If communism is the root of all evil, then...?

Question

...how do you explain China? I personally believe in Free Markets . Not free in terms of hire your own legislators, but free in terms of producers and consumers being able to negotiate thier own transactions without supervision. China appears to have adopted this concept without sheding it's socialist government framework. How do you reconcile this?

Answer 1

Communism isn't the root of all evil. Some of it perhaps, even a good deal of it, but not all of it.

The Chinese economic 'miracle' is due to labour costs there being a fraction of those in western countries so the leadership have woken up to the fact that they can produce goods and market them cheaply and therefore competitively in the west. They also attract western investors who are asset-stripping their factories and moving them to China to make even bigger profits.

The Chinese leadership are able to permit all this without abandoning their dictatorship over the masses. Making limited concessions to capitalism while retaining a communist dictatorship is not new - Lenin did it in the early 1920s in the Soviet Union.

An urban middle class has emerged in China with a standard of living comparable to the west, but at the price of strict political compliance, while the majority of people live in grinding poverty as before. I'll leave it up to the individual to debate whether any 'socialist' state worthy of the name should guarantee human rights to its workers, but whatever its leaders like to pretend, human rights don't come into the equation in the People's Republic of China and they never did.

Answer 2

China is an anomaly. They are not truly a free market nation, and yet they are no longer purely communist in all things. However, communism is entirely the opposite of free market, so the two could not exist in the same government anyway. You can't support both communism and free markets!

In my opinion, China has moved from being Communist China closer to becoming Fascist China. Fascism is defined as a government system where businesses are allowed to operate, but they are tightly controlled by the government, and heavily taxed. In my opinion, it is every bit as bad as Communism because it is all based in central control. When the Iron Curtain fell, some nations moved toward a thoroughly free market system (Estonia, Latvia), some moved toward European socialism (Poland, Hungary), but many have moved toward Fascism (China, Moldova, Russia, Kazakhstan). I'm afraid they won't find it to be much better in the long run. For the present, the people are probably happy that they are more prosperous, but ultimately, they will wish for freedom, and then things will probably get messy again.

Answer 3

I believe that there is the possiblity that for an undeterminate period of time, both socialism and capitalism can coexist to one degree or another.

Even within the same social and political environment.

You are right, China is doing a marvelous job (as far as we can see anyway) of utilizing the free market while maintaining a socialist government.

In America, we are going in the opposite direction, from an almost pure free market in the time following our Indipendence up to today, where we have a very strong socialistic influence in our society.

They seem to be opposites, and I believe in the long term, they are.

Ultimately, in the case of America, it will come to a revolution (whether with guns or votes) and one or the other will win out and take control.

Answer 4

Rank Deaths Event Time Frame
1 50 000 000 World War II 1937-1945
2 40 000 000 China: Mao Zedong's regime 1949-1976
3 20 000 000 USSR: Stalin's regime 1924-1953
4 15 000 000 World War I 1914-1918
5 8 800 000 Russian Civil War 1918-1921
6 4 000 000 China: Warlord & Nationalist Era 1917-1937
7 3 000 000 Congo Free State 1900-1908
8 2 800 000 Korean War 1950-1953
9 2 700 000 2nd Indochina War (incl. Laos & Cambodia) 1960-1975
10 2 500 000 Chinese Civil War 1945-1949
11 2 100 000 Expulsion of Germans after World War II 1945-1947
12 1 900 000 Second Sudanese Civil War 1983-1999
13 1 700 000 Congolese Civil War 1998-1999
13 1 500 000 Turkish Genocide against Armenia 1915-1923
14 1 000 000 Cambodia: Khmer Rouge regime 1975-1979

China and communism seem to hold quite a few places here. and as you stated it has moved to embrace capitalism to keep from dying out as the soviets did. they bought a little time and sold out the whole premise of Comminism.

Answer 5

HA HA HA

In China, the only thing communist is maybe the name of the country ! They are much more capitalist than the US and the difference between poors and rich is by far higher... Not to mention the differences between provinces...
Compared to them, the US would look like a socialist wellfare country !

They are in fact an oligarchic form of government.

I personnally don´t see the socialist framework in China and I guess if I return there I still won´t see it.

That´s why angry people demonstrate with pictures of Mao (the devil) to protest the present government

Answer 6

-It is no great mystery. China's economic succes has come from lessoning the degree to which there economic model is Socialist. They appear to be moving to a Faschist style of governance.
-China's grow has still not risen to a leave where personal GDP equal that of say Mexico. It is a rising economic power with vast potential, but is still a very small part of the world economy, when Taiwan is not included in it's GDP.

Answer 7

Firstly, communism is NOT the root of all evil.

And it would appear that China is interested in systems that work economically, without getting mired down in the semantics and idealogies that plague the US and other 'capitalist' countries.

The US could benefit from a mixed economic approach...without slapping labels on them. But this requires open minds...something in very short supply in the US of A!

Answer 8

The Chinese style of communism is actually a totalitarian form of government. The party bosses run the show.
To their credit, they have figured out that free enterprise works. They are not willing to give up control of the government and the party. In China, it looks like you can have it both ways.

Answer 9

Most of China is still very poor and depressed. The only bright spots are the areas that have been ALLOWED to experiment in capitalism.

Answer 10

the idea that communism is the root of evil is just propoganda that has been passed down through generations ever since it was introduced by marx and engels. It is just another form of government.