However, the people of China can afford to buy these extremely expensive properties. In fact, 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
It doesn’t, I have no idea where you’re getting that from. China eliminated urban poverty over a decade ago (~2013), and rural poverty is nearly eliminated. Source.
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. At China’s current national poverty line, the number of poor fell by 770 million over the same period.
Another anti-China western source because we know white supremacists wouldn’t accept any Chinese source about their poverty alleviation campaigns.
China is socialist. Socialist countries can have market economies and even capitalist economies, as long as the dictatorship of the proletariat ultimately controls all of the economy. Just a reminder China’s killed multiple billionaires.
Because China is capitalist, despite being formally led by a communist party. It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one. Socialism, by definition, requires social ownership of means of production, which is not the case in China; the term was appropriated and wrongfully used by US and several other countries to define economies with more state control and/or social policies, but this is simply not what socialism is.
Interestingly, China has entire ghost towns full of homes ready to accept people in - but, as in any capitalist economy, homes are seen as an investment, and state subsidies are low, pricing out the homeless. They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn’t make homes and homeless meet.
This link does not disprove the point. Home ownership isn’t the same thing, you can have families that rent, they aren’t homeless either.
Using the same source there is twice as many homeless (relative to population) in china than in spain, for example.
I’m not trying to prove that the number is high in China, I don’t know what’s the average for all countries. However, claiming that there isn’t a lot of homeless because 90% of the non homeless own their house is wrong.
Not to mention that if you’ve visited any Chinese city in the past few years, you won’t see any of the slums or homeless that you see in the neoliberal countries.
I just used the same source out of simplicity, I didn’t double check as that wasn’t my point. It would indeed be better to have more recent numbers.
Not seeing homeless people doesn’t mean they don’t exist, seems like Japanese streets are mostly devoid of homeless people, but a lot of people seem to be living in cafes, to avoid ending up in jail as as far as I’ve understood, the government has a harsh policy towards that. Might be wrong on japan, but again, I’m not trying to point fingers to a country saying they are bad or good, it’s the argument itself that I find “weak”.
PS: just to be clear, I do feel that first of all, the OP should be the one trying to prove their saying. Nice of you to try and debunk it though
China is demonstrably not capitalist, and people who keep repeating that it is are utterly clueless. If China was capitalist then it would be developing exactly the same way actual capitalist countries are developing. You will not see any of the following happening in a capitalist country ever
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Capitalism is not defined by how the poor are treated, but by the economic relationships and mode of ownership.
Nordic countries have low poverty and generally good social support. Like it or not, this is achieved with private property on means of production, hence they are capitalist.
China has private property on means of production, hence it too is capitalist.
Both of them feature strong state oversight, which allows them to direct more of the capitalist profits to help the poor - which is good! But this doesn’t make them “socialist”.
Love how you respond to a bunch of information from the World Bank, NYT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research with a definition from Wikipedia.
China is capitalist… It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one.
The response was a well-souced refutation of the idea that the Chinese economy is developing like a capitalist economy. You replied with Wikipedia. All I’m saying is that you’re not looking at this in a whole lot of detail and you might have some things to learn.
For instance, you say Nordic countries have low rates of poverty and good social supports despite private ownership of the means of production. But in reality a lot of that is due to sovereign wealth funds, like Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, which is owned by the government and managed by a state-owned bank.
This is all true - state intervention and state-owned businesses and funds bring about a positive change for the majority, and they should be there, but seriously calling those economies socialist would be missing the definitional mark, which is what I have highlighted.
I do believe that moving entire economy under public control would be beneficial, and that, actually, will be what can be called “socialism”. Virtually no country, except for heavily sanctioned and blatantly tyrannical North Korea, is currently there.
What we have right now, with heavy state intervention, is certainly better than “free” market economy though, and it reflects in quality of life for the economically disadvantaged - this very intervention leads to these economies following a different path compared to traditional capitalist societies. I do not argue there is no difference between China and, say, US in that regard - the difference is big, it’s just not what it takes to call the economy socialist.
