It’s anarchist theory that yes, auth communism is just state capitalism instead of private capitalism. None of the “alienation” markers Marx associated with capitalism are done away with. They only pinky promise to do so one things are safe enough and the govt magically dissolves to hand the reigns to workers. Sure.
You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what communists are actually advocating for. Communists don’t advocate for the dissolution of the government but the dissolution of the state, which are 2 distinct things. The government serves a vital purpose of administration and organisation. The state is the arm of the government that enforces one classes rule over the others. If there is only one class (the proletariat) the state dissolves not out of some virtue but because it simply stops serving a purpose.
The point is whether that time and place would ever come into being. Will the gracious leaders a hundred years from now actually do that deed. Hope and a dream, which can just end up always being conveniently around the bend. What mechanism is in place to actually make it occurr? Who decides when the time/place is sufficient? In the meantime, people are in power alienating the workers just like everywhere else, and have no end in sight or real incentive to give it up. Theres a bridge to be sold if you think they’ll willingly and voluntarily give the power up after centuries out of the goodness and purity of their hearts.
You continue to misunderstand the communist position. You are projecting liberal idealism onto a framework based on historical materialism. You still seem to think we expect the state to be abolished by decree or that its existence relies on the graciousness of future leaders. This is entirely backward. The state is not a moral entity held together by the goodwill or greed of individuals. It is an instrument of class suppression dictated by economic relations.
Once class division becomes a thing of the past, which is structurally inevitable following the comprehensive collectivization of the means of production, the state simply ceases to have a material purpose. When an institution loses its underlying economic justification, it does not need to be ceremoniously abolished. It withers away as obsolete waste. If a prison has no one in it, it is only a matter of time before it is repurposed for something useful to the community. You do not need a committee of wardens to vote on dismantling an empty prison. The guard force naturally dissolves because maintaining it defies basic logic.
You ask what mechanism decides when the time is sufficient. The mechanism is the material development of the productive forces and the conscious reorganization of the relations of production. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, state power is held collectively by the working class to suppress the former ruling class and organize socialist construction. As class antagonisms disappear, the coercive apparatus of the state naturally recedes into mere public administration. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of technical processes.
Also, you fundamentally conflate two distinct theoretical concepts. Marx’s theory of alienation and his definition of capital are not the same thing. Capital is a very specific social relation characterized by the extraction of surplus value from wage labor to generate profit. When the means of production are collectively owned and production is planned for social need rather than market accumulation, capital simply ceases to exist. Alienation is the broader estrangement of humans from the products of their labor, the act of production, and their own human potential.
Marx describes alienation as the effects that capitalism has on workers. So what explains the alienation workers experience in China? It’s capitalism, just via the state’s direction. With a nice mix of private capital in there too still, just for fun.
following the comprehensive collectivization of the means of production, the state simply ceases to have a material purpose.
That’s the hope and assumption im claiming is false. Collectivising all the means of production doesnt make the state useless. To those currently in power at that time, it’s still very useful: keeping them in their extra perks and standards of living they currently enjoy. Unless youre suggesting the leaders of the CCP have the same standard of living as the workers? Unless they’re 100% selfless (the blind hope) they’ll try to retain that power when push comes to shove. When the means of production are completely centralized, the worker will still have to pry it from the leaders’ cold dead hands
You claim that Marx described alienation as the effect of capitalism on workers (when in reality it is the effect of private property and wage labour continuing to exist), completely ignoring the fundamental material reality that China is still in the primary stage of socialism. The alienation currently experienced by Chinese workers is precisely because private ownership and wage labor still objectively exist at this stage. However, this is by no means the state-led capitalism you claim, but rather a necessary material compromise during the transition period. Your remark about retaining private capital for fun completely exposes your superficial, vibes based analysis, devoid of any serious political economy. Retaining and developing the non-public sector is for the rapid development of productive forces. If you have even a basic understanding of history, you will know that the Soviet Union’s absolute egalitarianism and complete nationalization, even eliminating all private small and micro-enterprises, resulted in a massive black market small/micro firms. It was these black markets and underground economies, detached from the interests of the masses, that were easily exploited in the 1990s, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and widespread suffering. China allows the existence of private capital to avoid repeating the Soviet Union’s mistakes; it is about utilizing capital while simultaneously controlling it, not surrendering to it.
