student protests

Very reductionist.

run over by tanks

Not really what happened it was more akin to rioters clashing with the military (standing in as riot police).

Definitely a contributing factor but I wouldn’t be so sure that it’s the core or main driver given the long history of orientalism etc.

If this was how the average anti-China poster was on Lemmy and Reddit it would be a marked improvement compared to the blatant aggressive racism, chauvinism etc. of current.

That’s reasonable thank you. I suppose I always took androids open source nature to be largely “theoretical”(?) given googles controlling stake and simply the nature of the mobile market where effectively every android device is running googles proprietary version. HarmonyOS is in reality in the same boat given it has OpenHarmony in parallel to HarmonyOS in the same way AOSP is parallel to Android.

to a worse one

This seems to be quite the leap. Elaborate?

Not accurate Chinese poster would have been banned as soon as they self identified and explained they didn’t hate China.

If I purchased a steel mill and was the sole oener/operator is that personal property?

No it’s private property you’re a petty bourgeois/small proprietor.

what if it is only used for hobby projects and not for profit?

If you’re not selling what you make it’s personal property.

Your observation of the coexistence of poverty and billionaires is a reasonable observation at first glance, however the theoretical conclusions drawn from it need to be examined within the proper framework of materialist analysis.

Historical materialism points out that the evolution of social formations is fundamentally constrained by the level of development of productive forces. China is currently, and will likely remain for a time, in the primary stage of socialism. At this stage, the core task of society is to liberate and develop the productive forces, accumulating the necessary material foundation for the transition to a higher stage of socialism and eventually communism (once capitalism on a global scale has been overcome). We cannot disregard the objective limitations of material conditions and attempt to leapfrog historical stages solely based on moral will or egalitarian distribution methods; such approaches have historically (such as under the gang of four) only led to common poverty rather than common prosperity.

Regarding the market economy and the continuation of private property. China implements a socialist market economy, allowing the existence of non-public ownership and private capital. This is not a departure from communist principles, nor is it so-called class collaboration, but rather a return to the standard application of Marxist theory (compared to the USSR and it’s war economy). Utilizing market mechanisms and private capital as a means of developing productive forces, under the premise that the proletariat holds state power, is the most efficient strategy at the current stage while also protecting revolutionary gains by avoiding the creation of large black markets of small and medium producers. The emergence of billionaires is an unfortunate byproduct of this secondary form of private property (like all forms of private property) and market distribution mechanism at a specific stage of development.

The key difference lies in the nature of the state power and its control over the economy. Unlike capitalist countries where capital captures the state apparatus, China upholds the dominant position of public ownership, with the state firmly controlling economic lifelines such as finance, energy, land, and communications. The development of private capital is strictly confined within the framework of serving the overall national development strategy. The poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, and regional coordinated development strategies that continue to this day, as well as the regulation of disorderly capital expansion, are precisely to ensure that wealth created by the market can be used for the goal of common prosperity through the institutional arrangements of primary distribution, redistribution, and tertiary distribution.

Regarding the mixed economy direction you mentioned, Marx already clarified in Critique of the Gotha Programme that a society newly emerging from capitalism still bears the traces of the old society from which it emerged. Socialism itself is a transitional period full of contradictions. A certain degree of inequality and private wealth accumulation is unavoidable to create the material prerequisites for the ultimate elimination of inequality. China has not stopped its efforts to eliminate poverty. The current policy focus is on addressing the principal contradiction between the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development through rural renewal and continued poverty alleviation campaigns.

Judging China’s current situation as a static historical snapshot falls into a metaphysical trap. Whether a country adheres to socialism does not depend on whether it meets certain subjective assumptions or dogmatic criteria. One must employ the correct dialectical materialist analysis, viewing history as the dynamic process of continuous movement, development, and evolution that it is. The key to examining the nature of a society lies in grasping the essence of its relations of production, the class nature of its state power, and its long-term development trajectory. China’s development path is precisely about harnessing capital rather than being harnessed by it, steadily moving towards the ultimate historical direction of eliminating class differences and realizing the comprehensive and free development of human beings through continuous dialectical negation.

what i fucking want is there to not be anymore poverty

Poverty reduction is absolutely not something we have made strides in. Over 940 million lifted out of poverty?Who? Being the country almost solely keeping global anti poverty trend positive through domestic poverty alleviation and investment in the global south? So? (Massive /S)

This was overly mean but the point stands that poverty alleviation has been one of the forefront policies of the CPC. Poverty can’t be removed at the wave of a wand.

Doesn’t China have a Gini coefficient almost as high as the US’s?

No. Actually China’s Gini coefficient is one of the lowest in the world

China: 0.26 US: 0.418

i have no idea where to start with reading xi’s speeches or whatever

The Governance of China is probably a good start

Your initial comment was stupid.

“The USSR was way more progressive on racial equality, women’s rights, workplace rights, anticolonialism etc but also they weren’t perfect and thus can be equated with the west who were still actively engaging in colonialism, genocide, slavery, segregation etc” it’s ridiculous. The USSR was one of the most progressive forces of the time the fact the west had minimal progression at the same time does not make them comparable.

