Introduction

Is China Capitalist?

Curated By

Amy Yang

Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist. No one is free until we are all free.

About this Collection

About this Collection

Many Westerners both from the right and from the ultra-left claim that socialism has failed and capitalism has been restored in China for different reasons. This claim is nothing but harmful for the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. If China has abandoned socialism in 1978, aren't all current achievements in China thanks to capitalism, aren't human beings doomed to be dominated by capitalism forever?

In contrast to this baseless claim, China is in reality in the primary stage of socialism and its rapid development of productive forces and significant improvement of people's well-being are solid proofs for the superority of socialism over capitalism. Books, articles and videos in this collection can help us understand the socialist market economy in China in a more holistic and scientific way.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/is-china-capitalist

10 articles · 2 books · 2 videos

This ebook is about 148 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

30 pages

https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/#quantitative-and-qualitative-inequality

Red Sails

By Domenico Losurdo

Argues that China's market socialism is not a restoration of capitalism but a Marxist-Leninist development strategy that prioritizes developing productive forces, and that within the context of global inequality, China's rise is reducing international disparities and challenging Western dominance.

2. Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles

37 pages

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1979/115.htm

Marxists Internet Archive

By Deng Xiaoping

In this 1979 speech, Deng Xiaoping outlines why China must uphold the Four Cardinal Principles—socialism, proletarian dictatorship, Party leadership, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought—as it shifts focus to modernization, warning against those who seek to undermine these pillars.

3. Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China

8 pages

https://socialistchina.org/2026/06/14/pure-socialism-is-pure-idealism-a-reply-to-jacobin-on-china/

Friends of Socialist China

By Carlos Martinez

Carlos Martinez critiques Jacobin's review of China, arguing that comparing China's development to an imagined utopia ignores its socialist foundations, massive poverty reduction, and structural protections for workers.

4. A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

10 pages

https://socialistchina.org/2026/07/23/a-reply-to-greg-godels-on-chinas-road-to-socialism/

Friends of Socialist China

By Carlos Martinez

Carlos Martinez defends China's socialist trajectory against Marxist critiques, arguing that state control over capital and the direction of surplus value distinguish it from imperialism.

5. The New Economic Policy And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments

24 pages

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm

Marxists Internet Archive

By Vladimir Lenin

Lenin explains the New Economic Policy as a strategic retreat, emphasizing personal incentive, stricter discipline, and political education to overcome cultural backwardness and build socialism.

6. We Must Adhere To Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism

3 pages

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1989/173.htm

Marxists Internet Archive

By Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping warns China must uphold socialism against Western 'peaceful evolution' and criticizes the Group of Seven's human rights stance as imperialist interference in sovereign states.

7. Socialist Chinamaxxing: How China's achievements are a product of socialism

1 page

https://socialistchina.org/2026/04/17/socialist-chinamaxxing-how-chinas-achievements-are-a-product-of-socialism/

Friends of Socialist China

Webinar explores how China's achievements in poverty reduction, technology, ecology, and infrastructure stem from its socialist system.

8. Planning and the Market Are Both Means of Developing the Productive Forces

1 page

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1987/83.htm

Marxists Internet Archive

By Deng Xiaoping

Planning and market are means to develop productive forces, not inherently capitalist or socialist, justifying their use in China's reform.

9. Opening Up New Frontiers for Marxist Political Economy in Contemporary China

10 pages

https://en.qstheory.cn/2020-11/08/c_560906.htm

Qiushi - CPC Central Committee

By Xi Jinping

Marxist political economy remains essential for China's development, detailing how its integration with Chinese practice has produced theories on people-centered development, new development philosophy, and socialist market economy.

10. China's long war on poverty

24 pages

https://socialistchina.org/2022/06/19/chinas-long-war-on-poverty/

Friends of Socialist China

By Carlos Martinez

China has eradicated extreme poverty through decades of socialist policies and targeted programs, lifting 100 million people out of poverty by 2020.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

The East is Still Red – Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_East_Is_Still_Red

Resource Not Added

By Carlos Martinez

China's socialist system maintains public ownership of key economic sectors and state control over the commanding heights, enabling the state to direct development toward long-term national goals and the material well-being of the people, distinguishing its market economy from capitalism.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/specials/2021SocialismwithChineseCharacteristics-AGuideforForeigners(Springer).pdf

Resource Not Added

By Roland Boer

Roland Boer's book uses Chinese Marxist scholarship to explain socialism with Chinese characteristics, arguing that Marxism is China's 'special skill' and that Western frameworks of analysis, including those of Western Marxists.

Videos

Dialogue with Fudan University’s China Institute: Is China really socialist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyRGFRN5qDk

Friends of Socialist China

A delegation discusses China's socialist development and historical sites with professors from Fudan University during a visit to Shanghai.

China has billionaires and stock markets. Is it still socialist?

https://youtu.be/G-TeCpxSzq4?si=AL4mnHn3zpwyMWpt

Resource Not Added

By Carlos Martinez

Despite such features, China can still be described as socialist, grounding its case in the persistence of socialist structures and the state's continued guiding role within the reformed economy—a claim that reframes the global debate on capitalism's convergence and the viability of socialism's path.

Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Is China Capitalist? — Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Article 1 of 10

Red Sails

By Domenico Losurdo

Originally published at https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/#quantitative-and-qualitative-inequality

Contents

Abstract

Soviet Russia and Various Experiments in Post-Capitalism

The Peculiarity of the Chinese Experience

Marxism or Populism? A Confrontation of Long Duration

Global Inequality and Inequality in China

Quantitative and Qualitative Inequality

Wealth and Political Power: An Adversarial Relationship

The Sights of the West: “Democratisation” or “Plutocratisation” of China?

References

Abstract

If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see three social experiments. The first experiment, based on the equal distribution of poverty, suggests the “universal asceticism” and “rough egalitarianism” criticised by the Communist Manifesto. We can now understand the decision to move to Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was often interpreted as a return to capitalism. The increasing threat of war pushed Stalin into sweeping economic collectivisation. The third experiment produced a very advanced welfare state but ended in failure: in the last years of the Soviet Union, it was characterised by mass absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace; this stalled productivity, and it became hard to find any application of the principle that Marx said should preside over socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered.

The history of China is different: Mao believed that, unlike “political capital,” the economic capital of the bourgeoisie should not be subject to total expropriation, at least until it can serve the development of the national economy. After the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, it took Deng Xiaoping to emphasise that socialism implies the development of the productive forces. Chinese market socialism has achieved extraordinary success.

Soviet Russia and Various Experiments in Post-Capitalism

Nowadays it is common to talk about the restoration of capitalism in China as resulting from the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. But what is the basis for this judgment? Is there a more or less coherent vision of socialism that can be contrasted with the reality of the current socio-economic relations in China today? Let’s take a quick look at the history of attempts to build a post-capitalist society. If we analyse the first 15 years of Soviet Russia, we see war communism, then the New Economic Policy (NEP), and finally the complete collectivisation of the economy (including agriculture) in quick succession. These were three totally different experiments, but all of them were an attempt to build a post-capitalist society. Why should we be shocked that, in the course of the more than 80 years that followed these experiments, other variations like market socialism and Chinese socialism appeared?

Let’s concentrate for now on Soviet Russia: which of the three experiments mentioned is closest to the socialism espoused by Marx and Engels? War communism was greeted by a devout French Catholic, Pierre Pascal, then in Moscow, as a “unique and intoxicating performance […] The rich are gone: only the poor and the very poor […] high and low salaries draw closer. The right to property is reduced to personal effects.” [1] This author read the widespread poverty and privation not as wretchedness caused by the war, to be overcome as quickly as possible; in his eyes, as long as they are distributed more or less equally, poverty and want are a condition of purity and moral excellence; on the contrary, affluence and wealth are sins. It is a vision that we can call populist, one that was criticised with great precision by the Communist Manifesto: there is “nothing easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist coat of paint”; the “first movements of the proletariat” often feature claims in the name of “universal asceticism and a rough egalitarianism.” [2] Lenin’s orientation was the opposite of Pascal’s, as he was far from the view that socialism would be the collectivisation of poverty, a more or less egalitarian distribution of privation. In October 1920 (“The Tasks of the Youth Associations”) Lenin declared, “We want to transform Russia from a poor and needy country to a rich country.” First, the country needed to be modernised and wired with electricity; therefore, it required “organised work” and “conscious and disciplined work,” overcoming anarchy in the workplace, with a methodical assimilation of the “latest technical achievements,” if necessary, by importing them from the most advanced capitalist countries. [3]

A few years later, the NEP took over from war communism. It was essential to overcome the desperate mass poverty and starvation that followed the catastrophe of World War I and the civil war, and to restart the economy and develop the productive forces. This was necessary not only to improve the living conditions of the people and to broaden the social basis of consensus on revolutionary power; it was also about avoiding an increase in Russia’s lag in development compared to the more advanced capitalist countries, which could affect the national security of the country emerging from the October Revolution, not to mention it being surrounded and besieged by the capitalist powers. To achieve these objectives, the Soviet government also made use of private initiative and a (limited) part of the capitalist economy; it used “bourgeois” specialists who were rewarded generously, and it sought to take advanced technology and capital, which were guaranteed attractive returns, from the West. The NEP had positive results: production started up again, and a certain development of the productive forces began to take place. Overall, the situation in Soviet Russia improved noticeably: on the international level it did not worsen; rather, Russia’s delay in development started to decrease compared to the successful capitalist countries. Domestically, the living conditions of the masses improved significantly. Precisely because social wealth increased, there were more than just “the poor and the very poor,” as in the war communism celebrated by Pierre Pascal; desperate hunger and starvation disappeared, but social inequalities increased.

These inequalities in Soviet Russia provoked a widespread and intense feeling of betrayal of the original ideals. Pierre Pascal was not the only one wanting to abandon the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; there were literally tens of thousands of Bolshevik workers who tore up their party cards in disgust at the NEP, which they re-named the “New Extortion from the Proletariat.” In the 1940s, a rank-and-file militant very effectively described the spiritual atmosphere prevailing in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution — the atmosphere arose from the horror of war caused by imperialist competition in plundering the colonies in order to conquer markets and acquire raw materials, as well as by capitalists searching for profit and super-profit:

We young Communists had all grown up in the belief that money was done away with once and for all. […] If money was reappearing, wouldn’t rich people reappear too? Weren’t we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? [4]

Therefore, one can understand the scandal and a persistent feeling of repugnance for the market and the commodity economy at the introduction of the NEP; it was above all the growing danger of war that caused the abandonment of the NEP and the removal of every trace of the private economy. The wholesale collectivisation of the country’s agriculture provoked a civil war that was fought ruthlessly by both sides. And yet, after this horrible tragedy, the Soviet economy seemed to proceed marvellously: the rapid development of modern industry was interwoven with the construction of a welfare state that guaranteed the economic and social rights of citizens in a way that was unprecedented. This, however, was a model that fell into crisis after a couple of decades. With the transition from great historical crisis to a more “normal” period (“peaceful coexistence”), the masses’ enthusiasm and commitment to production and work weakened and then disappeared. In the last years of its existence, the Soviet Union was characterised by massive absenteeism and disengagement in the workplace: not only did production development stagnate, but there was no longer any application of the principle that Marx said drove socialism — remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered. You could say that during the final stage of Soviet society, the dialectic of capitalist society that Marx described in The Poverty of Philosophy had been overturned:

While inside the modern factory the division of labour is meticulously regulated by the authority of the entrepreneur, modern society has no other rule or authority to distribute the work, except for free competition. […] One can also determine, as a general principle, that the less the authority presides over the division of labour inside the society, the more the division of labour develops inside of the factory, and it is placed under the authority of just one person. Thus the authorities in the factory and in society, in relation to the division of labour, are inversely related to each other. [5]

In the last years of the Soviet Union, the tight control exercised by the political powers over civil society coincided with a substantial amount of anarchy in workplaces. It was the reversal of the dialectic of capitalist society, but the overthrow of the capitalist society’s dialectic was not socialism and, therefore, it produced a weak economic order unable to resist the ideological and political offensives of the capitalist-imperialist world.

The Peculiarity of the Chinese Experience

China’s history is different. Although the Communist Party of China seized power at the national level in 1949, 20 years earlier it had already started to exercise its power in one region or another, regions whose size and population were comparable to those of a small or medium-sized European country. For much of these 85 years in power, China, partly or totally ruled by the communists, was characterised by the coexistence of different forms of economy and property. This was how Edgar Snow described the situation in the late 1930s in the “liberated” areas:

To guarantee success at these tasks it was necessary for the Reds, even from the earliest days, to begin some kind of economic construction. […] Soviet economy in the Northwest was a curious mixture of private capitalism, state capitalism, and primitive socialism. Private enterprise and industry were permitted and encouraged, and private transactions dealing in the land and its products were allowed with restrictions. At the same time the state owned and exploited enterprises such as oil wells, salt wells, and coal mines, and it traded in cattle, hides, salt, wool, cotton, paper, and other raw materials. But it did not establish a monopoly in these articles and in all of them private enterprises could, and to some extent did, compete. A third kind of economy was created by the establishment of cooperatives, in which the government and the masses participated as partners, competing not only with private capitalism but also with state capitalism! [6]

This picture is confirmed by a modern historian: in Yan’an, the city where Mao Zedong directed the struggle against Japanese imperialism and promoted the construction of a new China, the Communist Party of China did not pretend “to control the whole of the base area’s economy.” It rather supervised a “significant private economy,” which also included “large private landholdings.” [7]

In an essay in January 1940 (“On the New Democracy”), Mao Zedong clarified the meaning of the revolution taking place at that time:

Although such a revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its social character during its first stage or first step, and although its objective mission is to clear the path for the development of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of establishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism. [8]

This was a model characterised, at the economic level, by the coexistence of different forms of ownership; at the level of political power, by a dictatorship exercised by the “revolutionary classes” as well as the leadership of the Communist Party of China. It is a pattern confirmed 17 years later, although in the meantime the People’s Republic of China was founded, in a speech on January 18, 1957 (“Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committees”):

As for the charge that our urban policy has deviated to the Right, this seems to be the case, as we have undertaken to provide for the capitalists and pay them a fixed rate of interest for a period of seven years. What is to be done after the seven years? That is to be decided according to the circumstances prevailing then. It is better to leave the matter open, that is, to go on giving them a certain amount in fixed interest. At this small cost we are buying over this class. […] By buying over this class, we have deprived them of their political capital and kept their mouths shut. […] Thus political capital will not be in their hands but in ours. We must deprive them of every bit of their political capital and continue to do so until not one jot is left to them. Therefore, neither can our urban policy be said to have deviated to the Right. [9]

It is, therefore, a matter of distinguishing between the economic expropriation and the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Only the latter should be carried out to the end, while the former, if not contained within clear limits, risks undermining the development of the productive forces. Unlike “political capital,” the bourgeoisie’s economic capital should not be subject to total expropriation, at least as long as it serves the development of the national economy and thus, indirectly, the cause of socialism.

After taking off in the second half of the 1920s, this model revealed a remarkable continuity and offered great economic vitality before 1949 to the “liberated” areas governed by the communists and then the People’s Republic of China as a whole. The dramatic moment of breakthrough came with the Great Leap Forward of 1958–59 and with the Cultural Revolution unleashed in 1966. The coexistence of different forms of ownership and the use of material incentives were radically thrown on the table. There was an illusion of accelerating economic development through calls for mass mobilisation and mass enthusiasm, but this approach and these attempts failed miserably. Moreover, the struggle of everyone against everyone heightened the anarchy in factories and production sites.

The anarchy was so widespread and deep-rooted that it did not disappear immediately with the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping. For some time, customs continued in the public sector as described by a witness and Western scholar, “even the last attendant […], if he wants to, can decide to do nothing, stay home for a year or two and still receive his salary at the end of the month.” The “culture of laziness” also infected the expanding private sector of the economy. “The former employees of the State […] arrive late, then they read the newspaper, go to the canteen a half-hour early, leave the office an hour early,” and they were often absent for family reasons, for example, “because my wife is sick.” And the executives and technicians who tried to introduce discipline and efficiency into the workplace were forced to face not only resistance and the moral outrage of the employees (who considered it infamy to impose a fine on an absent worker caring for his wife), but sometimes even threats and violence from below. [10]

Thus, there was a paradox. After distinguishing itself for decades for its peculiar history and its commitment to stimulating production through competition not only between individuals but also between different forms of ownership, the China that arose from the Cultural Revolution resembled the Soviet Union to an extraordinary degree in its last years of existence: the socialist principle of compensation based on the amount and quality of work delivered was substantially liquidated, and disaffection, disengagement, absenteeism and anarchy reigned in the workplace. Before being ousted from power, the “Gang of Four” attempted to justify the economic stagnation, debating the populist reason for a socialism that is poor but beautiful, the populist “socialism” that in the early years of Soviet Russia was dear to Pierre Pascal, the fervent Catholic whom we already know.

Then populism became the target of Deng Xiaoping’s criticism. He called on the Marxists to realise “that poverty is not socialism, that socialism means eliminating poverty.” He wanted one thing to be absolutely clear: “Unless you are developing the productive forces and raising people’s living standards, you cannot say you are building socialism.” No, “there can be no communism with pauperism, or socialism with pauperism. So to get rich is no sin.” [11] Deng Xiaoping had the historic merit of understanding that socialism had nothing to do with the more or less egalitarian distribution of poverty and privation. In the eyes of Marx and Engels, socialism was superior to capitalism not only because it ensured a more equitable distribution of resources but also, and especially, because it ensured a faster and more equal development of social wealth, and to achieve this goal, socialism stimulated competition by affirming and putting into practice the principle of remuneration according to the quantity and quality of work delivered.

Deng Xiaoping’s reforms reintroduced in China the model that we already know, although giving it new coherence and radicalism. The fact remains that the coexistence of different forms of ownership was counterbalanced by strict state control directed by the Communist Party of China. If we analyse the history of China, not beginning with the founding of the People’s Republic, but as early as the first “liberated” areas being set up and governed by communists, we will find out that it was not China of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, but China in the years of the Great Leap Forward and of the Cultural Revolution that was the exception or the anomaly.

Marxism or Populism? A Confrontation of Long Duration

Well beyond the borders of Russia and China, during the twentieth century and even now, populism influenced and still negatively influences the reading of the great revolutions that radically changed the face of the world. In this sense, we can say that, after having played a part as an essential feature of the twentieth century, the conflict between populism and Marxism is far from over.

Pascal condemned the abandonment of war communism, or the society in which there are “only the poor and the very poor,” and that is precisely why it was free of the tensions and rifts caused by inequality and social polarisation. The attitude taken by fervent Christians at that time in Moscow was not in any way confined to Soviet Russia. Traces of populism can be felt in the young Ernst Bloch. In 1918, when he published the first edition of Spirit of Utopia, he called on the Soviets to effect a “transformation of power into love” and to put an end not only to “every private economy,” but also to any “money economy” and with it the “mercantile values that consecrate whatever is most evil in man.” [12] Here the populist trend was intertwined with Messianism: no attention was paid to the task of rebuilding the economy and developing the productive forces in a country destroyed by war and having a history marked by recurrent and devastating famines. The horror at the carnage of World War I stimulated the dream of a community that is satisfied with the scarce material resources available and that only in this circumstance, freed from worrying about wealth and power, can people live shielded from the “money economy” and instead live in “love.”

When he published the second edition of Spirit of Utopia in 1923, Bloch believed that it was appropriate to delete the populist and Messianic passages, as previously mentioned. However, the state of mind and the vision that inspired them did not vanish either in the Soviet Union or outside of it. The transition to NEP found perhaps its most passionate or sentimental critics among the militants as well as among Western communist leaders. As for them, in the “Political Report” he presented to the XI Congress of the Communist Party held on March 27, 1922, Lenin sarcastically wrote:

Seeing that we were withdrawing, some of them scattered, childishly and shamefully, even with tears, as happened at the last large session of the Executive Committee of the International Communist Party. Motivated by the best communist sentiments and the most ardent communist aspirations, some friends burst into tears. [13]

Antonio Gramsci had a very different attitude as early as the October Revolution, which he expressed in this way:

Collectivism of poverty and suffering will be the principle. But those very conditions of poverty and suffering would be inherited from a bourgeois regime. Capitalism could not immediately do more than collectivism did in Russia. Today, it would do even less, because it would have immediately run afoul of an unhappy, frantic proletariat, now unable to bear for others to endure the pain and bitterness that the economic hardship would have brought. […] The suffering that will come after peace will be tolerated only because the workers feel that it is their will and their determination to work to suppress it as quickly as possible. [14]

In this context, the war communism about to prevail in Soviet Russia was at the same time legitimised tactically and delegitimised strategically, legitimised immediately and delegitimised with an eye to the future. The “collectivism of poverty and suffering” is justified by the specific conditions prevailing in Russia at the time: capitalism would not be able to do anything better. It was understood, however, that the privation had to be overcome as quickly as possible.

Precisely for this reason, Gramsci had no difficulty in recognising himself in the NEP, the meaning of which he made sharply clear in his October 1926 stance: the reality of the Soviet Union put us in the presence of a phenomenon “never before seen in history.” A politically “dominant” class “as a whole” finds itself “in living conditions inferior to certain elements and strata of the [politically] dominated and dependent class.” The masses of people who continued to suffer a life of hardship were confused by the spectacle of “the NEPman dressed in fur who has at his disposal all the goods of the earth.” And yet this should not constitute grounds for a scandal or feelings of repugnance, because the proletariat, as it cannot gain power, also cannot even keep power if it is not capable of sacrificing individual and immediate interests to the “general and permanent interests of the class.” [15] Those who read the NEP as synonymous with a return to capitalism committed two serious errors: ignoring the issue of the fight against mass poverty and thus the development of the productive forces; they also wrongly identified the economically privileged class and the politically dominant class.

A reading of the NEP not unlike that seen in Gramsci came from another great intellectual of the twentieth century. He was Walter Benjamin, who, after returning from a trip to Moscow in 1927, summed up his impressions:

In a capitalist society, power and money have become of equal dimension. Any given amount of money can be converted into a well-defined portion of power and the exchange value of all power is a calculable entity. […] The Soviet state has interrupted this osmosis of money and power. The Party, of course, reserves power for itself; it does, however, leave the money to the NEPman. [16]

The latter, however, underwent a “terrible social isolation.” For Benjamin, too, there was no correspondence between economic wealth and political power. The NEP had nothing to do with the restoration of bourgeois and capitalist power. Soviet Russia could not help but engage in the reconstruction of the economy and the development of the productive forces. The task was made more difficult by the persistence of customs that were not suited to a modern industrial society. In Moscow, Benjamin was a direct witness to a very instructive display:

Not even in the Russian capital is there, in spite of all the “rationalisation,” a sense of the value of time. The “trud,” the Trade Union Institute of Work, by means of wall posters, waged […] a campaign for punctuality […] “time is money”; to give credence to such a strange rallying cry, they had to draw on Lenin’s authority in the posters. So, this mentality is foreign to Russians. Their playful instinct prevails over everything […] If, for example, a movie scene is being shot in the street, they forget where they are going and why, they queue up behind the crew for hours and arrive at work befuddled. [17]

Pascal also witnessed the developments in Soviet Russia, forming an opinion of strong condemnation: now in Moscow and in the rest of the country, everything revolved around the question of whether “industrialisation must be a little faster or a little slower,” around the problem of “how to get the necessary money.” The consequences of this new approach, which put aside “every revolutionary purpose,” were devastating: yes, “on the material level we approach Americanisation, a great development of national wealth,” but at what cost? “The docile mass became a slave to it, to its work, to its exploitation. It produces, there is an economic recovery, but the revolution is well buried.” [18]

The great Austrian writer Joseph Roth, not involved in the communist movement, reached the same conclusions. When visiting the land of the Soviets between September 1926 and January 1927, he expressed his disappointment at the “Americanisation” in progress. “They despise America, meaning big soulless capitalism; the country where gold is God. But they admire America, meaning progress, the electric iron, the hygiene and the waterworks.” In conclusion, “This is a modern Russia, technically advanced, with American ambitions. This is no longer Russia.” [19] The “spiritual void” had opened in a country that initially aroused many hopes. [20] The popular inspiration for these positions was obvious: as expressions of betrayal of the original revolutionary inspiration and of a drift toward a philistine and vulgar worldview, they pointed to the desire to improve living conditions and the pursuit of comfort (or of a minimum of comfort).

