by Michele Nobile
1. The problem posed by the epochal social transformation of China
The "peaceful rise" or "peaceful development" of China is one of the most remarkable processes marking the world economy between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ... and perhaps the most important.
Over four decades of the era of economic reforms, per capita product growth, industrial production and export rates have been impressive. The Chinese government can proudly show that since 1978 its gross domestic product has multiplied, that China's share in world production has increased fourfold, that China is the number one exporter in the world and that it is the country with the largest currency reserves (mostly in dollars).
For millennia, the Chinese Empire was the world's largest reservoir of peasant labour: in 1949, the year of the birth of the People's Republic, the population residing in urban areas was 11 percent of the total and only 19 percent thirty years later, at the beginning of the reforms. In 1999, the share of the urban population had already risen to 35 percent but by 2010 it had grown to 50 percent, and in 2017 it amounted to over 813 million people, 58.5 percent of the total population1.
The pace of urbanisation and the level it has reached demonstrate the epochal scope of the overall transformation of Chinese society: from a rural universe to becoming the leading workshop of global exports of industrial goods. The urban landscape of many cities has been altered and often those that were rural areas or small coastal settlements now have a skyline worthy of New York or Dubai, an urbanism that evokes the idea of an 'Americanism' with Chinese characteristics.
A few years ago, Marxist geographer Mike Davis wrote of China in Planet of Slumsthat "the greatest industrial revolution in history is the Archimedean lever shifting a population the size of Europe’s from rural villages to smog-choked sky-climbing cities"2.
Quantitative expansion and qualitative transformation of the physical and social space of cities are not effects of the natural growth of the urban population. In China, the most gigantic migration from rural to urban in the history of mankind is under way.
However, while the facts are well known, interpretation and evaluation are not obvious yet worthy of review and evaluation.
Especially when talking about the rise of China, economism is the norm. By this I mean that the Chinese economic "miracle" is often assumed as an objective datum, in which the exploitation and oppression on which it is based are reduced to marginal or temporary phenomena.
This is because the "miracle" in question is exalted as a result of the transition to the market economy – however much to be perfected – and of incorporation into the world economy, or as an example of the virtues of (pseudo) socialist statism or the industrial policy of a developing state.
The perspective is the evolutionary one of modernisation, of the progress of a system in which there may be contrasts between the "old" and the "new", between social strata and political orientations, but not structural antagonisms between social classes or functionality to development of modern of what appears outdated, including dictatorship of the single party and discrimination in the enjoyment of social rights on the basis of place of population registration. The language of modernisation is resolved in the paternalistic one of the State governed by enlightened leaders or the confident optimism of enterpreneurial 'animal spirits'. The dominant rhetoric in China combines both.
Modernity and modernisation are terms whose social meaning must be specified. When it comes to growth or economic development, it is necessary to specify which structure of relations between social classes generate quantitative relationships and the growth rates of macroeconomic variables, and which conflicts between social classes these imply. Otherwise, acknowledgment of the existence of imbalances will be traced back to the insufficiency of the favourite reason used to explain economic development, be it the market or the political regime.
China has peculiarities which in themselves make it a unique case in the world and therefore unrepeatable. In addition to its millenary culture, what stand out among these are the size of the country and the variety of its territory; its demographics, with an enormous workforce mass – confined thirty years to agriculture but now a factor on the way out; a productive structure and advanced technological capacities compared with other countries in the same class in terms of income per inhabitant, even before the reforms; and a powerful civil and military state apparatus – China is a nuclear state.
However, beyond the material data, what has happened in China over the last 40 years - a much longer period of time than the Maoist era – cannot contained in abstract formulae such as modernisation or described with insignificant phrasing like "peaceful development".
Starting from the third plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – which launched the policy of "economic reform and opening-up to the world" in December 1978 – a process of transition towards a different system of social relations of production began.
The decisive peculiarity of the recent history of China is made up of two phenomena that actually form a single whole: transition from the bureaucratic and pseudo-socialist statism of the Maoist era to capitalism; and the coincidence of this transition with the rapid development of capitalist industrialisation, integration into the international division of labour of transnational companies and the strong growth of exports of manufactured goods, in the context of what is referred to as globalisation and neoliberalism.
