cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/61602151
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In 2021, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the rising tide had lifted all boats — the Communist Party had won “complete victory” over absolute poverty — and pledged to pursue “common prosperity”1 for all. China does deserve credit: Since 1978 it has lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty, three-quarters of the global total, according to the World Bank. But to claim that victory, Beijing used a poverty line of about $2.30 a day, which critics contend is too low.
Against the World Bank’s $8.30-a-day poverty line for households in upper-middle-income countries — China’s current group — more than one-fifth of its population remained poor as of 2022. Against the $30 a day that marks poverty in the rich-country cohort China will be joining, the average citizen falls well short. China, in other words, is becoming a high-income country whose people, by any rich-world measure, remain exceedingly poor.
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Both sets of facts flow from the same political economy, and the tension between them will define China’s next quarter-century — turning less on whether the country grows rich, which by conventional measures it largely has, than on what it does about the millions left behind and the middle class it never allowed to form.
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[When China entered] the WTO, the bet was that prosperity would beget a middle class that would demand a say. But Beijing has spent two decades ensuring that constituency never takes shape, since time and time again history has shown that a secure, propertied population is where pressure for a political voice collects.
The evidence on social activism is instructive. In November 2022 a deadly apartment fire in remote Urumqi set off street protests against zero-Covid lockdowns that swelled into the “white paper revolution,” named after the blank sheets of paper demonstrators held up in wordless dissent. But these protests erupted not on China’s poor periphery but in its bourgeois core — along Urumqi Road in Shanghai, the country’s wealthiest city, and across elite campuses like Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The demonstrations confirmed the Party’s operating assumption: It is not hardship that is politically dangerous, but a comfortable middle class.
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On the institutions that underpin a secure middle class — most importantly a social safety net — China diverges sharply from its peers. Social spending sits near 10% of gross domestic product, roughly half the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Xi often warns that welfare programs breed idleness, a surprising stance for an avowed Marxist. The underlying motivation is more likely that households forced to self-insure stay precarious and pliable.
A grinding property crisis has only heightened the sense of vulnerability. Chinese households hold about 47% of their assets in real estate, and prices have fallen roughly a fifth from their 2021 peak, erasing trillions of yuan in wealth. Because a family’s home is often their only form of insurance, the loss of value has made people cling to cash all the more.
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Beijing has promised for years to rebalance the economy toward household consumption, so as to reduce the country’s reliance on the twin growth engines of exports and investment. Yet after two decades of jawboning and half measures, consumption is stuck at about 40% of GDP, compared with 55% to 70% across the rich world. Households save at extraordinary rates — deposits have roughly doubled since 2019, to some 165 trillion yuan ($24.7 trillion) — not from thrift but because the Chinese state offers thin retirement pensions, patchy healthcare coverage and unemployment insurance that reaches barely a third of the workforce. Jobless benefits are pegged to the local minimum wage — not to what a worker earned — and is capped at 90% of that: roughly 2,000 yuan a month. This year the minimum rural pension has increased by just 20 yuan, to 163 yuan a month. A people who cannot count on the government to care for them when they are ill, jobless or old will not spend.
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Youth unemployment tells the same story. The rate for 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school now stands at 18% — an indicator so politically sensitive that Beijing suspended its publication in 2023, and then revised the methodology. A generation that coined the term neijuan, “involution,” shorthand for running ever faster to stay in place, is not the confident spending cohort a middle class is built on.
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The artificial intelligence boom deepens the divide between the government’s industrial ambitions and household welfare. Beijing is pouring trillions of yuan into the development of more advanced chips and data centers to support AI, and that spending is, for now, what is powering growth. But it funds those technology investments by** starving the basics: hospitals, schools and other elements of the already meager safety net in rural areas**, while the rewards accrue to the coastal, educated sliver.
The resulting inequality would look familiar to any American. With the poor and middle held down, one group has been allowed to grow: the rich. China’s richest 10% of the population hold about 68% of its national wealth, close to the US figure of 70%. In 2025 the 1,434 individuals worth at least 5 billion yuan saw their combined wealth soar 42% thanks to a powerful stock market rally, according to an annual list compiled by the Hurun Research Institute, a Shanghai-based firm that has tracked China’s rich since 1999.
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Common prosperity, Xi’s supposed sequel to Deng’s “let some get rich first,” is turning out to mean shared restraint, not shared wealth: billionaires disciplined when convenient, the middle class asset-trapped, the poor pacified in 20-yuan increments. Everyone, in the end, is held equally in check.
