Is China a successful communist country?

[Zombdi]

A lot of people say that communism doesn't work, and that it is a good idea but it will always fail in the end. Well isn't China an example of a successful communist country? Do you think it will stay that way? What are your opinions on communism (pure communism, not any variation). What are your opinions on the People's Republic of China in general?

P.S. Do you capitalize "communism"?

[ncb1397]

China is a successful country. China is not a communist country any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea(North Korea) is a democracy.

[Angry Citizen]

Is it really? The vast majority of Chinese live in comparative squalor next to a few elites. It is worse than any capitalist society.

[ncb1397]

I guess I should add in the correct technical classification of the Chinese economy rather than just say what it isn't. China has a socialist/capitalist hybrid economy with elements of both state ownership and private-ownership, with income not fixed but instead widely variable.

[SoylentGreen]

Quote by: Angry Citizen Is it really? The vast majority of Chinese live in comparative squalor next to a few elites. It is worse than any capitalist society.

Comparative to who?
The poor do have many rights that many third world countries poor don't, A right to housing, clothing, health care and education.
But name me the capitalist society your referring to, i am not aware of any.

[tinybear]

China is not really communist country. It turned capitalist 30 years go

[FriedrichSeneca]

Quote by: Zombdi A lot of people say that communism doesn't work, and that it is a good idea but it will always fail in the end.

Well as a matter of fact it's never been tried, exept maybe in anarchist Spain during the Spanish civil war, where it was sucessful but short-lived: here!
USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba were all just state-capitalists dictatorship, they never even tried to be communists.

Quote by: Zombdi Well isn't China an example of a successful communist country? Do you think it will stay that way?

It's never been communist, and they stopped pretending to be communist a few decades ago.

Quote by: Zombdi What are your opinions on communism (pure communism, not any variation).

It depends of what you mean by "pure communism". There is marxists (and marxists split into luxemburgists and leninists, leninists split into maoists, trotskyist and hoxhaists) and non-marxists communists which are left-anarchists. All of them are claiming to be "pure" communism.
I am myself a communist anarchist (I use "libertarian socialist", it's less spooky in a discussion). I am for the direct abolition of the state and capitalism as they are illegetimate tools of social oppression.

Quote by: Zombdi What are your opinions on the People's Republic of China in general?

It's one of the worst place to live today, that's not even a question.

Quote by: Zombdi P.S. Do you capitalize "communism"?

Just when you live in places like North Korea I guess. Otherwise, that's up to you, but that's grammatically incorrect.

[grandpa]

Quote by: FriedrichSeneca Well as a matter of fact it's never been tried, exept maybe in anarchist Spain during the Spanish civil war, where it was sucessful but short-lived.

I'd say people have been doing this for ages, just not recognizing it as such and expanding it broadly enough throughout society.

Grandpa h.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: tinybear China is not really communist country. It turned capitalist 30 years go

What tinybear said.

Communism is a system of economics, just like capitalism is an economic system. Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism are totalitarian political systems, just as democracy is a political system.

China is currently a free-market capitalist system under an authoritarian, non-democratic government.

We could just as easily have a communist economic system under a perfectly democratic political system.

Quote by: FriedrichSeneca Well as a matter of fact it's never been tried, exept maybe in anarchist Spain during the Spanish civil war, where it was successful but short-lived:

It was never "successful" there either, because it was never actually implemented as a form of government. It was just "popular", resulting in a lot of labor strikes and lip service.

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[FriedrichSeneca]

Quote by: Sonart Communism is a system of economics, just like capitalism is an economic system. Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism are totalitarian political systems, just as democracy is a political system.

Is democracy a political system? I'd say that nowaday it's more like an ill-defined pet word: is the U.S a democracy or a republic, or both? Is the UK a democracy despite the fact that it's a constitutional monarchy?
It's is even possible to have a totalitarian democracy, where every single trivial thing is controlled by the government, as long as it's based on the will of the majority. Banning every books thought as dangerous, imposing a state religion and exterminating everybody wearing a mullet can be done through a democratic process.

Quote by: Sonart China is currently a free-market capitalist system under an authoritarian, non-democratic government.

It's a capitalist state, yet it's far from being free-market capitalism. Government control is still huge.

Quote by: Sonart We could just as easily have a communist economic system under a perfectly democratic political system.

True.

Quote by: Sonart It was never "successful" there either, because it was never actually implemented as a form of government. It was just "popular", resulting in a lot of labor strikes and lip service.

