But at what cost?
About “tree-fiddy”
It’s always funny to me when Westerners can’t even conceive of why anyone would support the Chinese government. Imagine being a middle-aged Chinese person who watched all this happen. Within living memory, you went from the tail end of the century of humiliation, emerging from under the heel of Western hegemony, and now you’re a world superpower of unprecedented independence from that hegemony. For the first time in the history of the colonial world, a country of the oppressed has risen up by its own power to challenge the oppressors that have spent the past 400 years immiserating every non-white country on earth. They went from ox carts to high speed rail in one lifetime. From colonial humiliation, to unprecedented pride and dignity for the first counterhegemonic force outside the West in the history of capitalism. They can look around themselves and see several examples of countries like India and Myanmar that didn’t choose communism, couldn’t challenge the West, didn’t have a cultural revolution (it was a mixed bag of very good and very bad) and they can see, clear as day, where their path led them vs the path the West would have preferred for them. Vassalage. Poverty. Exploitation. Rural idiocy, as Lenin put it. The path the West still wants to put them back on.
I’m not Chinese and China’s story from humiliation to world leadership is inspirational. To be Chinese and live through it would have been like a dream.
Who said this? It’s beautifully succinct
reddit user Gravelord-_Nito
deleted by creator
this is what developing the productive forces looks like. its not just developing tech, but the people that use the tech.
In China every 3 years a decade passes.
More like every year, at this point.
trainsition timeline
God, imagine wearing a fancy ass cap like that while reclining in your multi-million dollar vehicle absolutely blowing through the countryside. Love trains
I like trains
he should be grandfathered into wearing the leather jacket
not worried for losing his job in 26 years
how capitalism will recover?
I think I’m an unironic Dengist now.
The net result of decade long weeks.
Practically a century passes every decade in China
Impressive is an understatement
Heyyyyyyyy heyy
eyacha
eyacha
胜利的共产党开启了新时代 (Qianlima on the wing: Chinese version of the DPRK song)
Good progress for state capitalism, I guess?
But yes, trains are cool, old and new, regardless.
If China is “state capitalism”, then what function does the US state serve?
Laissez-faire capitalism, mostly with a dash of oligarchy. You know, “American characteristics”. One masquerades as something it isn’t, the other embraces its shittiness. Strangely much like the two major parties in the American electrical system.
But at the end of the day, they both serve moneyed interests. They both have class division, they both clearly embrace fiat currencies, and neither one is anywhere NEAR abolishing their respective states.
China is about as Communist as the United States is united.
Just about everything about this referencing China is wrong, so I’m not really sure where to begin with it. As State and Revolution outlines, the purpose of a dictatorship of the proletariat state is to suppress the capitalist class, guard against the reaction, and transition toward communism. China is communist, but it has not reached the stage of communism; an important distinction.
You can read some on Deng’s thought process here, on the direction China took: https://redsails.org/marxism-is-a-science/
Remember that no socialist project exists in a vacuum, left alone to develop at its own pace as it pleases. All of them have had to contend with imperialist forces wanting to violently undermine them* and the Soviet Union fell in part because of that opposition. China chose its own path to contend with that dynamic, one that would rapidly develop its productive forces. I’m sure you can find things to criticize in the choices made, but the ways you are describing it as equivalent to the US is nothing short of nonsense.
*this also applies to anti-imperialist / liberation movements that attempt to be more stateless: one of the core arguments for why the transition state is needed in the first place