Ironically and with hindsight, the Maoist era dissolved the social terrain by preparing it for the development of capitalism on a scale and quality incomparably superior to the work of the buyer and foreign bourgeoisie of the time of the Unequal Treatysigned with Western powers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. As far as the exploitation of the work force is concerned, China is a paradise of neoliberalism.
Chinese capitalism is a protagonist of the restructuring of the global economic geography, but the gradual transition to capitalism has not erased all the characteristics of the pseudo-socialist past, which were partly adapted to the new social relations of production. For this reason it is a capitalism with characteristics that differ from Western capitalism, but less distant from other developmental States of Asia.
For example, there exists a continuity with the Maoist era (at least until the early years of the 21st century, from an optimistic point of view) in policies that have discriminated against agriculture and rural areas in favour of industry and cities and in maintaining the registration system of individuals (thehukou system,which has recently been undergoing reform but in a non-homogeneous and partial way); the result of this is to make immigrants in cities foreigners in the homeland, excluding them from social rights formally recognised for other urban residents: the modern Chinese wall for internal purposes.
These are the same policies which at the same time help feed the migratory flow from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban areas, which is a pillar of Chinese capitalism due to the containment of labour costs – reinforced by the status of the immigrants – and a determining factor in the growth of urbanism and the associated construction speculation on urban and surrounding land.
Officially the Chinese regime is "socialism with Chinese characteristics", a self-definition that sounds bizarre when considering some elementary facts such as the level of inequality in the distribution of income, which is equal to or higher than that of the United States. The paradoxical core of truth in this self-definition is that, contrary to what occurred in the Soviet Union3, the transition to capitalism was desired and managed by the leaders of a party with a communist denomination not by its administrative divisions which have become politically or economically independent, and that this party continues to control the state apparatus at all levels, including an important segment of the country's productive and financial capital.
Thus the formula of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is simultaneously an ideological mystification and the sign of a real difference with respect to more advanced forms of capitalism. The question becomes even more complicated when one considers that this "socialism" is also one of the pillars of the capitalist world economy and of so-called globalisation. The Chinese "miracle" is, in fact, inconceivable in the absence of the further development of the international division of production processes of transnational companies in other Asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore), Europe and the United States, and in the absence of what is called neoliberalism in countries with advanced capitalism, which it supplies with low-price goods-wages.
It is a tangle of problems, where the indispensable effort of empirical knowledge is not sufficient to unravel it. The China question is complex and multidimensional and, as in the case of Russia, the conceptual instruments used to interpret and evaluate the past have a huge, albeit unconscious, weight on understanding and evaluation of the present.
At the heart of it all is the question of the state and party bureaucracy and therefore of the different ways in which state apparatus can intervene to model social relations and shape economic development. This is something that cannot be effectively explored if the contraposition between State and market is assumed. On the other hand, reasoning around the macroeconomics of China cannot be separated from determination of how the contradictions generated by the extension and deepening of capitalism on a global scale operate within the particular framework of Chinese society.
The success of capitalist development is always a harbinger of contradictions – national and international – and sooner or later raises conflicts between dominant and dominated classes and between sections of the ruling class itself. The reasons for success always become those of the crisis. After forty years of "reforms", Chinese capitalism is approaching its critical moment.
Neither the nationalistic and statist perspective of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" nor the flattening of the space of the world economy in the thesis of the tendential convergence of levels of development and obsolescence of the economic functions of States – characteristics of the notion of globalisation – allow us to resolve the issue of the relationship between internal transformation and ascent in the hierarchy of the global power of China. What is useful, however, is the concept of development that is unequal and combined as a form of existence of capitalism on a global scale, differentiation and interdependence in the space of processes of accumulation of capital which are the engine of transformations of the world economy. This is the history of imperialism, of the competition between states and of national and social liberation struggles4.
2. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" as a mask of capitalism
"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" isdescribed by the regimein the following terms:
"A historic transformation from a highly centralised planned economy to a dynamic socialist market economy has been achieved in China. A basic economic system in which public ownership takes the lead and different economic ownerships grow side by side has come into being. The market plays an increasingly important role in allocating resources, and the system of macroeconomic regulation is improving. A social security system covering both urban and rural residents is taking shape, and culture, education, science and technology, health care, sports and other social programs are flourishing"5.
The problem is that the series of economic reforms that began in 1978 has far surpassed the boundaries of theoretical discussion and concrete experiments about the relationship between planning and market typical of pseudo-socialist statism: the objective indicated by the top echelons of the party-state bureaucracy – the modernisation of Chinese society – has been resolved in a transition to capitalism. Nor could it be otherwise in the absence of a social and anti-bureaucratic revolution.