As for your second paragraph, it’s utter nonsense, rife with baseless conspiracy theories and Western-centric arrogance. You conjure up a group of leaders who crave privilege and cling desperately to power, a complete misinterpretation of the behavior of Western bourgeois politicians and corrupt oligarchs and their application to China. You lack even the most basic common sense, consistently using the abbreviation “CCP,” a common Western media term, while refusing to use the official English abbreviation “CPC.” This directly exposes that you haven’t conducted even the most basic research on China; your understanding is entirely based on secondhand information fed by American anti-communist media.
The Chinese Communist Party has over 100 million members, the vast majority of whom are farmers, workers, frontline laborers, and professional technicians. This is a true vanguard representing the broad masses of working people, not the gang of a few greedy elites you imagine. Your claim that those in power enjoy extra privileges is utterly untenable in the face of the vast grassroots Party organization. The vast majority of government and Party cadres are at the grassroots and county levels; frankly, their living standards are exactly the same as ordinary workers, and sometimes even worse due to the heavy workload at the grassroots level. As for provincial-level and above cadres, the vast majority enjoy a standard of living comparable to ordinary workers, far inferior to that of Western politicians or genuine capitalists.
Your assumption that once the means of production are completely centralized, workers must wrest power from the cold hands of leaders is an anarchistic paranoia that completely ignores democratic centralism and the mass line. The source and maintenance of power do not rely on the selflessness or morality of leaders, but on strict organizational discipline, continuous party rectification, and direct supervision by the people. Attributing the demise of the state apparatus to whether leaders are willing to relinquish privileges is using vulgar personal interests to deconstruct the grand process of historical materialism. When class differences truly disappear on the basis of highly developed material conditions, the public power governing society will naturally lose its nature of political oppression. This requires no one’s benevolence; it is an inevitable objective law arising from the development of productive forces to a certain stage.
The purpose of a system is what it does, the fundamental attribute of the state is that of a special coercive organ of one class oppressing another. With the realization of full collectivisation of the means of production, the material basis for the emergence and existence of classes is completely eradicated, and the demise of class differences becomes an irreversible historical inevitability. When there are no longer any hostile classes to be suppressed or ruling classes to maintain their privileges in society, the political function of the state as an instrument of class rule completely loses its material premise for existence. This is not because the state apparatus subjectively chooses to cease operation, but because with the elimination of class antagonism, this special violent machine of the state naturally loses its original function.
Communist kinda means nothing without a working class movement, which there aren’t any as of this moment. In both online spaces and irl though the identifier has become dominated by Marxist-Leninist types who get their entire worldview and “theory” through YouTube or social media hugboxes.
What this results in is, in short, complete misrepresentation of what communism and marxist theory actually are, extreme nationalist campism and straight delusion like claiming that China compared to other capitalists countries are fundamentally any different (most importantly in an economic sense, it’s also similar politically but that stems from the economic base, look up base and superstructure).
Yes all Chinese communists are delusional capitalists who get their understanding of theory from YouTube and social media hugboxes. You are very smart.
So you do genuinely believe that all of us Chinese communists are delusional? Interesting. Might I ask where your movement or contribution to theory is? To set us delusional “untermench” right.
Commonalities I see. (Reflecting both how the US is now, and how I could see it evolving on its current path.):
Mass surveillance with access to careers and positions of power dependent on living and thinking according to the party line. Wrongthink on social media results in real world consequence. (See political criticism in general in China, the reactions to the killing of Charlie Kirk in the US.)
Mass tracking of citizens. Every movement of every citizen is tracked and recorded 24/7. Every action they take with a computer of any kind is recorded. Every corner of every city is monitoring 24/7 by camera networks and surveillance drones. All these records are constantly trawled by AI for patterns of dissent. The invasive surveillance state the Uyghurs are subject to is the future our leaders want for all of us.)
