The Chinese Communist Party has just celebrated its centennial. Xi Jinping’s speech at the Party Congress was devoted throughout to the 5,000-year history of Chinese civilization, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and China’s progress toward prosperity. Among them, he talked about the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as many as 26 times. The original intention of communism and the Communist Party was to establish human equality, but the word “equality” did not appear once in the speech. Instead of declarations of determination to eliminate the exploiting class, the speech is full of warnings to foreigners not to cross China, saying that anyone who bullies China will meet with “bloodshed”.
If you call it a left-wing communist speech, you might as well call it a far-right nationalist speech imitating Mussolini’s proclamation of the Roman Empire and the great renaissance of the Italian nation, warning Britain and the United States not to mess with Italy.
Many people say that China has long since gone full capitalist, and that the Communist Party, which rules China, is also busy making money and walking away from capital, and that the word Communist in the Communist Party is just a historical legacy with no substance. This seems to make sense, but on closer examination, it is not true.
Western scholars and politicians, since the 1980s, have wishfully believed that the CCP was transforming China’s economic and social system into that of the United Kingdom and the United States, even if the political system remained the same, which is a kind of convergence. There is no mistaking that after decades of market reforms in China, civilians get what they need to live, mainly by buying and selling in the market. The previous system of state and unit distribution of goods no longer exists. Even services that were highly socialized and collectivized in many Western countries, such as health care and education, are very market-oriented in China. Basically all economic activity, meanwhile, is profit-driven. In the past, state-run enterprises operated with people’s employment and welfare in mind, but today they all seek only profits.
On the level of marketization and profit maximization, China’s socio-economic system is indeed not very different from that of Western capitalist societies. But the Chinese Communist Party, in its official discourse, has so far resolutely denied that China’s system is capitalist, but rather “market socialist. My last book, published in the United States, discussed China’s economic development and the global system. Since the translation rights are owned by the publisher, a Chinese state-run publisher bought the rights to translate it into simplified Chinese for publication on the mainland.
When I received the translation, I found that many words had been changed from their original meaning, for example, “Southeast Asia in the Shadow of China” became “Southeast Asia in the Light of China”. More tellingly, any reference to contemporary Chinese capitalism has been changed to “market socialism with Chinese characteristics. On reflection, this is not just a matter of the Communist Party’s insistent refusal to acknowledge that China is running a capitalist system, but has real significance.
Looking back at the CCP’s documents and debates on the nature of China’s economic system, you will find that the basis for the CCP’s insistence that China is still practicing socialism is not whether products and services are market-oriented or whether enterprises and individuals are chasing profits, but rather that the so-called “socialist public ownership system” has not wavered in the slightest after decades of reform.
Under China’s socialist public ownership system, the Communist Party represents the state, and the state enjoys ultimate ownership and control of all property, especially land property, on behalf of the people. The property and other “private property” that people buy and sell in the market is actually only the right to use, not own, the goods temporarily allowed by the state. These rights of use can be withdrawn by the state whenever it likes. Since everything is owned by the party state, any confiscation by the party state is not a plunder, but simply a “return of property to its rightful owner”.
For the past thirty years or so, the Party State has exercised restraint, and there seems to be no real difference between the right to use and the right to own property. But today, as the economy continues to slide and the party-state rushes to re-establish full totalitarian control, “private property” is being “confiscated” and “private enterprises” and “foreign enterprises” are being “confiscated”. “The party committee has been taking on the role of the real boss more and more frequently, so we can no longer pretend that we are blind to the fact that China has never been free from the Communist Party, and that the party-state power elite controls all property in the world in the name of the people.
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