The final result, although not the form of the process, has been the same as in the Soviet Union. On the secular arc it is the sign of the overall inferiority of pseudo-socialist systems compared with the more advanced forms of capitalism, the negative demonstration that social liberation does not pass through totalitarian statism, the blind alley of world history.
Of course, there has been no 'big bang' in China as there was in the Soviet Union and in Central and Eastern Europe; the process of transformation has been much more gradual. In the first half of the 1980s it was still plausible to discuss whether the reforms under way were a form of (pseudo) socialism of the market. The system of agricultural communes was over, replaced by the principle of responsibility of peasant households in the management of assigned land, and there was a double system of prices – administered and of the market – but farmers and state enterprises were allowed to market only the production exceeding the quota established by the central bodies.
Individual businesses (getihu) were born, municipal and village-based businesses (in part in fact private, usually referred to by the acronym TVE,standing for 'township and village enterprises') and transnational companies invested in the first special economic zones; nevertheless, state and collective enterprises sector had not yet been drastically reduced and restructured and the limit to the recruitment of wage earners in private companies was still formally in force – less so in reality6. The socioeconomic contradictions of that first phase of China's social transformation – expressed in inflation – exploded politically at the end of the decade, culminating in protests in Beijing and other cities until the Tiananmen Square protestsof 1989: these facts made it clear that capitalist social relations were in full development under the protection of the pseudo-socialist dictatorship7.
In Tiananmen Square the hopes of a mass democratic movement and the possibility that it would generate a workers' and people's movement of the Solidarność type were massacred. However, that massacre cannot be traced back to an organically conservative operation: of the power of the single Party yes, but not a conservative one of what remained of the social relations of the Maoist era.
On the contrary, the economy was "cooled" for a couple of years – the collapse of domestic investment was partially offset by strong export growth – but from Deng Xiaoping's southern tourin early 1992the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party pursued the strategy of attracting large-scale direct investment from abroad with determination while what remained of planning ended, and in the middle of the decade the complete destructuring of the labour relations of the working class formed under Mao began.
The sector of pseudo-socialist state enterprises (danwei) was drastically reduced, with the elimination of about 32 million jobs (dismissals managed in such a way as not to be included in the calculation of unemployment), to be reorganised within a few years as a modern system of capitalist holdings that can be compared to the Japanese keiretsu and the chaebol of South Korea, despite the differences arising from the greater concentration of power in China. This new sector of capitalist state enterprises and of companies that are formally private but actually controlled by the former is now the economic backbone of the power of the CCP.
Therefore, it can be said that China's transition took multiple paths which began to corrupt pseudo-socialist production relationships in the 1980s and develop "islands" of capitalism, but that the capitalist transformation was actually completed around the mid-1990s.
Party-State leaders have made and are leveraging on intensification of the exploitation of the new working class agglomerated in the centres of capital accumulation which emerged in the era of reforms – national, foreign and in shared ownership – and on the renewed exploitation of the rural population, which is revealed in the extraordinary extent of migratory flow and in the capitalist transformation also of agriculture, operating through the social differentiation of farmers and the diffusion of agricultural wage labour.
Market prices have ended up dominating state prices in domestic commerce; reproduction of the work force has been made completely dependent on the market; the income of farmers and crop specialisation depend on fluctuations in the international prices of their products and production inputs; the share of wages in national income has steadily decreased in favour of that of profit and this has led to maintaining high rates of investment for a lengthy period; the compression of labour costs has attracted foreign investment, the main driver of growth in exports of electronic products; the incorporation of China into the international division of labour, the importance of exports in the dynamics of capital accumulation and, finally, entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have effectively linked the expanded reproduction of Chinese capitalism to the fate of the world economy.
It is significant – for what counted in practice, namely nothing – that the right to strike was wiped out by the 1982 Constitution at the beginning of the reforms that promoted commercial relations. At the moment, the legal status of strikes is nothing short of ambiguous: they are, in fact, illegal although they can be tolerated in some situations and if the claims remain limited. More often than workers, the business leaders of the only legal union are also its managers or party cadres, and the union bureaucracy is part of local administrations. Article 27 of the 2001 law on trade unions explicitly prescribed that, "in the event of interruptions and slowdowns in work" (the word for strike is not used), "the union must cooperate with companies and public institutions to re-establish order in production as soon as possible".