Heavy police intervention in everyday life. (Checkpoints and showing your papers is the norm. Heavy integration between national and local law enforcement. Local law enforcement co-opted for political enforcement. Compare how China requires visiting foreigners to regularly check in at local police stations to the American ICE.)
Economic system consisting of market economies with heavy state intervention in key national industries. (Both are taking outright ownership stakes in companies in certain key sectors.)
Massive military spending for a military used to project power beyond national borders. (US more like Iraq or Iran wars. China more getting into wars you could call either revanchist or expansionist depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Think Taiwan or some of China’s land border disputes. Though admittedly the US is currently the far more interventionist of the two. But at the very least, both still maintain massive military-industrial complexes as major pieces of their national economies. China either has or will soon have the world’s largest navy. They currently want to use it to take Taiwan, but when you build a tool like that, an expeditionary Navy has all sorts of uses as a tool of national policy. Once you’re paying for the world’s largest Navy, the leadership of that Navy will constantly be pitching uses for it. No Navy admiral wants to see the size of the Navy cut. It will always be tempting to deal with a meddlesome trade dispute by dropping some bombs on people far away.)
Leadership chosen by performative but ultimately rigged and pointless elections.
One party political control. (Communist Party, Republican Party.)
The top leader is surrounded by a cult of personality. (Not sure to what extent Xi has done this. My impression is a lot less than Mao, but a lot more than other recent Chinese leaders. The Trump personality cult is more obvious. But at the least, both countries now have a clear precedent of the top leaders using cults of personality to maintain power.)
Nonexistent or co-opted labor unions
Birth rates maintained through state coercion. (I am not aware of any punitive measures implemented by China to raise birth rates. In the US, this looks like banning abortion and birth control. I think China is currently taking the carrot rather than the stick approach, but China has a clear precedent of using overwhelming state power to forcibly control the birth rate. See the One Child Policy. If they could justify that to lower the birth rate, coercive methods to raise the birth rate are also likely. Maybe tie access to careers to having children.)
Lead by a group of leaders seeking to cement permanent control through mass automation and artificial intelligence.
Close personal connections between the corporate and government leadership class. Through the Chinese lens, it looks like party members owning the big companies. Through the American lens, it looks like billionaire presidents and cabinet secretaries. The Venn diagram of the corporate leadership class and the government leadership class is a circle.
The US and China really seem to be converging to the same form of government. I suppose as both countries are heavily influenced by a class of billionaires with more loyalty to each other than to their respective nations, this shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s a reason Trump cozies up to dictators. These people are all copying each other’s homework.
On paper, China will remain nominally Communist and the US nominally capitalist. But both are converging towards what is probably better called techno-fascism.
I felt it could be helpful for others if I provided a more in depth response.
China certainly has political limits, but criticism and complaints are not remotely absent from the system. Local Party and government offices, petitioning channels, public consultations, and the 12345 hotline exist entirely to receive complaints about officials, services, and governance. That is very different from the fantasy that ordinary criticism automatically destroys your career.
China does have surveillance (as every modern state does), but the idea that every citizen’s movement and every computer action are constantly recorded and AI-scanned for dissent are complete fantasy. Xinjiang did experience much heavier security measures, but that policy arose after a real period of (US backed) terrorism and jihadist recruitment. On that note, compared with the Western response to terrorism, which involved invading, bombing, occupying, and destabilizing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, China’s emphasis on domestic security, education, policing and deradicalization was hardly monstrous.
Foreign visitors are also not required to repeatedly report to police stations. Their accommodation has to be registered, generally once at each place they stay, and hotels normally do it automatically. Nor is coordination between national and local police somehow inherently sinister. A coherent national legal system is preferable to fragmented local authorities acting as semi-independent fiefdoms.
The economic comparison is plainly ridiculous as it completely ignores class character. Both China and the US contain markets, corporations and state intervention because those are forms that can exist under very different systems. The real questions are who controls finance and strategic industry, whether private capital commands the state or is subordinate to it, where investment is directed, and what the system actually produces.
