The Qingdao city government in eastern China has decided to send state-appointed cadres to act as “labour union chiefs” into 92 local private enterprises – a move that raises concerns over whether the state is extending its reach too deeply into the private sector.
Private firms said they were not happy about the development.
“Honestly, we don’t want any official to be sent to our company, especially at this moment,” said Rob Li, who runs an electric wire and cable manufacturing company in Weifang city.
His company is not in the first batch of private enterprises to receive government-appointed labour union “first chairmen”.
“It sounds like our labour cost sand staff turnover, or further operation costs, will face more surveillance from the government."
Debate is intensifying in China over the role of the private sector in the country after a self-proclaimed financial expert wrote a short essay online arguing that it had “completed its historic mission” and should be phased out.
Private companies form the backbone of the Chinese economy, accounting for 60 per cent of its gross domestic product and 80 per cent of jobs in urban areas.
But they are having an increasingly tough time as their state-owned competitors become larger and stronger.
Last month, Qiu Xiaoping, the deputy director of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, floated the idea that employees should “participate in the management” of corporations.
He said they also should let more people serve in management positions and help strengthen the leadership of the Communist Party.
Debate is intensifying in China over the role of the private sector in the country after a self-proclaimed financial expert wrote a short essay online arguing that it had “completed its historic mission” and should be phased out.
Anybody know what this is referencing to? It sounds pretty sweet if you ask me
Fayafi posted:Interesting to see how this collection of investors, Republicans and free market capitalists view China: not as a communist power, but as an increasingly capitalist power that they don't seem to mind running the post-WWII order they love so:
This just in: capitalists will at least try to bet on whatever they think is the winning horse
hey posted:Debate is intensifying in China over the role of the private sector in the country after a self-proclaimed financial expert wrote a short essay online arguing that it had “completed its historic mission” and should be phased out.
Anybody know what this is referencing to? It sounds pretty sweet if you ask me
This is Wu Xiaoping 吴小平's article 中国私营经济已完成协助公有经济发展的任务，应逐渐离场, posted last September. It looks like there was quite a lot of English-language reporting on it.
Fayafi posted:They definitely see China as a winning horse, but the point is that they see it as a winning horse in the capitalist race, and that they are looking for inroads to "reform it" to be more recognizable to themselves and more willing to cater to their private interests.
Well, good luck to them I say, brandishing an improbably large bucket of popcorn.
cars posted:Very interesting how capitalists try to build more capital from the labor power of a country regardless of that country’s political or economic policy...... someone should write a book about it.......
I know this is a joke, but capitalists aren't "betting on" China because they can exploit labor-power there, they're betting on it for quite the opposite reason: it will overcome American competition in those industries - 5G etc. - which wind up with the bulk of profits in the capitalist market (i.e. high organic compositions) & continue to consequently restructure the world market to the detriment of US imperialism.
Naturally that can't happen without a world war, but the intelligent amongst them understand the tariff war as the opening shot of that.
cars posted:like I'm not sure I follow what you think the organic composition of capital means here. The amount of labor inputs per unit declines, but that doesn't mean labor power isn't exploited to build capital, it means the opposite.
Please don't insult me cars. the prices of production of commodities produced in industries of higher value compositions are only formed through a transfer of value from those with lower organic compositions. The point is that if China is not only assembling smart phones, but also selling them, and they are able to sell them far cheaper than their competitors, that's super-profits* that are flowing to China and not the US. Chinese workers are being exploited still, but the profits stay in China.
* is super-profit the right term? Cope in his new book presents this as the explanation of unequal exchange, but Emmanuel wrote in his book that even Otto Bauer recognized this as a factor in the uneven development of Austria Hungary. The issue is that it's the normal functioning of the capitalist market, not unequal exchange per se. But maybe it's time to ditch any theories that rely on "imperfection" a la Sweezy. I've been struggling with that
Edited by marlax78 ()
Edited by marlax78 ()
littlegreenpills posted:the capitalist stage of development cannot be bypassed but it can be accelerated then dismantled in an orderly fashion from above, is what seems to be the idea here. is dis revisionism
QFE
Parenti posted:Debate is intensifying in China over the role of the private sector in the country after a self-proclaimed financial expert wrote a short essay online arguing that it had “completed its historic mission” and should be phased out.
hey posted:Anybody know what this is referencing to? It sounds pretty sweet if you ask me
littlegreenpills posted:the capitalist stage of development cannot be bypassed but it can be accelerated then dismantled in an orderly fashion from above
I'm sure the "concentration camps" narrative of Western media is being overblown, however it seems pretty clear to me that the government of Xinjiang is putting excessive monitoring in place and trying to wash out Uyghur culture.
