China's Communist Capitalism: The Real World of Market Socialism

Abstract

In China, when the Four Modernizations programme was launched in 1978, it was announced that rapid development and growth would be achieved by 'using capitalism to develop socialism', necessitating the development of what would later be called 'market socialism with Chinese characteristics'. The ideological legitimation of 'Deng Xiaoping thought' in the post-Mao era of market reforms relied in part on Lenin's New Economic Policy, which, it was claimed, proved that under certain conditions it was both necessary and desirable to facilitate capitalism in order to further the socialist project. Most important of all, 'Deng Xiaoping thought' declared that exploitation would be tolerated, especially in the Special Economic Zones and 'open cities' which would act as 'windows' on the global economy, by attracting foreign capital to a disciplined and 'competitive' labour force. Indeed, there was a great deal of such tolerance, with over 30 million workers employed in these zones under the systematic repression of labour rights and unrestrained capitalist accumulation. Market socialists in the advanced capitalist countries who glorified the success of China's economic reforms all too often overlooked this even after the massacre of students and workers in Tiananmen Square. This tolerance for exploitation was not shared by the workers whose involvement in the mass protest was driven largely by the sentiment expressed in a worker's letter to the students in Tiananmen Square: that 'the wealth created by the sweat and blood of hundreds of millions of compatriots is squandered by the bureaucrats, China's biggest capitalists.