China directs credit and investment through planning, retains public control over strategic industries, and regularly disciplines private capital when it conflicts with public priorities. Billionaires exist because private property exists, but they do not exercise anything like the structural political power American billionaires do. In the US, capital openly dominates through ownership, lobbying, campaign finance, media power and the revolving door between business and government.
The military comparison is especially unserious because it compares America’s documented history with speculation about what China might someday do. The US has actually invaded, bombed, occupied, sanctioned and destabilized countries across the world. The China side of the argument is basically that China has a large navy, might fight over Taiwan, and therefore perhaps one day its admirals will invent overseas wars. One side is historical fact while the other is fan fiction.
It also ignores why China has expanded its military. China is surrounded by an American military architecture running through Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and the wider first island chain, while the United States spends vastly more on its military and maintains hundreds of overseas bases. Chinese military modernization does not occur in a vacuum.
Calling Chinese elections “performative and meaningless” is something only someone who knows nothing could say. That description does however fit the United States, where elections are enormous media spectacles financed by billionaires, corporations, PACs and lobbying networks, while vast amounts of real political and economic power remain in the hands of unelected owners of capital. Chinese elections are deliberately far less theatrical. Candidates are not expected to raise fortunes, buy national advertising campaigns or turn politics into celebrity competition. Deputies at the county and township levels are directly elected, with higher people’s congresses elected through the congress system, and these bodies form part of the actual machinery of state power.
China is also not literally a one-party state in the sense implied here. The CPC holds the leading role, but eight other recognized political parties participate through the united front and consultative system. They are not opposition parties competing to remove the CPC, but comparing that structure to the Republican Party controlling the United States is absurd.
The personality-cult comparison is similarly shallow. Xi has unquestionably overseen greater political centralization and has a much more prominent ideological role than some recent Chinese leaders. But Mao-era mass politics, Xi’s position within a Leninist party-state, and Trump’s highly personalized electoral movement are very different phenomena. Calling all three a personality cult obscures more than it explains.
Chinese unions are not nonexistent. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has hundreds of millions of members and operates throughout Chinese workplaces. There are valid criticisms about bureaucratism, insufficient worker initiative, and how effectively particular unions confront management, but that is very different from saying labor organization has been abolished or reduced to nothing.
The birth-rate claim is almost entirely speculation. China’s present policy is based overwhelmingly on subsidies, childcare support, tax relief and reducing the cost of raising children. The One Child Policy can and should be criticized for coercive implementation in earlier decades (even still said criticism must be situated in the context of the material reality of the time famine, underdevelopment etc.), but saying that because China once restricted fertility it will probably someday force women to have children is not evidence but once again more fan fiction.
The same applies to AI. China and the US invest heavily in artificial intelligence because it matters for industry, science, logistics, medicine, military capability and productivity. Claiming that both leaderships are secretly building AI in order to establish permanent political control is simply mind-reading unless evidence is provided.
The idea that the Chinese corporate and political leadership classes are basically identical is also false. Party membership among businesspeople does not mean that private companies somehow own the Party. The relevant issue is political supremacy. In the US, wealthy capitalists possess enormous independent power through ownership of production, finance, media and political funding. In China, private capital exists inside a system where strategic assets remain publicly controlled and where the state can regulate, discipline and redirect capital according to national priorities.
That is the central error throughout the whole argument. It sees police, cameras, corporations, markets, political parties, warships, leaders and AI in both countries and concludes that the systems must be converging. By that method almost every modern industrial state is the same.
A serious comparison has to examine property relations, class power, ownership, planning, political institutions, historical development, foreign policy and actual social outcomes. This argument largely avoids all of that.
Economic system consisting of market economies with heavy state intervention in key national industries. (Both are taking outright ownership stakes in companies in certain key sectors.)
What? Exactly which industries is the US in the business of nationalizing??
I read it. It’s a nothing burger of vibes based nonsense which again must go really hard if you have no idea about the reality of the material conditions class character and actual workings of China.
What even is Communist anymore? The US and China both seem to be converging to the same system of government.