It is an anti-worker and productivist logic through which the trade union organisation is reduced to a role of representation of requests which are filtered at the outset as "reasonable" in a framework of collaboration with company management; obviously this is incompatible with an independent organisation of workers.
The growth of protests and tensions has led to the introduction of some rules more favourable to workers, but in the absence of an autonomous organisation there is no institutional mechanism for collective bargaining. Moreover, genuine and combative collective bargaining would undermine Chinese capitalism because it would deprive it of its main comparative advantage: exploitation of a huge mass of relatively inexpensive labour.
3. The ideological mess and the reality of self-styled "socialism with Chinese characteristics"
One of the collective ideological hallucinations of the 20h century was Mao Zedong Thought. A remarkable thought in terms of metaphors and similitudes but even more so in terms of incoherence: as with Stalin, the most different lines can be extracted from the texts and the practice of Mao depending on convenience.
It is true that the Red Army was mostly peasant; but it is also true that from the "Great Leap Forward" in the second half of the 1950s – which resulted in the greatest famine of the twentieth century (about 30 million deaths between 1958 and 1961) – up to the phase of the "Third Front" of industrial development in China's interior, and passing through the Cultural Revolution and most of the 1970s, the peasant masses trapped by the hukousystem were uninterruptedly squeezed like a lemon to finance industrial development, especially heavy and military industry.
The belief in Mao's alleged peasantism must now be considered authentic idiocy, also demonstrated by the rapid reduction of rural poverty in the first half of the 1980s when agriculture was decollectivised – or, rather, freed (temporarily) from the forced extraction of surplus on the part of the State – and TVEs multiplied.
As for the minor importance of the role of material incentives as regards the Soviet Union and "putting politics first" – which attracted many intellectuals and militants as a seductive alternative to the economism of the "revisionist" and "socialist-imperialist" Soviet Union – this was nothing more than ideological justification of the deliberate compression of people's consumption combined with the struggle among parts of the dominant bureaucracy.
In actual fact what always remained paramount in the Maoist era were the objectives of the growth of state power (represented by industry), ensuring the supply of rationed food for the urban population and concentration of power in the hands of the great helmsman Mao.
If possible, the ideology of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is even more botched than that under Mao. Even in the era of reforms, the history of the Party and of Mao himself is subjected to careful selection and distortion, objectively facilitated by how much of non-Marxist there was in the thought of the Great Helmsman, that is, much or all from the perspective of the spirit of libertarian communism.
So the topoiand the slogans of China's modernisation and national rebirth are resumed, but declined in the sense of integration into the capitalist world economy rather than the self-sufficiency of the deceased "socialist world", a line that is more liberalist than Stalinist.
Paradoxically, just as there is the return of the bourgeoisie in China, differentiation among farmers has risen and socioeconomic inequality has increased enormously, and the discourses in terms of classes and mobilisation that had distinguished the political struggle in the years of Mao have disappeared.
The greyness of the uniforms of a mass that raises up the "red book" has been replaced by the normative image of the citizen whose superior status is expressed in the quality of middle classconsumption and living in a well-preserved, fortified residential unit.
"Even (or especially) in China," wrote Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, "the gated community has been defined as 'the most significant evolution in recent urban planning and design'."8 Let it be clear that it is this middle classof the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and of professions that the Party-State promotes, courts, recruits and incorporates into the ideology of the developmental State with the formula of productive forces and the most advanced culture. The image of the self-made man "with Chinese characteristics" corresponds with the economic success and political ambition of the Chinese nation in the international arena.
The reference to the value of ancient Chinese civilisation clashes with the destruction of mass Maoist campaigns but is in keeping with the tradition that makes the CCP the champion of national greatness. However, nationalism is moderate and controlled in order not to compromise the government's respectability with investors and foreign governments; and the reference to respect for the differences among civilisations serves as a barrier to the demands of democratisation – for the occasion described as "bourgeois liberalism", while this would not be the idea that "becoming rich is glorious" – and as a justification for censorship and dictatorship of the Party-State with a Communist denomination over the working population which was less favoured by the economic "miracle" in the transition to capitalism.
"Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth" read a slogan launched at the beginning of the reforms. This is a banality the pragmatism of which conceals the definitive criterion with which the leadership of the CCP evaluates its own politics: this is what allows it to remain in power. And to maintain state power, the political elite must open the Party up to private capitalists.
The point was theoretically clarified – so to speak – by Jiang Zemin, President of China from 1993 to 2003, with the formula of the Three Represents: the CCP "should represent the development trend of advanced productive forces, the orientation of advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in China".9 Of course, the productive forces also include capitalists willing to build so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" on the shoulders and the skin of workers; but Jiang Zemin did not speak of classes, rather of "new social strata": classes and their antagonism do not figure in the rhetoric of harmony and "peaceful development".
As for current CCP General Secretary and Chinese President Xi Jinping, he declared in the most authoritative forum possible – the 2017 Party Congress: "We will inspire and protect entrepreneurship, and encourage more entities to make innovations and start businesses ... We should ensure free flows of factors, flexible prices, fair and orderly competition, and that business survival is determined by competition ... [We will] clean up rules and practices that hinder a unified market and fair competition, support development of private firms and stimulate vitality of all types of market entities"10. There is hypocrisy in these words, given the privileges and monopolies of state capitalist enterprises, but the intent to reassure national and foreign entrepreneurship is clear.
In fact, so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" does not apply only to national capitalists. A white paperentitled China's Peaceful Developmentissued by the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China in September 2011, states that in its "peaceful development", "China will never close its doors to the outside world", combining the forces and "resources" of domestic and foreign markets, "making full use during the opening up of the favourable conditions created by economic globalisation and regional economic cooperation"11.
The reason given is the aspiration of China "to build a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity" and "to continue to actively participate in the international division of labour". These were concepts reiterated by Xi Jinping when he hoped to "transform Chinese companies into globally competitive, world-class enterprises" and also "promote the liberalisation and facilitation of investments and make economic globalisation more open, inclusive and balanced so that its benefits are shared by all"12.
And so – even in constitutional ideology as well as in reality – national capitalist transformation and insertion into the expanded reproduction of world capitalism are welded in the name of the scientific laws that "govern the development of economy, society and nature". The market is naturalised in the context of alleged "socialism".
China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 – after long negotiations with the United States – was not a beginning but a final recognition of China's participation as a key player in the process of internationalisation of capital. The Chinese phraseology is obviously different from that of the United States but the worldview is essentially the same as the administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s or that of Barack Obama in the early 2000s: economic globalisation as an agent of prosperity and vehicle of peaceful – or harmonious – relations among states.
It is the Chinese version of the liberal theory of democratic peace, the core of which is that the development of trade relations promotes peace among nations. An understandable and beautiful hope at the dawn of bourgeois civilisation against the warmongering mercantilism of absolute monarchies, the theory of democratic peace is now a way to legitimise the international exploitation of wage earners.
Since 2004-2005, the CCP has set itself the task of "building a harmonious society". The internal harmony of China presupposes the discipline of farmers and the working class within the paternalistic dictatorship of the single party. No longer totalitarian as in the time of Mao – and how could it be otherwise when becoming rich is the glory of "socialism", transnational societies are courted, Confucius is a model of wisdom and capitalists are no longer demons to beat? But still it is a dictatorship of a single party over the people and wage earners. In the face of this, the references to "characteristics" and national sovereignty are fig leaves that cover the shame.
The new Head of State and party Xi Jinping has specified the goal of achieving – between 2020 and 2035 – the condition of xiaokang shehui, of a moderately prosperous society, without poor. Already used by Deng, the formula can be traced back directly to the Confucian canon of the Book of Ritesand is full of associated meanings, which go beyond that of economic well-being.
Inferior and subsequent to datong, the mythical golden age of ideal harmony, here it is interesting to highlight that xiaokang shehuipresupposes that filial piety (xiao) does not extend to the whole of society and that individual interest is pursued, albeit within the framework of respect for rituals and roles in a hierarchical society governed by wise and lawful rulers. Chinese tradition and Adam Smith seem to merge into the rhetoric of a harmonious society, but the Sons of Heaven and the high mandarins of the current "celestial" bureaucracy are aware of the internal contradictions and dangers to social and political stability that they entail.
The memory of the 1989 crisis has certainly not disappeared from the memory of CCP leaders.
