When I look at other communist nations, they were invaded, couped, and/or sabotaged at every opportunity, and (forgive me, my history of China is weak) while I’m sure that China faced obstacles from capitalists outside of the country, it somehow rose up to be the power that it is today while the USSR fell, Vietnam and Korea got bombed to hell and back, Cuba was put under crippling sanctions, and surely countless other uprisings got squashed young.
But china didn’t just survive, they thrived. How?
Unironically Nixon Goes To China. This was part of a larger normalization of US-Communist relations throughout the world.
Also, throughout the 90s and 00s there was a persistent belief that China was “liberalizing” and they would one day become a Capitalist Democracy like the rest of us. There are shades of End Of History that influenced this thinking, and it wasn’t broken until the mid 10s. Here’s The Economist admitting as much in 2018, and probably the only admission of being wrong by the publication.
EDIT: I forgot to mention it, but several other significant events precipitated the current China.
All of these factors led to the western ‘certainty’ of China going down the path of Capitalist Democracy.
Years of Cold War propaganda convinced western libs that markets are the antithesis of socialism. So the emergence of markets in China was mistakenly interpreted as meaning the end of socialism in China.
It is interesting that liberalization hurt the USSR, but not China. At least, not yet. I wonder why that is.
The liberalization of the Russian economy was shock liberalism to the extreme. Zero transition, some “ownership vouchers” the people got as a perfunctory nod to the state capital being public, but that quickly descended into a speculative market, which given the lack of guard rails meant an oligarchy formed. So the sudden fallout of social services plus a non-competitive market meant millions of pre-mature deaths, brain drain, corruption.
China, on the other hand, engaged in a system of requiring the factories of making X number of widgets per month or quarter for the state, but then allowed them to sell anything production past that on the market. This allowed for the introduction of markets in a controlled, gradual way, maintained government ownership to an extent (this is why so many Chinese corporations are owned in no small part by the state, a lot of them were spin offs the state kept an interest in), while avoiding the productivity downtime issue that Marxist-Leninist economies can sometimes run into. This is also why, while China has a capitalist class, it’s on a much tighter leash than in social democratic economies.
China didn’t permit key foundational elements of its state and economy to liberalize. Energy, minerals, steel, cement, and other such basics are cornered by state enterprises, and banking is on a very short leash. Meanwhile Gorby gave everything away, and had no leverage over the black marketeers who couped the USSR and become the oligarchs of the Russian Federation and other former Soviet countries
Libs not understanding what socialism is, while frustrating, is such a boon to our efforts worldwide because they cannot effectively combat them without knowing how they work.
:this:
I remember when that article came out, my turbo-lib friend who read The Economist religiously nearly forced me to read it. They got pretty smug about China for a while, but I bet they’re melting down now after this tariff fiasco
Remind them of it now