It’s anarchist theory that yes, auth communism is just state capitalism instead of private capitalism. None of the “alienation” markers Marx associated with capitalism are done away with. They only pinky promise to do so one things are safe enough and the govt magically dissolves to hand the reigns to workers. Sure.
You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what communists are actually advocating for. Communists don’t advocate for the dissolution of the government but the dissolution of the state, which are 2 distinct things. The government serves a vital purpose of administration and organisation. The state is the arm of the government that enforces one classes rule over the others. If there is only one class (the proletariat) the state dissolves not out of some virtue but because it simply stops serving a purpose.
The point is whether that time and place would ever come into being. Will the gracious leaders a hundred years from now actually do that deed. Hope and a dream, which can just end up always being conveniently around the bend. What mechanism is in place to actually make it occurr? Who decides when the time/place is sufficient? In the meantime, people are in power alienating the workers just like everywhere else, and have no end in sight or real incentive to give it up. Theres a bridge to be sold if you think they’ll willingly and voluntarily give the power up after centuries out of the goodness and purity of their hearts.
You continue to misunderstand the communist position. You are projecting liberal idealism onto a framework based on historical materialism. You still seem to think we expect the state to be abolished by decree or that its existence relies on the graciousness of future leaders. This is entirely backward. The state is not a moral entity held together by the goodwill or greed of individuals. It is an instrument of class suppression dictated by economic relations.
Once class division becomes a thing of the past, which is structurally inevitable following the comprehensive collectivization of the means of production, the state simply ceases to have a material purpose. When an institution loses its underlying economic justification, it does not need to be ceremoniously abolished. It withers away as obsolete waste. If a prison has no one in it, it is only a matter of time before it is repurposed for something useful to the community. You do not need a committee of wardens to vote on dismantling an empty prison. The guard force naturally dissolves because maintaining it defies basic logic.
You ask what mechanism decides when the time is sufficient. The mechanism is the material development of the productive forces and the conscious reorganization of the relations of production. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, state power is held collectively by the working class to suppress the former ruling class and organize socialist construction. As class antagonisms disappear, the coercive apparatus of the state naturally recedes into mere public administration. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of technical processes.
Also, you fundamentally conflate two distinct theoretical concepts. Marx’s theory of alienation and his definition of capital are not the same thing. Capital is a very specific social relation characterized by the extraction of surplus value from wage labor to generate profit. When the means of production are collectively owned and production is planned for social need rather than market accumulation, capital simply ceases to exist. Alienation is the broader estrangement of humans from the products of their labor, the act of production, and their own human potential.
Marx describes alienation as the effects that capitalism has on workers. So what explains the alienation workers experience in China? It’s capitalism, just via the state’s direction. With a nice mix of private capital in there too still, just for fun.
That’s the hope and assumption im claiming is false. Collectivising all the means of production doesnt make the state useless. To those currently in power at that time, it’s still very useful: keeping them in their extra perks and standards of living they currently enjoy. Unless youre suggesting the leaders of the CCP have the same standard of living as the workers? Unless they’re 100% selfless (the blind hope) they’ll try to retain that power when push comes to shove. When the means of production are completely centralized, the worker will still have to pry it from the leaders’ cold dead hands
You claim that Marx described alienation as the effect of capitalism on workers (when in reality it is the effect of private property and wage labour continuing to exist), completely ignoring the fundamental material reality that China is still in the primary stage of socialism. The alienation currently experienced by Chinese workers is precisely because private ownership and wage labor still objectively exist at this stage. However, this is by no means the state-led capitalism you claim, but rather a necessary material compromise during the transition period. Your remark about retaining private capital for fun completely exposes your superficial, vibes based analysis, devoid of any serious political economy. Retaining and developing the non-public sector is for the rapid development of productive forces. If you have even a basic understanding of history, you will know that the Soviet Union’s absolute egalitarianism and complete nationalization, even eliminating all private small and micro-enterprises, resulted in a massive black market small/micro firms. It was these black markets and underground economies, detached from the interests of the masses, that were easily exploited in the 1990s, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and widespread suffering. China allows the existence of private capital to avoid repeating the Soviet Union’s mistakes; it is about utilizing capital while simultaneously controlling it, not surrendering to it.
