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Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

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Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#31
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no…

Good deconstruction, but do you really think the CCP is against western decadence? If that was so, why did they allow Western media/social media to completely infiltrate for decades? They just want economic control of everything. You really think if the US was this pure christian-type nation, they would be buddy buddy and let our audit-based economic system encroach and then take hold? The autocrats can't exist in a…

> why did they allow Western media/social media to completely infiltrate for decades

What are you talking about? There's probably only a handful of countries that has a stricter "censorship" of foreign media than China.

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#32

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and inn…

An interesting contrast is Vietnam. On the surface it looks like they’ve gone full Gordon Gekko capitalism. But the party is managing everything in the background. They are happy to let foreign investment flow in and Vietnamese get rich…to a point.

Think of it like this: 1) we’ll extract as much value from the capitalist model, 2) but strip any power capitalists might gain from their business dealings. Anyone who gains enough economic power to threaten the party will be squashed.

This is all about winding in the heads that got too big. Think of people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They would never be tolerated in China unless they were firmly in the camp of the CCP.

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#33
post #26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no…

You seem to believe that "Confucianism" is dead in China. It's really not. Officially the state follows some sort of Marxist/Communist-derived ideology, but culturally Confucian elements are very much still alive. You can read all about how the Chinese and CCP tried to discard the old ways in the 20th century, but that doesn't really capture the nuances of what actually happened. Japan and (South) Korea are good exam…

> In fact the "socialist" narrative used by CCP isn't exactly the socialism you might understand it to be, but rather it would be more like the collective-norm-abiding ideology that Confucius would have approved of

This.

I think you've nailed what chinese "communism" is (I've never been there).

> It doesn't only mean rejecting "decadence"

Whenever I come across the word "decadence", it's always someone trying to demonize someone else. It's like the word "terrorist". "Decadent" should mean something to do with decay, right? It certainly isn't the same as "permissive" or "hedonistic".

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#34
I think this is a very thoughtful long term strategy for a country as big and as globally relevant as china. Looking at the US and the decline of the middle class and the rise of the donor class shows where a country is headed when inequality gets out of hand. Right now the US is arguably not a democracy anymore but an oligarchy - that the Party looks to avoid going down the same road is of course out of self-protection. But it is also the very interest of the hundrets of millions who were left out of the distribution of the dividend of "opening" the economy. So - compared to a descend into a potentially fascist donor-run society it might be a better strategy to simply distribute the wealth more aggressively.

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#35
post #8

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and inn…

I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no…

Would you mind naming a few examples of this 'decadence'? (Often times when people use that term, especially in the context of changes from the 60s, they mean things like 'begrudging acceptance of homosexuality' and 'women can open bank accounts' and 'race mixing').

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#37
post #32

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and inn…

An interesting contrast is Vietnam. On the surface it looks like they’ve gone full Gordon Gekko capitalism. But the party is managing everything in the background. They are happy to let foreign investment flow in and Vietnamese get rich…to a point. Think of it like this: 1) we’ll extract as much value from the capitalist model, 2) but strip any power capitalists might gain from their business dealings. Anyone who gai…

Look at what happened to Jack Ma. He made some measured but pointed criticism of the party's banking regulations and disappeared for a month. His IPOs got shut down and a host of new regulations were added that basically kill his ambitions in banking.

Vs in the USA, Zuck attempted to create his own currency.

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#38
post #7

"Common Prosperity" is a marketing label to try to legitimize persecution of high tech billionaires who own platforms whose success/failure could destabilize the government. All of the major Chinese tech companies have created "Common Prosperity" funds now, which are essentially direct money transfers to the CCP for it to implement whatever agenda they have at the moment.

"persecution of billionaires whose success/failure could destabilize the government" sounds like a very reasonable policy to me. After all, isn't the promise of triple down effects to share the prosperity to all one of the core ideas of why society as a whole accepts the existence of billionaires? At the very least, they shouldn't make things worse.

It's historically sound. The US and Japan followed a variant of this policy in the 1950s and it led to an explosion of growth.

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#39
post #8

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and inn…

I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no…

Christianity gave no one customs and held little together. Europe has its own customs before Christianity that served as glue just as well, and the morality brought forth by christianity was so tenuous that you could make a good argument that it is even weaker than we have now.

If you want to see what religion being used to hold a society together looks like, look at the Middle East. The Middle Eastern religious elites are far more decadent than your tirade would predict, and society at large is not much better.

For all of your Wikipedia-summary characterization of Marx, he made almost the same argument as you have in substance, but far better, over 150 years ago when he wrote of alienation of labour and of the revolutionary aspect of capitalism.

Unlike you he actually did diagnose the central issue with "decadence" to the right source. Morality historically as well as societal norms were held up by the community, and the community was held up by its interdependence and shared experience. Marx foresaw that capitalism morphing these relations of interdependence into market relations, such as that the actual people that you rely on through shared labour are no longer apparent, and instead only money and products remain. This weakens the first social basis of community. Then, he saw capitalism as a mode of production, being entirely dependent on market relations as we saw earlier, as materially unshackled by the morality and structure of its host society. This is by contrast to feudalism that relied on these relations to perpetuate itself. From that he found capitalism to be revolutionary - it would continuously remake society after itself and in the process progressively destroy cultural norms of the society, thus being a revolutionary process. Sometimes it does so positively, sometimes negatively.

That is why Marx is said to be a materialist - instead of predicting the changes in society purely because of ideas and abstract concepts, he thought that the actual material limits on society would eventually come to dominate the ideas that people have and mold them moreso than the reverse. He wasn't a materialist in the sense that he thought that literally nothing except stuff mattered, much to the contrary, the stuff matters only because of its effect on people.

Now with this perspective in mine, if you re-read the statement, it should make even more sense.

Re: Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

#40
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no…

> It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism Is that "correctly" yours, or are you paraphrasing some authoritarian tract? You make quite a few very strong assertions, without argument or evidence. Maybe it depends on what you mean by "liberal"; one of the meanings is "generous". Another meaning is "permissive", and another is "opposed to authoritarianism". And then there's economic liberalism, which is…

For Marx, alienation had a specific, technical definition, meaning alienation from one’s labor. In The German Ideology, Marx expounds a totally materialistic anthropology, wherein man is material which creates itself through labor, and as such, human history is the history of material. Within this anthropology, alienation does not retain the common meaning, and Marx indeed stopped referring to it in his “mature” work (see Althusser).

“Stomach with legs” is maybe a bit vulgar, but only a bit. It is incredibly difficult to overstate Marx’s materialism.

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