The point about Norway wasn’t that it’s socialist (it’s not). The point was that Norway’s low rate of poverty and generous social supports come directly from parts of the economy that are publicly owned.
The notion that a country’s entire economy must be under public control otherwise it’s not Real Socialism is too idealistic. China in 1949 was a late-feudal/pre-industrial country that had just been through a century of colonial invasions and civil wars. It needed to attract capital and expertise in pretty much every field, and it needed to build an effective, modern administrative state. How was it supposed to do all of that at once, wholly through the government? The Soviets ran into the same problem and the result was the New Economic Policy, which, like China today, involved markets and some private ownership, but ultimately subjected both to real state control. You need a transitory period to go from pre-revolutionary society to whatever your vision of Real Socialism is.
For me, China is socialist because the state is ran to the benefit of the working class (see massive poverty alleviation), that state really does control the capitalist class, and China seems to be doing more of both as time goes on.
Capitalism is defined by which class holds power in society, and in China it’s demonstrably the working class. The reason the economy works in the interest of the poor is a direct result of that.
What your data shows is that the share of state in the economy has partially recovered in 2020’s from ~30 to ~50%, after falling from 80% to 30% in the previous decade. Impressive, indeed, and way ahead of most capitalist countries - but China is home to numerous giant private megacorporations, and allows many companies from abroad to build in the country.
“Who holds power” is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism. Even still, we just talked about homelessness - if workers held all the power, would there be homeless? Would there be any poor at all? Would there be overheated markets, including housing, which is one of the craziest in the world? Would there be Tencent, Alibaba, etc.? Would there be billionaires? Etc. etc. What defines “workers holding power” for you?
What is it about some leftists desperately trying to put socialist label on capitalist China - a desperate attempt to demonstrate a mighty socialist economy in the modern world? Socialist countries have lost the Cold War and are mostly not on the map anymore; there are objective reasons to that, including the fact most of the world never moved away from socialism and capitalist forces had greater capital to work with, and this does not mean socialism is bad, but currently, socialism is not represented by any large economy. That’s just the fact.
if workers held all the power, would there be homeless?
Not for the most part, no. In your imagined “capitalist” China, did you just assume that they have a homelessness crisis, without even checking? Because you’re unintentionally making our case for us.
Would there be any poor at all?
You can’t go from one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world to universal wealth overnight. But they have made unprecedented progress.
I did not say of a severe crisis, I just highlighted both homelessness and inflated housing prices are a thing. And under the rule of the workers, neither should be true.
Homelessness isn’t really a thing, though. As to the recent housing bubble, the Chinese state intentionally popped it and left the capitalists out to dry.
“We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.
Compare that to Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages, banks that knowingly wrote those bad mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.
Okay then, here are some articles showing how china’s people’s democracy works, and why they intentionally avoid the capitalist dictatorship model common in western countries.
then why has china got so many homeless people?
huh?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Nice, but not related. See that comment
maybe you should read the reply to that comment
Don’t worry I get notificatons
It doesn’t, I have no idea where you’re getting that from. China eliminated urban poverty over a decade ago (~2013), and rural poverty is nearly eliminated. Source.
Another anti-China western source because we know white supremacists wouldn’t accept any Chinese source about their poverty alleviation campaigns.
What is “so many”? Compared to whom?
If China is socialist then Lipton is tea.
Look into the country on the shallowest level. They have socialist programs but, honestly…
China is socialist. Socialist countries can have market economies and even capitalist economies, as long as the dictatorship of the proletariat ultimately controls all of the economy. Just a reminder China’s killed multiple billionaires.
Because China is capitalist, despite being formally led by a communist party. It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one. Socialism, by definition, requires social ownership of means of production, which is not the case in China; the term was appropriated and wrongfully used by US and several other countries to define economies with more state control and/or social policies, but this is simply not what socialism is.