As for the Uygers, China allowed this problem to fester by passively sitting by while the US trained fascist contras. But everyone knows about the devil's bargain China struck with imperialism and its long term goal, it's not like some great secret. That level of surveillance is the norm now, nobody goes around some suburb with a camera like "wow there's a camera watching us at every red light!" or goes into a corner store like "sir, how many cameras are in this store and outside it? 9?! unbelievable, they even hire members of the black and hispanic oppressed groups to watch their own people shop."
If the new norm of CCTV cameras bothers you, maybe in 50 years under global communism we can do something about it. I used to teach at a school where a camera constantly watched you but nobody made a documentary about my life. I only went to China briefly but all the security she went through is no different than Tiananmen square or Beijing airport, both of which were much less intrusive and obviously racist than Ronald Reagan National Airport (a name we are free to protest and yet still persists). Meanwhile in Manila they don't only have cameras, there are private security with shotguns at every entrance to a place not made of scrap metal.
I find that in these situations actually-existing socialist states stand in for everything we don't like about our own lives and then when reality fails to live up to it we dismiss reality to keep our escapism intact. Like, go to anywhere in the third world, you will find that there is far more security everywhere but it is privatized and heavily armed. China should be compared to India or Indonesia, not the imperial core, I would have thought the collapse of the Eastern Bloc so Gorbachev could appear in a Burger King commercial would have taught people that. Remember that for all of the bluster of China taking over the world, China's world shaking goal is to become a "moderately prosperous" country like Thailand or Brazil, what's remarkable about that video is that city doesn't look anything like the slums of Rio nor is it a paradise for western pedophiles like Bangkok.
this is what imperialism wants to turn China into
a british one was released around the same time (maybe on itv?) and it was basically the same content but with more german brown moses added
cars posted:i'm pretty sure he means that we all figured that out a long, long time ago
i will take any excuse to post about vice being shit, even if it means misreading a comrade's post. i regret nothing.
babyhueypnewton posted:I only went to China briefly but all the security she went through is no different than Tiananmen square or Beijing airport, both of which were much less intrusive and obviously racist than Ronald Reagan National Airport (a name we are free to protest and yet still persists). Meanwhile in Manila they don't only have cameras, there are private security with shotguns at every entrance to a place not made of scrap metal...
Like, go to anywhere in the third world, you will find that there is far more security everywhere but it is privatized and heavily armed.
"it's actually pretty normal and worse in other areas" is not a great argument, it's just moving the goalposts because apparently this is the best we can do
what's remarkable about that video is that city doesn't look anything like the slums of Rio nor is it a paradise for western pedophiles like Bangkok.
I'm glad it doesn't look like Rio, and it's nice to see a reduction in poverty throughout China, a turn towards energy efficiency, and other positive developments, but that doesn't mean I'm just going to ignore revisionism like billionaires existing. I've said this many times before and I'll say it again, it's possible to have a balanced view of a socialist/hybrid country. You don't need to have rose tinted glasses to be a supporter of a country's overall trajectory. When I watch videos on the DPRK I can see that the people are happy, they have their needs meet, they have control over their lives, etc. But I also recognize that there's an unhealthy emphasis on the Kim family and on Pyongyang. Amazingly I am able to have criticism while also supporting the country. What a wild position! Likewise I can see that VICE video is filled with spooky music and anti-China propaganda, however I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so and it sends us into the "can do no wrong" mindset that some communists fall into.
Synergy posted:I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so
Part of the problem with Xinjiang is we're only getting snippets of the picture and they're being funneled to us through these heavily biased channels. Barbed wire fences around a school don't look great but we have no idea why they're there (keeping people in or out?) nor how prevalent that is (are there particulatly bad security threats in that area?).
China is doing itself no favours in the court of public opinion by being so opaque about the details of its security operations in Xinjiang. The core issue, entirely ignored by reports like the Vice video, is that there is a genuine violent separatist threat in the region driven by islamist groups. The response has indeed been overzealous, partly due to excesses and abuses by local authorities, partly due to poor central decision making and oversight. But some shaky hidden camera footage from the foot soldiers of imperial propaganda proves exactly nothing.
Synergy posted:I'll say it again, it's possible to have a balanced view of a socialist/hybrid country. You don't need to have rose tinted glasses to be a supporter of a country's overall trajectory. When I watch videos on the DPRK I can see that the people are happy, they have their needs meet, they have control over their lives, etc. But I also recognize that there's an unhealthy emphasis on the Kim family and on Pyongyang. Amazingly I am able to have criticism while also supporting the country. What a wild position! Likewise I can see that VICE video is filled with spooky music and anti-China propaganda, however I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so and it sends us into the "can do no wrong" mindset that some communists fall into.