As for your second paragraph, it’s utter nonsense, rife with baseless conspiracy theories and Western-centric arrogance. You conjure up a group of leaders who crave privilege and cling desperately to power, a complete misinterpretation of the behavior of Western bourgeois politicians and corrupt oligarchs and their application to China. You lack even the most basic common sense, consistently using the abbreviation “CCP,” a common Western media term, while refusing to use the official English abbreviation “CPC.” This directly exposes that you haven’t conducted even the most basic research on China; your understanding is entirely based on secondhand information fed by American anti-communist media.
The Chinese Communist Party has over 100 million members, the vast majority of whom are farmers, workers, frontline laborers, and professional technicians. This is a true vanguard representing the broad masses of working people, not the gang of a few greedy elites you imagine. Your claim that those in power enjoy extra privileges is utterly untenable in the face of the vast grassroots Party organization. The vast majority of government and Party cadres are at the grassroots and county levels; frankly, their living standards are exactly the same as ordinary workers, and sometimes even worse due to the heavy workload at the grassroots level. As for provincial-level and above cadres, the vast majority enjoy a standard of living comparable to ordinary workers, far inferior to that of Western politicians or genuine capitalists.
Your assumption that once the means of production are completely centralized, workers must wrest power from the cold hands of leaders is an anarchistic paranoia that completely ignores democratic centralism and the mass line. The source and maintenance of power do not rely on the selflessness or morality of leaders, but on strict organizational discipline, continuous party rectification, and direct supervision by the people. Attributing the demise of the state apparatus to whether leaders are willing to relinquish privileges is using vulgar personal interests to deconstruct the grand process of historical materialism. When class differences truly disappear on the basis of highly developed material conditions, the public power governing society will naturally lose its nature of political oppression. This requires no one’s benevolence; it is an inevitable objective law arising from the development of productive forces to a certain stage.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Not really a response to anything I said.
It won’t simply stop serving a purpose.
The purpose of a system is what it does, the fundamental attribute of the state is that of a special coercive organ of one class oppressing another. With the realization of full collectivisation of the means of production, the material basis for the emergence and existence of classes is completely eradicated, and the demise of class differences becomes an irreversible historical inevitability. When there are no longer any hostile classes to be suppressed or ruling classes to maintain their privileges in society, the political function of the state as an instrument of class rule completely loses its material premise for existence. This is not because the state apparatus subjectively chooses to cease operation, but because with the elimination of class antagonism, this special violent machine of the state naturally loses its original function.
The hostile class is the ones in control of the state. But the state never actually questions that, but purges and consolidates power into itself.
That’s the problem, those who want to eliminate the state are hostile to the ones in power.
I don’t think you understand what constitutes a class.
Communist kinda means nothing without a working class movement, which there aren’t any as of this moment. In both online spaces and irl though the identifier has become dominated by Marxist-Leninist types who get their entire worldview and “theory” through YouTube or social media hugboxes.
What this results in is, in short, complete misrepresentation of what communism and marxist theory actually are, extreme nationalist campism and straight delusion like claiming that China compared to other capitalists countries are fundamentally any different (most importantly in an economic sense, it’s also similar politically but that stems from the economic base, look up base and superstructure).
Yes all Chinese communists are delusional capitalists who get their understanding of theory from YouTube and social media hugboxes. You are very smart.
Delusional capitalist who gets their understanding of theory from YouTube and social media hugboxes spotted
So you do genuinely believe that all of us Chinese communists are delusional? Interesting. Might I ask where your movement or contribution to theory is? To set us delusional “untermench” right.
Commonalities I see. (Reflecting both how the US is now, and how I could see it evolving on its current path.):
Mass surveillance with access to careers and positions of power dependent on living and thinking according to the party line. Wrongthink on social media results in real world consequence. (See political criticism in general in China, the reactions to the killing of Charlie Kirk in the US.)
Mass tracking of citizens. Every movement of every citizen is tracked and recorded 24/7. Every action they take with a computer of any kind is recorded. Every corner of every city is monitoring 24/7 by camera networks and surveillance drones. All these records are constantly trawled by AI for patterns of dissent. The invasive surveillance state the Uyghurs are subject to is the future our leaders want for all of us.)