Not at all. It was never meant to be implemented as a form of government, it intended and suceeded in emancipating workers from the state and capitalism. There has been worker control of factories and workshop and fields on a large scale, with the expropriation of landowners and the establishment of collectivist communes.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: FriedrichSeneca is the U.S a democracy or a republic, or both?

Can we not play petty semantics game? The U.S. is a federal constitutional Republic, but we are also a democracy, or if you insist, a "Representative Democracy", since we elect people to represent us in government.

democracy -noun, 1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

Quote by: FriedrichSeneca It's is even possible to have a totalitarian democracy, where every single trivial thing is controlled by the government, as long as it's based on the will of the majority.

More specifically, where power is vested in the power through the vote. We can vote in a totalitarian government, but we remain a democracy only so long as we can vote them out again if we so desire.

It's a capitalist state, yet it's far from being free-market capitalism. Government control is still huge.

Whatever, they are still capitalists. There is very little truly laissez-faire capitalism in the world, and for good reason. China continues to call themselves socialist, but that's more cosmetic than real, since not to would call into question the legitimacy of the Communist Party, which still runs the government.

But a capitalist by any other name....

Quote by: FriedrichSeneca Not at all. It was never meant to be implemented as a form of government, it intended and suceeded in emancipating workers from the state and capitalism.

No, Friedrich, it didn't. Emancipated them to what? All the anarcho-syndacalists in Spain managed to do was create a huge trade union, call bunches of meaningless strikes and collectivize some factories. It was never demonstrated that a anarchist nation or region or whatever anarchists call a non-government state could actually function and succeed, unless 'momentarily existing' is your definition of 'success'.

The Communist variation did better, but obviously without the anarchist component of no government, and even then, it too failed, because it couldn't compete with capitalism.

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[mbc85]

China might not be a communist country at the moment (or so it sure looks that way to you) but it started as one, and who is to say that because they have a hybrid of capitalist/communist government they are Not a successful communist country? Last time I checked every country that tried being one, failed. No one has seen a successful communist country. Maybe china IS the first one and we can't see it.

[tinybear]

You're probably correct to say China started out as a communist state. It was a dismal failure and caused the death of tens of millions of Chinese, not to mention putting the nation's progress back for decades. For details, trying googling "Great Leap Forward".

[cleverboy]

China is what the U.S. was. China is the merchant to the world these days. China is the banker to the world too. China has demonstrated capabilities in space that rival the U.S. Apollo program. China recently hosted the Olympic games and put on a show that amazed the world. So – do all of these accomplishments mean that communism is a superior economic system compared to capitalism? Not necessarily.

[mbc85]

Your point can be used two ways. One way, as you pointed out, "communism killed tens of millions of chinese"...... but every government kills their people for the good of the country. Example: the US government has killed hundreds of thousands, even millions, of americans. America is not communist so no one says anything about it. Japan has killed thousands of japanese and no one says anything cause they are not communist. The british have killed millions of their people but no one says anything cause they are not communist. Every country commits genocide, especially towards their own but not because of the type of government. Millions of countrymen deaths cannot be put on government types. So "tens of millions of chinese deaths" cannot be blamed on communism.

[Yarn]

China isn't a communist country anymore, so it can't be said to be a successful communist country.

A more debatable question is whether or not it is, as of now, successful. The answer to that question all depends on what metrics you wish to look at and whether or not you decide to consider progress a form of success or merely a journey towards greater success.

For instance, in terms of movement the West is backsliding whilst China is moving forward. However, the average living standard of a Westerner is much higher than that of a Chinese person.

China has an economy that is rocketing forward for multiple reasons, and it cannot be said that this has soley been a product of the Chinese government letting go of a vast portion of its economy. For instance, arguably two of the more successful market intereferences that the Chinese goverment has undertaken are the one child policy (which has reduced population growth to a mere .6% [many of the most prosperous portions of India have been those that have managed to pass some sort of population policy: e.g. Kerala]) and its policy of currency devaluation. The latter in turn is a subtle form of uber protectionism that, owing to its subtly, has been allowed to perpetuate without incurring major retaliatory measures but which nevertheless has the effect of making Chinese goods extremely cheap in foreign countries and foreign goods extremely expensive in China despite the drastic expansion of the Chinese economy.

The Chinese government has also been involved in major infrastructure projects, one of the most impressive of which is the Three Gorge Dam which allegedly, when completed, and it nearly is completed and is already mostly operational, would provide China with 1/8th to 1/10th of its electrical needs and be the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world.

