1. Why does China, a socialist country, have mega corporations like Tencent and Bytedance? Are they collectively owned by syndicates or unions? If this is a transitionary phase to socialism, can we trust China to actually enforce Socialism after this stage ends?
  2. Child Labor in factories: Myth or Fact? I have a Chinese friend who said he personally never worked as a child in China, but obviously if this was true not every single kid would have worked in a factory.
  3. Surveillance and Social Credit: are these myths, or are they true? Why would China go so far to implement these systems, surely it’d be far too costly and burdensome for whatever they’d gain from that.
  4. Uighur Muslim genocide: Is this true?

Thank you to anyone who answers, and if you do please cite sources so I can look further into China. I really appreciate it.

edit: I was going to ask about Tiananmen Square, but as it turns out that literally just didn’t happen. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html

https://leohezhao.medium.com/notes-for-30th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-incident-f098ef6efbc2

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Why does China, a socialist country, have mega corporations like Tencent and Bytedance? Are they collectively owned by syndicates or unions? If this is a transitionary phase to socialism, can we trust China to actually enforce Socialism after this stage ends?

    The “capitalist roaders” won as Deng and his allies came into power. They were Marxist, but wanted to approach China’s development very differently - by allowing markets, i.e. a form of market socialism - and doing two mutually-reinforcing things:

    1. Seek (qualified) foreign investment and build up China’s productive forces, which is to say, build up heavy industry, light industry, services, etc, the whole shebang.

    2. Do this at the expense of their own exploitation at the hands of imperialism. Accept the exploited country arrangement, but on their terms. Create an export economy, but one of commodities not raw materials. Depress wages (to an extent), depress exchange rates.

    This resulted in an entanglement as well, a defensive strategy against imperialists. It is not easy for, for example, the US to cut off China, because it exported most of its manufacturing base to China, and China took over most new manufacturing since.

    There’s plenty to criticize (carefully!) on this path, but one thing is for sure: China’s model coincides with its continued existence, which is more than you can say of, for example, the USSR. It is also in a strong position, having developed massively and lifted a billion people out of poverty in the last few decades.

    To go over your other questions:

    • China’s government owns or co-manages many companies, usually when they exceed a certain size. Some are co-ops, with government mandates. Many are also private companies operating in special economic zones, i.e. market zones. China will also heavily regulate many industries.

    • The question of when something is Real Socialism ™ should be fuzzier, imo. There are many different socialist projects taking different approaches to gaining and wielding the power of the working class and we should (critically) support all of them. China is going in a good direction and has a seemingly valid strategy.

    Child Labor in factories: Myth or Fact? I have a Chinese friend who said he personally never worked as a child in China, but obviously if this was true not every single kid would have worked in a factory.

    Generally a myth. It’s a real, large, diverse country, but has made huge strides to create an education-filled childhood for its people.

    Surveillance and Social Credit: are these myths, or are they true? Why would China go so far to implement these systems, surely it’d be far too costly and burdensome for whatever they’d gain from that.

    Outdoor surveillance is no worse than London. It’s a myth in that it’s ridiculously exaggerated and not fairly compared to surveillance in the countries that make anti-China propaganda.

    Internet surveillance is probably about the same as well, but China’s government acts on it more often. Not a ton more, but they do look out for various claims/behaviors and will take action in some circumstances.

    Social credit is largely a myth. It’s basically the same as a credit score.

    Uighur Muslim genocide: Is this true?

    No. Liberals are doing an old trope of genocidal trivislization by putting this in the same category as the holocaust. Happy to go into a critical look of what’s happening, but the dominant western narrative is inventive and exsggerative.

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      China’s model coincides with its continued existence, which is more than you can say of, for example, the USSR.

      To be fair, the USSR abandoned the Stalinist model as early as 1955, which sealed the fate of its inevitable downfall.

      Khrushchev’s economic model of abandoning the financial system set up under Stalin led to the sovereign debt default in 1957, the excuse being “the government can’t afford to pay back the exponential growth of debt owed”. The whole point of national debt is for it to keep growing so that people have income to spend and to drive the local economy, because the state that prints its own currency can never run out of money. This was Khrushchev succumbing to liberal (neoclassical) conception of monetary theory and the start of food/goods shortage era in the USSR.

      Khrushchev also had a weird fascination with American consumerism and vowed to compete with the American light industries using state planning. This led to the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of artels - cooperative enterprises producing a vast variety of consumer goods that had existed since the times of Tsarist Russia and were massive expanded and flourishing under Stalin’s USSR, and their consolidation into state planned industry doomed the Soviet economy to fail. State planning was meant for capital-intensive investment such as heavy industries and cutting edge R&D, not for producing furnitures and clothing.

      It needs to be said that the USSR under Stalin had the highest and most rapid economic growth of any country in the history of humanity (a feat that will likely never be repeated again) - and they did it without relying on foreign capital investment or lowering the labor wages, maintaining its working conditions on par with Western Europe, keeping pensions and social safety nets intact, restored its economy to pre-war era within 5 years after WWII after losing 27 million people, all the while being sanctioned by the entire prosperous Western capitalist world.

      China simply could not have done that with its huge population. They had to participate fully in the neoliberal model, driving the wages down and using its cheap labor to serve as the world’s factory for the American/European consumerism in order to attract foreign investment and build up the national wealth/capital accumulation. And all this was only made possible because America desperately needed to de-industrialize to crush the growing labor movements at home during the crises of 1970s.

      The trajectories are different for both the USSR and China because of the differences in the historical development of their respective economic conditions. One simply cannot copy the other and make it work.