The USSR was more progressive than the west at the time, that doesn’t mean the west wasn’t progressive at all or the the USSR was the only one? Are you sure you can read?

Whene did anyone say anything like that?

Almost like progressive for it’s time doesn’t mean progressivenand perfect for eternity ?!?!?! Please read what people are saying before responding.

Work camps

You mean prison. Work camp is nonsense used to demonise non western countries as barbaric (and often used in an attempt to evoke images of the nazi extermination machine even when they are not at all the same). Also what was progressive in the 40s 50s and 60s would be regressive by today’s standard yet that doesn’t mean it wasn’t progressive for the time.

The central nervous system of any modern economy is finance. In the West, private banks dictate state policy through debt and credit allocation. In China, the banking system is entirely state owned. The state controls capital allocation, directing credit toward strategic sectors like green energy, high speed rail, and advanced manufacturing based on Five Year Plans rather than short term profit motives. The state also maintains absolute ownership over land, energy, telecommunications, and heavy industry. This means the proletariat holds the dominant economic levers. Private capital is permitted to operate in the consumer and service sectors, but it is strictly subordinated to state planning. Expropriating all private property is neither necessary nor strictly Marxist. When the Soviet Union attempted to nationalize every small enterprise, it created massive bureaucratic inefficiencies as well as a thriving black economy of small firms ripe for counterrevolutionary leveraging. Only national scale industries and monopolies require direct public ownership to prevent the formation of oligarchies. Small and medium enterprises actually provide vital flexibility, local employment, and innovation. As long as the state controls finance and the commanding heights, private property in the nonstrategic sectors acts as a dynamic supplement to socialist construction rather than a threat to it.

Your comparison of Deng to Gorbachev fundamentally misreads the ideological trajectory of both nations. Gorbachev was the final tragic link in a long chain of ideological degradation that began with Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956 introduced historical nihilism into the communist movement by attacking Stalin with bourgeois lies. Khrushchev fractured the ideological unity of the Soviet vanguard and planted the seeds of revisionism. This ideological rot festered for decades until Gorbachev completely capitulated to Western liberalism, actively dismantling the party apparatus and surrendering state power. Deng took a radically different path based on a materialist analysis of China’s primary contradiction. China inherited immense historical backwardness. The most critical task of the Chinese revolution at that stage was the modernization and rapid development of the productive forces. Deng recognized that you cannot build a higher stage of society on a foundation of poverty and scarcity. He consciously adapted the strategy to utilize market mechanisms while strictly upholding the leadership of the Communist Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Deng developed the economy to strengthen the socialist state, whereas Gorbachev destroyed the state to appease imperialists.

Far from being an unorthodox approach, China’s current path is actually a return to the orthodox Marxist understanding of historical development. Marx and Engels clearly theorized that socialism requires a highly developed material base. It is the Soviet command economy model that was historically unorthodox. The Soviet system of total public ownership, extending down to the smallest retail shops and local services, was not a blueprint for socialism but an emergency measure necessitated by the brutal realities of a war economy and total imperialist encirclement. By forcing full public ownership of all small and medium firms, the Soviet state created a fatal contradiction. They outlawed legitimate small scale private enterprise, which directly pushed those economic activities into the shadows. This created a massive black market and a second economy. The operators of these shadow enterprises accumulated illicit wealth and eventually allied with counterrevolutionary elements within the party bureaucracy. When the Soviet state weakened, this shadow capitalist class actively supported the dissolution of the USSR so they could legally privatize their stolen wealth. By legalizing and regulating small and medium enterprises under the strict supervision of the vanguard party, China avoids creating a disenfranchised black market class. China is successfully building the massive productive forces required for transition.

To begin with, our first undertaking is that we must dispel your fundamental error of treating markets and capitalism as synonyms. They are not. Markets predate capitalism by millennia through simple commodity production and exchange, and they will likely outlive it as well. The market is merely a mechanism for resource allocation and a tool to develop the productive forces, not the defining characteristic of a capitalist mode of production. Socialism utilizes the market to build the material wealth required for a higher stage of communism, subordinating it to the needs of society rather than allowing it to dictate social relations.

Furthermore, the expectation of direct, individualized ownership of the means of production is petty bourgeois nonsense. What Marxists actually advocate for is the ownership of the means of production as a class. It is the proletariat, organized as the ruling class, that collectively owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy. Demanding that workers hold literal, individualized deeds to their factories reflects a profound misunderstanding of socialized production and retreats into utopian petit-bourgeois ideology.

Finally, addressing the Trotskyist accusation of state capitalism requires looking past superficial appearances. State capitalism and the primary stage of socialism are necessarily very similar because they share many identical economic forms, such as commodity production, wage labor, and state enterprises. However, analyzing form devoid from class content is nonsense that elucidates nothing. The decisive factor is which class holds political supremacy and dictates the purpose of these economic forms. Under bourgeois state capitalism, the state apparatus serves to maximize profit for the monopoly bourgeoisie. In China, the state is an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the Communist Party. Here, state capital is directed consciously to develop the productive forces, eradicate poverty, and build the material conditions for communism. The forms may resemble those of the transition period from capitalism, but the class content is entirely socialist because the market is strictly subordinated to the political and economic objectives of the working class.