Another thing the Chinese government has done is selectively spruce up various different regions of the country with conditions (tax, labor, etc) especially favourable to business. This has led, for instance, to the Shanghai becoming one of the most impressive, affluent, and ultra-modern cities in the world.

China is run by technocrats who can largely do whatever they want to. This I think has a lot to do with why it has been able to do so well.

Whereas the countries of the West have for decades now been selling their futures to avoid tax hikes, spending cuts, and facilitate spending hikes in the present, China has been lending them the money that enables them to do so.

Now, to be sure, a lot of China's, shall we say, successful vector, has simply to do with the fact that it is a formerly isolated economy with massive potential that has been benefiting from the economic equalization between stable countries that globalization ensures, and which Western government have been partially staving via currency manufacture, but the fact that it is outperforming India is noteworthy.

Until 1400 China was more advanced than Europe, and after 1400 is was the world's most advanced non-European locale until the ascendency of Japan. Several East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) have been the only large examples in the world of a complete transformation of a third world non-European country into a first world one.

Arguably, culturally East Asia is simply better suited for modern economics than India is, and China is just another success story that manifests the realm's great potential. However, like the West, Japan is facing severe debt problems that have resulted from profligacy.

It is plausible that when we look back at all this decades from now, China will illustrate the ability of a non-democratic government to behave more responsibly precisely because since it is not beholden to the people and therefore lacks the same strong populist political motive to sell the future. There already is significant evidence of this, but China's position of rising rather than risen makes such a comparison perhaps too premature.

[Yarn]

China has done a fantastic job of weathering the present economic storm, but there are some elephants in the room. I would cite 4 of these as being especially important:

1. The People. The Chinese government is quite popular at the moment, in large part because the economy is booming, but it remains to be seen what will happen when the economy inevitably slows down. Germany's GNI tripled between 1945 and 1964, and then the momentum sputtered, and serious problems began materializing. This may have been mostly because market conditions made such a permenent decelleration inevitable, but people tend to blame whoever happens to be in charge and that means the government. Aesthetically, Democracy, while in some ways plausibly less functional, is more pleasing than what China presently has. Not for nothing has democracy on average throughout the history of the past few centuries expanded more quickly than it recedes.

2. Energy. China is dependent on predominately foreign sources for its oil. If something, like severe shortages, or political chaos abroad, or something else, were to cause China to lose this lifeline. A broader truth is that even though China is the world's largest exporter (it just surpassed the former champion, Germany, on this metric) an essential component to its economic engine include foreign flows of resources. Basically, while the fact China has been able to largely shrug off the global economic recession does suggest its economy is relatively unsensitive to global economic trends, the fact remains its economy would collapse if the the inward resource flows were disrupted.

3. The Environment. I'm less knowledgable on this issue, but it seems to be the case that China is in many ways presently an environmental catastrophy. Likewise, the entire world is being strained.

Germany presently gets more than 15% of its electricity from renewable sources (this jumped from 12 to 15% from 2006-08), and this is a consequence of public policy promoting and subsidizing renewable energy. Because of this Germanty had been the world's largest producer of wind turbines and solar cells...until China recently surpassed Germany on this accord also.

Renewable energy industries here are adding jobs rapidly, reaching 1.12 million in 2008 and climbing by 100,000 a year, according to the government-backed Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association... China intends for wind, solar and biomass energy to represent 8 percent of its electricity generation capacity by 2020. That compares with less than 4 percent now in China and the United States. Coal will still represent two-thirds of China’s capacity in 2020, and nuclear and hydropower most of the rest... China’s biggest advantage may be its domestic demand for electricity, rising 15 percent a year. To meet demand in the coming decade, according to statistics from the International Energy Agency, China will need to add nearly nine times as much electricity generation capacity as the United States will... China’s commitment to renewable energy is expensive. Although costs are falling steeply through mass production, wind energy is still 20 to 40 percent more expensive than coal-fired power. Solar power is still at least twice as expensive as coal. The Chinese government charges a renewable energy fee to all electricity users. The fee increases residential electricity bills by 0.25 percent to 0.4 percent. For industrial users of electricity, the fee doubled in November to roughly 0.8 percent of the electricity bill. The fee revenue goes to companies that operate the electricity grid, to make up the cost difference between renewable energy and coal-fired power.

