Part 6: Xi and the New Era of Chinese Socialism

14. April 2024 Matthias Winter 8 min read

Part 6: Xi and the New Era of Chinese Socialism

The Secretary General of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping.

As a consequence of the PDRUÖ, China experienced an unprecedented rise in economy and
general standard of living.
However, also traditional economic problems such as overproduction and high debts emerged; this happened because the corporate strategies were not aimed at
maximizing profit, but rather at promoting business growth and size.
State-owned entrepreneurs often pursued solely the goal of maximizing sales and expanding their operations to create jobs and increase export capacity.

After Deng’s death, the contradictions of Socialism 2.0 reached their peak:
On one hand, the corporate management produced too few of the needed products and too many of those already in abundance.
The main cause was the lack of state oversight over corporate leadership and management, leading to increasing contradictions between market and planned economy aspects.
On the other hand, globalization and rapid technological development around the turn of the millennium revealed two entirely new contradictions for Chinese culture:
First, the expanded global interconnectedness, especially at the individual level, has significantly weakened the knowledge monopoly
and the moral authority of a few elites.
Since technological barriers to the rapid flow of information worldwide were dismantled, many Chinese people began to align themselves with the standards of the most developed regions of the world for the first time.
This has greatly reduced tolerance for global social inequality and led to an increasing convergence of mindsets.
Second, the new technologies, especially information technology, did not necessarily lead to a reduction of hierarchical structures in material production; instead, they refined and complicated existing hierarchies.
The trend towards outsourcing has gained importance – division of labor in production has not entirely abolished hierarchies but has used globally distributed production processes to spread costs within and between countries.
This results in a more fragmented and diverse connection between workers and means of production; global competitive pressure increasingly affects ordinary workers, while the trend of outsourcing services, driven by
network technologies, gradually weakens the middle class in various countries.

Developments and achievements of socialism since 2014

Xi Jinping, who took office as General Secretary in 2012, faced major political challenges at the beginning of his term, most of which stemmed from the contradictions listed above.
The widespread corruption, which had been established through Xi’s predecessor (both Jintao and Zemin) decentralization in many parts of production, was targeted by the Communist Party under its new Secretary General in 2012.
Since 2013, foreign companies accused of unfair competition practices have also been prosecuted.
In the first three and a half years of the campaign, around one million party members had been criminally prosecuted for “violations of party discipline” by October 2016.
In this context, assets worth approximately 38.7 billion yuan (about 6 billion euros) were confiscated from convicted individuals.

Furthermore, over 100 high-ranking officials who held leading positions within the party or in provincial ministries have been dismissed from their offices and, in most cases, expelled from the party.
Additionally, hundreds of thousands of officials, civil servants, and lower-level government employees have been disciplined.
At the same time, the CPC launched extensive projects to promote the study of Marxism in everyday life – including further support for the “Marx Project,” which aims to complete the Marx-Engels complete edition (MEGA) and conduct foundational research on Marxism-Leninism.
However, the most important part of Chinese Marxist research is the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which among other tasks, continues to develop the theory and practice of Chinese socialism as its own system (SMCC).

Unlike in the USSR, the achievements and errors of theory and practice in China are dialectically compared and surpassed, Xi said the following:

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the CPSU collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs were shaken. The ruling flag on the city tower changed overnight. These are important lessons for us. To deny the Soviet Union’s history and reject the CPSU, Lenin, Stalin, and everything else would be to enter the realm of historical nihilism, which would mislead our ideas and party organizations at all levels.“

While in the USSR, the achievements and mistakes of the theory and practice are dialectically contrasted and overtaken, Xi said the following:

The Marxism is undoubtedly gaining higher influence in the politics of the CPC under Xi, as well as international solidarity and networking:
On the 200th birthday of Marx, an international networking meeting was held in the metropolis of Shenzhen, attended by 75 Communist and workers’ parties, including the “Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)” and the Ukrainian Communist Party.
Additionally, the CPC, along with almost all other Communist parties worldwide, participates annually in the “International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties”, most recently under the motto:
“Solidarity with Cuba and all struggling peoples. United we are stronger in the anti-imperialist struggle, together with social and popular movements, in the face of capitalism and its policies, the threat of fascism and war; in defense of peace, the environment, workers’ rights, solidarity, and socialism” in Havana, October 2022.

A New Era of Chinese Socialism

In November 2017, Xi announced the beginning of a new era of socialism in China:
The first epoch of socialist construction, characterized by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and development of productive forces, was concluded.
The long-term development plan to achieve full socialism by 2049 has now entered its second phase.
Xi Jinping redefines the core contradiction for this second phase:
The main contradiction in the latter half of the initial stage of socialism is no longer between the growing material and cultural needs and the backward social production, as in the Deng era, but rather the balanced and insufficient
development.
For the first time since 1981, Xi shifts the focus from pure economic growth to a more balanced growth that emphasizes issues like social equality, poverty alleviation, and ecological sustainability.
Although China is still in the initial phase of socialism, the party sees in the “new era” a need to increasingly focus on the rising aspirations of its people.

These goals not only encompass material and cultural aspects but also a desire for a clean environment, rule of law, socialist democracy, equality, justice, and security.
The CPC plans to achieve these aims through a multi-stage plan to conclude the initial phase of socialism.
Through the “Made in China 2025” initiative, the country aims to establish itself as a global leader across various industries and to break the monopoly of Western industrial nations on cutting-edge technologies.
By 2035, the socialist modernization of the economy is largely to be completed:
This is currently mainly driven by foreign investments and exports.
Through reform and renewal of state-owned enterprises, China intends to develop a sufficiently large domestic market based on a growing middle class.
This is aimed at fostering a more sustainable and less export-dependent economic development.

The achievements of this first phase of socialist construction are difficult to list in their entirety, but here are the most important:

Eradication of 800 million Chinese from absolute poverty: This figure becomes even more impressive when you realize that these 800 million account for about 70% of all people lifted out of poverty worldwide since the 1970s.
A World Bank representative told the World Hunger Relief: “We are quite confident that China’s overcoming of rural poverty was successful – but considering the resources used, we are less sure that it was cost-effective.” For capital and its representatives, ending poverty appears worthwhile only if it is profitable.
In 2014, 1.4% of Chinese were still considered poor according to international standards; by 2017, using Chinese poverty definitions, that number was 3.1%, as they set a higher poverty line.
Complete end to hunger: For the century before the revolution (1849-1949), the number of hunger deaths is estimated at 100 million, today it is zero.
Economic development: Since 1949, China’s GDP has grown at an average of 9.4% per year, making it the fastest economic growth in human history.
The literacy rate increased from 65.5% (1982) to 96.3% (2015) during the Deng Xiaoping era alone.
The often-cited argument that China’s enormous economic growth benefits the people little is false: between 1978 and 2015, the real income of the poorest half of the population grew by 401%(!); in comparison, in Germany it increased by only 12.3% during a similar period.
Meanwhile, the average Chinese wage rose from about €56 per month in 1995 to €717 in 2016 — an increase of 1280%.
China’s quality of life, according to the United Nations HDI, with a value of 0.73 in 2016, has been classified since 2010 as a “high human development country” and has experienced the fastest increase in quality of life (1.57% per year) in the world.

With these facts, you could fill many more pages than I already have; but many “leftists” seem indifferent to these facts when they evaluate China, claiming it is not socialist enough.
In Deng Xiaoping’s words: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

To Part 7 of the series “How Red is the East?”, “China is socialist!”, click here.