China does not claim to be a fully communist society yet. Official ideology describes the country as being in a long-term developmental phase of socialism; communism is portrayed as a future goal. However, if they continue as they have been treating people like mere numbers, keeping them in poverty under total control, while billionaires amass wealth they will never achieve that anyway. In a society that ideologically advocates for overcoming class distinctions and capitalist exploitation, enormous private fortunes exist. Entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have at times amassed wealth running into the billions. At the same time, the Party controls key sectors of the economy and can exert massive pressure on companies. That transitional phase has gone spectacularly wrong. That is not how communism is defined. Private property is accepted only as long as it remains compatible with the Party’s political interests. This is very convenient for the government: it can harness the productivity and innovation of capitalism without adopting the political power structures of a liberal political system.

IMHO China is a more capitalist country than the USA. 12h workdays 6 days a week (996), with overtime 16h, no labour rights, no representation, only the party gets that. Flooding the markets with goods sold at a loss, to drive the other countries’ industry out of business. The taxpayer subsideses the loss. And once China is the monopoly, they can charge what they want.

IMO these MAGA cunts should wet themselves at the sight of China. After all, China is more capitalist than the USA, lol.

Tankies are the greatest right-wing propaganda that lefties still fall for both by believing in it and by believing that it’s actually coming from sincere leftists.

i have it on good authority from about half of lemmy that china is a wonderful place where everyone feels safe and actually there never were any uyghurs, since that’s just western propaganda

Same reason the US has the most prisons even though it’s aiming to be the freest country.

China is a capitalist country

They focus their government money on creating jobs and control. People will well paying jobs and money for fun stuff are less likely to start a civil war

Rather than the US where the focus is making themselves richer and funding the military

They didn’t used to have billionaires, when Mao was in power. Strangely, a lot of Westerners seem to hate what China is now, but also hate what China was before, which seems very strange to me. “The reforms were bad and China should be more Maoist” that is a coherent position, “The reforms were good but should have gone further and become even more capitalist” that is also a coherent position. But “China is bad now because they allow billionaires but they were also bad when they didn’t allow billionaires” isn’t really coherent, it just seems like knee-jerk opposition to whatever they do or don’t do. Anyone who wants to offer critiques should be able to answer the simple question of whether the reforms were good or bad, whether they moved in the right or wrong direction.

On the off-chance that you actually want a serious answer to the question, let’s start with some history. Before the revolution, China’s average life expectancy was in the 30’s, it experienced frequent famines, had no access to medicine, and had had similarly awful conditions for literally thousands of years with no improvement for the average person. The revolution brought about huge improvements in life expectancy and the basic necessities of life (with the failure of the Great Leap Forward being an exception to this general trend).

However, while central planning works for providing basic necessities because the demand for those necessities is very predictable, it is not the most efficient regarding consumer goods. This was one of the failures that caused the collapse of the USSR, the desire for consumer good and the inability to compete domestically. Furthermore, despite the increases in life expectancy, virtually everyone in China still lived in extreme poverty. The reforms in the 80s were intended to address this, and they were wildly successful at it:

In the words of Deng, it doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black, so long as it catches mice. It doesn’t really matter if a policy is ideologically “pure,” so long as it provides clear material benefits for the common people.

Where I’m standing, the whole point of having any sort of political beliefs at all is to figure out which policies will improve people’s lives. And lifting 800 million people out of extreme poverty over the span of 40 years, can you name a more successful policy, ever, in all of history?

Maybe the real shitpost was the comments we made along the way.

Because they’re marxist leninist and think socialism is something you work towards and isn’t achievable by pressing the big red communism button.

China has stopped being communist for a while now, it’s developed into some flavour of capitalist society though I don’t remember much about the different variants. It’s certainly top heavy though like the USA.

Cos playing at communism at best. China is a totalitarian fascist state.

They aren’t trying to be communist, they are trying to be “Communist with Chinese elements” which is just capitalism. Similar to how they are a “Democracy with Chinese elements” which is just a dictatorship.

Ask Jack Ma what being a billionaire in China is worth.