Council on Foreign RelationsWashington, D.C. MR. SULLIVAN: At least I had the bravery to give that speech at Brookings rather than at CFR. So — (laughter) — Mike, I want to say thank you for having me back at CFR. And to Susan and Kurt and Charlene and Steve, thank you for having me back…
Imagine if US spent all that effort changing itself and improving the lives of the people living in US. Maybe it could be half as good a country to live in as China today. 😂
China is great, yeah. I see a lot of Chinese people fleeing China and coming to the West, but, weirdly, the opposite is not true. I wonder why that is?
Could it be because they don’t want to be overworked? Could it be that they don’t thrive in an overly competitive environment? I don’t have an answer to that question, and I’d love to hear the point of view of a Chinese person living there. Mind you, I do know a few Chinese immigrants that left the country but they might be a bit biased.
Do you live there yourself? Or are you just peddling tankie shit as usual?
China is not the only implementation of socialism in the world. You can be for communism and also not think of China as the best model to implement communism. I’m talking about China specifically, though.
This will be downvoted by some of the authoritarians who dominate this sub but China is not a socialist country. It is state capitalist. Maybe this will help you understand why it is not a good place to live unless you belong to the upper echelons of society. It’s not so different from the US, despite all the propaganda to convince people otherwise.
Actually you could argue that many Western countries are closer to socialism because they have stronger unions. Not that that makes them socialist on their own but it is at least in line with socialist ideals.
I’m not spending 25 dollars to win an internet argument but I would consider reading it if you have a free way. But from my experience debating you previously, you have a tendency to post sources that do not support your claims at all, and often contradict them.
China is following the essentially the same development path as other capitalist countries so I’m not sure what you mean by this. In recent years it has become increasingly nationalistic, imperialist, expansionist, and staggering wealth inequality continues to develop and entrench. Barring a real bottom-up movement for equality I expect these types of governments to gradually slide towards fascism.
If you can’t figure out how to get the book for free on your own then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe ask your friends to teach you what bittorrent is. There are however plenty of other free resources explaining how Chinese system works. It’s interesting that you decided to slander me here though. It suggests to me that you’re not interested in having an constructive discussion.
Nevertheless, I’ll address your misinformed claims for other people reading the thread. If China was following the same path as other capitalist countries than it would look like India or countries in Latin America today where standard of living isn’t improving for workers in any meaningful way. China is pretty much the only developing nation where the standard of living is rapidly improving for the majority. This does not happen in any capitalist country. Here are a few concrete examples of what I’m talking about.
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
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
I’m not slandering you, just expressing skepticism at your own interest in constructive conversation and explaining why I don’t value your book recommendation very highly.
As to the rest of this, it is again much too long to read in its entirety but it seems to come down to the same economic growth metrics that are used to justify neoliberal economics in every country. Yes, a small fraction of the wealth falls down to the poor and by some metrics this leaves them better off. This is not socialism in Western countries and it is not socialism in China. In fact, these are the same reasons people supported far right politicians like Trump or Hitler. If we concentrate power in the hands of the people who know better, they will grow the whole economy and we will all get richer, right? It doesn’t matter if the ruling class seizes most of the wealth and power, now you can buy two toys for your kids instead of one!
The global definition of poverty is an especially misleading metric since it doesn’t actually measure people’s material conditions, just “dollars per day” which is often only tangentially related to actual well-being. See this paper for more information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
Notably:
The results of this method demonstrate there is often a significant divergence between the poverty rate as defined by the World Bank’s $1.90 method and the BNPL. Consider the case of China, for example. According to the $1.90 method, the poverty rate in China fell from 66% in 1990 to 19% in 2005, suggesting capitalist reforms delivered dramatic improvements (World Bank 2021). However, if we instead measure incomes against the BNPL, we find poverty increased during this period, from 0.2% in 1990 (one of the lowest figures in the world) to 24% in 2005, with a peak of 68% in 1995 (data from Moatsos, 2021).3 This reflects an increase in the relative price of food as China’s socialist provisioning systems were dismantled (Li, 2016). It is likely that something similar occurred across the global South during the 19th century, as colonial interventions undermined communal provisioning systems. As a result, the $1.90 PPP line likely reflects a changing standard of welfare during the period that the Ravallion/Pinker graph refers to.
But even if conditions did improve during some periods, none of this means there isn’t a better economic system, nor does it make any country where conditions improve socialist. There have been periods of economic improvement in many capitalist countries, partly because pure capitalism is extremely difficult to implement and maintain, so most capitalist countries do allow for some socialist practices to exist. Again, socialism means proletarian control of the means of production, something that no one in these conversations has even attempted to argue is happening in China. Workers in China, like workers in all capitalist countries, have very little say over their own working conditions and economic decision making. This is extremely obvious from the fact that corporate structures in China are very similar to elsewhere in the world; a structure that is incompatible with socialism.
If the US had embraced FDR’s vision of democratic socialism instead of letting Capitalists be unfettered Capitalist, I think we would have more people be way better off then China today since we wouldn’t have out-sourced anything to China to begin with (Unions and DemSocs wouldn’t have allowed the outsourcing.)
Thing is that US did embrace FDR’s vision and then capitalists dismantled it. As long as the country is ruled by capitalists then socialism is never going to be a long term option. You might get brief periods of sanity, but people at the top will work hard to revert these gains back.
I’m aware, but that’s why it’s a whatif. And honestly the Capitalists got way ahead of the Socialists before the 30’s so Communism was never going to take root as long as the “evil” USSR existed. The best we could have hoped for was a more robust FDR style Social Democracy which has a high probability of leading to what you are saying.
But who knows, maybe things could have been different. Maybe Karl could have moved to Texas in the 1800’s and the communist revolution could have kicked off once oil was discovered.