Heavy police intervention in everyday life. (Checkpoints and showing your papers is the norm. Heavy integration between national and local law enforcement. Local law enforcement co-opted for political enforcement. Compare how China requires visiting foreigners to regularly check in at local police stations to the American ICE.)
Economic system consisting of market economies with heavy state intervention in key national industries. (Both are taking outright ownership stakes in companies in certain key sectors.)
Massive military spending for a military used to project power beyond national borders. (US more like Iraq or Iran wars. China more getting into wars you could call either revanchist or expansionist depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Think Taiwan or some of China’s land border disputes. Though admittedly the US is currently the far more interventionist of the two. But at the very least, both still maintain massive military-industrial complexes as major pieces of their national economies. China either has or will soon have the world’s largest navy. They currently want to use it to take Taiwan, but when you build a tool like that, an expeditionary Navy has all sorts of uses as a tool of national policy. Once you’re paying for the world’s largest Navy, the leadership of that Navy will constantly be pitching uses for it. No Navy admiral wants to see the size of the Navy cut. It will always be tempting to deal with a meddlesome trade dispute by dropping some bombs on people far away.)
Leadership chosen by performative but ultimately rigged and pointless elections.
One party political control. (Communist Party, Republican Party.)
The top leader is surrounded by a cult of personality. (Not sure to what extent Xi has done this. My impression is a lot less than Mao, but a lot more than other recent Chinese leaders. The Trump personality cult is more obvious. But at the least, both countries now have a clear precedent of the top leaders using cults of personality to maintain power.)
Nonexistent or co-opted labor unions
Birth rates maintained through state coercion. (I am not aware of any punitive measures implemented by China to raise birth rates. In the US, this looks like banning abortion and birth control. I think China is currently taking the carrot rather than the stick approach, but China has a clear precedent of using overwhelming state power to forcibly control the birth rate. See the One Child Policy. If they could justify that to lower the birth rate, coercive methods to raise the birth rate are also likely. Maybe tie access to careers to having children.)
Lead by a group of leaders seeking to cement permanent control through mass automation and artificial intelligence.
Close personal connections between the corporate and government leadership class. Through the Chinese lens, it looks like party members owning the big companies. Through the American lens, it looks like billionaire presidents and cabinet secretaries. The Venn diagram of the corporate leadership class and the government leadership class is a circle.
The US and China really seem to be converging to the same form of government. I suppose as both countries are heavily influenced by a class of billionaires with more loyalty to each other than to their respective nations, this shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s a reason Trump cozies up to dictators. These people are all copying each other’s homework.
On paper, China will remain nominally Communist and the US nominally capitalist. But both are converging towards what is probably better called techno-fascism.
I felt it could be helpful for others if I provided a more in depth response.
China certainly has political limits, but criticism and complaints are not remotely absent from the system. Local Party and government offices, petitioning channels, public consultations, and the 12345 hotline exist entirely to receive complaints about officials, services, and governance. That is very different from the fantasy that ordinary criticism automatically destroys your career.
China does have surveillance (as every modern state does), but the idea that every citizen’s movement and every computer action are constantly recorded and AI-scanned for dissent are complete fantasy. Xinjiang did experience much heavier security measures, but that policy arose after a real period of (US backed) terrorism and jihadist recruitment. On that note, compared with the Western response to terrorism, which involved invading, bombing, occupying, and destabilizing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, China’s emphasis on domestic security, education, policing and deradicalization was hardly monstrous.
Foreign visitors are also not required to repeatedly report to police stations. Their accommodation has to be registered, generally once at each place they stay, and hotels normally do it automatically. Nor is coordination between national and local police somehow inherently sinister. A coherent national legal system is preferable to fragmented local authorities acting as semi-independent fiefdoms.
The economic comparison is plainly ridiculous as it completely ignores class character. Both China and the US contain markets, corporations and state intervention because those are forms that can exist under very different systems. The real questions are who controls finance and strategic industry, whether private capital commands the state or is subordinate to it, where investment is directed, and what the system actually produces.