- China Is Leading the Race to Make Renewable Energy - NYTimes.com

“The biggest advantage that China has over all other countries in the world is that their demand for electricity is consistently rising by 15% every year. In U.S., power companies usually have to choose between purchasing equipment for renewable energy or to continue using their fossil fuel powered plants which are already built. In China, these companies need to buy lots of equipment and the alternative sources of energy like nuclear & wind are priced very competitively.” Or, in the U.S. and in Europe, various renewable energies are having to compete with the existing power supply whereas in China they do not have to. There is more than enough space for the rapid expansion of renewable energy as well as for coal power plants. The unlimited demand needes the expansion to be across the board. Another reason for the low price is the low cost of labor in China.

- China's renewable energy views | BiofuelsWatch.com

So, like Germany, China's renewable energy is largely a product of public policy. But China has the added advantage of needing to build vast new capacity which means a lot of the upfront capital costs of becoming a more renewably powered economy are capital costs that woud've had to have been paid anyway.

Of course, even while China is improving the percentage of its power that it gets from renewables, the rapid expansion of consumption means it will probably get dirtier anyway because regardless of proportions, in absolute terms more and more coal plants are going to be running.

They are overstraining their water supplies, particularly in the relatively dry north, and that is basically a separate problem from energy and air pollution (presumably, sometime in the, by modern scales, far future when energy was much less scarce it would be practical to boil ocean water and pump it where it is needed, but right now that isn't very practical).
- China water crisis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Similar practices have played a large or complete role in causing a drought in Australia that has lasted 20 years, and a steady unprecedented advance desertification marching towards Australia southern Urban and Agricultural sectors.

Even China isn't directly crippled by environmental problems, if other areas of the world are it could cause and amplify dangerous geopolitical antagonisms.

4. The Rest of the World (The West & Co especially). Owing to deliberate and accidental close calls (those being caused by human and/or mechanical error causing one or the other side to mistakenly believe it was being attacked to nearly respond in kind), it seems as though humanity beat the odds when it survived the Cold War.

Atagonisms between China and other parts of the world resulting from competition over resources and differences in geopolitical opinion have the potential to cause big, and in the worst case even existential, problems

China's military is becoming more and more modernized, it is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and it to begin with had the world's largest army even though its army hasn't recently engaged in any offensive operations beyond its borders (in which case the incentive could exist and be obeyed for its massive military to be drastically expanded).

Economically speaking, the global economy is highly dependent on China, for credit, which is especially scarce in the midst of this present economic crises, and, of course, for products. China in turn is also, in some ways, i've already mentioned oil, dependent on foreign resources, but nevertheless China will increasingly be in a position to apply what the West and other would consider troubling economic influence without having to fire a shot.

There are already signs that the West and China may be descending into an more pronouncedly antagonistic relationship, and with resource scarcity growing, and with the potential side effects of global warming, the world situation may become more desparate so that even without increased tension resulting from political ideology China and others will have incentive to engage in forceful and dangerous rivalries.

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I would say that as of now China is becoming more successful but that its mid to long-term future will not necessarily be so positive.

[mbc85]

Yarn when the majority of the world believes something is true, then it's true, even if it is not. (Look at religion and the bible) Government is ever changing, even the US, but you don't hear the world calling us socialist? Even tho it SEEMS we are moving that way or at least a hybrid of capitalism/socialism (btw I am not pro or con, whatever type of gov fixes this economy I am cool with it) but we are, in our core, capitalists. So china is, in its core, communist, hence china is a successful communist country.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: ncb So china is, in its core, communist, hence china is a successful communist country.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that ncb sees the world only in terms of how he wishes to see it in order to suit his world view, in clearly defined indeological partisan talking points. Communism is an economic system in which private property is abolished and all economic production is owned by the State, which, in theory, means the people or, in practice, the Communist Party.

Since China is now rife with private property and private and corporate ownership it is not a communist country, period.

It is a one party, authoritarian socialist republic where "China's economy is mainly characterized as a market economy based on private property ownership."

If China insists on calling it's one party the 'Communist Party', it's in name only.


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[Deadeye]

Quote by: Zombdi A lot of people say that communism doesn't work, and that it is a good idea but it will always fail in the end. Well isn't China an example of a successful communist country? Do you think it will stay that way? What are your opinions on communism (pure communism, not any variation). What are your opinions on the People's Republic of China in general? P.S. Do you capitalize "communism"?

China is not a communist system. It is a capitalist system run by a dictator. It is not therefore, a democracy or a republic. It is a totalitarian society who understands that investment in capital goods by entrepreneurs builds wealth. There is no public input into the operation of the government. They are therefore a very dangerous nation. You want poor dictators, not rich ones.