Thatcherism with chinese characteristics
In the 1970s a right-wing english think-tank published a study of voting patterns which had enormous consequences as they found two main effects, one obvious and the other non-obvious and very important:
People who owned a car, owned property, invested in shares for retirement, voted for right-wing parties far more than people who used public transport, rented housing, had a defined benefit pension. This seems obvious because the former usually have higher income and status than the latter.
This difference however was largely independent of income and status. Particularly important for voting was that people with low income and status would often vote for right-wing parties if they owned very modest cars, property, and tiny investments in shares.
After that study right-wing parties across the world, but primarily in the UK, USA, Australia adopted policies to undermine public transport, rented housing (especially if public), and defined benefit pensions, with various excuses, and to subsidise directly or indirectly car travel, property ownership, share based pension accounts.
Note: with time it turned out that the key element is property ownership but only coupled with a solid expectation of long-term huge property profits redistributed from the lower classes.
"There were even prophetic council house sales by local Tories in the drive to create voters with a Conservative political mentality. As a Tory councillor in Leeds defiantly told Labour opponents in 1926, ‘it is a good thing for people to buy their own houses. They turn Tory directly. We shall go on making Tories and you will be wiped out.’ There is much of the Party history of the twentieth century in that remark."
"bought his council house in Devon in the early 80s for £17,000. When it was valued at £80,000 in 1989, he sold up and used the equity to put towards a £135,000 fisherman’s cottage in St Mawes. Now it’s valued at 1.1m. “I was very grateful to Margaret Thatcher,” he said.¨
These policies are the reason for the enduring appeal of thatcherism/reaganism for many voters who are workers, even if thatcherism/reaganism policies also include cutting wages and salaries and pension and social insurance, because those voters gain much more with property profits than they lose otherwise.
These policies are being implemented with great zeal in the People's Republic of China by the Communist Party of China: almost all social housing in the PRC has been privatized by the CPC, and the CPC has invested massively in promoting car ownership (even if there has also been big investment in public transport, in particular trains).
Now the CPC wants to switch PRC pensions from defined benefit to share investment accounts, as reported by the right-wing USA organization "Council for Foreign Relations":
"Beijing is pushing Chinese citizens to plan for their own retirements. On December 15, Chinese authorities launched a national expansion of their two-year old pilot private pension pilot project. According to the state circular issued jointly by tax, finance, and human resource bureaus, citizens participating in either of the two primary state retirement systems are authorized to open private pension accounts."
The only possible rationale for these moves is that the Communist Party of China has become vigorously anti-socialdemocratic, anti-socialist and anti-communist and intends to create a large base of car, property and share owners committed to thatcherism/reaganism and right-wing policies. China-mainland has been switching to a thatcherite/reaganite system like China-Taiwan, China-HongKong, Singapore, and previously the USA, the UK, etc.; this will also discourage productive investment and greatly increase financial speculation and rentierism.
That is not surprising: my guess is that virtually all the officials of the Communist Party of China own one or more cars and also significant portfolios of properties and shares, and are determined to protect their investments from the possibility of social-democratic, socialist or communist policies, and since they are all educated in marxism they understand well what their class interests are.
It is quite ironic that the Communist Party of China is today the party run by and representing the interests of landlords and speculators, the same as the Republican and Democratic parties in the USA or the Conservative, New Labour and LibDem parties in the UK.