China directs credit and investment through planning, retains public control over strategic industries, and regularly disciplines private capital when it conflicts with public priorities. Billionaires exist because private property exists, but they do not exercise anything like the structural political power American billionaires do. In the US, capital openly dominates through ownership, lobbying, campaign finance, media power and the revolving door between business and government.
The military comparison is especially unserious because it compares America’s documented history with speculation about what China might someday do. The US has actually invaded, bombed, occupied, sanctioned and destabilized countries across the world. The China side of the argument is basically that China has a large navy, might fight over Taiwan, and therefore perhaps one day its admirals will invent overseas wars. One side is historical fact while the other is fan fiction.
It also ignores why China has expanded its military. China is surrounded by an American military architecture running through Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and the wider first island chain, while the United States spends vastly more on its military and maintains hundreds of overseas bases. Chinese military modernization does not occur in a vacuum.
Calling Chinese elections “performative and meaningless” is something only someone who knows nothing could say. That description does however fit the United States, where elections are enormous media spectacles financed by billionaires, corporations, PACs and lobbying networks, while vast amounts of real political and economic power remain in the hands of unelected owners of capital. Chinese elections are deliberately far less theatrical. Candidates are not expected to raise fortunes, buy national advertising campaigns or turn politics into celebrity competition. Deputies at the county and township levels are directly elected, with higher people’s congresses elected through the congress system, and these bodies form part of the actual machinery of state power.
China is also not literally a one-party state in the sense implied here. The CPC holds the leading role, but eight other recognized political parties participate through the united front and consultative system. They are not opposition parties competing to remove the CPC, but comparing that structure to the Republican Party controlling the United States is absurd.
The personality-cult comparison is similarly shallow. Xi has unquestionably overseen greater political centralization and has a much more prominent ideological role than some recent Chinese leaders. But Mao-era mass politics, Xi’s position within a Leninist party-state, and Trump’s highly personalized electoral movement are very different phenomena. Calling all three a personality cult obscures more than it explains.
Chinese unions are not nonexistent. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has hundreds of millions of members and operates throughout Chinese workplaces. There are valid criticisms about bureaucratism, insufficient worker initiative, and how effectively particular unions confront management, but that is very different from saying labor organization has been abolished or reduced to nothing.
The birth-rate claim is almost entirely speculation. China’s present policy is based overwhelmingly on subsidies, childcare support, tax relief and reducing the cost of raising children. The One Child Policy can and should be criticized for coercive implementation in earlier decades (even still said criticism must be situated in the context of the material reality of the time famine, underdevelopment etc.), but saying that because China once restricted fertility it will probably someday force women to have children is not evidence but once again more fan fiction.
The same applies to AI. China and the US invest heavily in artificial intelligence because it matters for industry, science, logistics, medicine, military capability and productivity. Claiming that both leaderships are secretly building AI in order to establish permanent political control is simply mind-reading unless evidence is provided.
The idea that the Chinese corporate and political leadership classes are basically identical is also false. Party membership among businesspeople does not mean that private companies somehow own the Party. The relevant issue is political supremacy. In the US, wealthy capitalists possess enormous independent power through ownership of production, finance, media and political funding. In China, private capital exists inside a system where strategic assets remain publicly controlled and where the state can regulate, discipline and redirect capital according to national priorities.
That is the central error throughout the whole argument. It sees police, cameras, corporations, markets, political parties, warships, leaders and AI in both countries and concludes that the systems must be converging. By that method almost every modern industrial state is the same.
A serious comparison has to examine property relations, class power, ownership, planning, political institutions, historical development, foreign policy and actual social outcomes. This argument largely avoids all of that.
Thank you for your efforts here.
What? Exactly which industries is the US in the business of nationalizing??
This must go so hard if you have absolutely 0 idea what you’re talking about
See my explanation in the sister comment to yours.
I read it. It’s a nothing burger of vibes based nonsense which again must go really hard if you have no idea about the reality of the material conditions class character and actual workings of China.