Interestingly, China has entire ghost towns full of homes ready to accept people in - but, as in any capitalist economy, homes are seen as an investment, and state subsidies are low, pricing out the homeless. They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn’t make homes and homeless meet.
This is demonstratably false. China has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world, at ~90%. The US is at ~66% for comparison (and most of that isn’t actually full ownership, but a debt to mortgage brokers).
Why do you white supremacists think its okay to spout any unsourced nonsense because it fits your racist biases?
This link does not disprove the point. Home ownership isn’t the same thing, you can have families that rent, they aren’t homeless either.
Using the same source there is twice as many homeless (relative to population) in china than in spain, for example.
I’m not trying to prove that the number is high in China, I don’t know what’s the average for all countries. However, claiming that there isn’t a lot of homeless because 90% of the non homeless own their house is wrong.
The source for that appears to be this article from 2011 : https://web.archive.org/web/20160930015343/http://gbtimes.com/life/homelessness-china
Most of the poverty alleviation campaigns were well underway by 2012, so I’d be interested to see what those numbers are now.
But also, China is responsible for ~3/4ths of the reduction in world poverty via these campaigns.
Not to mention that if you’ve visited any Chinese city in the past few years, you won’t see any of the slums or homeless that you see in the neoliberal countries.
I just used the same source out of simplicity, I didn’t double check as that wasn’t my point. It would indeed be better to have more recent numbers.
Not seeing homeless people doesn’t mean they don’t exist, seems like Japanese streets are mostly devoid of homeless people, but a lot of people seem to be living in cafes, to avoid ending up in jail as as far as I’ve understood, the government has a harsh policy towards that. Might be wrong on japan, but again, I’m not trying to point fingers to a country saying they are bad or good, it’s the argument itself that I find “weak”.
PS: just to be clear, I do feel that first of all, the OP should be the one trying to prove their saying. Nice of you to try and debunk it though
China is demonstrably not capitalist, and people who keep repeating that it is are utterly clueless. If China was capitalist then it would be developing exactly the same way actual capitalist countries are developing. You will not see any of the following happening in a capitalist country ever
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
Capitalism is not defined by how the poor are treated, but by the economic relationships and mode of ownership.
Nordic countries have low poverty and generally good social support. Like it or not, this is achieved with private property on means of production, hence they are capitalist.
China has private property on means of production, hence it too is capitalist.
Both of them feature strong state oversight, which allows them to direct more of the capitalist profits to help the poor - which is good! But this doesn’t make them “socialist”.
China is not capitalist, its a mixed economy with the state-owned-and-planned sector dominating the heights of the economy.
Is China state capitalist?
Thoughtcrime. https://web.archive.org/web/20200727154945/https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/c2b7ma/china_megathread_everything_a_leftist_must_know/
Thx, I’ll update that.
Love how you respond to a bunch of information from the World Bank, NYT, and the National Bureau of Economic Research with a definition from Wikipedia.
Consider that you could learn more here.
Do any of the sources define socialism?
All of this could be true - none of this makes China socialist.
You said:
The response was a well-souced refutation of the idea that the Chinese economy is developing like a capitalist economy. You replied with Wikipedia. All I’m saying is that you’re not looking at this in a whole lot of detail and you might have some things to learn.
For instance, you say Nordic countries have low rates of poverty and good social supports despite private ownership of the means of production. But in reality a lot of that is due to sovereign wealth funds, like Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, which is owned by the government and managed by a state-owned bank.
This is all true - state intervention and state-owned businesses and funds bring about a positive change for the majority, and they should be there, but seriously calling those economies socialist would be missing the definitional mark, which is what I have highlighted.
I do believe that moving entire economy under public control would be beneficial, and that, actually, will be what can be called “socialism”. Virtually no country, except for heavily sanctioned and blatantly tyrannical North Korea, is currently there.
What we have right now, with heavy state intervention, is certainly better than “free” market economy though, and it reflects in quality of life for the economically disadvantaged - this very intervention leads to these economies following a different path compared to traditional capitalist societies. I do not argue there is no difference between China and, say, US in that regard - the difference is big, it’s just not what it takes to call the economy socialist.