As Pascal did, Roth also expressed his distaste for the “Americanisation” under way. These were the years in which the Bolsheviks engaged in the reconstruction and development of the economy to try to learn from the most advanced capitalist countries and the United States in particular. In March and April 1918 (“The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power”) Lenin noted that “compared to workers in the most advanced nations, the Russian is a bad worker”; therefore, he must “learn to work,” assimilating critically the “rich scientific achievements” of the “Taylor system” developed and implemented in the North American Republic. [21] On the same wavelength, Bukharin proclaimed in 1923, “We need to add Americanism to Marxism.” [22] The following year, Stalin made a significant appeal to the Bolshevik cadres: if they really wanted to be at the height of “principles of Leninism,” they should try to weave “Russian revolutionary impulses” with “the practical American approach.” [23] “Americanism” and “the practical American approach” were here synonyms for the development of productive forces and the escape from poverty or scarcity: socialism is not the equal sharing of poverty or deprivation, but the definitive and widespread overcoming of these conditions.

From outside of Russia, Gramsci countered populism with particular rigour and consistency. As we know, from the beginning he stressed the need for a rapid end to this “collectivism of poverty and suffering.” It was a political position with a wider theoretical vision as its foundation. L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) — the weekly he founded in the wake of the October Revolution in Russia — plus the movement to occupy factories in Italy, asked the revolutionary workers to fight for wages and thus for a more equitable distribution of social wealth, but also and above all to be “producers” taking “control of production” and the “development of work plans.” In doing so, in order also to promote the development of the productive forces, the revolutionary workers must know how to make use of the “most advanced industrial technology” that “(in a sense) is independent from the method of appropriating the assets produced,” that is, it got its autonomy from capitalism or socialism. [24] Not coincidentally, between October and November 1919, L’Ordine Nuovo devoted several articles to Taylorism, analysed beginning with the latest analysis of the distinction between “rich scientific achievements” (mentioned by Lenin) and their capitalist use. [25] In this sense, the Prison Notebooks later observed that already L’Ordine Nuovo had claimed its “Americanism.” [26] It was the Americanism that Lenin, Bukharin and Stalin directly or indirectly referenced.

And it should be clear that this is an Americanism that does not in any way rule out a judgment and clear condemnation of US capitalism and imperialism. In Gramsci’s eyes, this was a country that, despite its professions of democratic faith, imposed slavery on blacks for a long time and that, even after the Civil War, was characterised by a terrorist regime of white supremacy, as shown by “lynching of blacks by crowds incited by atrocious merchants dispossessed of human flesh.” [27] That terrorism was also manifested in terms of foreign policy: The North American Republic threatened to deprive the Russians of the grain necessary for their survival and, therefore, to starve to death the people who felt the pull of the October Revolution and were tempted to follow its example.

The “Americanism” understood as attention reserved for the problem of development of the productive forces pushed Gramsci, in the early 1930s, to greet enthusiastically the launching of the first Soviet five-year plan: the economic and industrial development of the country that emerged from the October Revolution was proof that, far from stimulating “fatalism and passivity,” in fact, “the concept of historical materialism […] gives rise to a flowering of initiatives and enterprises that astonishes many observers.” [28] Materialism and Marxism showed the ability to influence reality concretely, not only inspiring revolutions like the one that occurred in Russia but also promoting the growth of social wealth and freeing the masses from centuries of poverty and deprivation.

More disappointed than ever, even outraged by the developments in Soviet Russia, however, was Simone Weil, who in 1932 proceeded to a final showdown with the country which she had initially looked to with sympathy and hope: Soviet Russia had ended up taking America, American efficiency, productivity and “Taylorism” as its models. There could no longer be any doubts.

The fact that Stalin, on this issue, which is at the centre of the conflict between capital and labour, has abandoned the views of Marx and has been seduced by the capitalist system in its most perfect form, shows that the USSR is still quite far from having a working-class culture. [29]

In fact, the position taken here had nothing to do with Marx and Engels: according to the Communist Manifesto, capitalism is destined to be overcome because, after developing the productive forces with unprecedented scope and speed, it became an obstacle to their further development, as confirmed by the recurrent crises of overproduction. This deeply Christian French philosopher, also inclined to populism, recognised the country that emerged from the October Revolution only up to the stage of more or less equal distribution of poverty or deprivation; later, in addition to Soviet Russia, Weil also broke with Marx and Engels.

Global Inequality and Inequality in China

Populism continues to make its presence felt more than ever in the dismissive judgment that the Western left passes on today’s China. It is true that the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping spurred an economic boom unprecedented in history, with hundreds and thousands of millions of people liberated from poverty, but this is basically irrelevant for the populists.

Did the elimination of desperate and mass poverty happen at the same time as the worsening inequality? The answer to that question is less obvious than it may appear at first glance. Throughout history, the communist parties have won power only in countries that are relatively undeveloped economically and technologically; for this reason, they had to fight against not one but two types of inequality: 1) inequality existing on the global scale between the most and least developed countries; and 2) the inequality existing within each individual country. Only if we take into account both sides of the struggle can we adequately take stock of policy reform. With regard to the first type of inequality, there are no doubts: internationally, global inequality is levelling out sharply. Yes, China is gradually catching up to the most advanced Western capitalist countries. It is a turning point!

In the last years of the twentieth century, a prominent American political scientist noted that if the process of industrialisation and modernisation that started with Deng Xiaoping is to be successful, “China’s emergence as a major power will dwarf any comparable phenomena during the last half of the second millennium.” [30] About 15 years later, again with reference to the prodigious development of this great Asian country, a no less illustrious British historian noted, “What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance.” [31] The two authors cited here share the same, emphatic, view of timing. About five centuries ago, the discovery/conquest of America took place. In other words, the extraordinarily rapid rise of China is ending or promises to end the “Colombian epoch,” a period characterised by extreme inequality in international relations: the distinct lead held by the West in economics, technology and military might has allowed it to subdue and plunder the rest of the world for centuries.

The fight against global inequality is part of the struggle against colonialism and neo-colonialism. Mao understood this well and, in a speech given on September 16, 1949 (“The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History”) warned that Washington wants China reduced to relying “on US flour, in other words, to become a US colony.” [32] In fact, the newly founded People’s Republic of China became the target of a deadly embargo imposed by the United States. Its objectives are clear from studies done by the Truman administration and the confessions and statements of its leaders. It started from the premise that the type of measure that could defeat and oust the communist government “is economic rather than military or political.” And so, they needed to ensure that China suffered or continued to suffer the scourge of a “general standard of living around and below the subsistence level”; Washington felt committed to causing “economic backwardness” and “cultural lag” and leading a country of “desperate needs” to “a catastrophic economic situation,” “toward disaster” and “collapse.” [33] At the White House, one president succeeds another, but the embargo remains, and it is so ruthless as to include medicines, tractors and fertilisers. [34] In short: in the early 1960s, a collaborator of the Kennedy administration, Walt W. Rostow, pointed out that, because of this policy, the economic development of China was delayed for at least “tens of years.” [35]

There is no doubt: Deng Xiaoping’s reforms greatly stimulated the fight against global inequality and thus placed the economic (and political) independence of China on a solid footing. High technology is no longer a monopoly of the West, either. Now we see the prospect of overcoming the international division of labour, which for centuries has subjected people outside the West to a servile or semi-servile condition or relegated them in the bottom of the labour market. It is thus outlining a worldwide revolution that the Western left does not seem to be noticing. Rationally, they consider a strike obtaining better wages or better working conditions in a factory as an integral part of the process of emancipation, or they discuss it in the context of the patriarchal division of labour. It is very strange, then, that the struggle to end the oppressive international division of labour that was established through armed force during the “Colombian epoch” is considered something alien to the process of emancipation.

In any case, those who condemn China today as a whole due to its inequalities would do well to consider that Deng Xiaoping also promoted his reform policies as a part of the fight against planetary inequality. In a conversation on October 10, 1978, he noted that the technology “gap” was expanding compared to more advanced countries; these were developing “with tremendous speed,” while China could not keep up in any way. [36] And, 10 years later, “High technology is advancing at a tremendous pace”; so that there was a risk that “the gap between China and other countries will grow wider.” [37]

Quantitative and Qualitative Inequality

Drawing attention to the importance of global inequality does not mean losing sight of the second type of inequality. So, what is happening with China’s existing inequality? Have the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping escalated it to an intolerable point?

Before answering these questions, we should make a preliminary observation: both the Soviet NEP and the new Chinese course were preceded by poverty and shortages acute and widespread enough to cause large-scale starvation; this situation had to be ended and a repetition had to be prevented, and this marked the turning point within Soviet Russia and China. But how is inequality fought in such a desperate economic situation? In the quantitative sense, the distribution of the scarce available resources can be inspired by emphasising egalitarianism, so as to try to feed individuals, families and villages uniformly; however, the overall inadequacy of the available resources does not change, nor does the differing degree of need (the weakest individuals succumb more easily than the others); in such conditions, starvation can be contained but not eliminated. Well, the piece of bread that allows the most fortunate to survive, as modest and reduced in terms of quantity as it may be, nevertheless sanctions an absolute inequality in terms of quality, the absolute inequality that exists between life and death. In other words, when scarcity reaches an extreme level, the struggle against inequality can only be tackled effectively by focusing on the development of the productive forces. That is, even with regard to the second type of inequality, the inequality within a single country, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms eliminated once and for all the absolute qualitative inequality inherent in starvation and the risk of starvation.

Of course, once this scourge has been ended once and for all, it is time to address the problem of the struggle against quantitative inequality, as well as to achieve what Deng Xiaoping called “common prosperity.” [38] There is no doubt: the achievement of this goal is still far away. According to the Gini coefficient, which measures income distribution within a single country, social polarisation has reached alarming levels in China. We should of course pay close attention to the Gini coefficient, but without overemphasising its significance. Despite its utility, it has fundamental limitations: not only does it not distinguish between the two types of inequality (the global and the local), but it also tells us nothing about the underlying trends in local inequality in a given country.

The changes that have occurred in recent decades in China might be illustrated with a metaphor. There are two trains running from a station called “underdevelopment” and heading towards a station called “development.” One of the two trains is very fast, while the other train is slower: consequently, the distance between the two increases progressively. This discrepancy can be explained easily if you keep in mind the size of continental China and its tormented history: the coastal regions, which already had infrastructure (albeit elementary), enjoying easier access and the possibility of trade with developed areas, are in a better situation than the traditionally less developed regions that are landlocked and have as neighbours countries and areas marked by economic stagnation. It is clear that the distance between the two trains travelling at different speeds widens, but we should not lose sight of three fundamental points: in the first place, the direction (the development) is the same; second, today some interior regions are seeing their income grow faster than that of the coastal regions; third, because of the impressive urbanisation process (which pushes the population to the most developed regions and areas), the faster train tends to carry more passengers. Not surprisingly, if we take China as a whole, we see a steady and sizable growth of the middle class, as well as a wider diffusion of social protection and features of the welfare state.

However, the implicit warning in the values reported by the Gini coefficient still applies: if not contained in a proper and timely manner, quantitative inequality can also result in social and political destabilisation.

Wealth and Political Power: An Adversarial Relationship

Social and political destabilisation can also come from another front. How long will the new rich continue to accept a situation in which they can quietly enjoy their economic wealth (accumulated legitimately) but cannot turn it into political power?

Mao was aware of this problem. In 1958, he responded to criticism from the Soviet Union regarding the persistence of capitalist areas in the Chinese economy by saying, “There are still capitalists in China, but the state is under the leadership of the Communist Party.” [39] Almost 30 years later, to be exact, in August 1985, Deng Xiaoping made a remark we should ponder: “Perhaps Lenin had a good idea when he adopted the New Economic Policy.” [40] Here is an indirect comparison between the Soviet NEP and the reform policies adopted by Deng Xiaoping in China. It is obvious what the two have in common: total political expropriation of the bourgeoisie does not equal total economic expropriation. Of course there are also differences. The NEP involved a very small part of the private economy and was primarily intended as a temporary “retreat.” In other words, what was driving the Soviet NEP was the need to find some way out of an economically hopeless situation. There was no comprehensive reflection on which economic model to pursue: not surprisingly, according to Benjamin’s testimony, which we have already seen, the rich NEP man, who was also expected to contribute to developing the productive forces, was facing a “terrible social isolation.” The policy adopted by Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, leaves behind a clear historic toll: experience has shown that the totally collectivist economy erases all material incentives and motives for competition, paving the way (as previously seen) for mass disaffection and absenteeism; moreover, the populism that saw wealth and gain as such a sin hindered the development of entrepreneurship and technological innovation.

While initiating his policies of reform and openness, Deng was aware of their inherent risks. In October 1978, he cautioned, “We shall not allow a new bourgeoisie to take shape.” This goal is not contradicted by tolerance granted to individual capitalists. Of course, they must be given much consideration. However, one point is constant: “the struggle against these individuals is different from the struggle of one class against another, which occurred in the past (these individuals cannot form a cohesive and overt class).” [41] Although there are residues of the old class struggle, on the whole, with the strengthening of the revolution and the communist party’s power, a new situation was created. “Is it possible that a new bourgeoisie will emerge? A handful of bourgeois elements may appear, but they will not form a class,” especially as there is a “state apparatus” that is “powerful” and able to control them. [42] Besides the power of the state, ideology plays an important role: many of the new rich, although not communists, feel patriotic and share the horror at the “century of humiliation” that began with the Opium Wars and ended with the victory of the revolution, so these new rich also share the dream of “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

And yet, precisely as a result of the success of policy reforms and the extraordinary economic growth of China, the number of millionaires and billionaires is growing dramatically; will the wealth accumulated by the new capitalists have an influence on politics? It is in light of this concern that you may fully comprehend the ongoing campaign against corruption. The clean-up process does not aim only to consolidate social consensus on the Communist Party of China and the government; it means to implement Deng Xiaoping’s recommendation and thus prevent the “bourgeois elements” from forming a class that is ready to take power.

The Sights of the West: “Democratisation” or “Plutocratisation” of China?

The capitalists who were established and continue to get established can be a real danger only if they ally themselves with imperialist circles or pro-imperialists committed to achieving a “colour revolution” even in China. Strengthened by their excessive media power, for a very long time the United States has been trying to consolidate their world hegemony in order to impose a “democracy” on China in the time and manner Washington dictates.

In this behaviour, the United States shows ignorance of the lessons offered by their own national history and liberalism, that is, from the school of thought that they claim to represent. In 1787, just before the implementation of the Federal Constitution, Alexander Hamilton explained that limits on power and the establishment of the rule of law had been successful in two “insular” countries, Great Britain and the United States, thanks to the protection given by the ocean and their geopolitical position shielding them from threats from rival powers. If the plans for a federal union had failed and a system of states similar to the one in Europe had formed on its ruins, soon America would have seen a standing army, a strong central power and absolutism regardless. “Thus we should in a little time see established in every part of this country, the same engines of despotism, which have been the scourge of the old world.” [43] Hamilton ascribed so much weight to geopolitical security in creating a system based on the rule of law that he wrote how if, instead of being an island surrounded and protected by the sea, Britain had been placed on the continent, it “would in all probability, be at this day a victim to the absolute power of a single man,” just like the other European continental powers. [44] On the other hand, according to Hamilton, whenever “the preservation of the public peace” is threatened either by “external attacks” or by “internal convulsions,” even a country like the United States, which also enjoys an extremely fortunate geopolitical position, is authorised to resort to a strong power “without limitations” and without “constitutional shackles.” [45]

In fact, even protected by the Atlantic and the Pacific, every time it has felt, whether rightly or wrongly, in danger, the North American Republic has more or less drastically strengthened executive power and more or less heavily restricted freedom of association and expression. This was the case in the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its followers in America were affected by the harsh measures provided by the Alien and Sedition Acts) and during the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the situation created by the attack on the Twin Towers. To give an example: What happened to traditional liberal freedoms after the passage, on May 16, 1918, of the Espionage Act? Based on this act, a person could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for having expressed:

[…] any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag […] or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States. [46]

If the leaders in Washington were really serious about the banner of democracy that never tires of waving, they would seek in some way to reinforce geopolitical peace and a sense of security in the countries they claim to want to see become democratic. At the end of the Cold War (as was calmly acknowledged by a scholar who was an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney), the lone superpower used its naval and airforces to violate “China’s airspace and territorial waters with little fear of harassment and interdiction” unscrupulously and with impunity. The great Asian country was powerless at that time. Today, the situation has changed significantly. The United States is, however, still able to control the channels of maritime communications. Therefore, “China is already vulnerable to the effects of a naval blockade, and it will become even more so as its economy grows”; in fact, “its fate could depend on American forbearance.” [47] And it is this situation that the United States strives to perpetuate. All this is not conducive to the development of the rule of law.

The campaign of the West for the “democratisation” of China is taking place just as many political analysts are forced to see the decline of democracy in the West. A few years before the economic crisis, one could read in the International Herald Tribune that the United States had become a “plutocracy”; now the forces of private and corporate wealth have already taken hold of political institutions, while the rest of the population is cut off. [48] Nowadays, on the left as well as among those completely opposed to the Marxist tradition, it is common to read that in the West, and primarily in the United States, plutocracy has taken the place of democracy. We can conclude that the on-going campaign for the “democratisation” of China is actually a campaign for its plutocratisation, to turn in the opposite direction the “political expropriation” of the bourgeoisie that has taken place since 1949 in the big Asian country.

A second campaign, as usual, conducted by Washington and Brussels, requires substantial liquidation of the state-owned sector and the public economy which play such an important role in the fight against two great inequalities: on the international scene, this sector is making a major contribution to China’s technological development, which is increasingly closing the gap with the advanced countries; internally, the state-owned sector and the public economy reduce inequalities between different regions, accelerating the development of China’s less developed regions, which are now growing at a much faster pace than the coastal regions. If this second campaign launched by the West had been successful, the “economic” expropriation of the bourgeoisie, already reduced, would have been cancelled altogether, so that the bourgeoisie could enormously increase its influence in society and again pave the way for conquest of political power.

It is very clear which weapons will be used to fight in the country that has emerged from the greatest anti-colonial revolution in history to engage in a long-term process of building a post-capitalist and socialist society. Which side will the Western left take?

Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles

Is China Capitalist? — Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles

Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles

Article 2 of 10

Marxists Internet Archive

By Deng Xiaoping

Originally published at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1979/115.htm

Deng Xiaoping

1979

Published: March 30, 1979
Translated by: Unknown
Source: Deng Xiaoping Works
Transcription for MIA: Joonas Laine

Comrades,

This forum on the principles for the Party’s theoretical work has been in session for some time. With the meeting drawing to an end, the Central Committee has asked me to set forth a few views on the subject.

I. THE PRESENT SITUATION AND OUR TASKS

This meeting is being held in accordance with a decision of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. That session and the Central Working Conference prior to it confirmed the important work of the Central Committee since the smashing of the Gang of Four. Those two meetings decided that the nationwide mass movement to expose and criticize Lin Biao and the Gang of Four could be considered successfully completed and that, beginning from this year, the Party must shift the focus of its work to socialist modernization. The Third Plenary Session solved a series of major problems left over from the recent history of the Party in order to rally the whole Party and army and our people of all nationalities to march forward towards the grand objective — the four modernizations. Both meetings were of great significance in the history of the Party. At this forum on the principles for theoretical work convened after the Third Plenary Session, the participants have spoken frankly and put forward a number of questions deserving our attention and study. On the whole, the meeting has been fruitful. As I said at the Central Working Conference, it is essential that we emancipate our minds, use our heads, seek truth from facts and unite as one and look to the future. We must continue to follow these principles unswervingly. The important thing now is to go a step further in popularizing and applying them by proceeding from reality and linking them closely with the present situation and our tasks.

We need to make an adequate assessment of all aspects of the situation since the toppling of the Gang of Four, and particularly since the Third Plenary Session. In the two and a half years since the overthrow of the Gang, we have destroyed most of its counter-revolutionary political forces and readjusted and strengthened our leading bodies at various levels. Leadership in the Party, the government and the army is now mainly in the hands of cadres worthy of the people’s trust, and most of the work in these three spheres has returned to normal. This is a momentous, hard-won achievement. We have freed ourselves from the effects of the decade of turmoil created by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four and secured a political situation marked by stability and unity; this situation is both a prerequisite and a guarantee for our socialist modernization. All of us present here, all members of our Party, and especially those in leading posts, should treasure this political situation and lay great stress on preserving it. Stability and unity, of course, must be based on principle. As regards our ideological and political orientation, it can be said that through our exposure and criticism of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four and, in particular, through our discussions of ideological and theoretical problems at the Central Working Conference and the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee this past winter, we have basically returned to the correct path of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, which we mean to follow at all times. China’s economy has taken a turn for the better and production has been rapidly restored in all sectors. This political and economic situation has made it possible for the whole Party to begin shifting the focus of its work to socialist modernization this year. This is a great turning point in China’s history. Although we have been engaged in socialist construction for many years, we have good reason to consider this the beginning of a new phase of historical development. Events of the past three months have proved conclusively that the guiding principles laid down at the Third Plenary Session are correct and enjoy the firm support of the whole Party and people. Throughout the country, stability and unity are being consolidated and a buoyant democratic life is developing both inside and outside the Party. Our Party’s fine traditions have been largely revived, much progress has been made in emancipating thinking inside and outside the Party and the work style of seeking truth from facts is becoming ever more widespread. Furthermore, the implementation of the Party’s policies has aroused the enthusiasm of millions upon millions of people both inside and outside its ranks, and in the rural areas the two documents on agriculture adopted at the Third Plenary Session have been warmly received by the cadres and the masses of peasants. The victory in our counter-attack waged in self-defence on Viet Nam has immensely heightened China’s prestige in the international struggle against hegemonism as well as the prestige of the army among our own people. This counter-attack has demonstrated that our army still deserves to be called the valiant and battle-tested People’s Liberation Army, and that it remains the Great Wall of defence of our socialist modernization.

Furthermore, it must be stressed that we have done a lot of diplomatic work in the past two years and have secured an excellent international environment for the realization of China’s four modernizations. Judging from the international reaction to our defensive counter-attack on Viet Nam, we have the genuine sympathy of the vast majority of people. It is now even clearer to everyone how brilliant and far-sighted was the strategy of differentiating the three worlds formulated by Comrade Mao Zedong in the evening of his life. It is also clearer how brilliant and far-sighted were his policy decisions on this issue, namely, that China should side with the third-world countries and strengthen its unity with them, try to win over the second-world countries for a concerted effort against hegemonism, and establish normal diplomatic relations with the United States and Japan. This strategic principle and these policies have been invaluable in rallying the world’s people to oppose hegemonism, changing the world political balance, frustrating the Soviet hegemonists’ arrogant plan to isolate China internationally, improving China’s international environment, and heightening its international prestige.

