I agree that China isn’t exploiting Africa as the west does, but what I’m saying is that they are laying the groundwork’s to be able to do it in the future, and no one could stop them eventually. I guess I’m being petty because there will be improvement. But I wonder if Africans would fare better without foreigners with wealth, which I suspect, but that could be argued to be an petty standard.
As I argued earlier, the selection of “philosopher kings” (people that are good and can choose people that are good to succeed them), a moral meritocracy, might be possible in authoritarian nations where the workers have large influence thanks to population size. So maybe you are correct about China’s morality, but I wonder how it could continue with all the various factions.
Who runs China in your opinion? There’s the army and Xi and all various groups and individuals.
Xi and the clique around him run the show now and I suppose they are trying to isolate the capitalist-roaders or at least get them to come around.
The People’s Army is very conservative in a pure sense of the word – in other words, they are very Maoist and Communist. They are dying off, but the top officer staff in the military (and the top of the state for that matter) has traditionally been made up of survivors of the Great March. That hardens a man. The military runs many of the state-owned enterprises in China and they do a good job of it and make quite a bit of money for themselves too. So there’s no push in the army for privatization.
Oh, there are definitely capitalist-roaders in the CCP! And they are not throwing them out of the party either. There is a billionaire who sits in the People’s Assembly. He recently stated his views and they were straight up neoliberalism. Surprise surprise!
Right now Xi is on a back to Maoism campaign. Xi is a real Maoist, a real Communist. A lot of firms have been renationalized. There are capitalist-roaders in the party who are not happy about this turn of events and they have been complaining a lot. People don’t understand China.
It’s a dictatorship, true, but there is a lot of democracy in the party itself especially after the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward, most of the problems of which were caused by a lack of democracy in the party.
At the time, lot of cadres were aware that things were catastrophic at the local levels but they were under orders to increase production so they inflated their harvest statistics. The famine itself was caused by overprovisioning: quite a bit of food was grown in those years, but because they were under pressure to increase harvests, if you normally would have to give 70% of the harvest to the state and leave 30% to feed your people at the local level, they would give 90% to the state and leave only 10% to feed their people.
What is odd is that if you go to rural China these days, you can easily find people who lived through the Great Leap, and they are philosophical about it and not nearly as condemnatory as you would think. In every year but one during the Great Leap, the death rate was lower than only 10 years before in pre-revolutionary China. So even though a lot of people died during the Great Leap, in general even more people were dying in Republican China only 10 years before. So even the Great Leap was a time of significantly reduced death rate due to the Revolution.