You know the reason you feel like you need to have a "balanced" view of China is because, even if you think this vice video is stupid, you add up the video times a million and you get an ideology that makes you think there has to be something to it. Why are you even honing in on barbed wire around a school for instance? It's an unconscious bias (totalitarian evil dictatorship, mindless brainwashed slaves) that you're refusing to cast aside.
https://rupturemagazine.org/2019/08/04/why-china-cannot-win-a-trade-war-against-the-usa%e2%80%a8-samuel-t-king/
If anti-revisionists forwarded the position that Chinese revisionism is a failure and was always going to be a failure in the face of global imperialism that is one thing. Then we can discuss the real contradictions China and the USSR faced in the late 70s and possible solutions. Instead China is social imperialist, full of wealth inequality and worker alienation, oppresses national minorities, and has all the features of totalitarian social control. Not only are these identical to the Trump administration but "moderated," they are the same complaints as those against the USSR which player a greater than zero role in its collapse.
Criticism of China in that way doesn't interest me because it is just beating up a third world nation that has very little control over what it can do just because we expect something different for socialist states. Even this issue was created by American imperialism, giving China very little room to maneuver given American military, economic, and political hegemony.
The piece I posted is a bit too cynical, both for underestimating Huawei and potential inter-imperialist ruptures. The US is teetering on the edge of recession with many of the secondary imperialists already experiencing it, there are severe limits the American labor aristocracy will take while China can take a lot more on its economic long march. But the essential framing is correct, any discussion of China which does not being with imperialism as not only the primary contradiction but saturating every "semi-autonomous" local issue isn't worth much.
marlax78 posted:Synergy posted:I'll say it again, it's possible to have a balanced view of a socialist/hybrid country. You don't need to have rose tinted glasses to be a supporter of a country's overall trajectory. When I watch videos on the DPRK I can see that the people are happy, they have their needs meet, they have control over their lives, etc. But I also recognize that there's an unhealthy emphasis on the Kim family and on Pyongyang. Amazingly I am able to have criticism while also supporting the country. What a wild position! Likewise I can see that VICE video is filled with spooky music and anti-China propaganda, however I also see lots of security everywhere including barbed wire fence around a school. Is this really necessary? I don't think so and it sends us into the "can do no wrong" mindset that some communists fall into.
You know the reason you feel like you need to have a "balanced" view of China is because, even if you think this vice video is stupid, you add up the video times a million and you get an ideology that makes you think there has to be something to it. Why are you even honing in on barbed wire around a school for instance? It's an unconscious bias (totalitarian evil dictatorship, mindless brainwashed slaves) that you're refusing to cast aside.
Right, people always ask "what are some legitimate criticisms of Stalin/Mao/China/Marxism." Or "Stalin wasn't perfect but..." It's a very strange way to think about the world, like the world is born with original sin and therefore anything that appears good must secretly bad. The impulse is what matters far before any factual claim. Criticism isn't really a good way to approach reality anyway while critique should emerge from study, which people want to skip to the end of not understanding that the dialectical process itself is knowledge.
We all know that, what's interesting rather is that this way of thinking has become common sense which says something about hegemonic liberal ideology being rather self-critical and yet fully dependent on abstractions like "democracy" to fill in the gaps of reality. It shouldn't surprise anyone here that "socialism" can serve a similar function when severed from the totality of the world so that my abstract desire for worker's control is my own rather than rooted in a hierarchy of social relations scaling all the way to go the imperialist world system at the most abstract level.
babyhueypnewton posted:anything that appears good must secretly bad
catchphrase
marlax78 posted:You know the reason you feel like you need to have a "balanced" view of China is because, even if you think this vice video is stupid, you add up the video times a million and you get an ideology that makes you think there has to be something to it. Why are you even honing in on barbed wire around a school for instance? It's an unconscious bias (totalitarian evil dictatorship, mindless brainwashed slaves) that you're refusing to cast aside.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Cuba or Venezuela feels it necessary to resort to these kinds of measures despite also being constantly attacked by imperialism. It's easy to get stuck in an ideological bubble where you refuse to believe anything coming out of western media. Maybe only 10% of it is accurate but if you choose to throw out the plausible parts you're going to end up with blindspots. That's how you get "Pol Pot Did Nothing Wrong" takes.