In short, if we compare the country today with what it was at the time when Lin Biao and the Gang of Four ran riot, we see that radical changes have taken place in every respect. Under the correct leadership of the Central Committee, the Party, the army and the people are once again filled with confident hope for the future of our great socialist motherland. Anyone who fails to recognize that is bound to make major errors.

But at the same time we are confronted with some rather serious difficulties, and failure to recognize that too will likewise lead to major errors. First of all, we must make a sober appraisal of our country’s economy, which has long suffered damage from Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, and reach a common view of the subject. In the past decade we have failed to rid the economy of the serious imbalances which have made it impossible to achieve a steady and reliable high rate of growth. It appears that in the general process of advance, our economy — that is, our agriculture, industry, capital construction, transport services, domestic and foreign trade, and banking and finance — needs a period of readjustment in order to change from varying degrees of imbalance to relative balance. The present readjustment is different from that of the early 1960s. Being made at a time when the economy is growing, it aims to lay a solid foundation for the four modernizations. However, it is necessary to make a partial retreat. Some unrealistically high targets, which it would do more harm than good to aim at, must be resolutely lowered, and some ill-managed enterprises which run at a heavy loss must be consolidated within a certain time span or even temporarily shut down so that consolidation can be carried out. We must take one step back in order to take two steps forward. At the same time, in order to achieve the four modernizations, we must be earnest in solving a variety of problems related to our economic structure, and this too involves an extensive and complex readjustment. If we can smoothly carry out our tasks for 1979, the first year of readjustment, we will have made a big advance, a good beginning in shifting the focus of our work.

When there are disproportions in the economy, correct readjustment must be made in order for it to make steady progress; this fact is borne out by our historical experience in the economic readjustments of the years immediately following Liberation and of the early 1960s. We must therefore tell the people throughout China that no headway can be made unless such a readjustment is carried out, and that while the process is going on everyone must have full confidence in, and comply with, the arrangements made by the Party and the government. It should be recognized that, compared with the readjustment in the early sixties, the current one has many more conditions in its favour, but that it also faces some difficulties. During the readjustment of the sixties, the leadership at all levels and the sense of organization and discipline both inside and outside the Party were better than now, when there are certain elements of political and ideological instability. At present the various localities face the enormous task of clearing away the problems left behind by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four after their decade of trouble-making. Their poisonous influence — reflected particularly in factionalism and anarchism — has begun to spread again among a small section of people, along with doubts about socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Party’s leadership and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. And some of our cadres, faced with entirely new historical tasks, have not sufficiently freed themselves from old ideas, nor are they good at studying the new situations and solving the new problems. Moreover, we are still plagued by the force of habit of the small producer and by the habits of bureaucracy. It is quite obvious that under these circumstances extensive readjustment may be accompanied by small or big disturbances. We can avoid them only if we have strong, centralized leadership and a strict sense of organization and discipline, only if we strengthen our efforts to maintain public and political order and to educate people in this regard, and only if we firmly improve the style of work in the Party and take further steps to restore its fine traditions of seeking truth from facts, following the mass line and working hard. Otherwise, these disturbances could become serious obstacles to our modernization programme at its very outset. The Central Committee has now decided to set up a Financial and Economic Commission, headed by Comrades Chen Yun and Li Xiannian, which will give unified direction to financial and economic work and to the current readjustment. The Central Committee, the State Council and the leading bodies in various localities have taken, and will continue to take, measures to strengthen public order, consolidate socialist legality and ensure stability and unity while resolutely promoting democracy. Discipline inspection commissions have been established by the Central Committee and local organizations of the Party. Their main task is to help the Central Committee and the local Party committees to improve their style of work. We have full confidence in our ability to surmount the temporary obstacles to our advance and to lead the Party and people to victory in our modernization drive.

What is our main task at present and for a fairly long time to come? To put it briefly, it is to carry out the modernization programme. The destiny of our country and people hinges on its success. Given our present conditions, it will be precisely by succeeding in the four modernizations that we will be adhering to Marxism and holding high the great banner of Mao Zedong Thought. And if we fail to proceed from this reality and to concentrate on the four modernizations, it will mean that we are departing from Marxism while indulging in empty talk about it. At the present time, socialist modernization is of supreme political importance for us, because it represents the most fundamental interest of our people. Today every member of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League and every patriotic citizen must devote all his energies to the modernization drive and do all he can to overcome every difficulty under the unified leadership of the Party and government.

II. THE NECESSITY OF UPHOLDING THE FOUR CARDINAL PRINCIPLES IN THE DRIVE FOR THE FOUR MODERNIZATIONS

To achieve the four modernizations and make China a powerful socialist country before the end of this century will be a gigantic task.

In our democratic revolution, we had to act in accordance with China’s specific situation and follow the path discovered by Comrade Mao Zedong of encircling the cities from the rural areas. Now, in our national construction, we must likewise act in accordance with our own situation and find a Chinese path to modernization.

At least two important features of our situation must be taken into account in order to carry out the four modernizations in China.

First, we are starting from a weak base. The damage inflicted over a long period by the forces of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism reduced China to a state of poverty and backwardness. However, since the founding of the People’s Republic we have achieved signal successes in economic construction, established a fairly comprehensive industrial system and trained a body of technical personnel. From Liberation to last year, the average annual rate of growth in our industry and agriculture was fairly high by world standards. Nonetheless, because of our low starting point, China is still one of the world’s poor countries. Our scientific and technological forces are far from adequate. Generally speaking, we are 20 to 30 years behind the advanced countries in the development of science and technology. In the past three decades our economy has gone through reversals. The havoc wrought by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four in the decade 1966-76 has had particularly grave consequences. Our present readjustment is aimed precisely at eliminating those consequences.

Second, we have a large population but not enough arable land. Of China’s population of more than 900 million, 80 per cent are peasants. While there are advantages to having a large population, there are disadvantages as well. When production is insufficiently developed, it poses serious problems with regard to food, education and employment. We must greatly increase our efforts in family planning; but even if the population does not grow for a number of years, we will still have a population problem for a certain period. Our vast territory and rich natural resources are big assets. But many of these resources have not yet been surveyed and exploited, so they do not constitute actual means of production. Despite China’s vast territory, the amount of arable land is limited, and neither this fact nor the fact that we have a large, mostly peasant population can be easily changed. This is a distinctive characteristic which we must take into account in carrying out our modernization programme.

To accomplish modernization of a Chinese type, we must proceed from China’s special characteristics. For example, modern production requires only a small number of people, while our population is enormous. How shall we reconcile these two facts? Unless we take all factors into account, we shall be faced for a long time with the social problem of insufficient employment. There are many problems in this connection which Party comrades doing practical and theoretical work must study together. We can surely find ways of solving these problems. But I am not going to discuss them today.

What I want to talk about now is ideological and political questions. The Central Committee maintains that, to carry out China’s four modernizations, we must uphold the Four Cardinal Principles ideologically and politically. This is the basic prerequisite for achieving modernization. The four principles are:

1. We must keep to the socialist road.

2. We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat.

3. We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party.

4. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

As we all know, far from being new, these Four Cardinal Principles have long been upheld by our Party. The Central Committee has been adhering to these principles in all its guidelines and policies adopted since the smashing of the Gang of Four, and especially since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee.

We have criticized, on both a theoretical and a practical level, the phoney, ultra-Left socialism pushed by the Gang of Four, which boils down to universal poverty. We have always followed the principles of socialist public ownership and distribution according to work. We have always followed the policy of developing socialist economic construction mainly through self-reliance-supplemented by foreign aid-and through the study and acquisition of advanced technology from abroad. We have tried to act in accordance with objective economic laws. In other words, we have adhered to scientific socialism.

We have smashed the feudal fascism of the Gang of Four, redressed many injustices, solved many problems left over from the past, consolidated the dictatorship of the proletariat, and restored and extended socialist democracy. And particularly since the Third Plenary Session, we have created a lively political situation of the type Comrade Mao Zedong had long looked forward to in his lifetime.

We have restored the three major features of the Party’s style of work, which had been trampled upon, improved the system of democratic centralism in the Party, and reinforced unity throughout the Party and between the Party and the masses. All this has enormously enhanced the Party’s prestige and strengthened its leadership of the state and society.

We have broken the mental shackles forged by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four and have insisted that leaders should be regarded as human beings, not demigods. We have always tried to understand Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought correctly and as an integral, scientific system, and have always proceeded from reality and sought truth from facts. In other words, we have restored the original features of Mao Zedong Thought and defended the eminence of Comrade Mao Zedong as a great figure in the history of the Chinese revolution and of world revolution.

Nevertheless, the Central Committee believes that today there is still a tremendous need to stress propaganda on the four principles. This need continues because some Party comrades have not yet freed themselves from the evil influence of the ultra-Left ideology of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. A handful have gone so far as to spread rumors and calumnies, attacking the principles and policies adopted by the Central Committee since the toppling of the Gang of Four and particularly since the Third Plenary Session as running counter to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. It is necessary to continue emphasizing the Four Cardinal Principles also because a handful of people in society at large are spreading ideas which are against them or at least cast doubt on them, and because individual Party comrades, instead of recognizing the danger of such ideas, have given them a certain degree of direct or indirect support. Although the number of such persons both inside and outside the Party is very small, we must not overlook their impact on that account. Facts show that they can do great damage to our cause and that they have already done so. Therefore, it is not enough for us to keep on resolutely eliminating the pernicious influence of the Gang of Four, helping those comrades who have been misled by it to come to their senses, and rebutting the reactionary statements of those who slander the Central Committee. While continuing to do all these things, we must also struggle unremittingly against currents of thought which throw doubt on the Four Cardinal Principles. Both the ultra-Left and Right currents of thought run counter to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and obstruct our advance towards modernization. We have conducted massive criticism of the ultra-Left thinking spread by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four (there is no question that this thinking too is in opposition to the four cardinal principles, only it is opposition from the “Left”), and we will go on criticizing it relentlessly. But what I want to emphasize now is criticism of a trend of thought which is sceptical of, or opposed to, our Four Cardinal Principles, but which comes from the Right.

First, we must keep to the socialist road. Some people are now openly saying that socialism in inferior to capitalism. We must demolish this contention. In the first place, socialism and socialism alone can save China — this is the unshakable historical conclusion that the Chinese people have drawn from their own experience in the 60 years since the May 4th Movement [1919]. Deviate from socialism and China will inevitably retrogress to semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism. The overwhelming majority of the Chinese people will never allow such a retrogression. In the second place, although it is a fact that socialist China lags behind the developed capitalist countries in its economy, technology and culture, this is not due to the socialist system but basically to China’s historical development before Liberation; it is the result of imperialism and feudalism. The socialist revolution has greatly narrowed the gap in economic development between China and the advanced capitalist countries. Despite our errors, in the past three decades we have made progress on a scale which old China could not achieve in hundreds or even thousands of years. Our economy has attained a fairly high rate of growth. Now that we have summed up experience and corrected errors, it will undoubtedly develop more rapidly than the economy of any capitalist country, and the development will be steady and sustained. Of course, it will take a considerable period of time for the value of our national output per capita to catch up with and surpass that of the developed capitalist countries. In the third place, let’s ask: Which is better, the socialist system or the capitalist system? Of course the socialist system is better. In certain circumstances, a socialist country may make serious errors, and even experience such major setbacks as the havoc created by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. Naturally, this has its subjective causes, but basically it is due to influences inherited from the old society with its long history, influences that cannot be swept away overnight. Capitalist countries with a long feudal history — such as Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Italy — all experienced major setbacks and reversals at different times (counter-revolutionary restorations occurred in Britain and France while Germany, Japan and Italy had periods of fascist rule). But relying on the socialist system and our own strength, we toppled Lin Biao and the Gang of Four without too much difficulty and quickly set our country back on the road to stability, unity and healthy development. The socialist economy is based on public ownership, and socialist production is designed to meet the material and cultural needs of the people to the maximum extent possible — not to exploit them. These characteristics of the socialist system make it possible for the people of our country to share common political, economic and social ideals and moral standards. All this can never happen in a capitalist society. There is no way by which capitalism can ever eliminate the extraction of super-profits by its millionaires or ever get rid of exploitation, plundering and economic crises. It can never generate common ideals and moral standards or free itself from appalling crimes, moral degradation and despair. On the other hand, capitalism already has a history of several hundred years, and we have to learn from the peoples of the capitalist countries. We must make use of the science and technology they have developed and of those elements in their accumulated knowledge and experience which can be adapted to our use. While we will import advanced technology and other things useful to us from the capitalist countries — selectively and according to plan — we will never learn from or import the capitalist system itself, nor anything repellent or decadent. If the developed capitalist countries were to rid themselves of the capitalist system, their economy and culture would certainly make greater progress. That is why the progressive political forces in the capitalist countries are trying to study and propagate socialism and are fighting to eliminate the injustices and irrational phenomena endemic in capitalist society and to carry out socialist revolution. We should introduce to our people, and particularly to our youth, whatever is progressive and useful in the capitalist countries, and we should criticize whatever is reactionary and decadent.

Second, we must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat. We have conducted a lot of propaganda explaining that the dictatorship of the proletariat means socialist democracy for the people, democracy enjoyed by the workers, peasants, intellectuals and other working people, the broadest democracy that has ever existed in history. In the past, we did not practise democracy enough and we made mistakes. Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, while boosting their so-called “all-round dictatorship”, exercised a feudal fascist dictatorship over the people. We have smashed this dictatorship, which had nothing in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat but was its diametric opposite. Now we have corrected the past mistakes and adopted many measures to constantly expand democracy in the Party and among the people. Without democracy there can be no socialism and no socialist modernization. Of course, democratization, like modernization, must advance step by step. The more socialism develops, the more must democracy develop. This is beyond all doubt. However, the development of socialist democracy in no way means that we can dispense with the proletarian dictatorship over forces hostile to socialism. We are opposed to broadening the scope of class struggle. We do not believe that there is a bourgeoisie within the Party, nor do we believe that under the socialist system a bourgeoisie or any other exploiting class will re-emerge after exploiting classes and the conditions of exploitation have really been eliminated. But we must recognize that in our socialist society there are still counter-revolutionaries, enemy agents, criminals and other bad elements of all kinds who undermine socialist public order, as well as new exploiters who engage in corruption, embezzlement, speculation and profiteering. And we must also recognize that such phenomena cannot be all eliminated for a long time to come. The struggle against these individuals is different from the struggle of one class against another, which occurred in the past (these individuals cannot form a cohesive and overt class). However, it is still a special form of class struggle or a special form of the leftover, under socialist conditions, of the class struggles of past history. It is still necessary to exercise dictatorship over all these anti-socialist elements, and socialist democracy is impossible without it. This dictatorship is an internal struggle and in some cases an international struggle as well; in fact, the two aspects are inseparable. Therefore, so long as class struggle exists and so long as imperialism and hegemonism exist, it is inconceivable that the dictatorial function of the state should wither away, that the standing army, public security organs, courts and prisons should wither away. Their existence is not in contradiction with the democratization of the socialist state, for their correct and effective work ensures, rather than hampers, such democratization. The fact of the matter is that socialism cannot be defended or built up without the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Third, we must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party. Since the inception of the international communist movement, it has been demonstrated that its survival is impossible without the political parties of the proletariat. Moreover, since the October Revolution it has been clear that without the leadership of a Communist Party, the socialist revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist construction would all be impossible. Lenin said: “The dictatorship of the proletariat is a persistent struggle — bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative — against the forces and traditions of the old society…. Without an iron party tempered in the struggle, without a party enjoying the confidence of all that is honest in the given class, without a party capable of watching and influencing the mood of the masses, it is impossible to conduct such a struggle successfully.” This truth enunciated by Lenin remains valid today. In our country, in the 60 years since the May 4th Movement, no political party other than the Communist Party of China has integrated itself with the masses of the working people in the way described by Lenin. Without the Chinese Communist Party there would be no socialist new China. The misdeeds of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four aroused the resolute opposition of the whole Chinese people as well as of the whole Party precisely because Lin Biao and the Gang cast aside the Chinese Communist Party, the long-tested leading force that maintains flesh-and-blood ties with the masses. And if the Party’s prestige among the people throughout the country has been enhanced since the downfall of the Gang of Four, and particularly since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, it is precisely because the entire nation pins all its hopes for the future on leadership by the Party. Although the mass movement of 1976 that culminated in the incident at Tiananmen Square where the people gathered to mourn Premier Zhou Enlai was not led by the Party organizationally, it staunchly supported the Party’s leadership and opposed the Gang of Four. The revolutionary consciousness of the masses in that movement was inseparable from the education given by the Party over the years, and it was precisely members of the Party and the Communist Youth League who were the principal activists among them. Hence we must on no account consider the mass movement at Tiananmen Square to have been a purely spontaneous one like the May 4th Movement, which had no connection with Party leadership. In reality, without the Chinese Communist Party, who would organize the socialist economy, politics, military affairs and culture of China, and who would organize the four modernizations? In the China of today we can never dispense with leadership by the Party and extol the spontaneity of the masses. Party leadership, of course, is not infallible, and the problem of how the Party can maintain close links with the masses and exercise correct and effective leadership is still one that we must seriously study and try to solve. But this can never be made a pretext for demanding the weakening or liquidation of the Party’s leadership. Our Party has made many errors, but each time the errors were corrected by relying on the Party organization, not by discarding it. The present Central Committee is persistent in promoting democracy in the Party and among the people and is determined to correct past errors. Under these circumstances, it would be all the more intolerable to the masses of our people to demand the liquidation or even the weakening of leadership by the Party. In fact, bowing to this demand would only lead to anarchism and the disruption and ruin of the socialist cause. Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, as they put it, kicked aside the Party committees to “make revolution”, and it is clear to all what kind of revolution they made. If today we tried to achieve democracy by kicking aside the Party committees, isn’t it equally clear what kind of democracy we would produce? In 1966 the Chinese economy, having gone through a few years of readjustment, was in a position to develop rapidly. But Lin Biao and the Gang of Four did it grave damage. Only now, under the leadership of the Central Committee and of the State Council, has our economy returned to the road of sound growth. If a handful of people are again allowed to kick aside the Party committees and make trouble, the four modernizations will vanish into thin air. This is not an exaggerated statement I am making to scare people; it is the objective truth corroborated by a wealth of facts.

Fourth, we must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. One of the key points of our struggle against Lin Biao and the Gang of Four was opposition to their falsification, doctoring and fragmenting of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. Since the smashing of the Gang, we have restored the scientific character of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and have guided ourselves by them. This is a resounding victory for the whole Party and people. But a few individuals think otherwise. Either they openly oppose the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism, or else they uphold Marxism-Leninism in word only while in deed opposing Mao Zedong Thought, which represents the integration of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the practice of the Chinese revolution. We must oppose these erroneous trends of thought. Some comrades say that we should uphold “correct Mao Zedong Thought”, but not “erroneous Mao Zedong Thought”. This kind of statement is also wrong. What we consistently take as our guide to action are the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought or, to put it another way, the scientific system formed by these tenets. When it comes to individual theses, neither Marx and Lenin nor Comrade Mao could be immune from misjudgements of one sort or another. But these do not belong to the scientific system formed by the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

Now I want to talk at some length about Mao Zedong Thought. China’s anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolution went through innumerable cruel defeats. Was it not Mao Zedong Thought which enabled the Chinese people — about a quarter of the world’s population — to find the correct road for their revolution, achieve nationwide liberation in 1949, and basically accomplish socialist transformation by 1956? This succession of splendid victories changed not only China’s destiny but the world situation as well. From the international point of view, Mao Zedong Thought is inseparably linked with the struggle against hegemonism; and the practice of hegemonism under the banner of socialism is a most obvious betrayal of socialist principles on the part of a Marxist-Leninist party after it has come to power. As I have already mentioned, in the evening of his life Comrade Mao Zedong formulated the strategy of differentiating the three worlds and personally ushered in a new stage in Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations. By so doing he created new conditions for the development of the worldwide struggle against hegemonism and for the future of world politics. While conducting our modernization programme in the present international environment, we cannot help recalling Comrade Mao’s contributions. Comrade Mao, like any other man, had his defects and made errors. But how can these errors in his illustrious life be put on a par with his immortal contributions to the people? In analysing his defects and errors, we certainly should recognize his personal responsibility, but what is more important is to analyse their complicated historical background. That is the only just and scientific — that is, Marxist — way to assess history and historical figures. Anyone who departs from Marxism on so serious a question will be censured by the Party and the masses. Isn’t that natural?

Mao Zedong Thought has been the banner of the Chinese revolution. It is and always will be the banner of China’s socialist cause and of the anti-hegemonist cause. In our forward march we will always hold the banner of Mao Zedong Thought high.

The cause and the thought of Comrade Mao Zedong are not his alone: they are likewise those of his comrades-in-arms, the Party and the people. His thought is the crystallization of the experience of the Chinese people’s revolutionary struggle over half a century. The case of Karl Marx was similar. In his estimation of Marx, Frederick Engels said that it was only thanks to Marx that the contemporary proletariat became conscious for the first time of its own position and demands and of the conditions necessary for its own liberation. Does this mean that history is made by any one individual? History is made by the people, but this does not preclude the people from respecting an outstanding individual. Of course, this respect must not turn into blind worship. No man should be looked upon as a demigod.

To sum up, in order to achieve the four modernizations we must keep to the socialist road, uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat, uphold the leadership of the Communist Party, and uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The Central Committee considers that we must now repeatedly emphasize the necessity of upholding these four cardinal principles, because certain people (even if only a handful) are attempting to undermine them. In no way can such attempts be tolerated. No Party member and, needless to say, no Party ideological or theoretical worker, must ever waver in the slightest on this basic stand. To undermine any of the four cardinal principles is to undermine the whole cause of socialism in China, the whole cause of modernization.

Is the Central Committee making a mountain out of a molehill when it takes this view of the matter? No, it is not. In the light of current developments the Party has no choice.

In the recent period a small number of persons have provoked incidents in some places. Instead of accepting the guidance, advice, and explanations of leading officials of the Party and government, certain bad elements have raised sundry demands that cannot be met at present or are altogether unreasonable. They have provoked or tricked some of the masses into raiding Party and government organizations, occupying offices, holding sit-down and hunger strikes and obstructing traffic, thereby seriously disrupting production, other work and public order.

Moreover, they have raised such sensational slogans as “Oppose hunger” and “Give us human rights”, inciting people to hold demonstrations and deliberately trying to get foreigners to give worldwide publicity to their words and deeds. There is a so-called China Human Rights Group which has gone so far as to put up big-character posters requesting the President of the United States to “show concern” for human rights in China. Can we permit such an open call for intervention in China’s internal affairs? There is also a so-called Thaw Society which has issued a declaration openly opposing the dictatorship of the proletariat on the ground that it “divides mankind”. Can we tolerate this kind of freedom of speech which flagrantly contravenes the principles of our Constitution?

In Shanghai there is a so-called Democracy Forum. Some of its members have slandered Comrade Mao Zedong and put up big counter-revolutionary posters proclaiming that “proletarian dictatorship is the source of all evils” and that it is necessary to “resolutely and thoroughly criticize the Communist Party of China”. They allege that capitalism is better than socialism and that, therefore, instead of carrying out the four modernizations China should introduce what they call “social reform”, by which they mean that it should turn to capitalism. They publicly declare that their task is to settle accounts with those whom the Gang of Four called the capitalist roaders but whom it had failed to deal with. Some of them have asked to go abroad to seek political asylum, and some have even made clandestine contact with the Kuomintang secret service, plotting sabotage.