Since the end of the 1990s, labour conflicts, citizens' protests and social movements of various kinds have increased considerably13, and have been dealt with through a combination, which varies according to the case, of repression, opinion campaigns aimed at neutralising the impact – in the exemplary cases cited in party propaganda manuals also through the use of internet and modern methods of investigation and marketing – and channelling into individual legal procedures. Furthermore, the Great Recession, the effects of which on world trade have not yet ended, has shown how risky it is to rely on exports to guarantee the dynamism of the Chinese economy. So the regime must at the same time prevent social mobilisation – inequality among classes and privileges and corruption among Party-State cadres are even greater than thirty years ago – and reckon with the uncertainty of foreign demand.
For social stabilisation, the regime has set itself the objectives of creating a consumerist and politically integrated middle class and of reducing the number of people in extreme poverty. In the first decade of this century, this gave rise to a gradual adjustment of rhetoric and social policies, accelerated by the consequences of the international economic crisis that began in 2008.
It must be considered that until a few years ago most of the rural population was in practice excluded from pension and health care systems; and this is true by definition and for all types of social insurance also for workers in the informal economy (which includes but is not limited to workers and migrant workers from the countryside) who are by far the largest part of China's workforce, and who are also prevented from resorting to procedures in the field of labour law.
The first important correction of line was the downsizing of the tax burden placed on farmers in 2004, which in the 1990s had become unbearable, a disparagement for the Party and also the cause of criminal-type behaviour by village cadres14; in 2007, the minimum guaranteed income programme (dibao) was extended to the countrysides. Then, and especially with Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2013, regulations to extend the coverage of public services and social welfare have been increased.
However, these measures come after thirty years of "reforms" that have dismantled the relationship between state-owned enterprises and public services for urban workers, increased private spending on health and education, discriminated against rural areas, structured a social security system that has been unequal and regressive in favour of – in order of importance – Party cadres, state officials, employees of state enterprises and the population with urban hukou.
The problem is that while coverageof the population as regards pensions and health has been extended, the value of this coverage is extremely uneven according to employment, hukouand province, and it is inadequate precisely for the groups most in need. The social security system is fragmented and subject to fiscal constraints because the responsibility of social policy falls on local administrations: the central government has started to contribute, but local differences in spending capacity remain considerable.
On the whole, the reform of social policy is a very late and limited operation of rationalisation of the reproduction of the labour force, which extends the legal framework of rights but has a very unequal economic value. Moreover, rather than aiming to grant social rights to workers and immigrants working in the city, reform of the hukousystem is motivated by the desire to create a land market in order to extend cities and industrial and commercial projects through exchange between the land rights of rural families and urban hukou.
Another obstacle on the path of harmony is corruption of officials. Campaigns against the corrupt and exemplary punishment are recurrent, but these are limited to individual cases and scandals that could not be managed in silence. On the other hand, the systemic nature of corruption and cronyism of good relations – guangxi– cannot be touched because it is rooted in the synergy between the dictatorship and the extent of economic interests managed directly and indirectly by the party-state bureaucracy.
The building of harmony is a source of agonising dilemmas for administrators in the peripheries. Because of the uniqueness of the Chinese one-party system, the career of cadres depends on a score for objectives. However, especially in the poorer regions, it is difficult to reconcile budget constraints, investment levels, extension of social security coverage, respect for environmental regulations and conflict neutralisation in localities of their jurisdiction.
As often happens, the more there is a focus on harmony and the needs of the people, the more this is indicative of the danger of social conflict given the scale of socioeconomic imbalances, power whose ideological legitimacy is nothing short of fragile and corruption that is taken for granted.
The Confucian imperial tradition which the modernisers of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" recall is two thousand years old – of enormous importance but not the most sympathetic of Chinese civilisations. However the development of capitalism does not produce a harmonious society, it produces economic contradictions and social conflict.
Ultimately, the "socialist" element of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" tautologically comes down to the fact that the ruling Party calls itself "communist": it is a case of ideology in the purest sense of the term, "opium for the people" at home and for the gullible abroad. Since it is now too far removed from the collectivist ideology of the Maoist era and the Party cadres are the first to get rich, nothing remains for legitimisation of the power of this "socialism" but paternalistic statism and nationalism.
