the past few decades, you will quickly see that slogans such as "seize the means of production" are completely nonsensical when applied to the Chinese context.

Before the Chinese revolution China was suffering through a period of their history that is now referred to as the hundred years of humiliation. During this time the Chinese people were victim to several colonial/imperial powers occupying China, carving it up into spheres of influence between the colonial powers, and during this time these colonial powers basically robbed the country at gunpoint. The vast majority of China's natural resources and labor power ended up getting exported to subsidize the development of the colonial powers with the help of a comprador feudal class. Opium wars were waged as a way to beat the people into submission and to keep sizable portions of the country in a drugged up stupor so that they were less likely to organize and revolt against the colonial powers that were robbing their country. The conditions during this time were so brutal that the average life expectancy throughout China was only 35 years.

So when China finally had their revolution and the communist party took power, they were left with a country that was in the running for being one of the poorest countries on earth. There were no means of production there for them to seize, over 90% of China was still agrarian peasant farmers, most of whom were doing the brutally difficult work of tending to the land with hand tools. Any means of production that had been developed over the past century as a result of Chinese labor and Chinese resources had already been taken out of the country and locked behind the doors of global capital.

So if you're in the shoes of the Chinese communist party, you are still left with the problem that you need to develop the productive forces that are capable of providing a decent standard of living for all if you wish to achieve any true liberation for the working class. That is to say a liberation that provides the foundation for you to live a life of your own choosing free from the coercion of food insecurity, housing insecurity, health insecurity, and so on.

Completing the task of rapidly developing the productive forces required for laying this foundation therefore is the primary goal of the Chinese communist party. Since there were no means of production for the people to walk in and seize inside China like there is in the west, this means that China has a fairly limited set of options available to advance forward. One option would be to just put your nose to the grindstone and get to work, throwing all of your efforts into building a modern economy out of the hand tools you have available. Essentially, you would be trying to build an advanced economy out of sticks and stones. Another consideration in this plan is the geopolitical context, since you would be undertaking this construction during the height of cold war hostilities during a time when the world's most dominant military superpower is dedicating a tremendous amount of resources towards attacking and destabilizing socialist counties in an attempt to ensure that those countries fail so that socialism doesn't continue spreading throughout the world. This means that much of the effort you expend building up your productive capabilities will inevitably need to be duplicated as you suffer setbacks caused by sabotage and general cold war aggression.

The plan that I'm describing largely describes the strategy taken during the great leap forward, and history shows that this path of socialist development was unsustainable for China. As a result of the pressure to rapidly industrialize while also having to defend against cold war aggression, the country underwent a great deal of toil and was tragically left unprepared when famine hit, leading to a potentially avoidable loss of life.

The other path forward for undertaking socialist construction, and the path that China is currently taking, is the path of compromising with global capital. If the plan is to "seize the means of production," and all of those means are currently locked behind the doors of global trade, then it makes sense to try to sit down at the negotiating table to see under what conditions you can peacefully gain access to the labor saving tools and technologies that you desperately need if you want to significantly reduce the toil associated with developing the productive capabilities of a nation with over one billion people.

This compromise took the form of the "reform and opening up" policies of the Deng era. As a result, many of the contradictions inherent to private enterprise and market based economic planning were reintroduced into China, such as the contradictions of exploitation, uneven development, unequal distribution of wealth, and so on. But this compromise also gave critical benefits to China. By gaining access to investments of labor saving tools and technologies, China was able to develop their productive forces far more quickly and with far less toil than the country had suffered under the development plans of the great leap forward. And possibly even more crucially, by participating in the global market you create a kind of "mutually assured economic destruction" that acts as a powerful deterrent to Cold War/imperialist aggression. No country is going to be enthusiastic about invading China or sabotaging China's economic development is hurting China's economic development also hurts their own country's economy.

Sure, the early years of reform and opening up were very difficult. Sweatshop conditions were commonplace because when China opened itself up to foreign investment it was still an incredibly underdeveloped nation and it was entering into competition with the rest of the desperately poor, formerly colonized and neocolonial world. Given these circumstances, China didn't really have the leverage to negotiate for much better deals. By entering the global market China's fate was tied up with the fate of the rest of the global south.

But what is important to note is that the policies of "reform and opening up" are in a state of constant flux. As China develops its productive forces and becomes less and less dependent on foreign investment to do so, the CPC is constantly using that new leverage to transform their economic development into material gains for the working class. This takes the form of labor law reform consistently expanding and improving worker's rights and labor conditions, it takes the form of state pressure consistently pushing to increase wages, for an average 14% wage increase each year and a roughly 400% increase over the past 30 years, and it takes the form of consistently nationalizing industries where capital investment is no longer necessary/beneficial and administering those industries according to the public good instead of according to the whims of the market.

To me, these are all excellent indicators that the policies of "reform and opening up" were compromises made with the genuine intent of improving the lives of the Chinese people and during towards laying the groundwork for a socialist society that is capable of providing a high standard of living to all its people, and that these policies to not represent a surrender to capital or the victory of capitalism over socialism. China is simply taking the best path available to them towards socialist construction given the historical conditions the were required to address.