It is obvious that these people are out to use any and all means to disrupt our effort to shift the focus of our work to the achievement of modernization. If we ignored these grave problems, our Party and government organs at various levels would be so harassed that they would find it impossible to function. How, then, could we concentrate on the four modernizations?

It is true that there are very few such incidents and that the overwhelming majority of our people disapprove of them. Nevertheless, they merit our serious attention. First, these trouble-makers generally say they speak in the name of democracy, a claim by which people are easily misled. Second, taking advantage of social problems left over from the time when Lin Biao and the Gang of Four held sway, they may deceive some people who have difficulties which the government cannot help to clear up at the moment. Third, the trouble-makers have begun to form all kinds of secret or semi-secret organizations which seek to establish contact with each other on a nationwide scale and at the same time to collaborate with political forces in Taiwan and abroad. Fourth, some of these people work hand in glove with gangster organizations and followers of the Gang of Four, trying to expand the scope of their sabotage. Fifth, they do all they can to use as a pretext — or as a shield — indiscreet statements of one sort or another made by some of our comrades. All this shows that the struggle against these individuals is no simple matter that can be settled quickly. We must strive to clearly distinguish between people (many of them innocent young people) and the counter-revolutionaries and bad elements who have hoodwinked them, and whom we must deal with sternly and according to law. At the same time, we must educate comrades throughout the Party about the necessity of sharpening their vigilance, bearing in mind the interests of the country as a whole and uniting as one under the leadership of the Central Committee. We must encourage them to continue the emancipation of their minds and consistently promote democracy so that they can mobilize all positive forces while at the same time endeavouring to clear up the ideological confusion among a small section of the people, especially young people.

We must make a special effort to explain the question of democracy clearly to the people, and to our youth in particular. The socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought — all these are tied up with democracy. What kind of democracy do the Chinese people need today? It can only be socialist democracy, people’s democracy, and not bourgeois democracy, individualist democracy. People’s democracy is inseparable from dictatorship over the enemy and from centralism based on democracy. We practise democratic centralism, which is the integration of centralism based on democracy with democracy under the guidance of centralism. Democratic centralism is an integral part of the socialist system. Under this system, personal interests must be subordinated to collective ones, the interests of the part to those of the whole, and immediate to long-term interests. In other words, limited interests must be subordinated to overall interests, and minor interests to major ones. Our advocacy and practice of these principles in no way means that we can ignore personal, local or immediate interests. In the final analysis, under the socialist system there is a unity of personal interests and collective interests, of the interests of the part and those of the whole, and of immediate and long-term interests. We must adjust the relations between these various types of interests in accordance with the principle of taking them all into proper consideration. Were we to do the opposite and pursue personal, local or immediate interests at the expense of the others, both sets of interests would inevitably suffer. In the final analysis, the relations between democracy and centralism and between rights and duties are the political and legal expressions of the relations between these diverse interests. This is precisely why Comrade Mao Zedong said that our aim is to create a political situation in which we have both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind and liveliness. That is the political situation which exists when there is true socialist democracy — the situation we must strive to create today and in the years to come.

We have not propagated and practised democracy enough, and our systems and institutions leave much to be desired. The constant promotion of democracy is therefore a firm, long-term Party objective. However, while propagating democracy, we must strictly distinguish between socialist democracy on the one hand and bourgeois, individualist democracy on the other. We must link democracy for the people with dictatorship over the enemy, and with centralism, legality, discipline and the leadership by the Communist Party. At present when we are confronted with manifold difficulties in our economic life which can be overcome only by a series of readjustments and by consolidation and reorganization, it is particularly necessary to stress publicly the importance of subordinating personal interests to collective ones, interests of the part to those of the whole, and immediate to long-term interests. Only when everyone — whether inside or outside the Party, in a leading position or among the rank and file — is concerned for the overall interests shall we be able to overcome our difficulties and ensure a bright future for the four modernizations. Conversely, departure from the four cardinal principles and talk about democracy in the abstract will inevitably lead to the unchecked spread of ultra-democracy and anarchism, to the complete disruption of political stability and unity, and to the total failure of our modernization programme. If this happens, the decade of struggle against Lin Biao and the Gang of Four will have been in vain, China will once again be plunged into chaos, division, retrogression and darkness, and the Chinese people will be deprived of all hope. This is a matter of deep concern not only for the Chinese people of whatever nationality but also for all people abroad who wish to see China strong, and even for those who merely wish to expand trade with China.

Here I would like to raise the question of standards of social conduct. Thanks to the correct leadership of the Party and government, these standards were quite sound in our country for a decade or more after the founding of the People’s Republic. Most of the young people who grew up under the Party’s education had high ideals, ardently loved the socialist motherland, responded actively to the calls of the Party and government, defended the people’s interests, helped safeguard public order, and generally displayed a fine spirit of dedication and discipline. This type of conduct on the part of young people had a good influence on the conduct of other members of society, and vice versa. And this won the praise of foreigners as well as of our own people. However, in the decade of the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four plunged our Party, government and society into chaos, poisoned the minds of many young people and did grave damage to socialist moral standards. The situation has improved considerably since the downfall of the Gang of Four, but we must not underestimate the residue of their pernicious influence in certain spheres. The present state of affairs is entirely incompatible with the requirements of the shift of focus in the Party’s work. We encourage normal contact between Chinese and foreigners, because it is essential to the growth of understanding and friendship between our people and other peoples and to the acquisition of foreign technology and funds. There will be a vast increase in such contact in the future. However, some unhealthy phenomena have emerged among a small number of young people, because we have not adequately educated or guided them. Some young men and women blindly admire the capitalist countries, and some even show a blatant disregard for both national and personal dignity in their contact with foreigners. This is a matter requiring our serious attention. It is imperative that we educate our younger generation, take effective measures in all spheres to raise the standards of social conduct and deal sternly with offensive behaviour which seriously lowers them.

To raise the standards of social conduct, we must first of all improve the Party’s work style, and in particular this requires that leading Party comrades at all levels set a good example. The Party is a model for our entire society, and the leading Party comrades at all levels are models for our entire Party. If the Party organization ignores the views and interests of the masses, how can it expect to win their trust and their support for its leadership? If leading cadres in the Party do not set strict standards for themselves and observe Party discipline and the laws of the state, how can they be expected to help reform the standards of social conduct? How can they do so if, in violation of Party principles, they engage in factionalism, use their positions to obtain personal privileges, seize advantages through connections or influence, indulge in extravagance and waste, and seek personal gain at the expense of the public interest? How can they do so if they fail to share the joys and sorrows of the masses, refuse to be the first to bear hardships and the last to enjoy comforts, disobey the decisions of the Party organization and reject supervision by the masses or even retaliate against those who criticize them? In the present period of historical change, when problems have piled up and a thousand things wait to be done, it is crucial for us to strengthen the leadership of the Party and correct its work style. Comrade Mao Zedong said: “Once our Party’s style of work is put completely right, the people all over the country will learn from our example. Those outside the Party who have the same kind of bad style will, if they are good and honest people, learn from our example and correct their mistakes, and thus the whole nation will be influenced.” Only if we improve the Party’s style of work can the standards of social conduct be improved and the four cardinal principles be upheld.

Is anything I have said here out of keeping with the spirit of the Third Plenary Session of the Party’s Eleventh Central Committee? No, everything I have said relates to measures that must be taken to carry out the principles and policies laid down at that session. Let me repeat: If we fail to adopt these measures, these principles and policies will come to naught. So will our effort to shift the focus of our work, so will our modernization programme, and so will the promotion of democracy inside and outside the Party. Therefore, it is entirely wrong to say, as some have said, that the Central Committee has decided on a “tightening up” policy, or that it has changed its policy of promoting democracy. Only by upholding the four cardinal principles to which our Party has always adhered, and by firmly correcting the unhealthy tendencies which hamper the implementation of the principles and policies set forth at the Third Plenary Session can we advance steadfastly and victoriously towards our great objective.

III. TASKS OF OUR IDEOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL WORKERS

At the forums organized by the Central Committee and the various provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions to discuss the principles for the Party’s theoretical work, many questions have been raised. I cannot address them all now. But today I would like to discuss two matters related to the tasks of our ideological and theoretical workers. Since I am not thoroughly familiar with the situation, and particularly with local conditions, I ask you to decide whether what I say is entirely correct or not.

First, about the requirements of our present ideological and theoretical work.

Marxist ideological and theoretical work cannot be divorced from current politics. By politics here I mean the overall situation in the domestic and international class struggle and the fundamental interests of the Chinese people and the people of the world in current struggles. It is inconceivable that anyone can become a Marxist thinker or theorist if he is divorced from the overall political situation, if he doesn’t study it, if he doesn’t assess the actual development of the revolutionary struggle. If this is not so, what was the point of our devoting more than six months last year to discussions about practice being the criterion for testing truth? Scientific socialism develops in the course of actual struggle, and so do Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. We will not, of course, backtrack from scientific socialism to utopian socialism, nor will we allow Marxism to remain arrested at the level of the particular theses arrived at as long as a century ago. This is why we have often repeated that it is necessary to emancipate our minds, that is, to study new situations and solve new problems by applying the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

What is the most important new problem in the new situation of China today? It is, of course, the realization of the four modernizations, or as I said before, the realization of a Chinese type of modernization. We have said that by studying in depth the new conditions and new problems encountered in realizing the four modernizations, and by working out solutions to those problems — solutions that will serve as guidelines for our action — our ideological and theoretical workers will be making a major contribution to Marxism and a genuine effort to hold high the banner of Mao Zedong Thought. Of course, this does not imply that we should neglect to make serious in-depth studies of ideological and theoretical problems not directly related to the four modernizations. We must on no account overlook the study of basic theories in philosophy and the social sciences any more than in the natural sciences, because such study is indispensable to major advances in all these spheres.

In the second part of my speech, I talked about the four cardinal principles which we must uphold in order to accomplish the four modernizations. Although, as I said, these principles are nothing new, they have taken on fresh significance in the new situation before us, and so we should make new and convincing expositions of them based on the wealth of new facts. Only in this way can we educate the people of the whole country, including our youth, the workers and all the officers and men of the People’s Liberation Army, and convince people abroad who look to present-day China for the truth. This is a momentous theoretical and political task, and it certainly cannot be accomplished just by rehashing the same old arguments copied from a book. It is honourable, creative and scientific work which places great demands on our revolutionary theorists. Because of the decade of troubles generated by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, so much ideological nonsense has been spread for so long that people have lost confidence in many cadres and teachers engaged in political and educational work. This is not the fault of these cadres and teachers. They too are deeply disturbed, as are many parents, old workers and veteran fighters. This is another significant circumstance exploited by the handful of hostile trouble-makers. Our comrades on the ideological and theoretical front must quickly organize their forces and draw up plans to fill the vacuum in the shortest possible time by publishing a series of articles and books, including readers and textbooks, new in content and ideas and presented in fresh language — in other words, works that will carry weight. I suggest that the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee take charge of this task. I also suggest that the authors of really good books and articles be awarded monetary prizes by the Party and government, so that the work in this sphere, which is seemingly routine but actually very demanding, is given due recognition.

Realizing the four modernizations is a many-sided, complex and difficult undertaking. The task of the ideological and theoretical workers cannot be confined to discussion of the basic principles. We are confronted with many questions of economic theory, including both basic theory and theory applied to particular spheres such as industry, agriculture, commerce and management. Lenin called for more talk about economics and less about politics. In my opinion, his words are still applicable with regard to the proportion of effort that should be devoted to theoretical work in these two spheres. I am not saying, of course, that there are no more questions to be studied in the political field. For many years we have neglected the study of political science, law, sociology and world politics, and now we must hurry to make up our deficiencies in these subjects. Most of our ideological and theoretical workers should dig into one or more specialized subjects. All those who can do so should learn foreign languages, so as to be able to read important foreign works on the social sciences without difficulty. We have admitted that we lag behind many countries in our study of the natural sciences. Now we should admit that we also lag behind in our study of the social sciences, insofar as they are comparable in China and abroad. Our level is very low, and for years we haven’t even had adequate statistical data in the social sciences, a lack that is naturally a great obstacle to any serious study. So our ideological and theoretical workers must make up their minds to catch up. They must concentrate on specialized fields, carry on investigations and studies of actual situations, familiarize themselves thoroughly with their subjects and guard against empty talk. Empty talk is of no help whatever to our modernization programme. Also, our ideological and theoretical workers should always guard against self-satisfaction, narrow-minded conservatism and ignorant boasting, failings which Comrade Mao Zedong warned us against. Only by admitting our backwardness can we overcome it. It should be pointed out that the responsibility for our present state of backwardness lies in the first place with the Central Committee and the Party committees at other levels, because they have not used the proper methods in guiding ideological and theoretical work, have set up too many forbidden zones, and have failed to give adequate attention or support to such work. Today, at this meeting, I make this self-criticism on behalf of the Central Committee. From now on, Party committees at all levels, from the Central Committee down, will be required to give the correct orientation to ideological and theoretical work and to recognize its importance. Ours is a big Marxist party. If we don’t stress the study of Marxism, if we don’t advance Marxism in step with the development of practice, how can we do our other work well? In that case, won’t our call to hold high the banner of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought be so many empty words?

Second, about my views on some theoretical questions.

A lot of questions have been raised in the discussions among theoretical workers in the last few months. Many of them need continued study. Here I would like to express my views on a few of the more pressing ones.

1. On the basic contradictions of socialist society and the principal contradiction in the current period. In regard to basic contradictions, I think it is still best to put the question the way Comrade Mao Zedong did in his “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”. He wrote: “In socialist society the basic contradictions are still those between the relations of production and the productive forces and between the superstructure and the economic base.” He made a long statement in this connection which I shall not repeat here. Of course, pointing out the basic contradictions does not automatically solve the problem, and deep-going, concrete study is still required. But judging from practice over the past 20 years or so, Comrade Mao’s formulation is more accurate than others. As for the question of what is the principal contradiction in the current period — what is the main issue or central task confronting the Party and the people in the current period — actually this question was answered by the decision of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee to shift the focus of our work to socialist modernization. The level of our productive forces is very low and is far from meeting the needs of our people and country. This is the principal contradiction in the current period, and to resolve it is our central task.

2. On class struggle in socialist society. I touched on this question earlier when discussing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Class struggle exists objectively in socialist society. It should be neither underestimated nor exaggerated. Otherwise, as practice has shown, we shall make serious mistakes. The problem of whether or not class struggle of one kind or another always exists throughout the entire historical period of socialism involves many complicated and difficult questions both of theory and practice, and they cannot be answered merely by quoting from books by our predecessors. We should continue to study these questions. But, to put it briefly, the class struggle in socialist society at present is, and will continue to be, clearly different from that in historical class societies. This, too, is an objective fact we cannot deny if we want to avoid serious mistakes.

3. On continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Practice has proved that this formulation is wrong if it is construed — as it was when it was advanced — to mean “seizing power from the capitalist roaders”, or making revolution by kicking aside the Party committees and toppling everything. As for making a new interpretation, that is something we can continue to study within the Party.

4. On whether there can be further discussion of certain formulations involving the line of the Party’s Eleventh Congress. The Party’s line, like its resolutions, should always be tested in practice. This is a principle repeatedly expounded by Comrade Mao Zedong. It should never be said that once a formulation has been adopted by a Party congress, there can be no further discussion of its correctness. If that were so, how could new formulations be put forward at a subsequent Party congress? It often happens that because of a change in the actual situation, the Central Committee has to amend the resolution of one Party congress before the next. Owing to the changes in the actual situation and in our own understanding of it, the line formulated by the Party’s Eleventh Congress underwent necessary readjustment at the successive plenary sessions of the Central Committee, and particularly at the Third Plenary Session. Further readjustments may also be required in the future. This is entirely normal. But according to Party discipline, discussion of formulations involving the line of the Eleventh Congress (except for those on which the Central Committee has made formal decisions) should be confined to appropriate Party meetings.

However, in the study and discussion of ideological and theoretical questions, we must always resolutely follow the policy of “letting a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend”, the principle of the “three don’ts” (don’t pick on others for their faults, don’t put labels on people, and don’t use a big stick), and the principle of emancipating our minds, abandoning blind faith and proceeding from reality in everything. All this was decided upon by the Third Plenary Session, and we reaffirm them here. We cannot allow the slightest deviation from these principles.

Comrades! The current period represents a momentous turning point in the history of our Party and state. The Party has led the Chinese people in surmounting the many difficulties created by the Gang of Four and in transforming a country that had been reduced to chaos into one of order and rapid progress. The magnificent prospect of the accomplishment of the four modernizations is inspiring our Party, army and people, and drawing them forward. Our cadres and masses are vying with one another to contribute to the realization of this bright future. In this period our ideological and theoretical workers have a particularly heavy responsibility. They have scored major successes since the downfall of the Gang of Four and significant achievements since the Third Plenary Session. It would be wrong to underestimate their achievements. However, the situation is developing very rapidly and our work must keep pace with it. I hope that this important meeting will help the Party’s ideological and theoretical workers to a better understanding of the current situation and our tasks, of the Party’s principles and policies and of their own work. I hope that it will inspire them to rally more closely around the Central Committee, and that they in turn, through their effective work, will inspire the whole people to rally more closely around the Communist Party. Let us work with one heart and one mind to firmly implement the principles of the Third Plenary Session of the Central Committee, to shift the focus of the Party’s work and to surmount all difficulties so as to win great victories in China’s four modernizations.

(A speech at a forum on the principles for the Party’s theoretical work.)

Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China

Is China Capitalist? — Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China

Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China

Article 3 of 10

Friends of Socialist China

By Carlos Martinez

Originally published at https://socialistchina.org/2026/06/14/pure-socialism-is-pure-idealism-a-reply-to-jacobin-on-china/

In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez responds to a recent Jacobin book review which presents China’s economic rise as a simple story of “brutal exploitation” indistinguishable from the horrors of Britain’s industrial revolution.

While not doubting the hardships described in the book under review, Carlos argues that Jacobin’s framing is ahistorical and idealist. China’s growth has not merely enriched a class of capitalists but transformed the lives of the majority, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and improving working class wages and conditions at an extraordinary pace.

The book review essentially compares China with an imagined socialist utopia, rather than comparing China with other destinations of outsourced production – where wages are lower, repression harsher, and no comparable rise in living standards is on offer.

Drawing on Friedrich Engels, Deng Xiaoping, Michael Parenti and John Smith, the article shows how China’s socialist land ownership system has protected living standards for hundreds of millions, and how the state is working to expand protections for workers in the “gig economy”. The article concludes:

At a moment when China is the largest and most developed socialist country on earth; when it is the leading proponent of a multipolar world order; and when it is the target of a systematic propaganda war designed to manufacture consent for a New Cold War (and ultimately hot war), for self-described socialists and anti-imperialists to offer this kind of context-free condemnation is, to say the least, deeply unhelpful.

Jacobin has published a review by Daniel Cheng of Adrift in the South, the memoir of the Chinese worker-poet Xiao Hai, detailing the harsh conditions he faced as a migrant worker in the megacities of southern China.

The book itself sounds interesting and worthwhile, and there is no reason to doubt the harshness of the conditions Xiao Hai describes. But the frame the review wraps around his story – that China’s economic miracle was “made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers”, and that China’s development and the dark satanic mills of Britain’s industrialisation can be comfortably placed together in a category of “the universal suffering of capitalism” – is ahistorical, idealist, and, in the present geopolitical conjuncture, actively unhelpful.

Exploitation has to be contextualised

The first thing to say is that China’s growth has not simply enriched a class of capitalists. It has transformed the lives of the great majority. Over the past half-century, China has lifted an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty – by the World Bank’s own reckoning, more than three-quarters of the entire reduction in global poverty over the same period. Chinese workers and farmers today live longer, eat better, are far better educated and enjoy a level of material security their grandparents could barely have imagined.

Manufacturing wages roughly trebled between 2005 and 2016, and real wages have continued to climb at an impressive clip. The rate of exploitation of Chinese labour has been falling, not rising.

That is the context in which “brutal exploitation” must be understood. The phrase conjures a process whereby the many are ground down so that the few may prosper. What actually happened is closer to the opposite: vast numbers of people worked very hard, in difficult conditions, in a process that has lifted the whole of society. Daniel Cheng himself half-concedes the point when he writes that “workers face exploitative conditions all over the Global South in countries that have not enjoyed China’s miraculous levels of growth”. Quite so. The exploitation is not the distinguishing feature; the shared and rising prosperity is.

Indeed, the most extreme exploitation in the world economy is concentrated precisely in the countries that have not followed China’s path. In Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, John Smith describes how the good health of global capitalism “rests on extreme rates of exploitation of workers in the low-wage countries where production of consumer goods and intermediate inputs has been relocated”. His central example is Bangladesh – the lowest factory wages of any major exporter, garment workers whose union activists are “routinely blacklisted, beaten up, and subject to arbitrary arrest”, and an industry in which no employer “has ever been convicted of an infringement of health and safety laws”.

That is the comparison the review needs and never makes: not between China and an imagined socialist utopia, but between China and the other destinations of outsourced production, where wages are lower, repression is harsher, and no commensurate rise in living standards is on offer.

Meanwhile, workers’ pay and conditions in China are improving continuously, and that improvement is driven by, and enforced at, every level of government, precisely because the Chinese state is not an instrument of capital; which is to say, because China is not a capitalist country.

A tale of two urbanisations

“In the cities”, Cheng writes, migrant workers “searched for an escape from rural poverty but encountered the horrors of industrial capitalism”.

Consider for a moment what they did not encounter. Across the rest of the Global South, large-scale urbanisation has invariably meant the explosion of slums: Mumbai, Lagos, Dhaka, São Paulo and Manila are ringed by vast informal settlements, and slum growth has outpaced urbanisation across the developing world since the 1970s. More than 600 million Chinese people have moved from countryside to city over the last half-century, and yet China has avoided this fate. Walk through Beijing or Shanghai, each home to more than twenty million people, and the pervasive slums and street homelessness of comparably sized cities elsewhere are conspicuously absent.

This is not a matter of accident or good fortune; it is the product of conscious planning, and above all of a land system that was never privatised. Because rural land remains collectively owned, with use rights allocated to households, China’s migrant workers never lost their stake in the village. This is the decisive difference between a Chinese migrant worker and his or her counterpart in South Asia. The Chinese worker is not trapped in debt bondage and is not one missed wage from destitution, because there is always a home and a plot of land to return to. When the 2008 crisis cost more than 20 million migrants their jobs, they were not cast onto the streets; they went home.

Friedrich Engels grasped why this matters. The proletarian, he observed in The Condition of the Working Class in England, is more exposed than even the bondsman of earlier epochs: “The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest of his master, the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live … but the proletarian must depend upon himself alone”.

By refusing to privatise rural land, China ensured that its migrant workers, unlike the dispossessed proletarians of early industrial Britain, never lost that “scrap of land”. China’s home-ownership rate exceeds 90 percent – a figure barely conceivable in the advanced capitalist countries of the West, never mind in the slum-ringed metropolises of the Global South.

So while the relative poverty Cheng describes is real, it is markedly less than that endured by workers elsewhere in the developing world, and that difference is structural and socialist in origin.

What the review leaves out

Xiao Hai’s hardest passages concern gig work – the delivery rider fined for a late package, uninsured, paying off a motorist in cash to avoid the police. It is striking, then, that the review makes no mention of the policies now being directed at exactly this layer of workers.