I’m sure history could’ve played out in many different ways. Capitalists at the time were smart enough to realize that they would have to give workers concessions to avoid a Soviet style revolution. It’s not clear that the current crop of capitalists have that level of self awareness. The whole green new deal thing Bernie was proposing was a necessary measure to keep the system going in my opinion. Yet, the idea never got traction with the ruling class and things continue to spiral out of control now.
Imagine if US spent all that effort changing itself and improving the lives of the people living in US. Maybe it could be half as good a country to live in as China today. 😂
But why would it do that, that’d be silly. The system is working fantastically for those who run it
indeed it is, rich people are making money hand over fist
China is great, yeah. I see a lot of Chinese people fleeing China and coming to the West, but, weirdly, the opposite is not true. I wonder why that is?
Could it be because they don’t want to be overworked? Could it be that they don’t thrive in an overly competitive environment? I don’t have an answer to that question, and I’d love to hear the point of view of a Chinese person living there. Mind you, I do know a few Chinese immigrants that left the country but they might be a bit biased.
Do you live there yourself? Or are you just peddling tankie shit as usual?
Removed by mod
China is not the only implementation of socialism in the world. You can be for communism and also not think of China as the best model to implement communism. I’m talking about China specifically, though.
This will be downvoted by some of the authoritarians who dominate this sub but China is not a socialist country. It is state capitalist. Maybe this will help you understand why it is not a good place to live unless you belong to the upper echelons of society. It’s not so different from the US, despite all the propaganda to convince people otherwise.
Actually you could argue that many Western countries are closer to socialism because they have stronger unions. Not that that makes them socialist on their own but it is at least in line with socialist ideals.
It helps to learn about the subject you’re opining on. Here’s a book you can read that explains in detail how China is very much a socialist country https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red
And if China was capitalist as people like you argue, then we’d expect China to follow the development path of actual capitalist countries.
I’m not spending 25 dollars to win an internet argument but I would consider reading it if you have a free way. But from my experience debating you previously, you have a tendency to post sources that do not support your claims at all, and often contradict them.
China is following the essentially the same development path as other capitalist countries so I’m not sure what you mean by this. In recent years it has become increasingly nationalistic, imperialist, expansionist, and staggering wealth inequality continues to develop and entrench. Barring a real bottom-up movement for equality I expect these types of governments to gradually slide towards fascism.
If you can’t figure out how to get the book for free on your own then I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe ask your friends to teach you what bittorrent is. There are however plenty of other free resources explaining how Chinese system works. It’s interesting that you decided to slander me here though. It suggests to me that you’re not interested in having an constructive discussion.
Nevertheless, I’ll address your misinformed claims for other people reading the thread. If China was following the same path as other capitalist countries than it would look like India or countries in Latin America today where standard of living isn’t improving for workers in any meaningful way. China is pretty much the only developing nation where the standard of living is rapidly improving for the majority. This does not happen in any capitalist country. Here are a few concrete examples of what I’m talking about.
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’s-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&locations=CN&start=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
I’m not slandering you, just expressing skepticism at your own interest in constructive conversation and explaining why I don’t value your book recommendation very highly.
As to the rest of this, it is again much too long to read in its entirety but it seems to come down to the same economic growth metrics that are used to justify neoliberal economics in every country. Yes, a small fraction of the wealth falls down to the poor and by some metrics this leaves them better off. This is not socialism in Western countries and it is not socialism in China. In fact, these are the same reasons people supported far right politicians like Trump or Hitler. If we concentrate power in the hands of the people who know better, they will grow the whole economy and we will all get richer, right? It doesn’t matter if the ruling class seizes most of the wealth and power, now you can buy two toys for your kids instead of one!
The global definition of poverty is an especially misleading metric since it doesn’t actually measure people’s material conditions, just “dollars per day” which is often only tangentially related to actual well-being. See this paper for more information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
Notably:
But even if conditions did improve during some periods, none of this means there isn’t a better economic system, nor does it make any country where conditions improve socialist. There have been periods of economic improvement in many capitalist countries, partly because pure capitalism is extremely difficult to implement and maintain, so most capitalist countries do allow for some socialist practices to exist. Again, socialism means proletarian control of the means of production, something that no one in these conversations has even attempted to argue is happening in China. Workers in China, like workers in all capitalist countries, have very little say over their own working conditions and economic decision making. This is extremely obvious from the fact that corporate structures in China are very similar to elsewhere in the world; a structure that is incompatible with socialism.
If the US had embraced FDR’s vision of democratic socialism instead of letting Capitalists be unfettered Capitalist, I think we would have more people be way better off then China today since we wouldn’t have out-sourced anything to China to begin with (Unions and DemSocs wouldn’t have allowed the outsourcing.)
Thing is that US did embrace FDR’s vision and then capitalists dismantled it. As long as the country is ruled by capitalists then socialism is never going to be a long term option. You might get brief periods of sanity, but people at the top will work hard to revert these gains back.
I’m aware, but that’s why it’s a whatif. And honestly the Capitalists got way ahead of the Socialists before the 30’s so Communism was never going to take root as long as the “evil” USSR existed. The best we could have hoped for was a more robust FDR style Social Democracy which has a high probability of leading to what you are saying.
But who knows, maybe things could have been different. Maybe Karl could have moved to Texas in the 1800’s and the communist revolution could have kicked off once oil was discovered.
I’m sure history could’ve played out in many different ways. Capitalists at the time were smart enough to realize that they would have to give workers concessions to avoid a Soviet style revolution. It’s not clear that the current crop of capitalists have that level of self awareness. The whole green new deal thing Bernie was proposing was a necessary measure to keep the system going in my opinion. Yet, the idea never got traction with the ruling class and things continue to spiral out of control now.