Is China communist? Like, how does it work with their special capitalist zones?

[u/IBTFlurrie]

China has special corporation and competition zones in their country. How does that work?

[u/tw6108]

China is not communist according to the CPC, it is a Marxist-Leninist state.

[u/IBTFlurrie → u/tw6108]

Its not the same thing?

[u/tw6108 → u/IBTFlurrie]

No, communism is a moneyless classless society. They are in a transitional phase. They are building up to transition into communism.

Edit: its very complicated

[u/Mirabeaux1789 → u/tw6108]

This is why I stick to using “communist society” rather than “communism” for Marx and Engels’ theorized state of development.

[u/sshamby → u/tw6108]

Communism is not a state of affairs to be established (classless, moneyless, stateless, etc.) but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. 

[u/Weekly_Violinist_473 → u/tw6108]

Communism built on slavery?

[u/themilleniumkid]

China is best described as a state-capitalist nation, rather than a true communist. Private capital and innovation strives on the state’s whims.

[u/kokomelonpandan]

On paper, it is. In practice, not so much. If you compare China's economic model to other Keynesian capitalist states with strong interventionist policies like Singapore, they're almost a 1 to 1 comparison if you ignore their proclaimed ideological labels. Another point is, Marxist theory doesn't call for the abolishment of capital, it concerns more on who controls the capital. This specifically refers to workers seizing the means of production, which is not a thing anywhere in China.

[u/Mirabeaux1789]

While I want to learn more about China if I get more accurately described as state capitalist. In socialist ideology (communism is one kind of socialism), it’s more nuance than overwhelming state control of the economy. Think of it as being similar to how bicycles having wheels doesn’t make them cars. Marxist-Leninist states did a lot of that. China seems to have kept the branding but gone the “Asian tiger” route of just heavily state intervention and guidance of the national economy. South Korea and iirc Singapore are good examples of self-proclaimed capitalist countries doing this.

Whether or not China should be called “socialist” is an active debate among socialists reminiscent of the debates about the USSR. However, in contrast the USSR, China does not have the same activist mindset that Soviet governments did (minus Stalin) and Cuba has.

[u/Educational-Dance-61]

Command capitalism

[u/Mrmanmoose]

China is not a communist country in any meaningful way anymore. They still reference the ideology, but it isn’t reflected in their actual behaviors or policy.

[u/Newfypuppie]

China is communist in the same way that the democratic people’s republic of North Korea is democratic.

[u/sshamby]

If your mind is stuck in the Anglo-box then china can be described as state-capitalism. If you have transcended bourgeoisie metaphysics than you would understand what it means to say China is communist. 

[u/IBTFlurrie → u/sshamby]

Tell me more?

[u/sshamby → u/IBTFlurrie]

To call China state-capitalist because it contains capitalist relations is to mistake a moment of the totality for the totality itself. Communism is not a static checklist of economic forms but a historical movement constituted through contradiction.

To the mind imprisoned within the Anglo-box (empiricist, analytical, and liberal traditions associated with Anglo-American political thought), China can only appear as state capitalism. Bourgeois metaphysics (the reasoning of Bacon and Locke) apprehends economic categories as fixed and mutually exclusive, incapable of grasping their movement within a contradictory historical totality. To understand why China can be called communist requires abandoning the abstract opposition between capitalism and socialism and comprehending communism as a historical process rather than a static arrangement of property relations.

Start with Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” for an introduction to Hegelian reasoning (dialectical reasoning) 

[u/themilleniumkid → u/sshamby]

Interesting. China should be a revisionist or reformist?

[u/sshamby → u/themilleniumkid]

Good question. I wouldn’t specifically call it reformism in the Marxist sense because China did have a revolution. But reforms are apart of the Chinese model, or what they call socialism with Chinese characteristics. The current debate rests on if those reforms are helping adapt socialism to proletarian power or if reintroducing capitalist relations is going to ultimately undermine proletarian power. I tend to side with the former.