In 2026 China’s highest bodies, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, issued new guidelines mandating standardised contracts, minimum pay, maximum hours, social insurance and algorithmic transparency for more than two hundred million workers in the platform economy. Food delivery platforms are being required to guarantee riders an income above the minimum wage, to provide insurance, and to relax the punishing delivery deadlines.

The recent hukou reform extends social insurance to migrant workers in the cities where they actually work. The trajectory is the precise opposite of the one in Britain and the United States, where companies such as Uber and Deliveroo have spent fortunes in the courts to deny their workers the status of employees at all.

To review a book about Chinese gig workers and omit the fact that the Chinese state is moving to protect them is to leave out the most important part of the story.

The difference between Shenzhen and Manchester

The review’s emotional centre is the comparison with the industrial revolution: the phosphorus of Manchester’s match factories and the toxins of Shenzhen’s screen printers “both poisoned their workers”, and Marx’s Capital and Xiao Hai’s memoir describe the same labour alienation. But the comparison collapses on contact with the historical record.

The workers of Engels’ Manchester did not see their lives improve rapidly over a few decades. They died young – Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 sanitary report put the average age at death of labourers and mechanics in Manchester at just 17, against 38 for the local gentry and professional classes – and they had no public healthcare, no guaranteed housing, no universal education. More than 57 percent of working-class children in Manchester, Engels recorded, died before their fifth birthday.

Engels refused to treat this as the neutral price of progress, naming it instead “social murder” – the condition in which society “deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live … knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain”.

The Chinese worker who slices a finger has access to a public health system; everyone in China today has guaranteed food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, clean water and modern energy. That is not a quantitative difference in degree of suffering. It is a qualitative difference in the nature of the society: the difference between a state oriented towards the pursuit of private profit at all costs and one oriented – however imperfectly – towards common prosperity.

There is a second point Jacobin’s comparison erases. Britain was the world’s foremost colonial power, and the riches of its industrial revolution were inseparable from the plunder of India, the Atlantic slave trade and the looting of half the globe. Insofar as the British working class eventually won better conditions, this was to a significant extent facilitated by crumbs from the imperial table – the super-exploitation of the colonies. China’s rise has involved no colonies and no empire. It has lifted itself by its own efforts, against the grain of an imperialist world system, not by feeding off the subjugation of others.

Why China?

“Under capitalism, our cultures are increasingly similar”, the review concludes. If that were the whole story – if China were just another capitalist society passing through a phase Britain passed through two centuries ago – we would have to explain a series of awkward facts.

Why is it China, and not the dozens of other developing countries integrated into global capitalism on far harsher terms, that has eliminated extreme poverty? That has all but abolished homelessness? That has become the world’s only green-energy superpower, with more installed wind and solar capacity than the rest of the world combined and three-quarters of all the large-scale wind and solar under construction anywhere on earth? That has climbed to the summit of science and technology – and done so outside the framework of the imperialist world order?

These are not the achievements of a society indistinguishable from any other capitalist one. They are the achievements of a country where the state is not subordinated to capital, where the economy is planned and directed, where the fruits of growth are shared, and where the development of productive forces is consciously pursued as a national project. In short, they are the achievements of socialism.

Pure socialism is pure idealism

What the review offers, in the end, is an example of what Michael Parenti called “pure socialism”: measuring actually existing socialist construction not against the real alternatives available to a poor, encircled, formerly colonised or semi-colonised country, but against an imagined frictionless utopia.

As Parenti put it in Blackshirts and Reds, this “pure socialism” view “is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second”. Its adherents, he observed, “support every revolution except the ones that succeed”.

Held to an impossible standard, every actual socialist project is found wanting. But this is idealism, not materialism. It abstracts away from imperialist encirclement, from the level of development of the productive forces, from the actual balance of class forces – the very things a Marxist analysis is supposed to address.

“There can be no communism with pauperism”, Deng Xiaoping told the American journalist Mike Wallace in 1986, “or socialism with pauperism … We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster”. The current common prosperity drive, and the new protections for the lowest-paid and most precarious workers, represent that principle being applied in earnest – the second half of Deng’s formula beginning to operate, as those who got rich first have a responsibility to help the rest catch up.

None of this means Xiao Hai’s pain should be waved away, or that China is without contradictions and injustices; that would be another form of idealism. It is rather to insist that China’s problems be understood in their historical and political context.

At a moment when China is the largest and most developed socialist country on earth; when it is the leading proponent of a multipolar world order; and when it is the target of a systematic propaganda war designed to manufacture consent for a New Cold War (and ultimately hot war), for self-described socialists and anti-imperialists to offer this kind of context-free condemnation is, to say the least, deeply unhelpful.

A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

Is China Capitalist? — A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

A reply to Greg Godels on China’s road to socialism

Article 4 of 10

Friends of Socialist China

By Carlos Martinez

Originally published at https://socialistchina.org/2026/07/23/a-reply-to-greg-godels-on-chinas-road-to-socialism/

Greg Godels has published a thoughtful response in ML Today to Carlos Martinez’s recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Godels argues that the exploitation of the many by the few remains a central driving force of the Chinese economy, and questions whether China’s market reforms and its billionaire class can be squared with a socialist trajectory.

In the article below, Carlos argues that the decisive Marxist question is not simply whether wage labour and surplus value exist, but which class holds state power and in whose interest the economic surplus is directed. On that test – the class nature of the state – China’s billionaires answer to the state rather than command it; its reforms were a conscious strategy to develop the productive forces and build the material basis for a more advanced socialism; and China provably does not participate in imperialist super-exploitation.

Greg Godels has written a considered response in ML Today to my recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Unlike much of what passes for left commentary on China, Godels writes as a comrade, not a Cold Warrior. He admires the Chinese revolution, insists that China’s fate must be decided by the Chinese people, and closes by affirming that, whatever its difficulties, “it is China’s road”. On all of that we agree. Where we part company is over a question that Godels, for all his fidelity to the classics of Marxism, never quite poses: which class holds state power?

State and revolution

Godels’s central charge is that the debate over China too rarely invokes “the exploitation of the many by the few”, and that when I ask for exploitation to be “contextualised”, I am really relativising and rationalising it. He is right that exploitation belongs at the centre of any Marxist analysis. But there is a second important category that is missing from his account entirely: the class nature of the state.

For Marx and Lenin alike, the question of whether a society is advancing towards socialism was never settled simply by cataloguing the presence or absence of wage labour and surplus value at the point of production. It was settled principally by asking which class holds power, and in whose interest the state directs the economic surplus. This is the whole point of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of Lenin’s insistence, throughout the period of the New Economic Policy, that market mechanisms within a workers’ state are something categorically different from capitalism under a bourgeois state.

Under the NEP in the Soviet state, private capital, wage labour, rich peasants and market relations all flourished. Lenin did not conclude that the October Revolution had thereby been cancelled. He concluded that the proletarian state would make use of capitalist forms, on its own terms and under its own control, in order to build the material foundations of socialism.

Godels praises the successes of the early-1950s Chinese economy – and rightly so – yet that economy included a substantial private-capitalist sector and a national bourgeoisie, all operating within the framework of New Democracy. He invokes Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR – but Stalin’s argument there is precisely that commodity production still existed in the Soviet Union nearly four decades after the revolution, and that the abolition of exploitation was a process, not an event accomplished at a stroke. If the persistence of capitalist forms disqualifies China from the socialist camp, it disqualifies Lenin’s Russia too – not to mention today’s Cuba.

Trickle down

Godels argues that rising living standards are no proof that exploitation has ceased: after all, British life expectancy has more than doubled since 1800, yet the British working class remained profoundly exploited and capital ever more concentrated. To point to China’s improving conditions, then, is supposedly to echo the capitalist promise that “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

Such an analysis ignores some important facts. In nineteenth-century Britain, rising living standards were a byproduct – wrung from a resisting ruling class through bitter class struggle, and underwritten by the plunder of empire. To the extent that the Western working classes have secured rising wages, shorter hours and welfare states, this was made possible in no small part by the super-exploitation of the colonies and neo-colonies – the imperial rent drawn from half the globe, which allowed a portion to be redistributed at home without threatening the accumulation of capital. Lenin’s account of the “labour aristocracy”, bribed with “crumbs” from imperialist super-profits, describes exactly this mechanism.

Western prosperity has always had a hidden supplier: the low-wage workers of the Global South, whose super-exploitation John Smith has shown to be the beating heart of twenty-first century imperialism. The capitalist state serves capital; whatever reaches workers does so incidentally, or as a concession extracted under duress and financed from abroad. That is what “trickle down” actually describes.

China is the opposite case. It has no empire and no colonies from which to draw imperial rent. And the rise in living standards is not a byproduct but the conscious, planned objective of state policy. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty by design – through targeted programmes in which three million cadres were dispatched to live in poor villages until every household was raised above the line; through directed investment; through a land system that was never privatised; and through the conscious mobilisation of the state’s resources towards common prosperity.

The distinction is between a state that is an instrument of capital and one that is not. Indeed China passes Godels’s own preferred test – that in the Soviet Union sacrifice was bearable because the wealth produced was “not systematically and methodically directed to the few” but towards a better future for all. A planned economy under Communist Party command has directed the surplus into poverty eradication, mass housing, universal education and healthcare, the world’s largest clean-energy build-out, and the climb to the technological frontier. That has nothing in common with the theories of “trickle down” economics, which call for minimal state intervention and the upward redistribution of wealth.

The difference between Shenzhen and New York

Godels points out that Shenzhen has 132 billionaires to New York’s 146, and asks, what is the social utility of a billionaire?

It is a fair question, of course. The issue, however, is not the existence of great private fortunes as such but their relationship to a process of national development. In the US, billionaires effectively own the state: capital sets the limits of what politics may attempt, and no administration of either party may seriously threaten its prerogatives. In China, billionaires answer to the state. They are tolerated to the degree that their activity serves the national development plan, and they are disciplined the moment it does not – through regulation, ideological guidance, anti-monopoly action, the common prosperity agenda, the anti-corruption campaigns, and, when necessary, the halting of what would have been the largest public offering in history and the humbling of the country’s then richest man. As Eric Li puts it, in China “capital does not rise above political authority”; in the US, “the interests of capital and capital itself have risen above the American nation”.

The “iron logic” of accumulation

Godels’s deepest theoretical claim is that accumulation is “Moses and the Prophets”: capital, once amassed in private hands, is driven by an iron logic to reinvest, expand and seek profit abroad, and China’s billionaires “cannot escape that logic”. The Belt and Road, on this reading, is simply the export of their accumulated capital – China following the well-travelled road to imperialism.

The trouble is that the iron logic operates under specific conditions: where the capitalist class commands the state, and where crises of overproduction and falling profitability at home drive capital outward to super-exploit cheaper labour. Far from exploiting others, China has itself been a net loser in the world economy. Its wages have risen rapidly and it has been steadily climbing the value chain, but it super-exploits no one, and the net drain of value still runs the other way. The Marxist economists Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts calculate that surplus value has been transferred out of China to the imperialist bloc at an average of 5 to 10 percent of Chinese GDP every year since the 1990s – a drain amounting to more than 60 percent of China’s annual exports to those countries. On their reckoning, China “clearly fits into the dominated bloc”.

The Belt and Road does not reverse this by super-exploiting the Global South. It carries no austerity conditionalities. Chinese investment banks lend at roughly half Western interest rates. China is supporting countries of the Global South in modernising their economies and breaking out of underdevelopment. In fact, the largest recipients of Chinese overseas investment are the United States, Britain and Australia, which are self-evidently not targets of cheap-labour super-exploitation.

Export of capital, as Lenin’s own framework makes clear, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of imperialism; around 90 percent of the world’s countries export capital to one degree or another. Imperialism is domination – and China dominates no one. It has no colonies, wages no wars of conquest. It has not built a global infrastructure of power projection. A country cannot have become imperialist without ever having fought its way to empire; that would be unprecedented in world history, and would render Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and war obsolete.

What I did not argue

Godels has me saying that “the ends justify the means” – that Chinese workers must suffer capitalist exploitation now so that gains may come later. I argued nothing of the kind. My argument was that exploitation must be measured against the real alternatives available to a relatively poor, blockaded, formerly semi-colonised country – against Bangladesh, against the other destinations of outsourced production, where wages are lower and repression harsher and no commensurate rise in living standards is on offer – and not against an imagined, frictionless socialist utopia.

The purpose of reform

Godels treats China’s post-1978 reforms as, in effect, a capitulation – capitalism admitted “through the front door”.

The reforms had a clear purpose, stated openly and consistently by their architects: to develop the productive forces so as to build the material basis for a more advanced socialism. This is not a retrospective gloss; it is orthodox historical materialism. Marx wrote in Volume III of Capital that the development of the productive forces is “capital’s historic mission and justification”, for “it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production”. The vision of the Chinese leadership was to replace “unwittingly” with “purposefully” – to use capital, within strict limits and under heavy regulation, to accomplish that development consciously, under the direction of a workers’ state, rather than leaving it to the blind operation of the market. That is precisely the logic of Lenin’s NEP, applied, extended, deepened and updated.

The reforms answered a real and urgent problem. Despite its achievements, China in 1978 remained a poor country: per capita income of around 210 dollars, some 250 million people below the poverty line, food production barely ten percent higher per head than in 1952. As Deng Xiaoping put it with characteristic bluntness, “socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism”. The superiority of socialism, Deng argued, had ultimately to be demonstrated by developing the productive forces faster than capitalism and raising living standards accordingly – otherwise the whole project would forfeit its legitimacy and ultimately fail.

This was not a betrayal of the revolution’s purpose but a restatement of it: as Deng insisted, “only the socialist system can eradicate poverty”, and only a socialist state would direct development towards that end rather than towards private accumulation.

Deng’s generation drew from the decline and fall of the Soviet Union the conclusion that what fatally destabilised it was not its experiments with the market but its long failure, from the mid-1970s, to deliver rising living standards – combined with decades of ideological degeneration – such that when socialism came under attack the masses could not be mobilised to defend it. China’s reforms were, among other things, an attempt to avoid that fate: to root socialism in the tangible, improving material life of the people. While this has generated very real contradictions, it has kept the Chinese revolution alive and advancing while the Soviet one perished. An important consideration for us Marxists.

China’s internationalism

Godels appends a separate charge: that China “fence-sits” on Gaza, Iran and Cuba, and that the foremost potential counterweight to US imperialism has simply stepped aside. This issue is dealt with at length by Danny Haiphong, but the actual record is worth setting out.

Iran has been subjected since February 2026 to a criminal US-Israeli war of aggression. China has consistently condemned that war as a flagrant violation of international law, opposed the illegal sanctions regime, and repeatedly demanded a ceasefire and an end to the bombing of Iran’s civilian and energy infrastructure. Far from standing aside, China purchases the great majority of Iran’s oil exports in open defiance of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and there are credible reports that Chinese air-defence, satellite and navigation systems have materially strengthened Iran’s ability to defend itself. Coordinating with Pakistan in particular, China has also been central to efforts for a negotiated peace.

It was China that brokered the 2023 Iran–Saudi normalisation, one fruit of which was Riyadh’s refusal to let US and Israeli jets refuel on its soil. And when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to vessels tied to the US, Israel and their allies, it pointedly exempted China – to the point that ships have taken to switching their transponders to feign Chinese ownership in order to pass safely. As Haiphong argues, the demand that China instead “do more” by confronting the US militarily would drag it into a war no one in the Axis of Resistance has asked it to fight, on behalf of others, at enormous risk – while doing nothing to help Palestine or Iran that China’s actual support is not already doing.

On Palestine the record is likewise substantive. China was among the first states to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in 1965, and the State of Palestine, in 1988. It has used its standing at the United Nations not only to demand an immediate ceasefire but to uphold the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance. In 2024 it convened all the major Palestinian factions in Beijing and brokered the Beijing Declaration on national unity. Relations between Beijing and Tel Aviv have fallen to their lowest ebb.

One may still wish for more; but the blame for Gaza rests with the United States, which supplies the arms and the diplomatic shield, and the responsibility for stopping it rests first of all with us, in the imperialist countries, whose task is to disarm our own governments rather than to demand that a sanctioned developing country fight the empire on our behalf.

Cuba is the clearest case of all. As Washington tightens an illegal blockade that has plunged the island into daily blackouts, it is China that has stepped in – financing and building dozens of solar parks, committing to some two gigawatts of capacity by 2028, and donating tens of thousands of photovoltaic kits for rural clinics and homes, all with no conditionalities, no structural adjustment, no demand for market access. Cuba’s solar revolution is socialist solidarity in a highly concrete, life-saving, form.

While we are on the historical record, one older charge in Godels’s essay deserves correction: that Mao-era China entered a “shameful alliance with South African apartheid” in the anti-colonial wars in Portugal’s African colonies. This misrepresents what happened. In Mozambique China backed Frelimo, and in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde the PAIGC – the very movements that won those liberation wars. Angola is more complicated. China’s stated position was for the unity of the three liberation movements, as set out in the Alvor Agreement and recognised by the Organisation of African Unity; it received an MPLA delegation in Beijing as late as June 1975, and it never attacked the MPLA, or the government the MPLA went on to form, by name. But by loudly opposing the Soviet and Cuban role in the country, China effectively lined up against what proved to be the only genuine liberation movement – whose victory, secured with Cuban and Soviet support, was a triumph of proletarian internationalism. That turned out to be a genuine error, amid the poison of the Sino-Soviet split. But it was by no means an alliance with apartheid, and to describe it as such is to seriously misrepresent the historical record.

China’s road

“It is China’s road”, Godels concludes, and there he is absolutely right. Our task, as Marxists outside China looking in, is to defend China’s right to travel its own road, and to assess it as we assess all socialist construction – materially, historically, against the real alternatives, and not in comparison with an ideal held up precisely so that reality can come off second best. To do otherwise, at a moment when the imperialist camp is manufacturing consent for a New Cold War and rehearsing the arguments for a hot one, is to hand ammunition to the wrong side.

No question there are potholes on China’s road, as there are on every road out of underdevelopment and encirclement. But the road nonetheless runs unmistakably in the direction of socialism.

The New Economic Policy And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments

Is China Capitalist? — The New Economic Policy And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments

The New Economic Policy And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments

Article 5 of 10

Marxists Internet Archive

By Vladimir Lenin

Originally published at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The New Economic Policy

And The Tasks Of The Political Education Departments

Report To The Second All-Russia Congress Of Political Education Departments October 17, 1921[1]

Delivered: 17 October, 1921
First Published: Published in the Vtoroi Vserossiishy syezd politprosvetov. Bulleten syezda (Bulletin of the Second All-Russia Congress of Political Education Departments) No. 2, October 19, 1921; Published according to the Bulletin proofs corrected by Lenin
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pages 60-79
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters & R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Comrades, I intend to devote this report, or rather talk, to the New Economic Policy, and to the tasks of the Political Education Departments arising out of this policy, as I understand them. I think it would be quite wrong to limit reports on questions that do not come within the scope of a given congress to bare information about what is going on generally in the Party or in the Soviet Republic.

Abrupt Change Of Policy Of The Soviet Government And The R.C.P.

While I do not in the least deny the value of such information and the usefulness of conferences on all questions, I nevertheless find that the main defect in the proceedings of most of our congresses is that they are not directly and immediately connected with the practical problems before them. These are the defects that I should like to speak about both in connection with and in respect of the New Economic Policy.

I shall speak about the Now Economic Policy briefly and in general terms. Comrades, the overwhelming majority of you are Communists, and although some of you are very young, you have worked magnificently to carry out our general policy in the first years of our revolution. Having done a large part of this work you cannot help seeing the abrupt change made by our Soviet government and our Communist Party in adopting the economic policy which we call “new", new, that is, in respect of our previous economic policy.

In substance, however, this new policy contains more elements of the old than our previous economic policy did.

Why? Because our previous economic policy, if we cannot say counted on (in the situation then prevailing we did little counting in general), then to a certain degree assumed—we may say uncalculatingly assumed—that there would be a direct transition from the old Russian economy to state production and distribution on communist lines.

If we recall the economic literature that we ourselves issued in the past, if we recall what Communists wrote before and very soon after we took power in Russia—for example, in the beginning of 1918, when the first political assault upon old Russia ended in a smashing victory, when the Soviet Republic was created, when Russia emerged from the imperialist war, mutilated, it is true, but not so mutilated as she would have been had she continued to “defend the fatherland” as she was advised to do by the imperialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries—if we recall all this we shall understand that in the initial period, when we had only just completed the first stage in the work of building up the Soviet government and had only just emerged from the imperialist war, what we said about our tasks in the field of economic development was much more cautious and circumspect than our actions in the latter half of 1918 and throughout 1919 and 1920.

The 1918 Decision Of The All-Russia
Central Executive Committee On The Role Of The Peasantry

Even if all of you were not yet active workers in the Party and the Soviets at that time, you have at all events been able to make, and of course have made, yourselves familiar with decisions such as that adopted by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee at the end of April 1918.[2] That decision pointed to the necessity to take peasant farming into consideration, and it was based on a report which made allowance for the role of state capitalism in building socialism in a peasant country; a report which emphasised the importance of personal, individual, one-man responsibility; which emphasised the significance of that factor in the administration of the country as distinct from the political tasks of organising state power and from military tasks.

Our Mistake

At the beginning of 1918 we expected a period in which peaceful construction would be possible. When the Brest peace was signed it seemed that danger had subsided for a time and that it would be possible to start peaceful construction. But we were mistaken, because in 1918 a real military danger overtook us in the shape of the Czechoslovak mutiny and the outbreak of civil war, which dragged on until 1920. Partly owing to the war problems that overwhelmed us and partly owing to the desperate position in which the Republic found itself when the imperialist war ended—owing to these circumstances, and a number of others, we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution. We thought that under the surplus-food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution.

I cannot say that we pictured this plan as definitely and as clearly as that; but we acted approximately on those lines. That, unfortunately, is a fact. I say unfortunately, because brief experience convinced us that that line was wrong, that it ran counter to what we had previously written about the transition from capitalism to socialism, namely, that it would be impossible to bypass the period of socialist accounting and control in approaching even the lower stage of communism. Ever since 1917, when the problem of taking power arose and the Bolsheviks explained it to the whole people, our theoretical literature has been definitely stressing the necessity for a prolonged, complex transition through socialist accounting and control from capitalist society (and the less developed it is the longer the transition will take) to even one of the approaches to communist society.

A Strategical Retreat

At that time, when in the heat of the Civil War we had to take the necessary steps in economic organisation, it seemed to have been forgotten. In substance, our New Economic Policy signifies that, having sustained severe defeat on this point, we have started a strategical retreat. We said in effect: “Before we are completely routed, let us retreat and reorganise everything, but on a firmer basis. “ If Communists deliberately examine the question of the New Economic Policy there cannot be the slightest doubt in their minds that we have sustained a very severe defeat on the economic front. In the circumstances it is inevitable, of course, for some people to become very despondent, almost panic-stricken, and because of the retreat, these people will begin to give way to panic. That is inevitable. When the Red Army retreated, was its flight from the enemy not the prelude to its victory? Every retreat on every front, however, caused some people to give way to panic for a time. But on each occasion—on the Kolchak front, on the Denikin front, on the Yudenich front, on the Polish front and on the Wrangel front—once we had been badly battered (and sometimes more than once) we proved the truth of the proverb: “A man who has been beaten is worth two who haven’t.” After being beaten we began to advance slowly, systematically and cautiously.