Through a sort of parable in a contribution to One China, Many Paths, Wang Yi has expressed the path of the people of China from the time of Mao to that of reforms or, in his words, from status to contract as follows:
"There is something akin to slavery in this. A slave is originally the property of a slave-owner. The slave-owner pays no wage to the slave but allows him a little plot on which to grow his food, to keep him alive while he toils on the plantation, and supplies him with a hut, clothing and some medical care. One day the slave-owner suddenly announces: 'you are free - we shall contractualise our relationship', cancels all the necessities he has been providing to the slave and deprives him of his plot of land. If the former slave complains, we criticise his dependence on the slave-owner and remark that he does not understand the meaning of freedom".
Wang Yi then describes some of the consequences of contractualisation for slaves released in the late twentieth century: the sacking of tens of millions of workers – in breach of contracts signed a few years earlier – the concentration of wealth, the inexistence of a pension system up to 1995, the high cost of medical care, and so on. And he rightly observes:
"On the one hand, the government pursues legal reform to shed, step by step, its historical responsibilities to workers. On the other, it is also increasing taxation to improve 'profits' (...) In other words, as it shifts from status to contract, the government still keeps to the totalitarian policy of expropriating from labourers as much as possible of their surplus in order to concentrate resources on developing a state-directed economy"15.
It is to the capitalist sector of state ownership, at that time in a phase of restructuring, that reference is being made here, but the argument is still valid. However, despite the harsh criticism, Wang Yi appeals to the Party's sense of responsibility in establishing "the great contract of a constitutional system, without which all other contracts are vulnerable", alluding to democratisation from within the regime.
Almost twenty years have gone by since that hope was expressed, and forty have passed since the turning point in 1978: "contractualisation" has made further great strides in China, but workers continue to be denied the freedom to strike and of independent organisation, censorship continues to operate and political dissent persecuted.
Meanwhile, the most recent amendments to the Constitution are abolition of the limit of two presidential terms and the constitutionalisation of Xi Jinping-thought, so that the dictatorship of a single party formally returns being complete with concentration of power indefinitely in the hands of a single man and his clique of associates. And, even more so after the reorganisation and grand-style revival of the state capitalist sector, it is not plausible that the Party-State is willing to abandon control of the economic enterprises that make the private fortune of its cadres.
The conclusion is that the ruling caste of the "communist" Party-State has made its capitalist "revolution" but cannot give the Chinese people elementary "bourgeois" freedoms: the interdependence between the dictatorship and the accumulation of capital is stronger than ever.
The Chinese people will have to conquer political freedom and social liberation with their own forces. As always, as everywhere in the world.
Notes
1) National Bureau of Statistics of China, Statistical communiqué of the People's Republic of China on the 2017 national economic and social development, 28 February 2018; http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/pressrelease/201802/t 20180228_1585666.html; National Bureau of Statistics of China, China Statistical Yearbook 2015, table 2.1, population and its composition; http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2015/indexeh.htm;
2) Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006.
3) On the Soviet transition: David M. Kotz-Fred Weir, Russia's Path from Gorbachev to Putin. The Demise of the Soviet Dystem and the New Russia, Routledge 2007; Simon Pirani, Change in Putin's Russia, Power, Money and People, Pluto Press 2010. For a reasoning on the characteristics of Russian capitalism, also in this case resulting from the modes of transition to capitalism: Ruslan Dzarasov,The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism. The Post-Soviet Economy in the World System, Pluto Press, London 2013.
4) Reference to Michele Nobile, Imperialism. The Real Face of Globalisation, 2006 and Capitalism and Post-Democracy. Economics and Politics in the Systemic Crisis, 2012, both published by Massari Editore.
5) Information office of the State Council, The People's Republic of China, China's peaceful development, Beijing, September 2011
http://english.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2014/09/09/content_281474986284646.htm.
Those who wish can also refer to the long report of Xi Jinping, Secretary of the Communist Party since 2012 and President of the Republic since 2013, at the XIX Congress of the CCP, which apparently lasted a good three hours. Xi Jinping, Secure a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and strive for the great success of socialism, Delivered at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China October 18, 2017 http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/special/2017-11/03/c_136725942.htm
6) As comprehensive, very articulate and documented overviews of the People's Republic: Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy. Transitions and Growth, The MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), London 2007 and Chris Bramall, Chinese economic development, Routledge, London and New York 2009; the chapters of different authors in Loren Brandt-Thomas G. Rawski (edited by), China's Great Economic Transformation, Cambridge University Press, 2008. For the Marxist analysis: Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, China and Socialism. Market Reforms and Class Struggle, Monthly Review Press, New York 2005 and “The Chinese reform experience: a critical assessment”, Review of Radical Political Economics, March 2011 by Hart-Landsberg; Andong Zhu-David M. Kotz, “The dependence of China's economic growth on exports and investment”, in Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2011, offer a macroeconomic analysis; a recente and particularly interesting view is found in Hung Ho-fung,China Boom. Why China Will Not Rule the World, Columbia University Press, New York 2016. On the state sector and the Supervisory Commission (State-owned assets and administration of the state council, SASAC): Barry Naughton-Kellee S. Tsai (edited by), State Capitalism, Institutional Adaptation and the ChineseMiracle, Cambridge University Press, New York 2015.
