Chinese President Xi Jinping said he won’t let the world’s second-largest economy return to its days as a planned economy, pushing back against U.S. criticism that the nation has failed to deliver on promised reforms.
Before we decide to get our news from and make conclusions based on Bloomberg, let’s not rush to misconstrue what President Xi said as an abandonment of the CPC’s commitment to Marxism and its ultimate goal of realizing communism.
Xi says: “We’ve come to the understanding that we should not ignore the blindness of the market, nor should we return to the old path of a planned economy.” Xinhuanet goes into further detail regarding this statement:
Reiterating the necessity to view current difficulties, risks and challenges from a comprehensive, dialectical and long-term perspective, Xi said efforts should be made to boost confidence of the whole society, especially market entities.
Limited markets have played a significant role in China’s rapid growth and development, and the state remains supreme over those market entities, and continues to strengthen state-owned enterprises. We’re already well aware of the compromises needed to engage in a US-dominated global market. Otherwise, China risks isolating itself.
People’s Daily reports:
"Noting that this year marks the end of the 13th five-year plan for military development, Xi said extraordinary measures must be taken to overcome the impact of the epidemic to ensure major tasks on the military building are achieved.
He demanded good planning on the next five-year plan. On defense expenditure, Xi said every penny must be well spent to produce maximum results."
(Emphasis mine)
China has decided to scrap its planned GDP target for this year -- the focus is shifted onto other targets:
Xi called for consolidating the fundamental role of agriculture, ensuring stability on the six fronts and security in the six areas, and accomplishing the targets and tasks of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and winning the battle against poverty.
The six fronts refer to employment, the financial sector, foreign trade, foreign investment, domestic investment, and expectations. The six areas refer to job security, basic living needs, operations of market entities, food and energy security, stable industrial and supply chains, and the normal functioning of primary-level governments.
(Emphasis mine)
As @Rainer_Shea shared on Twitter:
A comrade writes... “People are sharing this Bloomberg article as proof China is revisionist and now I have to explain that Xi was referring to not returning to the old, stagnant 20th century model of socialism that failed catastrophically to replace capitalism/imperialism as the global economic function. China's market economy will always be planned centrally through a proletarian dictatorship. Deng Xiaoping's market reforms were based on the science of dialectical materialist philosophy allowing China to rapidly create massive amounts of material wealth nothing in history has come close to matching through understanding matter and development. Now the Chinese Century is upon us and socialism is decisively an inevitable trend in historical development. Nothing changes the historical role China has paved for proliferating material wealth, infrastructure and socialism. Anyone against China has fallen for idealist deviations and bourgeois sophistry.”
Furthermore, the “market” as understood here is not the same as that of a liberal free market economy. It’s difficult to predict what socialism will look like and what the effects of these plans will have on reaching the 2049 goal - we can concede that. That’s expected and fair as what we’re seeing in China is unprecedented, yet the experiment provides exciting prospects. What we do know is that the path to socialism is gradual and is bound to be interceded by certain compromises along the way. Most importantly here, the CPC is working to address disparities in resource allocation due to the economic effects of COVID-19. Not going back to Mao-era planned economy does not mean that Xi has changed the CPC’s plan -- it remains the same.
Xi Jinping detailed the plan before:
1.) 2020-2035: Socialist modernization. Creating larger and sustainable capital to support socialist initiatives of the people.
Xi described the period from 2020 through 2035 as a phase for the nation to realize modernized socialism and a time to expand the middle-class and narrow the wealth gap to create a more harmonious society.
2.) 2035-2049: Transition to a modern socialist country.
The period from 2035 to mid-century, on the other hand, will be spent building a great world power based on a fully modernized socialist society. He said Chinese citizens would live in a moderately prosperous society, while the nation itself moves toward a focal position in the world.
Effectively, they are implementing several consecutive five-year plans to build up their economy and continue on the goal of raising people out of poverty, and this is part of that. Yes, unfortunately, capitalism remains in some form for the time being. I don’t know what this is going to look like in the long-term or how that will translate into achieving the 2049 goal (and what the ends will look like), but we’ll see.
Once again, this is as important a time as any other to give ourselves a chance to better understand Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