Of course, tasks on the economic front are much more difficult than tasks on the war front, although there is a general similarity between the two elementary outlines of strategy. In attempting to go over straight to communism we, in the spring of 1921, sustained a more serious defeat on the economic front than any defeat inflicted upon us by Kolchak, Denikin or Pilsudski. This defeat was much more serious, significant and dangerous. It was expressed in the isolation of the higher administrators of our economic policy from the lower and their failure to produce that development of the productive forces which the Programme of our Party regards as vital and urgent.

The surplus-food appropriation system in the rural districts—this direct communist approach to the problem of urban development—hindered the growth of the productive forces and proved to be the main cause of the profound economic and political crisis that we experienced in the spring of 1921. That was why we had to take a step which from the point of view of our line, of our policy, cannot be called anything else than a very severe defeat and retreat. Moreover, it cannot be said that this retreat is—like retreats of the Red Army—a completely orderly retreat to previously prepared positions. True, the positions for our present retreat were prepared beforehand. That can be proved by comparing the decisions adopted by our Party in the spring of 1921 with the one adopted in April 1918, which I have mentioned. The positions were prepared beforehand; but the retreat to these positions took place (and is still taking place in many parts of the country) in disorder, and even in extreme disorder.

Purport Of The New Economic Policy

It is here that the task of the Political Education Departments to combat this comes to the forefront. The main problem in the light of the New Economic Policy is to take advantage of the situation that has arisen as speedily as possible.

The New Economic Policy means substituting a tax for the requisitioning of food; it means reverting to capitalism to a considerable extent—to what extent we do not know. Concessions to foreign capitalists (true, only very few have been accepted, especially when compared with the number we have offered) and leasing enterprises to private capitalists definitely mean restoring capitalism, and this is part and parcel of the New Economic Policy; for the abolition of the surplus-food appropriation system means allowing the peasants to trade freely in their surplus agricultural produce, in whatever is left over after the tax is collected—and the tax~ takes only a small share of that produce. The peasants constitute a huge section of our population and of our entire economy, and that is why capitalism must grow out of this soil of free trading.

That is the very ABC of economics as taught by the rudiments of that science, and in Russia taught, furthermore, by the profiteer, the creature who needs no economic or political science to teach us economics with. From the point of view of strategy the root question is: who will take advantage of the new situation first? The whole question is—whom will the peasantry follow? The proletariat, which wants to build socialist society? Or the capitalist, who says, “Let us turn back; it is safer that way; we don’t know anything about this socialism they have invented”?

Who Will Win, The Capitalist Or Soviet Power?

The issue in the present war is—who will win, who will first take advantage of the situation: the capitalist, whom we are allowing to come in by the door, and even by several doors (and by many doors we are not aware of, and which open without us, and in spite of us), or proletarian state power? What has the latter to rely on economically? On the one hand, the improved position of the people. In this connection we must remember the peasants. It is absolutely incontrovertible and obvious to all that in spite of the awful disaster of the famine—and leaving that disaster out of the reckoning for the moment—the improvement that has taken place in the position of the people has been due to the change in our economic policy.

On the other hand, if capitalism gains by it, industrial production will grow, and the proletariat will grow too. The capitalists will gain from our policy and will create an industrial proletariat, which in our country, owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i. e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat. The proletariat is the class which is engaged in the production of material values in large-scale capitalist industry. Since large-scale capitalist industry has been destroyed, since the factories are at a standstill, the proletariat has disappeared. It has sometimes figured in statistics, but it has not been held together economically.

The restoration of capitalism would mean the restoration of a proletarian class engaged in the production of socially useful material values in big factories employing machinery, and not in profiteering, not in making cigarette-lighters for sale, and in other “work” which is not very useful, but which is inevitable when our industry is in a state of ruin.

The whole question is who will take the lead. We must face this issue squarely—who will come out on top? Either the capitalists succeed in organising first—in which case they will drive out the Communists and that will be the end of it. Or the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove capable of keeping a proper rein on those gentlemen, the capitalists, so as to direct capitalism along state channels and to create a capitalism that will be subordinate to the state and serve the state. The question must be put soberly. All this ideology, all these arguments about political liberties that we hear so much of, especially among Russian ßmigrßs, in Russia No. 2, where scores of daily newspapers published by all the political parties extol these liberties in every key and every manner—all these are mere talk, mere phrase-mongering. We must learn to ignore this phrase mongering.

The Fight Will Be Even Fiercer

During the past four years we have fought many hard battles and we have learnt that it is one thing to fight hard battles and another to talk about them—something onlookers particularly indulge in. We must learn to ignore all this ideology, all this chatter, and see the substance of things. And the substance is that the fight will be even more desperate and fiercer than the fight we waged against Kolchak and Denikin. That fighting was war, something we were familiar with. There have been wars for hundreds, for thousands of years. In the art of human slaughter much progress has been made.

True, nearly every landowner had at his headquarters Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who talked loudly about government by the people, the Constituent Assembly, and about the Bolsheviks having violated all liberties.

It was, of course, much easier to solve war problems than those that confront us now; war problems could be solved by assault, attack, enthusiasm, by the sheer physical force of the hosts of workers and peasants, who saw the landowners marching against them. Now there are no avowed landowners. Some of the Wrangels, Kolchaks and Denikins have gone the way of Nicholas Romanov, and some have sought refuge abroad. The people no longer see the open enemy as they formerly saw the landowners and capitalists. The people cannot clearly picture to themselves that the enemy is the same, that he is now in our very midst, that the revolution is on the brink of the precipice which all previous revolutions reached and recoiled from—they cannot picture this because of their profound ignorance and illiteracy. It is hard to say how long it will take all sorts of extraordinary commissions to eradicate this illiteracy by extraordinary means.

How can the people know that instead of Kolchak, Wrangel and Denikin we have in our midst the enemy who has crushed all previous revolutions? If the capitalists gain the upper hand there will be a return to the old regime. That has been demonstrated by the experience of all previous revolutions. Our Party must make the masses realise that the enemy in our midst is anarchic capitalism and anarchic commodity exchange. We ourselves must see clearly that the issue in this struggle is: Who will win? Who will gain the upper hand? and we must make the broadest masses of workers and peasants see it clearly. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the sternest and fiercest struggle that the proletariat must wage against the whole world, for the whole world was against us in supporting Kolchak and Denikin.

Now the bourgeoisie of the whole world are supporting the Russian bourgeoisie, and they are still ever so much stronger than we are. That, however, does not throw us into a panic. Their military forces were stronger than ours. Nevertheless, they failed to crush us in war, although, being immeasurably superior to us in artillery and aircraft, it should have been very easy for them to do so. Perhaps they would have crushed us had any of the capitalist states that were fighting us mobilised a few army corps in time, and had they not grudged a loan of several millions in gold to Kolchak.

However, they failed because the rank-and-file British soldiers who came to Archangel, and the sailors who compelled the French fleet to leave Odessa, realised that their rulers were wrong and we were right. Now, too, we are being attacked by forces that are stronger than ours; and to win in this struggle we must rely upon our last source of strength. That last source of strength is the mass of workers and peasants, their class-consciousness and organisation.

Either organised proletarian power—and the advanced workers and a small section of the advanced peasants will understand this and succeed in organising a popular movement around themselves—in which case we shall be victorious; or we fail to do this—in which case the enemy, being technologically stronger, will inevitably defeat us.

Is This The Last Fight?

The dictatorship of the proletariat is fierce war. The proletariat has been victorious in one country, but it is still weak internationally. It must unite all the workers and peasants around itself in the knowledge that the war is not over. Although in our anthem we sing: “The last fight let us face", unfortunately it is not quite true; it is not our last fight. Either you succeed in uniting the workers and peasants in this fight, or you fail to achieve victory.

Never before in history has there been a struggle like the one we are now witnesses of; but there have been wars between peasants and landowners more than once in history, ever since the earliest times of slavery. Such wars have occurred more than once; but there has never been a war waged by a government against the bourgeoisie of its own country and against the united bourgeoisie of all countries.

The issue of the struggle depends upon whether we succeed in organising the small peasants on the basis of the development of their productive forces with proletarian state assistance for this development, or whether the capitalists gain control over them. The same issue has arisen in scores of revolutions in the past; but the world has never witnessed a struggle like the one we are waging now. The people have had no way of acquiring experience in wars of this kind. We ourselves must create this experience and we can rely only on the class-consciousness of the workers and peasants. That is the keynote and the enormous difficulty of this task.

We Must Not Count On Going Straight To Communism

We must not count on going straight to communism. We must build on the basis of peasants’ personal incentive. We are told that the personal incentive of the peasants means restoring private property. But we have never interfered with personally owned articles of consumption and implements of production as far as the peasants are concerned. We have abolished private ownership of land. Peasants farmed land that they did not own—rented land, for instance. That system exists in very many countries. There is nothing impossible about it from the standpoint of economics. The difficulty lies in creating personal incentive. We must also give every specialist an incentive to develop our industry.

Have we been able to do that? No, we have not! We thought that production and distribution would go on at communist bidding in a country with a declassed proletariat. We must change that now, or we shall be unable to make the proletariat understand this process of transition. No such problems have ever arisen in history before. We tried to solve this problem straight out, by a frontal attack, as it were, but we suffered defeat. Such mistakes occur in every war, and they are not even regarded as mistakes. Since the frontal attack failed, we shall make a flanking movement and also use the method of siege and undermining.

The Principle Of Personal Incentive And Responsibility

We say that every important branch of the economy must be built up on the principle of personal incentive. There must be collective discussion, but individual responsibility. At every step we suffer from our inability to apply this principle. The. New Economic Policy demands this line of demarcation to be drawn with absolute sharpness and distinction. When the people found themselves under new economic conditions they immediately began to discuss what would come of it, and how things should be reorganised. We could not have started anything without this general discussion because for decades and centuries the people had been prohibited from discussing anything, and the revolution could not develop without a period in which people everywhere hold meetings to argue about all questions.

This has created much confusion. This is what happened—this was inevitable, but it must be said that it was not dangerous. If we learn in good time to separate what is appropriate for meetings from what is appropriate for administration we shall succeed in raising the position of the Soviet Republic to its proper level. Unfortunately, we have not yet learnt to do this, and most congresses are far from business-like.

In the number of our congresses we excel all other countries in the world. Not a single democratic republic holds as many congresses as we do; nor could they permit it.

We must remember that ours is a country that has suffered great loss and impoverishment, and that we must teach it to hold meetings in such a way as not to confuse, as I have said, what is appropriate for meetings with what is appropriate for administration. Hold meetings, but govern without the slightest hesitation; govern with a firmer hand than the capitalist governed before you. If you do not, you will not vanquish him. You must remember that government must be much stricter and much firmer than it was before.

After many months of meetings, the discipline of the Red Army was not inferior to the discipline of the old army. Strict, stern measures were adopted, including capital punishment, measures that even the former government did not apply. Philistines wrote and howled, “The Bolsheviks have introduced capital punishment.” Our reply is, “Yes, we have introduced it, and have done so deliberately.”

We must say: either those who wanted to crush us—and who we think ought to be destroyed—must perish, in which case our Soviet Republic will live or the capitalists will live, and in that case the Republic will perish. In an impoverished country either those who cannot stand the pace will perish, or the workers’ and peasants’ republic will perish. There is not and cannot be any choice or any room for sentiment. Sentiment is no less a crime than cowardice in wartime. Whoever now departs from order and discipline is permitting the enemy to penetrate our midst.

That is why I say that the New Economic Policy also has its educational aspect. You here are discussing methods of education. You must go as far as saying that we have no room for the half-educated. When there is communism, the methods of education will be milder. Now, however, I say education must be harsh, otherwise we shall perish.

Shall We Be Able To Work For Our Own Benefit?

We had deserters from the army, and also from the labour front. We must say that in the past you worked for the benefit of the capitalists, of the exploiters, and of course you did not do your best. But now you are working for yourselves, for the workers’ and peasants’ state. Remember that the question at issue is whether we shall be able to work for ourselves, for if we cannot, I repeat, our Republic will perish. And we say, as we said in the army. that either those who want to cause our destruction must perish, or we must adopt the sternest disciplinary measures and thereby save our country—and our Republic will live.

That is what our line must be, that is why (among other things) we need the New Economic Policy.

Get down to business, all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them. Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. Since we must necessarily learn quickly, any slackness in this respect is a serious crime. And we must undergo this training, this severe, stern and sometimes even cruel training, because we have no other way out.

You must remember that our Soviet land is impoverished after many years of trial and suffering, and has no socialist France or socialist England as neighbours which could help us with their highly developed technology and their highly developed industry. Bear that in mind! We must remember that at present all their highly developed technology and their highly developed industry belong to the capitalists, who are fighting us.

We must remember that we must either strain every nerve in everyday effort, or we shall inevitably go under.

Owing to the present circumstances the whole world is developing faster than we are. While developing, the capitalist world is directing all its forces against us. That is how the matter stands! That is why we must devote special attention to this struggle.

Owing to our cultural backwardness we cannot crush capitalism by a frontal attack. Had we been on a different cultural level we could have approached the problem more directly; perhaps other countries will do it in this way when their turn comes to build their communist republics. But we cannot do it in the direct way.

The state must learn to trade in such a way that industry satisfies the needs of the peasantry, so that the peasantry may satisfy their needs by means of trade. We must see to it that everyone who works devotes himself to strengthening the workers’ and peasants’ state. Only then shall we be able to create large-scale industry.

The masses must become conscious of this, and not only conscious of it, but put it into practice. This, I say, suggests what the functions of the Central Political Education Department should be. After every deep-going political revolution the people require a great deal of time to assimilate the change. And it is a question of whether the people have assimilated the lessons they received. To my deep regret, the answer to this question must be in the negative. Had they assimilated the lessons we should have started creating large-scale industry much more quickly and much earlier.

After we had solved the problem of the greatest political revolution in history, other problems confronted us, cultural problems, which may be called “minor affairs". This political revolution must be assimilated; we must help the masses of the people to understand it. We must see to it that the political revolution remains something more than a mere declaration.

Obsolete Methods

At one time we needed declarations, statements, manifestos and decrees. We have had enough of them. At one time we needed them to show the people how and what we wanted to build, what new and hitherto unseen things we were striving for. But can we go on showing the people what we want to build? No. Even an ordinary labourer will begin to sneer at us and say: “What use is it to keep on showing us what you want to build? Show us that you can build. If you can’t build, we’re not with you, and you can go to hell!” And he will be right.

Gone is the time when it was necessary to draw political pictures of great tasks; today these tasks must be carried out in practice. Today we are confronted with cultural tasks, those of assimilating that political experience, which can and must be put into practice. Either we lay an economic foundation for the political gains of the Soviet state, or we shall lose them all. This foundation has not yet been laid—that is what we must get down to.

The task of raising the cultural level is one of the most urgent confronting us. And that is the job the Political Education Departments must do, if they are capable of serving the cause of “political education", which is the title they have adopted for themselves. It is easy to adopt a title; but how about acting up to it? Let us hope that after this Congress we shall have precise information about this. A Commission for the Abolition of Illiteracy was set up on July 19, 1920. Before coming to this Congress I purposely read the decree establishing that commission. It says: All-Russia Commission for the Abolition of Illiteracy. . . . More than that—Extraordinary Commission for the Abolition of Illiteracy. Let us hope that after this Congress we shall receive information about what has been done in this field, and in how many gubernias, and that the report will be concrete. But the very need to set up an Extraordinary Commission for the Abolition of Illiteracy shows that we are (what is the mildest term I can use for it?), well, something like semi-savages because in a country that was not semi-savage it would be considered a disgrace to have to set up an Extraordinary Commission for the Abolition of Illiteracy. In such countries illiteracy is abolished in schools. There they have tolerably good schools where people are taught. What are they taught? First of all they are taught to read and write. If we have not yet solved this elementary problem it is ridiculous to talk about a New Economic Policy.

The Greatest Miracle Of All

What talk can there be of a new policy? God grant that we manage to stick to the old policy if we have to resort to extraordinary measures to abolish illiteracy. That is obvious. But it is still more obvious that in the military and other fields we performed miracles. The greatest miracle of all, in my opinion, would be if the Commission for the Abolition of Illiteracy were completely abolished, and if no proposals, such as I have heard here, were made for separating it from the People’s Commissariat of Education. If that is true, and if you give it some thought, you will agree with me that an extraordinary commission should be set up to abolish certain bad proposals.

More than that—it is not enough to abolish illiteracy, it is necessary to build up Soviet economy, and for that literacy alone will not carry us very far. We must raise culture to a much higher level. A man must make use of his ability to read and write; he must have something to read, he must have newspapers and propaganda pamphlets, which should be properly distributed and reach the people and not get lost in transit, as they do now, so that no more than half of them are read, and the rest are used in offices for some purpose or other. Perhaps not even one-fourth reach the people. We must learn to make full use of the scanty resources we do possess.

That is why we must, in connection with the New Economic Policy, ceaselessly propagate the idea that political education calls for raising the level of culture at all costs. The ability to read and write must be made to serve the purpose of raising the cultural level; the peasants must be able to use the ability to read and write for the improvement of their farms and their state.

Soviet laws are very good laws, because they give everyone an opportunity to combat bureaucracy and red tape, an opportunity the workers and peasants in any capitalist state do not have. But does anybody take advantage of this? Hardly anybody! Not only the peasants, but an enormous percentage of the Communists do not know how to utilise Soviet laws to combat red tape and bureaucracy, or such a truly Russian phenomenon as bribery. What hinders the fight against this? Our laws? Our propaganda? On the contrary! We have any number of laws! Why then have we achieved no success in this struggle? Because it cannot be waged by propaganda alone. It can be done if the masses of the people help. No less than half our Communists are incapable of fighting, to say nothing of those who are a hindrance in the fight. True, ninety-nine per cent of you are Communists, and you know that we are carrying out an operation on these latter Communists. The operation is being carried out by the Commission for Purging the Party, and we have hopes of removing a hundred thousand or so from our Party. Some say two hundred thousand, and I much prefer that figure.

I hope very much that we shall expel a hundred thou sand to two hundred thousand Communists who have attached themselves to the Party and who are not only incapable of fighting red tape and bribery, but are even a hindrance in this fight.

Tasks Of Political Educationalists

If we purge the Party of a couple of hundred thousand it will be useful, but that is only a tiny fraction of what we must do. The Political Education Departments must adapt all their activities to this purpose. Illiteracy must be combated; but literacy alone is likewise not enough. We also need the culture which teaches us to fight red tape and bribery. It is an ulcer which no military victories and no political reforms can heal. By the very nature of things, it cannot be healed by military victories and political reforms, but only by raising the cultural level. And that is the task that devolves upon the Political Education Departments.

Political educationalists must not understand their job as that of functionaries, as often seems to be the case when people discuss whether representatives of Gubernia Political Education Departments should or should not be appointed to gubernia economic conferences.[3] Excuse me for saying so, but I do not think you should be appointed to any office; you should do your job as ordinary citizens. When you are appointed to some office you become bureaucrats; but if you deal with the people, and if you enlighten them politically, experience will show you that there will be no bribery among a politically enlightened people. At present bribery surrounds us on all sides. You will be asked what must be done to abolish bribery, to prevent so-and-so on the Executive Committee from taking bribes. You will he asked to teach people how to put a stop to it. And if a political educationalist replies that it does not come within the functions of his department, or that pamphlets have been published and proclamations made on the subject, the people will say that he is a bad Party member. True, this does not come within the functions of your department, we have the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection for that; but are you not members of the Party? You have adopted the title of political educationalists. When you were about to adopt that title you were warned not to choose such a pretentious one, to choose something more modest. But yon wanted the title of political educationalists, and that title implies a great deal. You did not take the title of general educationalists, but of political educationalists. You may be told, “It is a good thing that you are teaching the people to read and write and to carry on economic campaigns; that is all very well, but it is not political education, because political education is the sum total of everything.”

We are carrying on propaganda against barbarism and against ulcers like bribery, and I hope you are doing the same, but political education is much more than this propaganda—it means practical results, it means teaching the people how to achieve these results, and setting an example to others, not as members of an Executive Committee, but as ordinary citizens who, being politically better educated, are able not only to hurl imprecations at red tape—that is very widely practised among us—but to show how this evil can really be overcome. This is a very difficult art, which cannot be practised until the general level of culture is raised, until the mass of workers and peasants is more cultured than now. It is to this function that I should like most of all to draw the attention of the Central Political Education Department.

I should now like to sum up all that I have said and to suggest practical solutions for the problems that confront the Gubernia Political Education Departments.

The Three Chief Enemies

In my opinion, three chief enemies now confront one, irrespective of one’s departmental functions; these tasks confront the political educationalist, if he is a Communist—and most of the political educationalists are. The three chief enemies that confront him are the following: the first is communist conceit; the second—illiteracy, and the third—bribery.

The First Enemy—Communist Conceit

A member of the Communist Party, who has not yet been combed out, and who imagines he can solve all his problems by issuing communist decrees, is guilty of communist conceit. Because he is still a member of the ruling party and is employed in some government office, he imagines this entitles him to talk about the results of political education. Nothing of the sort! That is only communist conceit. The point is to learn to impart political knowledge; but that we have not yet learnt; we have not yet learnt how to approach the subject properly.

The Second Enemy—Illiteracy

As regards the second enemy, illiteracy, I can say that so long as there is such a thing as illiteracy in our country it is too much to talk about political education. This is not a political problem; it is a condition without which it is useless talking about politics. An illiterate person stands outside politics, he must first learn his ABC. Without that there can be no politics; without that there are rumours, gossip, fairy-tales and prejudices, but not politics.

The Third Enemy—Bribery

Lastly, if such a thing as bribery is possible it is no use talking about politics. Here we have not even an approach to politics; here it is impossible to pursue politics, because all measures are left hanging in the air and produce absolutely no results. A law applied in conditions which permit of widespread bribery can only make things worse. Under such conditions no politics whatever can be pursued; the fundamental condition for engaging in politics is lacking. To be able to outline our political tasks to the people, to be able to say to the masses what things we must strive for (and this is what we should be doing!), we must understand that a higher cultural level of the masses is what is required. This higher level we must achieve, otherwise it will be impossible really to solve our problems.

Difference Between Military And Cultural Problems

A cultural problem cannot be solved as quickly as political and military problems. It must be understood that conditions for further progress are no longer what they were. In a period of acute crisis it is possible to achieve a political victory within a few weeks. It is possible to obtain victory in war in a few months. But it is impossible to achieve a cultural victory in such a short time. By its very nature it requires a longer period; and we must adapt ourselves to this longer period, plan our work accordingly, and display the maximum of perseverance, persistence and method. Without these qualities it is impossible even to start on the work of political education. And the only criterion of the results of political education is the improvement achieved in industry and agriculture. We must not only abolish illiteracy and the bribery which persists on the soil of illiteracy, but we must get the people really to accept our propaganda, our guidance and our pamphlets, so that the result may be an improvement in the national economy.

Those are the functions of the Political Education Departments in connection with the New Economic Policy, and I hope this Congress will help us to achieve greater success in this field.

Notes

[1] Held in Moscow on October 17-22, 1921, this Congress was attended by 307 delegates.

Its main object was to endorse a plan of work for 1922 and work out the forms and methods of agitation and propaganda in the situation called forth by the New Economic Policy.

Lenin, who was given an ovation by the delegates, spoke at the evening session on October 17.

The Political Education Departments were formed by local (volost, uyezd and gubernia) public education bodies in conformity with a decree issued on February 23, 1920. Their work was guided by the Central Political Education Committee at the People’s Commissariat of Education.

[2] The All-Russia Central Executive Committee passed its decision of April 29, 1918 on the basis of Lenin’s report On the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government. The propositions in that report and in the article The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government were summed up by Lenin in six theses, which, with some additions, were unanimously endorsed by the Party Central Committee on May 3, 1918. See Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government.

