A top economist has joined the growing list of China’s elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China’s cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a “body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership.”
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China’s sluggish economy and criticizing Xi’s leadership in a private group on WeChat.
Listen, I appreciate you taking the time to respond, but this is an extremely lengthy conversation where each minor paragraph could be the focus of a single conversation, and the information conveyed would be much better. I’m not going to disrespect you and accuse you of gish-galloping. If you want to focus on a particular topic, I am okay to continue, you can pick one strand and develop it into a sizeable argument and we can discuss from there, but as it stands there is no way to do justice to any of these topics in one cohesive lemmy comment thread.
I read your comment, you have points worthy of responding to. I’m not dismissing that, and I don’t want this comment to be interpreted as such, I just wanted to give you the respect of explaining why I would rather focus on one topic at a time, or disengage altogether. Lemmy isn’t the right format for such a convo.
Have a good day if you decide you don’t want to continue, I appreciate your time.
Fair enough, however I would like to point out that my responses have been direct responses prompted by questions and statements originated by you and the person you were originally responding to.
But I agree that we may benefit from narrowing our topic to a more specific field of discussion. I would be interested in knowing how you feel a profit driven SOE is inherently different from a private company.
In my opinion so long as the company’s structural hierarchy and it’s inherent purpose remains the same or similar, there’s not really going to be a meaningful difference in how the workers are treated. For example, don’t really see how the workers have seized any more of the means of production than a worker for a company that offers stock options.
There’s still just as much opportunity and motivation for exploiting workers. There’s still an inherent profit motive that spurs the worst aspects of capitalism. Even if we propose that there could be less destructive competition due to the states monopoly of production, the fact that these SOE are publicly traded still means there’s a competition of capital acquisition. These SOE still have to make sure they invest a significant amount of their excess production value back into the organization to ensure their stock increases in value next year.
Thank you for your time, it’s pleasant knowing you can still get into the nitty and gritty with someone you don’t 100% see eye to eye with, and not have it break down to name calling. Cheers.
First off, thanks for bearing with me. This is a good question!
The framing of this question is important. Are we evaluating effectiveness? Loyalty to Marxism itself? Simply looking for points of divergence? I’ll assume you are more interested in the benefits of SOEs, and whether or not they are loyal to the Marxist idea of Socialism, you can correct me if I’m wrong on that.
Since I am assuming we are evaluating from a Marxist perspective, it truly is important to apply Dialectical Materialism. One of the pillars of DiaMat is that any analysis that doesn’t see the entirety of the system, and purely compares stationary snapshots of entities, is not Dialectical analysis but mechanical.
Within the context of the PRC, SOEs are guided by the CPC, which practices central planning as can be made to work with the rest of the CPCs planning, while private companies in Capitalist countries are the ones lobbying the State for lucrative projects of their own. The fact that SOEs are profit driven does not mean that they are guided by Bourgeois interests. It’s a measure similar to the NEP.
Private companies within the PRC as compared to SOEs obviously see less direct influence and guiding than SOEs do, but similarly exist under the thumb of the PRC, who allows them to act in their own interests as long as they fulfill their role in rapidly building up the productive forces, which we can see is a role that, to this point, has helped dramatically compared to the era of Mao and the Gang of Four, which saw much slower development.
This really depends on outside factors, again analyzing the context within which these entities exist. In SOEs and Private Companies within the PRC there are elements of Workplace Democracy, as I showed prior, but the idea that business entities are perfectly democratic within the PRC is false, which is why I haven’t attempted to make such a point. Assuming the CPC is in fact a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (and we must do so for this argument to not spiral into endless discussions again, we can absolutely revisit this as its own argument if you wish), then this is an example of a Proletarian managed market economy, which is different from Social Democracy where the State acts in the interest of the Bourgeoisie. Given that the CPC regularly punishes their domestic bourgeoisie and the CPC itself has a 90%+ approval rate among the people, we can at least see that the CPC appears to be acting and managing for the benefit of society as a whole, and not for their bourgoeis class.
You are correctly identifying that there is a contradiction at play. The benefits of the market economy are in rapidly developing the productive forces and educating the working masses in how to manage and run production. This is where Historical Materialism comes in, the CPC can’t beam information into everyone’s brains and mind control them. Instead, market forces result in syndicates and monopolization of Capital, which is dominated and manipulated by the CPC. As the markets develop themselves, they increasingly make themselves easier to directly manage and operate from above. Imagine a million competing factories in earlier Capitalism, and compare it to the era of monopoly Capitalism where a dozen companies practice their own planning, then imagine there is an entity pulling the strings, letting them grow, then seizing them in proportion to their growth.
I try to treat those who treat me with respect with respect in kind. Cheers!