Columnist Yuen Yuen Ang wrote last year that according to an expert economic opinion, the much-maligned Deng reforms have undeniably been the source of China's vast increases in living standards:
Over the last four decades, more than 850 million people in China have escaped poverty. As Peking University's Yao Yang notes, this had "nothing to do with RCTs", nor did it involve giving handouts to the poor. Instead, it was the result of rapid national development. Since Deng Xiaoping launched "reform and opening up" in 1978, China has pursued export-driven industrialisation, liberalised the private sector, welcomed foreign investment, and embraced global trade. As millions of farmers moved from fields to factories, they earned wages, saved, and sent their children to school.
China's liberalization of the private sector and embrace of foreign trade have objectively given great material benefit to the country's people, explaining why the overwhelming majority of Chinese people have a positive view of their government. And despite the claims from anti-CPC socialist organizations about this leading to a dismantling of China's proletarian democracy and a Chinese embrace of imperialism, the nature of the Chinese state as a dictatorship of the proletariat hasn't fundamentally changed since the Mao era.
As Marxist writer H Khoo has written in response to a 2006 International Marxist Tendency document which accused China of engaging in a "long march to capitalism":
The fact is that Communist Party members or lower levels of the bureaucracy lead most workers' struggles. This clearly reveals that the gulf between the classes is reflected inside the Communist Party and the state. The capitalist class is not a consolidated national political or economic force able to determine the direction of national policy. In order for it to assume power a decisive defeat of the working class and the Communist Party would be required. The position our tendency has adopted on China misreads the situation and misleads our movement into a sectarian positions vis-Ã -vis the Communist Party of China.
This reality-that China's economic and political systems are driven by and to serve the proletariat-helps prove what I've made the case for in one past essay: that China doesn't fit Lenin's criteria for being an imperialist power. One of these criteria is that bank capital and industrial capital merge together to form a financial oligarchy, which clearly isn't the case for China given the severe political limitations on the Chinese capitalist class that Khoo pointed out.
In addition to these flaws in the claims about China being controlled by the capitalist class, the extent to which private enterprise has gained a presence within the country is greatly exaggerated by the narratives about a "capitalist China." Public ownership still dominates the country, and the state is in charge of the economy. It may be no ideal communist utopia, but it's no cruel neoliberal society either. This reflects the economic model that's been explained by Vice Chairman of Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee's Commission Tran Dac Loi, whose party embraces a very similar economic approach to that of China's:
The market is managed and regulated by the socialist state in order to utilise the positive sides, minimise the negative ones, and direct market activities into implementation of given comprehensive development goals" The state economic sector should play the dominating role in key areas essential to macro economy such as energy, finance, telecommunications, aviation, railways, maritime, public transportation, etc" The land and natural resources remain within all-people ownership under the state management.
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