[3] Gubernia economic conferences were local organs of the Council of Labour and Defence. They were set up by the Executive Committees of the gubernia Soviets in conformity with the decision passed by the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Soviets in December 1920.

We Must Adhere To Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism

Is China Capitalist? — We Must Adhere To Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism

We Must Adhere To Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism

Article 6 of 10

Marxists Internet Archive

By Deng Xiaoping

Originally published at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1989/173.htm

Deng Xiaoping

1989

Published: November 23, 1989
Translated by: Unknown
Source: Deng Xiaoping Works
Transcription for MIA: Joonas Laine

The liberation and development of Africa cannot be accomplished in just a few years. The world is so full of colonialism, neocolonialism, hegemony and power politics! It is more difficult than it used to be for small, poor countries, so they have to struggle even harder.

The United States and the Soviet Union have held talks that showed an encouraging tendency towards disarmament. We are happy to see this. I looked forward to the end of the Cold War, but now I feel disappointed. It seems that one Cold War has come to an end but that two others have already begun: one is being waged against all the countries of the South and the Third World, and the other against socialism. The Western countries are staging a third world war without gunsmoke. By that I mean they want to bring about the peaceful evolution of socialist countries towards capitalism.

We are not surprised at the developments in Eastern Europe. These changes were bound to take place sooner or later. The trouble there started from inside. The Western countries have the same attitude towards China as towards the East European countries. They are unhappy that China adheres to socialism. The turmoil that arose in China this year also had to come about sooner or later. We ourselves were partly to blame. As you know, two of our General Secretaries fell because of their failure to deal with the problem of bourgeois liberalization. If China allowed bourgeois liberalization, there would inevitably be turmoil. We would accomplish nothing, and our principles, policies, line and three-stage development strategy would all be doomed to failure. Therefore, we must take resolute measures to stop any unrest. Whenever there is unrest in future, we must stop it, so as to maintain stability.

Western countries criticize us for violating human rights. As a matter of fact, they are the ones who have violated human rights. How many Chinese people were killed or wounded when the United States helped Chiang Kai-shek fight the civil war? And how many Chinese volunteers were killed or wounded when it supported South Korea in the Korean War? And that’s not counting the immeasurable losses inflicted on our people during a century of aggression by colonialists and imperialists, including the United States! So they have no right to talk about human rights.

We used to say that the United States and the Soviet Union were seeking hegemony. Now at their summit meeting the Group of Seven have been seeking hegemony and playing power politics too. After we put down the rebellion, the Group of Seven summit meeting issued a declaration imposing sanctions on China. What qualifies them to do that? Who granted them the authority? Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but they often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is only designed to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practise power politics. We never listen to such stuff. Nor do you. Even in the past when we were quite weak, we ignored them.

When we started fighting in the Jinggang Mountains, we had only a few thousand men. Through 22 years of incessant war we eventually defeated the imperialists and the forces they supported, and the Chinese people stood up. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, we also encountered enormous difficulties. The civil war had just ended, problems were piling up at home, and abroad we were fighting a war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea. Actually, it was China and the United States who fought that war. The United States was a big power, and China was comparatively weak, especially in equipment. However, justice triumphed, and the United States had to sit down and hold talks with us in Panmunjom.

China’s determination to adhere to socialism will not change. At the Thirteenth National Party Congress we decided on the strategy of “one central task, two basic points”. We had put forward that idea ten years ago, but it was at the Thirteenth Party Congress that we summed it up in this phrase. We shall never deviate from this strategy. No threat can daunt us. Our Party was born amid threats and matured amid threats. It struggled for 28 years before it founded the People’s Republic. Anyway, things are much better than before. So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.

(A talk with Julius Kambarage Nyerere, former President of Tanzania, Chairman of the Tanzanian Revolutionary Party and Chairman of the South Commission.)

Socialist Chinamaxxing: How China's achievements are a product of socialism

Is China Capitalist? — Socialist Chinamaxxing: How China's achievements are a product of socialism

Socialist Chinamaxxing: How China's achievements are a product of socialism

Article 7 of 10

Friends of Socialist China

Originally published at https://socialistchina.org/2026/04/17/socialist-chinamaxxing-how-chinas-achievements-are-a-product-of-socialism/

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On Sunday 12 April, Friends of Socialist China hosted a webinar on the subject of Socialist Chinamaxxing: How China’s achievements are a product of socialism.

In spite of several years of intense propaganda and misinformation about China in the media, large numbers of young people in the West are going through “a very Chinese time in their lives”, not least because they are seeing China’s extraordinary achievements in poverty reduction, technological innovation, ecological protection, infrastructure development and more.

This webinar explored how these achievements are a product of China’s social, political and economic system: socialism. The speakers argued that China’s progress would simply not have been possible within a framework of capitalist rule, and that the country’s experience provides a powerful example of the superiority of socialism in terms of delivering for the people and for the planet.

The speakers were:

Li Jingjing (Journalist and political commentator, CGTN)

Tings Chak (Asia co-coordinator, Tricontinental Institute)

George Galloway (Former MP, leader of Workers Party of Britain)

Danny Haiphong (Geopolitical analyst and journalist)

Ben Norton (Editor, Geopolitical Economy Report)

Chen Weihua (Former China Daily EU bureau chief)

Qiao Collective (Diaspora Chinese media collective)

Ileana Chan (Host of the Global Majority for Peace podcast)

Keith Bennett (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)

Chair: Carlos Martinez (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China)

Embedded below is the full event stream, followed by the individual speeches.

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Planning and the Market Are Both Means of Developing the Productive Forces

Is China Capitalist? — Planning and the Market Are Both Means of Developing the Productive Forces

Planning and the Market Are Both Means of Developing the Productive Forces

Article 8 of 10

Marxists Internet Archive

By Deng Xiaoping

Originally published at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1987/83.htm

Deng Xiaoping

1987

Published: February 6, 1987
Translated by: Unknown
Source: Deng Xiaoping Works
Transcription for MIA: Joonas Laine

Why do some people always insist that the market is capitalist and only planning is socialist? Actually they are both means of developing the productive forces. So long as they serve that purpose, we should make use of them. If they serve socialism they are socialist; if they serve capitalism they are capitalist. It is not correct to say that planning is only socialist, because there is a planning department in Japan and there is also planning in the United States. At one time we copied the Soviet model of economic development and had a planned economy. Later we said that in a socialist economy planning was primary. We should not say that any longer.

Recently we have made some mistakes in our work, but that’s nothing to be alarmed at. Don’t be afraid; if we’re afraid of making mistakes, we can’t go on with the reform. I, for my part, feel we’ve been much too cautious. Of course, it is better not to move too fast just now because of the recent student unrest. But in the long run, the pace of reform should not be too slow.

The report to be delivered at the Thirteenth National Party Congress should elaborate the theory of socialism and make it clear that our reform is socialist. At the same time, it should clearly explain from a theoretical point of view the need to adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles, to combat bourgeois liberalization, to carry out reform and to open China to the outside world. It should be a good document.

(Excerpt from a talk with leading members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.)

Opening Up New Frontiers for Marxist Political Economy in Contemporary China

Is China Capitalist? — Opening Up New Frontiers for Marxist Political Economy in Contemporary China

Opening Up New Frontiers for Marxist Political Economy in Contemporary China

Article 9 of 10

Qiushi - CPC Central Committee

By Xi Jinping

Originally published at https://en.qstheory.cn/2020-11/08/c_560906.htm

Opening Up New Frontiers for Marxist Political Economy in Contemporary China

Xi Jinping

Today, we are holding the 28th group study session of the Political Bureau and our focus is on the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy. The aim of this study session is to strengthen our understanding of the basic principles of Marxism. We have previously held sessions on subjects related to historical materialism and dialectical materialism. On this occasion, we will deepen our understanding and grasp of the laws underlying economic development by reviewing Marxist political economy so that we can become more competent and proficient at leading the nation's economic development.

I would now like to discuss some of my thoughts.

Marxist political economy is an important component of Marxism, and required learning for our efforts to uphold and develop Marxism. Marx and Engels carried forward historical achievements made in the field of economics, especially British classical political economy, through a process of critical examination based on the worldview and methodology of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. After intensive study of human economic activities, they founded Marxist political economy, which drew back the curtain on the laws underlying the economic workings of human society and capitalist society in particular. Engels said that the whole theory of a proletarian party was derived from the study of political economy, while Lenin regarded political economy as the most profound, most comprehensive, and most detailed proof and application of Marxist theory. Though there is now a rich diversity of economic theories, our study of political economy must be based on Marxist political economy and not any other economic theory.

There are people who believe Marxist political economy and Das Kapital are obsolete, but this is an arbitrary and erroneous judgment. Setting aside more distant events and looking at just the period since the global financial crisis, we can see that many capitalist countries have remained in an economic slump, with serious unemployment problems, intensifying polarization, and deepening social divides. The facts tell us that the contradictions between the socialization of production and the private possession of the means of production still exist, but they are manifested in ways and show characteristics that are somewhat different. After the global financial crisis, many Western scholars began studying Marxist political economy and Das Kapital again for the purpose of reflecting on the deficiencies of capitalism. Last year, the book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French scholar Thomas Piketty aroused broad discussion in international academic circles. Using accurate and abundant data, Piketty shows that levels of inequality are as high or higher than they have ever been in the US and other Western countries. He argues that unconstrained capitalism has aggravated phenomena such as wealth inequality, and that the situation will continue to get worse. His analysis is mainly conducted from the perspective of distribution and does not touch significantly upon more fundamental questions of ownership, but the conclusions he reaches are nonetheless well worth our consideration.

A ceremony marking the completion and launch of the BeiDou-3 global navigation satellite system was held in Beijing on July 31, 2020. President Xi Jinping attended the ceremony, where he announced the official launch of BeiDou-3 and visited an exhibition on achievements made in the development of the BeiDou system. [Photo by Xinhua reporter Ju Peng]

Our Party has always attached great importance to the study, analysis, and application of Marxist political economy. Mao Zedong arranged special reviews of Das Kapital on four occasions, and led multiple discussions on the Soviet Textbook on Political Economy, stressing that the analysis of questions on political economy was of great theoretical and practical significance. During the period of New Democracy (1911-1949), Mao Zedong created the new democratic economic program, and introduced a number of original ideas on developing China's economy in the process of exploring the path to socialism. For example, he introduced the theory of basic contradictions in socialist societies, and put forward important concepts such as pursing comprehensive planning and overall balance, regarding agriculture as the foundation and industry as the leading force, and coordinating the development of agriculture, light industry, and heavy industry. These are all examples of how our Party has driven forward evolution of Marxist political economy.

Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978, our Party has integrated the basic principles of Marxist political economy with the practice of reform and opening up, and made constant efforts to enrich and develop Marxist political economy. After the "Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Reform of the Economic Structure" was passed in October 1984, Deng Xiaoping commented that this represented a "first draft" of political economy that fused the basic principles of Marxism with the practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics. As reform and opening up has constantly pushed deeper in the more than three decades that have passed since then, we have brought about many important theoretical achievements in the Marxist political economy of contemporary China. Some examples are the theory on the essence of socialism, the theory on the basic economic system for the primary stage of socialism, the theory on establishing and implementing the philosophy of innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development, the theory on developing the socialist market economy and making the market play the decisive role in resource allocation while ensuring that the government better plays its role, the theory on China's entrance into a new normal of economic development, the theory on coordinating the processes of new industrialization, digitalization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization, the theory on the nature of ownership rights, contract rights, and usage rights for contracted farmland, the theory on making effective use of domestic and international markets and resources, and the theory on promoting social equity and justice and bringing about common prosperity for everyone. These theoretical achievements were never discussed by the authors of the Marxist classics, and before reform and opening up we had no experience or understanding of the issues with which they are concerned. Instead, they form a body of knowledge about political economy that has been molded by the conditions of contemporary China and the nature of the times. This has not only provided firm guidance for China's endeavors in economic development, but also opened up new frontiers for Marxist political economy.

In the volatile and unpredictable tide of the world economy today, a major test of our Party is whether or not we can effectively steer the great ship of China's economy. With an extremely complex economic landscape both at home and abroad and an overwhelming profusion of economic phenomena to contend with, studying the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy can help us master sound means of economic analysis, understand the processes through which the economy runs, build a grasp of the laws underlying social and economic development, and become more competent at keeping the socialist market economy on course. This will enable us to address theoretical and practical challenges in our nation's economic development more effectively.

The purpose of studying Marxist political economy is to better lead China's economic development. While we must ensure that we uphold its basic principles and methodology, it is even more important that we integrate Marxist political economy with the realities of our nation's economic development, and constantly strive toward new theoretical achievements in the process. 

First, we must uphold a people-centered approach to development. Development is for the people; this is the fundamental position of Marxist political economy. Marx and Engels stated that, "The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority," and that in future societies, production would be "calculated for the wealth of all." Deng Xiaoping said that emancipating and developing productive forces and eliminating exploitation and polarization in order to ultimately bring about common prosperity represents the essence of socialism. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in October 2015 clearly emphasized the need to uphold a people-centered approach to development, and to make improving the people's wellbeing, promoting their all-round development, and pursuing steady progress toward common prosperity the immutable aims of economic development. This is something that we must never lose sight of. When planning economic work, formulating economic policies, and promoting economic development, we must always adhere firmly to this fundamental position.

Second, we must uphold the new development philosophy. Responding to new changes in the environment, conditions, tasks, and requirements for our nation's development, the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee set forward the need to establish and uphold a new philosophy of innovative, coordinated, green, open, and shared development. The five components of this philosophy were introduced on the basis of a deep review of lessons and experience in development from at home and further afield, as well as a thorough analysis of major domestic and international development trends. They represent a concentrated reflection of our Party's new understanding of the underlying laws governing China's development, and correspond with many of the perspectives of Marxist political economy. For example, Marx and Engels imagined future societies in which there would be "participation by all in enjoyments produced by all," in which "man is directly a natural being," and in which "the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other." Meanwhile, the five components of the new development philosophy also represent a distillation of the perceptual knowledge we have acquired in the process of driving forward economic development and a theoretical summary of our experience in this regard. We must persist in using the new development philosophy to guide and advance our nation's economic development, and to consistently resolve challenges and break new ground in the process.

Xi Jinping visits the planning exhibition of the Changchun New Area, afternoon of July 23, 2020, during a tour of Jilin Province from July 22 to 24. [Photo by Xinhua reporter Wang Ye]

Third, we must uphold and improve our basic socialist economic system. According to Marxist political economy, ownership of the means of production is the core of the relations of production, and this determines a society's fundamental nature and the orientation of its development. Since reform and opening up, our Party has reflected on both positive and negative experiences, and established a basic economic system for the primary stage of socialism. Under this system, we have stressed the importance of continuing to make public ownership the mainstay while allowing ownership of other forms to develop side by side, and made it clear that both the public and non-public sectors are important components of the socialist market economy as well as crucial foundations for our nation's economic and social development. We must consolidate and develop the public sector with firm commitment, and devote equal commitment to encouraging, supporting, and guiding the development of the non-public sector, ensuring that ownership of all forms can reinforce each other and develop together. At the same time, we must be extremely clear that our nation's basic economic system is an important pillar of the Chinese socialist system and the basis of the socialist market economy, and therefore the dominant role of public ownership and the leading role of the state sector must not change. This represents an institutional guarantee for ensuring that people of all ethnic groups across China are able to share in the fruits of development, as well as an important means of consolidating the CPC's governing position and upholding our nation's socialist system.

Xi Jinping learns about the development of modernized agriculture and the production of specialty agricultural products at a rural ecotourism park in Helan County, Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, afternoon of June 9, 2020, during a visit to Ningxia from June 8 to 10. [Photo by Xinhua reporter Ju Peng]

Fourth, we must uphold and improve our basic socialist distribution system. Marxist political economy posits that distribution is both determined by and reactive to production, and that "production is most encouraged by a mode of distribution which allows all members of society to develop, maintain, and exert their capacities with maximum universality." Through consideration of our actual conditions, we established a system of distribution centered on labor-based distribution while allowing other forms of distribution to coexist. This institutional arrangement has been proven through practice to be conducive to mobilizing the initiative of all sectors and achieving an organic balance between efficiency and equity. Due to a multitude of factors, however, a number of prominent problems still exist in China's income distribution. The main problems are that the income gap has grown wider, the proportion of primary distribution accounted for by wages is relatively low, and the share of personal income in the distribution of national income is also on the low side. We have taken these problems very seriously, working hard to ensure that personal income grows in step with the economy, and that wages increase in step with labor productivity. We will adjust the national income distribution structure, bring about consistent increases in the incomes of urban and rural residents, and continue to shrink the income gap, through constant improvement of systems and mechanisms as well as specific measures.

Fifth, we must uphold reforms to develop the socialist market economy. Developing a market economy under conditions of socialism represents a great pioneering effort undertaken by our Party. One of the key factors behind China's tremendous success in economic development is that we have simultaneously leveraged the strengths of both the market economy and the socialist system. Our market economy has developed under the essential conditions of socialist system and the leadership of the CPC. The term "socialist" is the key descriptor, and this is something that we must never lose sight of. We call our economy a socialist market economy because we are committed to maintaining the strengths of our system while effectively avoiding the deficiencies of a capitalist market economy. Recognizing the two-sided nature of things under a dialectical approach, we must keep working to integrate the basic socialist system with the market economy, ensuring that the strengths of each are brought to bear, and devote practical efforts to solving the universal economic challenge of how to have both an efficient market and an effective government.

Sixth, we must uphold the fundamental national policy of opening up. According to Marxist political economy, human society will ultimately witness the transcendence of history from the level of individual nations to the global scale. Today, the degree of our country's connection with the world is unprecedented, as is our economy's impact on the world economy and vice versa. With globalization advancing deeper, we could not possibly pursue development by closing ourselves off. Instead, we must be adept at keeping an eye on the landscape both at home and abroad, and making good use of domestic and international markets and resources. Conforming to the trend of our economy's deep integration into the world economy, we must develop a more open economy, actively participate in global economic governance, and push the global economic order in a more just, equitable, cooperative, and mutually beneficial direction. At the same time, we must firmly safeguard our nation's development interests, forestall risks of all kinds, and ensure our economic security. In carrying out these tasks, there are many theoretical and practical questions that we must explore further.

To conclude, our commitment to upholding the basic principles and methodology of Marxist political economy does not imply rejection of the rational components of the economic theories of other countries. Western economic knowledge on topics such as finance, prices, currency, markets, competition, trade, exchange rates, industries, enterprises, growth, and management do reflect one side of the general laws underpinning socialized production and market economics, and should therefore be used as reference. At the same time, however, we must cast a discerning eye on the economic theories of other countries, particularly those of the West, making sure that we separate the wheat from the chaff. Putting our own interests first while using the strengths of others to our advantage, we must ensure that we do not mechanically copy the aspects of these theories that reflect the nature and values of the capitalist system or that are colored by Western ideology. Although the discipline of economics is devoted to the study of economic issues, it does not exist in a vacuum, and therefore cannot be separated from social and political issues. Therefore, when our educators teach economics, they must not advocate the indiscriminate absorption of foreign concepts. They must discuss Marxist political economy and the socialist political economy of contemporary China thoroughly and at length so to prevent their marginalization.

For Marxist political economy to remain vital, it must evolve with the times. Practice is the source of theory. In the space of mere decades, we have completed a process of development that took centuries for developed countries. Behind all our incredible progress and achievements in economic development have been the tremendous momentum, vigor, and potential of theoretical innovation. Today, our economy and the world economy are facing many major new challenges, and these need to be addressed by sound theories. Grounded in China's national conditions and our experiences in development, we must thoroughly look into new issues and circumstances faced by the domestic and global economies, bringing new patterns and characteristics to light. We must review and refine the achievements we have made in recognizing underlying laws through the process of economic development, and elevate our practical experience to the level of systematized economic theories. By doing so, we will constantly open up new frontiers for Marxist political economy in contemporary China, and contribute Chinese wisdom to the discipline's innovation and development.

—Speech at the 28th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee on November 23, 2015

(Originally appeared in Qiushi Journal, Chinese edition, No. 16, 2020)

China's long war on poverty

Is China Capitalist? — China's long war on poverty

China's long war on poverty

Article 10 of 10

Friends of Socialist China

By Carlos Martinez

Originally published at https://socialistchina.org/2022/06/19/chinas-long-war-on-poverty/

This article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez provides a detailed analysis of China’s ongoing war against poverty. In addition to discussing the recently-concluded targeted poverty alleviation program, in which the government achieved its goal of ending extreme poverty, Carlos discusses the anti-poverty measures taken during the various phases of the Chinese Revolution, including land reform in the liberated areas in the 1930s and 40s; the period of initial socialist construction from 1949; Reform and Opening Up from 1978; and the more recent measures aimed at building common prosperity. He concludes that poverty alleviation, and more broadly the improvement of people’s living standards, is foundational to the entire Chinese socialist project and constitutes a key theme of each of its stages.

In late 2020, the Chinese government announced that its goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2021 (the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China) had been met. At the start of the targeted poverty alleviation program in 2014, just under 100 million people were identified as living below the poverty line; seven years later, the number was zero.

To eradicate extreme poverty in a developing country of 1.4 billion people – which at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was one of the poorest countries in the world, characterised by widespread malnutrition, illiteracy, foreign domination and technological backwardness – is without doubt “the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history”, in the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.¹

What does it mean to not suffer extreme poverty in China? The most easily measurable aspect is having a daily income higher than the World Bank-defined international poverty line of 1.90 USD per day. But according to the Chinese government’s definition, a person can be considered to have left extreme poverty only if the “two assurances and three guarantees” have been met.² The two assurances are for adequate food and clothing; the three guarantees are for access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education. Meanwhile, the land ownership system in China means that the rural poor have rent-free access to land and housing – putting them in a very different category to the rural poor elsewhere in the world.

Hence ending extreme poverty is far more than simply ensuring that everyone’s income is greater than the international poverty line; it means their overall basic needs are adequately met; that they enjoy sufficient access to food, clothing, housing, clean water, modern energy, education and healthcare. As Fudan University professor Zhang Weiwei has pointed out, “the concept of poverty in most other developing countries means lack of basics for life like food, electricity and housing. This is not the case with the poor or the poor regions of China.”³

While the achievements of the targeted poverty alleviation program are unprecedented, the Communist Party of China’s preoccupation with poverty alleviation begins not in 2013 but in 1921. The pursuit of common prosperity and ensuring the fundamental human rights of the Chinese people is a thread that runs throughout the history of the Chinese Revolution and of the People’s Republic of China.

The Chinese communists’ first major steps towards poverty alleviation were taken in the liberated zones, starting with the Jiangxi–Fujian Soviet in 1931. Under the prevailing social order, the Chinese peasantry (the vast majority of the population) endured atrocious conditions, regularly suffering famines. A century of foreign domination and warlord rule had only deepened the brutal inequality of the feudal system, with the peasantry having to provide both foot soldiers and grain surpluses.

Land reform was the starting point for addressing this monstrous poverty. In their classic book about the land reform process in a small village in Hebei, Ten Mile Inn, Isabel and David Crook describe the situation prevailing in 1937:

Seventy percent of the people of the village lived in the most dire circumstances. For much of the year they subsisted on husks, wild herbs, and watery gruel ‘so thin you could see the reflection of the moon in it’… Landlords and peasants alike were pitifully poor. Nevertheless there was a profound difference between them. In times of famine, it was the members of the poor families who died or emigrated, who were forced by poverty to kill or sell children whom they could not feed, who were driven by hunger to join the warlord armies, who were imprisoned for the nonpayment of taxes or lost their meagre property by default for nonpayment of debts.⁴

Land reform acquired different dimensions in different places and at different times, but its essence was “the uncompensated division of landlords’ fields among the peasants and outright cancellation of all accumulated rural debt – that is, the destruction of feudalism.”⁵ Rural collectivisation in the liberated zones allowed for the entire village population to share both the work and the fruits of the land.

