Question about China’s economic plan

any day now suswcc

do you guys have an emoji for Lucy with the football
- China keeps tricking me, I thought they were gonna do follow MY plan for communism (me being the world's foremost expert) but instead they just lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and built the world's largest thriving economy to the point that they can challenge global US hegemony, I feel so let down. 😞
- I don't know what that means

Here is Cheng Enfu's outline for the different stages of socialism. He is the president of the Academy of Marxism at CASS.

I've been trying to find a PDF of the book it is from, China's Economic Dialectic, but haven't been able to. I'll buy it one day. Here is a paper I didn't realized he published which has a similar chart: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0051EA1A0EAA00EF7B1B1D61428EE3A2 "On the Three Stages in the Development of Socialism"

So what does he say about current status, timeline, etc?

Communism button when, basically.
- Well first off, the paper mentions how there are disagreements with regard to defining stages of socialism.
  
  excerpt, p 176
  
  In contemporary China, there exists a variety of ideas with regard to the criteria for distinguishing stages of socialism. To sum up, these criteria include “the level of productivity development,” “the realization of modernization and its corresponding living standard,” “the relations of production and the ownership of means of production,” and “the operational mechanism of social economy.”
  
  And towards the end he mentions the different definitions by Lenin, Stalin, and Deng.
  
  But he believes there are five conditions necessary to transition to communism. It's not very ground-breaking though.
  
  excerpt, p 177-178
  
  To that end, five basic conditions must be met: first, the material condition — highly advanced productive forces; second, the economic condition — single ownership of the means of production by all the people, a planned economy and distribution according to need; third, the social condition — full development of education, science, technology, culture and health care, and the elimination of the major difference between mental labor and manual labor; fourth, the spiritual condition — the great improvement of ideological awareness and moral character; fifth, the political condition — abolition of class and the withering away of the state.
  
  Probably the most reassuring thing is this:
  
  excerpt, p 178
  
  The primary stage is not only about laying foundations; it is also the transition to the intermediate and advanced stages of socialism. This is a historical process in which the public-owned economy grows stronger and distribution according to labor becomes dominant. The key is to grasp the present and future economy from the perspectives of the three economic systems — property rights, distribution, and regulation — at different stages of development. Some may argue that there is no risk to China’s superstructure, i.e., the long-term rule of the working-class political party, even if privatization becomes the main element of the reform. This is a misconception, which deviates from historical materialism. The rule of the political party of the working class, public ownership, and the guidance of Marxism are all indispensable factors that together constitute the essential content of socialism.
  
  So, communism eventually. Not market socialism forever though.

China is just going to keep doing what works. Their whole system is built on continuous 5 year and 20 year plans with an overall goal outlined for longer periods, but their focuses on each plan will be targeting existing issues and realities within China.

Their current system is functioning well enough and into there's a need to change they'll probably keep it.

That being said, the housing collapse and the pressure from the lower wage workers is rising, so I can see a shift happening soon. Especially since they lock down investments for citizens and keep most money internal.

If there's any more movement towards a war, that's another factor that would likely cause them to rapidly liquidate the Special Economic Zones. Having the tech and light industrial sectors under state control would be necessary for wartime production, and it's unlikely that they'd return those factories to the capitalists that ran them afterwards.

Hijacking this like Leila Khaled.

Can anyone recommend any good books generally on the history of the Chinese revolution and maybe its initial stages?

Permanently Deleted
- Pantsov Dance-ov
- Thanks, comrade!
Mao's China and after by Maurice meisner
- Thanks! This one seems really great!
  
  I found it really cheap so I already bought it.
A user already gave a book, so if you want a TV historical drama (you can turn your brain off to supplement the book) about the origins of the Communist Party, you can watch "The Age of Awakening here or here (translation is a little funny on either, choose whichever makes the most sense for you)

I really liked it but it depends if you enjoy every detail being explored in a show, starting with Chen Duxiu before the Communist party was established. Speaking of, Chen is played by one of my favorite Chinese actors who did a really good job in the Three Body Problem as Da Shi.

I believe they've stated their goal is by 2050

Do you have the link to the article where they mention this?
- I think he's referring to the 2049 centenary goal of a "strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious, and modern socialist country". Unfortunately for planned economy enthusiasts, I can't recall a single official statement that links such a goal with a drastic change in how the economy is run. For the CPC, SWCC is socialism. Unless the collapse of capitalism in 2040 or whatever makes it necessary, don't expect China to implement cyber communism.