The point about Norway wasn’t that it’s socialist (it’s not). The point was that Norway’s low rate of poverty and generous social supports come directly from parts of the economy that are publicly owned.
The notion that a country’s entire economy must be under public control otherwise it’s not Real Socialism is too idealistic. China in 1949 was a late-feudal/pre-industrial country that had just been through a century of colonial invasions and civil wars. It needed to attract capital and expertise in pretty much every field, and it needed to build an effective, modern administrative state. How was it supposed to do all of that at once, wholly through the government? The Soviets ran into the same problem and the result was the New Economic Policy, which, like China today, involved markets and some private ownership, but ultimately subjected both to real state control. You need a transitory period to go from pre-revolutionary society to whatever your vision of Real Socialism is.
For me, China is socialist because the state is ran to the benefit of the working class (see massive poverty alleviation), that state really does control the capitalist class, and China seems to be doing more of both as time goes on.
Capitalism is defined by which class holds power in society, and in China it’s demonstrably the working class. The reason the economy works in the interest of the poor is a direct result of that.
All the core economy in China is state owned, and the role of private sector continues to decline https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-private-sector-has-lost-ground-state-sector-has-gained-share-among
You might want to learn a bit about the subject you’re attempting to debate here.
What your data shows is that the share of state in the economy has partially recovered in 2020’s from ~30 to ~50%, after falling from 80% to 30% in the previous decade. Impressive, indeed, and way ahead of most capitalist countries - but China is home to numerous giant private megacorporations, and allows many companies from abroad to build in the country.
“Who holds power” is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism. Even still, we just talked about homelessness - if workers held all the power, would there be homeless? Would there be any poor at all? Would there be overheated markets, including housing, which is one of the craziest in the world? Would there be Tencent, Alibaba, etc.? Would there be billionaires? Etc. etc. What defines “workers holding power” for you?
What is it about some leftists desperately trying to put socialist label on capitalist China - a desperate attempt to demonstrate a mighty socialist economy in the modern world? Socialist countries have lost the Cold War and are mostly not on the map anymore; there are objective reasons to that, including the fact most of the world never moved away from socialism and capitalist forces had greater capital to work with, and this does not mean socialism is bad, but currently, socialism is not represented by any large economy. That’s just the fact.
Power isn’t abstract, and who holds it is definitional to socialism and capitalism, and to feudalism before them.
Not for the most part, no. In your imagined “capitalist” China, did you just assume that they have a homelessness crisis, without even checking? Because you’re unintentionally making our case for us.
You can’t go from one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world to universal wealth overnight. But they have made unprecedented progress.
I did not say of a severe crisis, I just highlighted both homelessness and inflated housing prices are a thing. And under the rule of the workers, neither should be true.
Homelessness isn’t really a thing, though. As to the recent housing bubble, the Chinese state intentionally popped it and left the capitalists out to dry.
.
Compare that to Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages, banks that knowingly wrote those bad mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not captured by the private finance capitalists like the US state is.
You have an infantile understanding of what capitalism is. I recommend reading this article to get a bit of a perspective https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
Not actually democratic, thus not socialist.
seems like people who actually live in China disagree with you champ
Most Americans think that too
They don’t as the links I provided clearly show. Maybe actually look at the sources before replying.
That’s a gish gallop, and the core premise that people believing it’s democratic makes it so is incorrect.
~Edit: added link~
The very first article yogthos showed you, had a poll that showed half of usonians don’t think their country is a democracy (they’re right)
The US congress, its highest governing body, hasn’t gotten over a 20% approval rating for many years.
You’re deliberately avoiding the core premise that people thinking it’s democratic means it’s democratic.
Okay then, here are some articles showing how china’s people’s democracy works, and why they intentionally avoid the capitalist dictatorship model common in western countries.
Is China a Democracy?
What makes you right and a bunch of people who actually live in China wrong?
🤡
Good talk
bye