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Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country?

China’s restrictions on free speech scare me… and I don’t like all their policies… at all…

but, in China’s defense…

Many countries that have tried to implement communism have been overthrown… and so if China is trying to position itself in a technologically dominant way to avoid being overthrown, embracing some limited capitalism to foster technological dominance may make sense. If you look at China, they make a lot of great tech and they are really excelling at robotics.

If someone is really good at making money, they sometimes use that capital to create more companies or push technological development further. So it may be a thought out policy choice to allow limited capitalism, even resulting in billionaires, so as to gain technological dominance, so as to not be overthrown?

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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

China’s restrictions on free speech scare me…

I see people complain about free speech restrictions in China with this deep paranoid fervor. And then I see them dismiss free speech restrictions on Reddit or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or Twitter as personal problems created by trolls and losers.

That’s not even to say the Chinese bureaucracy doesn’t have a rigid and claustraphobic anti-speech policy. I’ve seen ostensibly pro-China people bang their heads into it and come back complaining. I’ve also seen the kind of baby-brained content that Chinese network TV produces in an effort to be inoffensive and I absolutely agree it sucks. I’ve also seen the insane shit that gets posted in their back corners. Conspiracy theories and ugly shitposts and bonkers memes that would give Alex Jones a run for his money, give me sympathy for anyone who has to act as moderator in that asylum. Something of a running joke that the Chinese Firewall isn’t about protecting them from us, it’s about protecting us from them.

Of cousre, I’m not living in China. So my fear of Chinese restrictions on free speech are minimal because the Chinese government isn’t the one I have to worry about.

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- someone@lemmy.today ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s a great point and the anti-free speech climate in the USA is terrifying.
  
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BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
No political system can exist in its purest form. ALL successful governments are a mix of the best elements of multiple systems. America positions itself as the big democracy, but many of the best things about America are SOCIALIST.

Communist China ran into all sorts of problems when they tried to implement the purest form, but now that they’ve allowed capitalism into the mix, job quality and working conditions have increased greatly, and they have become the manufacturing capital of the world.

They will end up being the most influential country on the planet, without firing a shot.

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boonhet@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

embracing some limited capitalism

They were embracing some limited capitalism last century. They’re fully capitalist now, minting more brand new billionaires every year than any other country. Per capita the US still has more, but not for long. China’s working with some pretty bad inequality.

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skidicarus@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Not only does it make sense from a global perspective, but it also makes sense economically. China would still be in the gutter if they didn’t have market engagement. The USSR, for example, failed dramatically at trying to have a strictly command-based economy.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Did it fail because of the command-economy? I seem to recall the worst days of the USSR following implementation of perestroika. And then the Shock Doctrine that followed Yeltsin’s tank-ride into parliament (literally) was even worse.
  
  The amount of complaining under the command-economy was arguably much worse. But that stemmed more from the receptiveness of the government to complaints than under the modern system, where they just arrest you and shove you into a trench in Ukraine.
  
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  - skidicarus@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I believe so, yes. Other to a the well-documented issues that arose from the information problem, Vivek Chibber has done some recent work on the incentive problems that also plague Soviet-style command economies. …substack.com/…/why-soviet-style-planning-fails
    
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    UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Vivek Chibber has done some recent work on the incentive problems that also plague Soviet-style command economies.
    
    He comes at it empirically - “We ought to be skeptical, as any rational person ought to be, because when you see something failing over and over and over again” - and extends causality from there. And he goes running back to price signals as the proximate cause of the failure, because he conflates market signals with efficient consumption patterns.
    
    Planning was consciously directing the flows of investment into the sectors that you deemed to be the priority sectors, discouraging investment from sectors that you deemed to be superfluous or unimportant. And then the key — the really hard part — was figuring out how to incentivize the managers of your factories, the managers of the agricultural cooperatives that you had to follow the dictates of the plan, because you cannot rely on price signals.
    
    Which is all true, but not unique to communist economic planners. We have a bevy of capitalist planners that live all through the corporate world, fixated on directing the flow of investment. And once an industry becomes vertically integrated, it also can’t rely on market signals, because all the company is dealing with is raw material inputs and final product outputs.
    
    What private industry in capitalist states have achieved that communists arguably lacked was the proverbial “Manufactured Consent” of the end consumer. You take a thing that’s incredibly cheap to produce and engineer at scale - plastic or particle board or ink/paper or data - and you upsell it through marketing. So you end up with a $600B/year budget in the United States that’s dedicated just to telling people that they need to buy stuff.
    
    And that doesn’t include the budget for industry lobbying or legal wrangling. It doesn’t include the kind of bribery and kickbacks that avoid popular resistance to industry. Or the negative externalities of waste management that are displaced onto end consumers.
    
    Normally in capitalism, what do managers do? They want to make profits. The way to make a profit is by trying to sell at the lowest price possible, the best quality good that you can.
    
    That’s straight foward not true. You make a profit by selling at the highest price possible with the lowest quality of good that you can. You aim for higher margins per unit sold. And then you aim to maximize volume. McDonalds would not exist in its current state if it was in the business of undercutting people making sandwiches at home with superior products.
    
    Everything he’s writing about is just the restatement of the old economic calculation problem posited by Ludwig von Mises in 1920. And it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked with the advent of modern computer technology. But even before the invention of the microprocessor, it was on shaking footing in countries like Allende’s Chile and Deng’s China.
    
    In fact, the reactionary response to central planning as an institution wasn’t to outcompete it but to demolish the methods by which it was achieved. Most famously, when Pinochet’s troops stormed the Presidential offices and shot the computers.
    
    Not only is central planning possible, but it is proven successful, as often within capitalism as within the socialist sphere.
    
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- Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  The USSR, for example, failed dramatically at trying to have a strictly command-based economy.
  
  So did East Germany.
  
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