China, a Capitalist-Imperialist Country

Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR) — Bolivia

July 20, 2021

Original (in Spanish)

We publish below a third part of the article “In China, Capitalism Is Being Consolidated, Not Socialism” (Political Review Nº 33), which describes key elements for understanding that in that country capitalist forms of production dominate and that there is a powerful bourgeoisie that controls power. Due to space limitations, the full article has not been published.

Deepening the capitalist path

In the course of the last four decades, the adoption of pro-capitalist reforms has always been cloaked in “innovative” proposals which, depending on their significance, have been labelled with the categories of “theory” or “thought”. The last congress of the Chinese revisionists decided to reform the Party Constitution and to “glorify” “Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”…. “Xi’s thought is the ultimate achievement and the ultimate level of Marxist practice, writing it into the Constitution shows the authority of Xi’s thought, which requires the Party to obey and promote the development of the theory,” says Cai Zhiqiang, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee. The last reform of the Party Constitution in this regard came at the 12th CPC Congress in 1982, which — according to the official version — “corrected ‘leftist’ errors and established economic construction for socialist modernisation as the focus of Party work”. This was the time of Deng Xiaoping, who introduced a series of reforms with a capitalist content. In 1997 “Deng Xiaoping Theory” was established as the guiding theory of the CPC, in 2002 the Three Represents Theory and in 2007 the Scientific Outlook on Development. The Three Represents Theory, coined by Jiang Zemin, speaks of “taking a step forward on the socialist road” by incorporating the so-called “emerging sectors of society: entrepreneurs, capitalists and the middle class”. The emerging classes of which Jiang Zemin spoke at the time were the new entrepreneurs, financiers, who according to him are “builders, together with other social spheres, of socialism with Chinese characteristics”, a euphemism which conceals the presence of capitalism. It can be said that this theory is an extension of Deng Xiaoping’s theory: “One country, two systems”.

“The Party must always represent the concerns of the development of China’s advanced productive forces, represent the orientation of the development of China’s advanced culture, and represent the fundamental interests of the majority of China’s population”, Jiang Zemin said at the 16th National Congress of the CPC in arguing his theory. This approach is the ideological basis that allowed many businessmen to join the CPC, it expresses the total abandonment of the class character that a genuine communist party must have — which is not surprising that they do so — and also the abandonment of the principle of the class struggle…. The inclusions in the CPC Constitution, they say, constitute “a range of new ideas, ideas and strategies put forward by the CPC Central Committee with Xi at its core… which include the decisive role of market forces in the allocation of resources…”, which makes it clear that the essence of Xi’s thinking is economic liberalism….

So entrenched is capitalism in China that the same report acknowledges that the Central Committee has had to take measures to “rectify”, among other behaviours, hedonism and a proclivity for wastefulness and lavishness, typical expressions of a bourgeois society.

Capitalism and chauvinism

Nationalist chauvinism leads Xi to speak of the “Chinisation” of Marxism. “The thinking on socialism with Chinese peculiarities of the new epoch,” he says in the Report, “is the most recent fruit of the Chinisation of Marxism…”. The Chinisation of Marxism is merely the label with which they seek to justify the total abandonment of Marxism, not any development of Marxism in the new conditions in which the world is living. So much so that, while putting forward such a “breakthrough”, they insist that socialism can only develop through reform and opening up (capitalist reform and opening up to private and foreign capital), and that it is necessary to “resolutely eradicate all anachronistic ideas and concepts” and to have “a completely new outlook in close combination with the new conditions of our times and the new demands of practice”. In other words, for the Chinese revisionists Marxism-Leninism is anachronistic. The history of the international communist and revolutionary movement records several moments when revisionism has hidden or tried to justify its betrayal of Marxist-Leninist ideals under the criterion of local particularities.

So acted Tito with his “Yugoslav self-management”, the Eurocommunist revisionists, the North Koreans with their deification of the “Juche idea”. Regardless of the fact that the CPC makes some effort to claim that it supposedly follows the lines of Marxism-Leninism, its entire practice and the orientations defined at its last congress point to the contrary. Let us look at some of the lines of action set out at the last congress, which can only lead to the consolidation of an already existing capitalism: Acceleration of the improvement of the socialist market economy regime… the focus must be on improving both the system of property rights and the market-based distribution of the elements of production…. We must deepen the reform of state-owned enterprises, develop the mixed-ownership economy and build globally competitive world-class enterprises… support the development of non-public enterprises and activate the vigour of all types of market players. We will deepen the reform of the market system, dismantle the administrative monopoly, prevent market monopolization, accelerate the reform of commodity price marketization, relax restrictions on access to the service sector, and improve the system of market supervision and control… we will deepen the reform of the rural land system and improve the system of separating the “three rights” [of ownership, contracting and management] of contracted land. (In other words, private ownership of land is affirmed). We will grant greater reforming autonomy to the experimental free trade zones and explore the construction of free ports. We need to innovate overseas investment modalities…. There is no doubt that capitalism is rooted in China; but all is not lost, the workers and peoples of China have the task of organising and leading to victory a genuine proletarian revolution.