When they are sure they don't need it anymore. It has been a very successful weapon against the west. China is still roughly as economically powerful a Mexico. They have a long way to go before they don't have to worry about the CIA. When the material conditions are right they will do so. We can seen countless examples of them improving things as conditions allow so there is no reason to belive this would be any different

China is not roughly as economically powerful as Mexico. You can't use per capita numbers when measuring a country's economic power. By those numbers Lichtenstein is much more economically powerful than the US.
- Fair. I think it still holds up when discussing domestic economic targets.

this isn't a direct answer to your question, but here's aimixin on Marx and the elimination of private production (the first two paragraphs are setup):

Marxists do not claim people should just work for society because of some selfless feelings, Marx was personally annoyed with people who constantly said this and commented on it himself:

Communists do not oppose egoism...The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc...the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.

—Marx, The German Ideology

The reason Marx saw a post-capitalist society as having socialized production, where people work for society, is because they have to. But, I know what you're thinking, "that's authoritarian!" But you'd be misunderstanding, he did not believe people would work socially because the government would tell them to at gunpoint or that owning a private business would be against the law.

No, he thought they would work socially because any other sort of economic arrangement would simply not be possible. Even if you changed the laws to allow for starting a private business, you still could not start one, because it would just not be something feasible people could do.

Why? Because Marx observed that in all capitalist societies, private enterprises always grow in scale, and the proportion of small businesses to big is continually shrinking. The more this goes on, the smaller the proportion of businesses owners to workers in a society becomes, the more and more small businesses go bankrupt and people the business owners then become regular workers.

Why does this happen? Because the government outlawed private businesses? No, because as businesses grow in size, the smaller businesses that can't keep up eventually just can't compete and are less efficient and go bankrupt.

Not only this, but as businesses get bigger, the barrier of entry constantly rises. Can you start a small business in your basement to compete with Samsung? Of course not, you need hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to even begin to compete!

Again, it's not the government making it illegal to own a business. It's the physical conditions of everyday life making it simply impossible to own one no matter what the laws say.

It is a misunderstanding of Marxism to think that what Marx had in mind was just to make all private businesses illegal. Rather, the vision he had was to nationalize the "big industry" which has already grown so large that there is hardly much competition anymore anyways, and then to use it to try and speed up economic development, because this will make more of the small business sector grow into big businesses, and then eventually they too can be nationalized.

Hence, Marx argued for a gradual, "by degree" nationalization process, alongside encouraging rapid economic development, "the development of the productive forces." Not just making all private enterprise illegal.

People would work for this big industry because there would simply be no other industry to work for and it would not be physically possible for them to start a small business even if the laws allowed them to.

I firmly disagree with this analysis of Marx. Marx did not JUST advocate for gradual nationalization processes, that is some Kautskyist revisionism. To paraphrase Lenin, that is taking the revolutionary sentiment and reasoning out of Marx and rendering him a sheepdog to bourgeoisie capitalism, something he very much was not.

It is clear that Marx thought that the international communist movement would emerge out of history, birthed not wholesale but cobbled together, as all movements are, through both violent and peaceful processes. In some areas that would look like gradual nationalism, in others that would have to be emergent from violent social revolution. There was no 'one size fits all' solution because what Marx was primarily focused on was describing the existent, novel and nascent, capitalist formations that were around him and predicting the reason and types of crises they would encounter because of their contradictory formations, than describing a theoretical communist society or even the 'proper' movement towards one.

As far as I'm aware, China doesn't plan on changing what it's currently doing. People read predictions like "China will be a prosperous socialist country by 2050" and think that means they will start phasing out their market economy and private property before that date. But I don't think they will. As far as I'm aware, everything indicates that the CPC believes that what they are currently doing IS socialism. There is also a very strong reaction to the obviously untrue US propaganda created to make people hostile to China, which leads to a lot of leftists counterjerking very hard and denying that any criticism can be made of the direction that Marxism has taken in the country.

Except that if you read their theory and literature, it's not that they believe what they are doing 'is socialism' it's that they believe that 'socialism' occurs in stages, with the properties of those stages emergent within the contradictions and economic circumstances of their era. Communism, according to marxist analysis, is the social movement that emerges from the contradictions of capitalism, but marxism does not define what that movement is or looks like (a fundamental critique of Marx by Mao), and China operates in a fundamentally different manner than any other country of it's kind. The differences between them and India, despite theoretically occupying the same rung on the global economic ladder, are stark, and evidence of this.

If their theory is sound will remain to be seen, but what is clear is that they are still here and doing 'communism' while the USSR is not. They have forded the contradictions into this new, bleaker era, keeping the torch of Marxism and Marxist analysis, however dim, lit, and that is to be commended, as much as their foreign policy is to be criticized.

This is good summarize The official position of the CPC