Village collectives established public health and education for the first time. Edgar Snow observed that for example, in the Chinese Soviets, “the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.”⁶

William Hinton wrote in Fanshen about the extraordinary impact that the land reform process had on the rural poor, and particularly women: “For the first time in their lives they felt some measure of control over their destiny. They slept under their own roofs, walked on their own land, planted their own seed, looked forward to harvesting their own crops and, what was perhaps best of all, owed neither grain nor money to any man.”⁷

This newly-democratised countryside would form the core support base for the Chinese Revolution in the ensuing decades. As Peng Dehuai (who would later become China’s Defence Minister) commented, “tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us.”⁸ The social and economic progress was deeply intertwined with the military resistance against Japanese aggression and, later, the reactionary nationalist armies. Hinton observes that the CPC and its allies “mobilised tens of millions of hard-pressed peasants for resistance, and that resistance, by reaching out to all strata of society, laid the groundwork for the social revolution to come.”⁹

During the war against Japanese aggression (1937-45), land expropriation in the liberated zones was paused in the interests of building the broadest possible united front to defend Chinese sovereignty. In this period, the CPC and its armies worked with village committees to reduce rents, reduce interest on loans, and mitigate some of the gross injustices of feudal life.

Following the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the land reform program that had been trialled in the liberated areas was expanded throughout the country. Within a few years, landlordism was eliminated and almost the entire peasantry was organised in collective farms. This was, in the words of Xi Jinping, “the most extensive and profound social reform in Chinese history.”¹⁰

Bourgeois history tends to regard the period from 1949 until 1978 (the start of Reform and Opening Up) as a failure in economic terms. According to the standard narrative, the Chinese people discovered to their own cost that common ownership and equality run counter to human nature. And yet in terms of improving the wellbeing of the Chinese people, the period of initial socialist construction was an overwhelming success, in spite of setbacks, mistakes, excesses and an adverse external environment. So much is conceded even by Adrian Wood, principal economist on the team that compiled the first World Bank report on China in 1983, who commented that “the previous 30 to 40 years of Chinese development had been remarkably successful.”¹¹

The curse of famine had finally been lifted. There was unprecedented progress in public health, leading to an increase in life expectancy from 36 to 67 in the first three decades following liberation. It’s true that life expectancy increased globally during this period, but in China’s case the increase was particularly steep – from several years below the global average to several years above it. Access to education was universal, and young adult illiteracy was wiped out. China broke out of perennial underdevelopment, building a broad industrial base.

While poor in comparison with most people in the advanced capitalist countries, Chinese people lived significantly better than their counterparts in most other developing countries. In neighbouring India for example, the rural poor continued to face famine, widespread malnutrition, and lack of access to healthcare, education, modern energy and clean water.

Thus it is important to recognise that the period of initial socialist construction played an essential role in China’s long march to end poverty.

A bigger cake

The period of Reform and Opening Up, starting in 1978 with a set of economic policies introduced by the Deng Xiaoping leadership, is not typically discussed in terms of poverty alleviation. And yet it was conceived in precisely those terms: “to rid our country of poverty and backwardness.”¹² Professor He Ganqiang of Nanjing University has described the basic goals of the reforms as: “release and develop the social productive forces, boost scientific development, and promote common prosperity for the people.¹³

China in 1978 was still very much a poor country. Thirty percent of the rural population – around 250 million people – lived below the poverty line. Millions experienced inadequate nutrition. While basic industrialisation had been achieved, productivity was still low, a long way behind the advanced capitalist countries. Per capita food production had only grown 10 percent since 1952, although its distribution was now of course far more equitable.¹⁴ Conditions in the countryside were infinitely better than they had been before the revolution, as a result of land reform and the deployment of social welfare; however, the fast-track program of industrialisation placed a heavy demand on the peasantry to provide a grain surplus that would subsidise the country’s overall development.

Kang Bing, former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily, wrote a moving personal account of his childhood growing up in Xi’an:

Growing up in 1960s and 1970s, my childhood memory is closely connected with hunger. Unable to provide enough food to feed its ever-increasing population which almost doubled in about 30 years, the People’s Republic had to adopt a food rationing system to ensure equal distribution of food… In my home city of Xi’an, the monthly quota for one urban resident was 100 grams of cooking oil, half a kilogram of meat, half a dozen eggs and 100 grams of sugar. As for milk, that was given only to families with newborns. Many families today consume the entire monthly quota of oil, meat, eggs and sugar in one day. Although the ration system ensured everybody had a share of the available food and prevented starvation deaths, it led to malnutrition among children, adolescents, adults and the elderly alike.¹⁵

Chen Yun, one of the CPC’s foremost economic strategists from the early 1940s onwards, and a leading architect of Reform and Opening Up, warned in 1979: “Our country has more than 900 million people, 80 percent are peasants. The revolution has been won for 30 years and the people are demanding improvements in their lives. Have there been improvements? Yes. But many places still do not have enough to eat, this is a big problem.”¹⁶ Significant numbers in South China were migrating to Hong Kong in search of a better life. Prominent Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin puts the case bluntly:

By 1978 Japan had basically caught up with the United States, and South Korea and Taiwan, China, had narrowed the income gap with developed countries. China, although boasting a complete industrial system, an atomic bomb, and a man-made satellite, had a standard of living a far cry from that of the developed world. The new leadership had to improve national economic performance and make its people as rich as their neighbours, or it might lose support and its legitimacy for rule.¹⁷

The CPC leadership concluded that scientific and technological development were the crucial factor in pushing forward the evolution of the Chinese Revolution and raising the living standards of the people. To a considerable degree then, Reform and Opening Up was part of a longer-term strategy of catching up with the West. Mao himself placed great emphasis on the value of catching up:

America has 170 million people, we have several times that number, plentiful resources, and a similar climate; catching up is possible. Should we catch up? Of course we should, or else what are you 600 million people doing? … In another 50 or 60 years, we should be ahead of them. This is a responsibility, we have this many people, this much territory, this many resources, and a socialist society. If in 50 or 60 years you still can’t catch up to America, what’s the matter with you? You deserve to have your membership in the human race revoked!¹⁸

Lenin wrote in his 1918 article The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government that “socialism calls for a conscious mass advance to greater productivity of labour compared with capitalism.”¹⁹ Yet three decades after the establishment of the PRC, China’s labour productivity remained far behind that of the US. Part of the reason for this is that China had been cut off from technological developments in the capitalist world as a result of a near-total blockade imposed by the Truman administration. In the same article, Lenin had opined that “the possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism.” But these up-to-date achievements of capitalism were beyond China’s reach during the 1950s and 60s.

The improvement in relations with the US – starting with Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in 1971 and President Nixon’s visit the following year – opened the way for China to acquire capital goods, attract investment and learn from the West’s scientific, technological and managerial innovations. With the formal establishment of US-China bilateral relations in 1979 and the US granting China most favoured nation in 1980, China also gained access to a global market.

Concurrently, the Chinese leadership was developing a deeper understanding of the situation in the countryside and the need to urgently improve living standards. Isabella Weber writes in her 2021 book How China Escaped Shock Therapy that, somewhat ironically, many of the young economists pushing for reform in the rural economy were urban intellectuals that had been ‘sent down’ to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution: “The experience of rural poverty was the starting point for a movement of young intellectuals who were dedicated to rural reform after their return to the urban centres.”²⁰

Xi Jinping, himself a ‘sent-down youth’ in the 1970s, made a similar point in 1990, while working as party secretary in Ningde, Fujian: “Many Party members are sent to extremely remote, impoverished areas, where they learn about the people’s suffering firsthand… Upon their return, Party members always say that they have developed more empathy for the people, and they feel a stronger sense of responsibility to serve them.”²¹

Solving the problem of rural poverty thus was the starting point for the reform process, which emphasised productivity, science and technology as means of generating greater social wealth. That process has been spectacularly successful in its poverty reduction aims. Indeed the UN Development Program in 2010 described China as having achieved “the most rapid decline in absolute poverty ever witnessed.”²²

Between 1978 and 2013, the number of people living below the World Bank threshold of absolute poverty dropped from 80 percent to 9 percent of the population.²³ While China’s per capita GDP was approximately the same as India’s in 1978, by 2020 it was five times higher. Per capita GDP figures are partially misleading here since, in the pre-reform era, many essential goods and services were provided freely to the population (hence the Chinese peasantry enjoyed a far higher standard of living than the Indian peasantry, in spite having a similar income). Nonetheless, the vast majority of Chinese people experienced a dramatic improvement in living standards in the decades following the adoption of Reform and Opening Up.

Food production increased substantially, such that “China finally produced enough grain to abolish grain rationing altogether.”²⁴ People also benefitted from a much more varied diet. In the 1980s, key consumer goods such as refrigerators and washing machines went from being relatively rare to being almost universal. The rate of access to clean water and modern energy also increased dramatically.

British economist John Ross judges that “the most comprehensive criteria for judging the overall impact of social and environmental conditions in a country is average life expectancy – as this sums up and balances the combined effect of all positive and negative economic, social, environmental, health, educational and other trends.”²⁵ Average life expectancy in China in 1975 was 62 – impressive for a large developing country at the time, certainly when compared with India’s 49. However in the US it was 71. By 2021, life expectancy in both China and the US was 77.

Infant mortality rate is another important poverty indicator. Colin Mackerras notes that infant mortality in China “fell from 37.6 deaths per 1,000 live births around the late 1970s to 5.4 per 1,000 in 2020, just lower than the United States, where it was 5.69 per 1000 live births the same year.”²⁶

Arthur Kroeber writes that between 1988 and 2008, average per capita income in China grew by 229 percent – “ten times the global average of 24 percent, and far ahead of the rates for India (34 percent).”²⁷ Noting that this increased income was by no means limited to the wealthy, Kroeber points out that whereas in 1994 a Chinese factory worker made only a quarter of the wage of their counterpart in Thailand, by 2008, the Chinese worker was earning 25 percent more than the Thai worker.²⁸

Thus it is beyond dispute that economic reforms have been tremendously impactful in terms of reducing poverty in China. What is also beyond dispute is that inequality has grown at a startling rate. While the cake is much bigger – China’s GDP rose from 150 billion USD in 1978 to 17.7 trillion USD in 2021 – it has been divided very unequally.²⁹ But even the smallest slices are much larger than they were. The late Egyptian political scientist Samir Amin, who was by no means uncritical of Chinese socialism, pointed out that “the growth of income has been a reality for almost all the population even if that growth has been much higher for some than it has been for the others.” Therefore in China, “growing inequality has been accompanied by reduction of poverty”, unlike in the vast majority of countries of the Global South, where “growth – and in some cases significant high growth – has benefited only a minority.”³⁰

The Italian Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo made a profound analysis of the inequalities introduced as a result of China’s market reforms. He pointed out that there are two types of inequality to consider: “1) inequality existing on the global scale between the most and least developed countries; and 2) the inequality existing within each individual country.” Losurdo states that China’s rise constitutes a most extraordinary contribution to the fight against global-scale inequality. He also points to the existence of an “absolute inequality that exists between life and death” which Chinese socialism has addressed with extraordinary success, “eliminating once and for all the absolute qualitative inequality inherent in starvation and the risk of starvation.”³¹

None of which is to say that inequality in China is not a problem. It is a serious problem, and is recognised as such by China’s government, which has been actively working to reduce inequality for the last two decades. Kroeber notes that since 2000, Beijing has launched “a host of policies specifically designed to reduce urban-rural inequality and inequalities between poor and rich regions. Programs to boost rural incomes have included: a relaxation of rules requiring farmers to grow grain, enabling them to increase production of more profitable cash crops; the easing and finally abolition of taxes and fees on agricultural production; a major push to build farm-to-market roads, helping farmers gain access to richer urban consumers; and stepped-up investments in food processing industries.”³²

All this has been combined with vast infrastructure development programs, particularly in the poorer Western and Central regions. Kroeber observes that the urban-rural income gap started to shrink from 2009. In addition to the urban-rural gap, inequality between lower-income groups and higher-income groups has also been waning since 2010. Compulsory free 9-year education was established in 2007, and the rural cooperative medical insurance system was set up in 2003. The dibao rural minimum living standard guarantee (dibao) program, first introduced in Shanghai in 1993, is “one of the largest minimum income cash transfer schemes in the world.”³³ These and other steps to restore a functioning social welfare system aim to address the inequality and unfairness associated with the market economy.

In sum, it should be clear that four decades of market reforms and the expansion of private capital, while introducing a level of inequality that would have been unimaginable in pre-1978 China, have nevertheless played an indispensable role in reducing poverty. Indeed eliminating poverty was the central motivating force of reform and opening up. As Deng Xiaoping said in 1987: “to uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty.”³⁴

Targeted poverty alleviation

At the 18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012, General Secretary Xi Jinping announced the two centenary goals: “realising a moderately prosperous society by the centenary of the CPC in 2021 and in turning China into a prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious modern socialist country by the centenary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049.”³⁵ The most important component of becoming a “moderately prosperous society” was to eliminate absolute poverty. Towards this goal, in 2014, China’s government embarked upon the largest systematic poverty alleviation program in history.

Researchers at the Tricontinental Institute have published a dossier about the targeted poverty alleviation program, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, based on extensive research, case studies and interviews, carried out by a small team on the ground in China. The dossier describes the four questions that guided implementation of the program: “Who should be lifted out of poverty? Who carries out the work? What measures need to be taken to address poverty? How can evaluations be done to ensure that people remain out of poverty?”³⁶

To help answer the first question, that is, to identify those living in extreme poverty, the dossier notes that 800,000 CPC cadres, community workers and volunteers were mobilised to “visit and survey every household across the country, identifying 89.62 million poor people in 29.48 million households and 128,000 villages.” Having identified those living below the poverty line, the cadres worked with each family and community to identify specific measures to improve their situation.

As noted in the introduction to this article, the Chinese government’s definition of extreme poverty is not based solely on income level, but also includes the two assurances (for adequate food and clothing) and three guarantees (access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education).³⁷ As such, permanently ending extreme poverty is not a unidimensional problem that can be solved simply by transferring cash to poor families.

To create specific, family- and community-specific solutions to poverty has required an extraordinary mobilisation. “Three million carefully selected cadres were dispatched to poor villages, forming 255,000 teams that reside there. Living in humble conditions for generally one to three years at a time, the teams worked alongside poor peasants, local officials, and volunteers until each household was lifted out of poverty… By 2015, all poor villages had a resident team, and every poor household had an assigned cadre to help in the process of being lifted, and more importantly, of lifting themselves out of poverty.”³⁸

The targeted poverty alleviation campaign used a wide array of methods. Millions of jobs were created through the development of local production units (with the corresponding access to funding, training, equipment and markets), and also through the innovative use of technology, for example using e-commerce to connect small rural businesses with China’s vast online market. A report by China’s State Council Information Office discusses the launch of e-commerce projects throughout the countryside: “All 832 poor counties have been included in the initiative… The number of e-businesses in these counties grew from 1.32 million in 2016 to 3.11 million in 2020.”³⁹

As part of the poverty alleviation program, many industries have been transferred from the urban coastal areas to the rural inland zones, with more than 300,000 industrial bases having been built in the last decade. The government “has facilitated the transfer of food processing, clothes manufacturing, and other labour-intensive industries from the east to the west. With the growth of such specialty industries, poor areas have gained economic momentum.”⁴⁰ Thus while working to eliminate poverty, China is also making progress towards the vision outlined by Marx and Engels 150 years ago of “abolishing the antithesis between town and country”.⁴¹

The poverty alleviation program is also connected to China’s bid to create an ‘ecological civilisation’, protecting ecosystems, reducing pollution and getting to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. For example, millions of people have been employed in the restoration and protection of forests and grasslands.⁴²

Education also plays an important role in poverty alleviation, and in recent years several million teachers have been dispatched to the poorer Central and Western regions.⁴³ In the decade from 2010 to 2020, the average number of years of education for Chinese adults increased from nine to ten, and the number of people with tertiary education nearly doubled, from 8,930 to 15,467 per 100,000.⁴⁴ Remote learning techniques have also been widely deployed in impoverished areas, greatly aided by improvements in communications infrastructure: over 98 percent of poor villages now have access to optical fibre communications and 4G technology, up from less than 70 percent in 2017.⁴⁵

The authors of the Tricontinental dossier note that, “for families who are living in extremely remote areas or exposed to frequent natural disasters, it is near impossible to break the cycle of poverty without moving to more habitable environments.” As such, almost 10 million people were voluntarily relocated from remote zones to newly built urban communities, which included schools, hospitals, childcare facilities and cultural centres.

As noted at the beginning of the article, the targeted poverty alleviation program succeeded in reducing the number of people living in absolute poverty from just under 100 million people to zero. As Xi Jinping observed, “thanks to the sustained efforts of the Chinese people from generation to generation, those who once lived in poverty no longer have to worry about food or clothing or access to education, housing and medical insurance.”⁴⁶

What’s more, the goal of eliminating extreme poverty was fulfilled while the country was concurrently battling a pandemic which has driven millions into poverty throughout the world. The success of this campaign should be considered as testament to China’s socialist system: no state with a capitalist ruling class has ever made such a comprehensive and systematic effort to provide people’s most basic human rights. The orientation of government policy towards the needs of the poor; the strong institutional and infrastructural framework; and the willingness of millions of cadre to participate in the campaign: all these are reflections of a vibrant Chinese socialism.

Towards common prosperity

With the completion of the targeted poverty alleviation campaign and the accomplishment of the first centenary goal, China has scored an important victory; but the long war on poverty continues, and the second centenary goal has now come into sharper focus. Building a great modern socialist country in all respects implies taking on relative poverty, improving per capita GDP, revitalising rural areas, and reducing inequality between regions and groups. It is time for “making the cake bigger and better and sharing it fairly through rational institutional arrangements.”⁴⁷

In an article entitled Making Solid Progress Toward Common Prosperity, based on a speech at the 10th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission on 17 August 2021, Xi Jinping explained that the success of the targeted poverty alleviation campaign had “created conditions conducive to bringing about prosperity for all,” and that China was now advancing into “a historical stage in which we will make solid steps toward common prosperity.”⁴⁸

In a detailed analysis of the concept of common prosperity, British academic Michael Dunford notes that the phrase first appeared in an article in People’s Daily on 25th September 1953, and was posed as a key goal of China’s socialist construction.⁴⁹ Deng Xiaoping talked frequently about common prosperity, highlighting that the principle of “letting a few get rich first” was only a means of accelerating the advance of the entire population, and that the basic aims and structures of socialism should not be thrown out with the introduction of certain elements of capitalism:

Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people. To get rich in a socialist society means prosperity for the entire people. The principles of socialism are: first, development of production and second, common prosperity. We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster.⁵⁰

Jiang Zemin also often invoked the idea of common prosperity: “We will ensure that our people will reap the benefit of continued economic growth and gradually achieve common prosperity.”⁵¹ In his report to the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC, Hu Jintao described common prosperity as “the fundamental principle of socialism with Chinese characteristics”, adding that the government must “adjust the pattern of national income distribution, tighten its regulation by secondary distribution and work hard to narrow income gaps so that all the people can share in more fruits of development in a fair way and move steadily toward common prosperity.”⁵²

Thus each generation of the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has actively promoted the concept of common prosperity. However, with the completion of the targeted poverty alleviation program, common prosperity becomes a major policy priority. In a speech given in January 2021 at a seminar for provincial and ministerial level officials on studying and implementing the guiding principles of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, Xi Jinping said:

Realising common prosperity is more than an economic goal. It is a major political issue that bears on our Party’s governance foundation. We cannot allow the gap between the rich and the poor to continue growing… We cannot permit the wealth gap to become an unbridgeable gulf… We must be proactive about narrowing the gaps between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between rich and poor people. We should promote all-around social progress and well-rounded personal development, and advocate social fairness and justice, so that our people enjoy the fruits of development in a fairer way. We should see that people have a stronger sense of fulfilment, happiness, and security and make them feel that common prosperity is not an empty slogan but a concrete fact that they can see and feel for themselves.⁵³

In the above-cited article, Making Solid Progress Toward Common Prosperity, Xi Jinping put forward various targets and timelines: to make “solid progress toward bringing prosperity to all”, reducing income inequality by the end of the 14th five-year plan in 2025; ensuring equitable access to basic public services by 2035; and “basically achieving” common prosperity by 2049, with “gaps between individual incomes and actual consumption levels narrowed to an appropriate range.” Xi called for an action plan to be formulated with these targets in mind. And since the Chinese government is not in the habit of making empty promises, the action plan should include “rational and workable systems of targets and methods of evaluation.”

The renewed emphasis on common prosperity also sends a message about maintaining the primacy of the public sector of China’s economy, since it is the role of the state-owned companies, government planning and macroeconomic regulation which ensures the country’s overall economic activity serves the people as a whole. As the influential Chinese academic Cheng Enfu pointed out in 2014: “If the public economy is not treated as dominant in the socialist economy, government’s adjustment function will be weakened greatly, which will greatly hinder the implementation of the economic and social development strategy of the country and the country will lack the economic basis that will guarantee the fundamental interest of the masses and common prosperity.”⁵⁴

Hu Leming, Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, makes a similar point about the relationship between the public economy and the pursuit of common prosperity: “Without the leading position of the public economy, there will be no solid economic basis and powerful material means and basis for governance by the Communist Party, nor for the whole socialist superstructure, and we will have no means to prevent growing income disparity and will not be able to realise common prosperity.”⁵⁵

Deng Xiaoping often insisted that “predominance of public ownership and common prosperity are the two fundamental socialist principles that we must adhere to.”⁵⁶ The renewed emphasis on common prosperity is an important step in the ongoing attempts to “strike a proper balance between efficiency and fairness”,⁵⁷ to impose limits on the influence of the owners of capital, to reassert the primacy of the state-owned economy and the interests of the working class, and to reiterate that the CPC will never “take the evil road of changing our flags and banners.”⁵⁸

While the common prosperity campaign is in its early stages, there have already been a number of important developments, including a regulatory crackdown on the private education sector,⁵⁹ a set of measures to prevent gaming addition among children,⁶⁰ the imposition of stricter rent controls,⁶¹ and several laws and regulations to protect the rights of workers in the “gig economy”. Tech companies “must now sign labour contracts with their gig workers, and provide them with the insurance coverage of state-run insurers”⁶²; furthermore, China’s Trade Union Law has been revised to enable and encourage unionisation of gig economy workers.⁶³

China’s success in eliminating extreme poverty is “far from a full stop” and we can expect the Chinese party and government to continue “consolidating and expanding poverty alleviation achievements,”⁶⁴ deepening the campaign to end relative poverty and achieve common prosperity.

Meanwhile in the advanced capitalist countries, where the capitalist class is the ruling class, and where neoliberal economic theory has dominated for the last four decades, we are seeing an alarming rise in poverty and inequality. Rather than pursuing common prosperity, the US and its allies are drifting towards mass destitution. This disparity highlights that China’s continuing achievements in poverty alleviation are a function of its socialist system. As Deng Xiaoping said in 1987, ultimately, “only the socialist system can eradicate poverty.”⁶⁵

Citations

Citations

Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

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China's long war on poverty

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