7) Around the crisis of 1898: Maitan, Livio, The Chinese Dilemma. Critical Analysis of Post-Revolutionary China 1949-1993, Datanews, Rome, 1994 and edited by Maitan, Tiananmen's China, Massari Editore, Bolsena 1999.
8) Mike Davis, Planet of Slums,op. cit., p. 107, quotes Pu Miao, “Deserted streets in a jammed town. The gated community in Chinesecities and its solutions, in Journal of Urban Design, 2003, p. 45, perhaps the first study on the subject, which begins with a brief description of the residential areas outside the Shanghai ring road, surrounded by walls over two metres high and even 500 metres long, interrupted by portals flanked by copies of Greek statues; the biggest contrast with the crowded city is that this looks like a stage without actors.
In Gated Communities in China. Class, Privilege and the Moral Politics of the Good Life, Routledge, London, 2009, Pow Choon-Piew brilliantly describes and interprets the gated Chinese communities, especially Shangai: from the construction of the image for marketing purposes to the symbolic and social value of self-segregation, of the pleasant landscape, of the monumental portals, of the armed guards' clothing and of the employees in charge of internal services. These kinds of residential units are a positional asset, indicative of social status, important for the psychological and social identity of the Chinese middle class, which thus ostentatiously separates itself from the lower classes. The aesthetics of the landscape – and of the fortification – embody the ideal of good life and represent at the same time social separation and power over subordinates. See also Luigi Tomba, "Creating an urban middle class. Social engineering in Beijing” in The China Journal, No. 51, 2004.
9) Jiang Zemin, Party Secretary in 1989-2002 and President of the Republic in 1993-2003. The formula is very well known, here I quote from the translation by Guido Samarani, Contemporary China. From the End of the Empire to Today, Einaudi, 2017.
10) Xi Jinping, Secure a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and strive for the great success of socialism, op. cit., pp. 26 and 29.
11) Information Office of the State Council, The People's Republic of China, China's peaceful development, op. cit.
12) Xi Jinping, Secure a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and strive for the great success of socialism, op. cit., pp. pp. 29 and 53.
13) For updated information see the articles and maps of the China labour bullettin strikes, http://www.clb.org.hk; Lee Ching Kwan, Against the Law. Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007, very interesting for the process of destruction and creation of labour relations, the typology of claims and the dynamics of protests; Elizabeth J. Perry-Mark Selden (edited by), Chinese Society. Change, Conflict and Resistance, Routledge, 2010, describes the various types of conflicts and social movements in China: William Hurst, The Chinese Worker After Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 2009, in particular the chapter "Contention, protest, and social order"; Yew Chiew Ping, “Rising trend of labour strikes. Tables turned for Chinese workers?”, In Wang, Gungwu-Zheng Yongnian (ed.), China. Development and Governance, World Scientific Publishing Vompany,Singapore 2013. For social movements: K.J. O'Brien (edited by), Popular Protest in China, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008; Elizabeth J. Perry-Selden, Mark (edited by), Chinese Society. Change, Conflict and Resistance, Routledge, 2010.
14) Episodes of violent abuses up to gangsterism of local cadres were denounced in the book which caused quite a stir, to the point that he was credited with the merit of the change of policy towards farmers, and which was quickly censored even though he thought he sold ten million copies on the black market: Chen Guidi-Wu Chuntao, Zhongguo nongmin niaocha [Survey of Chinese Peasants], People's Literature Publication Company, Beijing 2004, in English Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China's Peasants, Public Affairs, New York 2006.
15) Wang Yi, "From status to contract?", In Wang Chaohua (edited by), One China, Many Paths, Verso, London 2003, pp. 192-193.