this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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Because China is capitalist, despite being formally led by a communist party. It has private property on means of production, and it is defining Chinese economy just like any other capitalist one. Socialism, by definition, requires social ownership of means of production, which is not the case in China; the term was appropriated and wrongfully used by US and several other countries to define economies with more state control and/or social policies, but this is simply not what socialism is.
Interestingly, China has entire ghost towns full of homes ready to accept people in - but, as in any capitalist economy, homes are seen as an investment, and state subsidies are low, pricing out the homeless. They have more than enough homes, they just chose to pursue a system that doesn't make homes and homeless meet.
This is demonstratably false. China has one of the highest home ownership rates in the world, at ~90%. The US is at ~66% for comparison (and most of that isn't actually full ownership, but a debt to mortgage brokers).
Why do you white supremacists think its okay to spout any unsourced nonsense because it fits your racist biases?
This link does not disprove the point. Home ownership isn't the same thing, you can have families that rent, they aren't homeless either.
Using the same source there is twice as many homeless (relative to population) in china than in spain, for example.
I'm not trying to prove that the number is high in China, I don't know what's the average for all countries. However, claiming that there isn't a lot of homeless because 90% of the non homeless own their house is wrong.
The source for that appears to be this article from 2011 : https://web.archive.org/web/20160930015343/http://gbtimes.com/life/homelessness-china
Most of the poverty alleviation campaigns were well underway by 2012, so I'd be interested to see what those numbers are now.
But also, China is responsible for ~3/4ths of the reduction in world poverty via these campaigns.
Not to mention that if you've visited any Chinese city in the past few years, you won't see any of the slums or homeless that you see in the neoliberal countries.
I just used the same source out of simplicity, I didn't double check as that wasn't my point. It would indeed be better to have more recent numbers.
Not seeing homeless people doesn't mean they don't exist, seems like Japanese streets are mostly devoid of homeless people, but a lot of people seem to be living in cafes, to avoid ending up in jail as as far as I've understood, the government has a harsh policy towards that. Might be wrong on japan, but again, I'm not trying to point fingers to a country saying they are bad or good, it's the argument itself that I find "weak".
PS: just to be clear, I do feel that first of all, the OP should be the one trying to prove their saying. Nice of you to try and debunk it though
China is demonstrably not capitalist, and people who keep repeating that it is are utterly clueless. If China was capitalist then it would be developing exactly the same way actual capitalist countries are developing. You will not see any of the following happening in a capitalist country ever
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
Capitalism is not defined by how the poor are treated, but by the economic relationships and mode of ownership.
Nordic countries have low poverty and generally good social support. Like it or not, this is achieved with private property on means of production, hence they are capitalist.
China has private property on means of production, hence it too is capitalist.
Both of them feature strong state oversight, which allows them to direct more of the capitalist profits to help the poor - which is good! But this doesn't make them "socialist".
China is not capitalist, its a mixed economy with the state-owned-and-planned sector dominating the heights of the economy.
Is China state capitalist?
Thoughtcrime. https://web.archive.org/web/20200727154945/https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/c2b7ma/china_megathread_everything_a_leftist_must_know/
Thx, I'll update that.
Capitalism is defined by which class holds power in society, and in China it's demonstrably the working class. The reason the economy works in the interest of the poor is a direct result of that.
All the core economy in China is state owned, and the role of private sector continues to decline https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-private-sector-has-lost-ground-state-sector-has-gained-share-among
You might want to learn a bit about the subject you're attempting to debate here.
What your data shows is that the share of state in the economy has partially recovered in 2020's from ~30 to ~50%, after falling from 80% to 30% in the previous decade. Impressive, indeed, and way ahead of most capitalist countries - but China is home to numerous giant private megacorporations, and allows many companies from abroad to build in the country.
"Who holds power" is very abstract and is not part of definition of socialism or capitalism. Even still, we just talked about homelessness - if workers held all the power, would there be homeless? Would there be any poor at all? Would there be overheated markets, including housing, which is one of the craziest in the world? Would there be Tencent, Alibaba, etc.? Would there be billionaires? Etc. etc. What defines "workers holding power" for you?
What is it about some leftists desperately trying to put socialist label on capitalist China - a desperate attempt to demonstrate a mighty socialist economy in the modern world? Socialist countries have lost the Cold War and are mostly not on the map anymore; there are objective reasons to that, including the fact most of the world never moved away from socialism and capitalist forces had greater capital to work with, and this does not mean socialism is bad, but currently, socialism is not represented by any large economy. That's just the fact.
Power isn’t abstract, and who holds it is definitional to socialism and capitalism, and to feudalism before them.
Not for the most part, no. In your imagined “capitalist” China, did you just assume that they have a homelessness crisis, without even checking? Because you’re unintentionally making our case for us.
You can’t go from one of the poorest, least developed countries in the world to universal wealth overnight. But they have made unprecedented progress.
I did not say of a severe crisis, I just highlighted both homelessness and inflated housing prices are a thing. And under the rule of the workers, neither should be true.
Homelessness isn’t really a thing, though. As to the recent housing bubble, the Chinese state intentionally popped it and left the capitalists out to dry.
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Compare that to Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages, banks that knowingly wrote those bad mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not captured by the private finance capitalists like the US state is.
You have an infantile understanding of what capitalism is. I recommend reading this article to get a bit of a perspective https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/