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During 14 years in power, [Xi Jinping] has chosen control over household welfare at every turn, and for the fourth presidential term he’s expected to claim in 2027, there’s no reason to expect a change of course. So the likeliest path is welfare that grows but stays minimal and conditional: enough to keep the peace, and calibrated to sustain dependence rather than end it.
The West wagered in 2001 [when China entered the WTO] that trade would make China rich and wealth would make it liberal. It got the first half. Whether a great power can hold the rest together while keeping most of its citizens poor is, at best, a formula for grinding stagnation — at worst, a slow-burning fuse.
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reminder in case anyone needs it: the only thing communist in china is the name of the party. they are a capitalist nation. these are capitalist problems.
If China’s economy pulls ahead of the US, suddenly Americans will all agree with you
China is only thought of as communist because they’re poorer
I honestly wonder why both the US and “Communist” nations keep this charade going. Like, I’m not deeply educated on the history and intricacies of Communisim and Socialism (I know it’s not the same as Communism, please don’t attack me), and I know US education is heavily biased, but even I know China and Russia have crazy rich oligarchs and destitute citizens (not all, just some, just like the US). Obviously, “true” Communism wouldn’t allow that to happen, so why even pretend to be Communist? What benefit does China and Russia get out of claiming to be Communist? Why do US communists continue to think these countries are paradises that are free from the same capitalist issues America has?
All around the world commoners endlessly get fucked over by the rich…
This feels like it needs a semester more than a few paragraphs lol. But I will attempt to answer some of it to the best of my ability cause I think if nothing else it can be helpful cause almost everything you said here I come across all the time.
1.) Communism is an end goal strived for after achieving sufficient social and economic transformation, not something you simply enact by decree.
Socialism though, broadly speaking, is understood as a transitional process of transforming the institutions, property relations, and class structures inherited from capitalism into one that serves the proletariat as opposed to the capitalist class.
And developing those productive forces can take a myriad of forms, including managed capitalism.
This is actually one of the fundamental misconceptions I see people fall into constantly.
And that process will necessarily look different depending on a country’s historical circumstances, material conditions, level of economic development, and position within the global economy.
That’s why Marxism is fundamentally a materialist framework rather than a strict blueprint for organizing society. The goal isn’t to immediately abolish every market, private enterprise, or capitalist institution regardless of circumstances. It’s to transform the underlying class relations and develop the material conditions necessary to eventually transcend capitalism altogether.
2.) China and Russia are not really interchangeable beyond their relationship as adversaries to the US hegemonic order.
First, Russia doesn’t even claim to be communist anymore from what I read(maybe nostalgia for the USSR). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Russian Federation that emerged underwent an enormously destructive process of capitalist restoration thanks to US shock therapy and Yeltsin’s government(which Putin comes out of). Which led to mass privatization and oligarchic consolidation. Putin’s Russia is an authoritarian capitalist state and the re-hardening of hostilities is it’s own chapter but the friction points came over perceived encroachment into it’s spheres of influence and economic protectionism America saw as acts of economic warfare.
China is a fundamentally different story, and the distinction is important because it goes directly to questions of class power and who ultimately controls the economy.
China has billionaires, private capitalists, wage labor, markets, and significant wealth inequality. That is all true
However, unlike Russia, where the post-Soviet transition transferred enormous amounts of public wealth into private hands and created a politically powerful oligarchic capitalist class, China’s proletarian revolution retained substantial state ownership of strategic industries, a state-controlled banking system, and a Communist Party that maintains ultimate political authority over private capital.
TLDR: Think of the words of lesser remembered founding father and first Supreme Court Justice John Jay:
The people who own the country ought to govern it
This gets to the heart of what separates Russia and China’s relationship to capital, property, and who holds power in the state and who that state is designed to serve and preserve. And I often find it a bit frustrating cause a materialist understanding of Russia today is more like a sneak preview of America tomorrow than it is of anything to do with communism.
3.) So why even pretend to be Communist?
The theoretical justification behind the Great Leap Forward and then Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms was that China, emerging from centuries of imperial domination, war, and extreme underdevelopment, needed to develop its productive forces before it could construct a more advanced socialist economy. And that in order to survive as a nation had to be reflective of the broader global economy, geopolitical realities, and historical context they existed within.
And attempts to go against that were met with what places like Cuba, the USSR, and any number of other attempted socialist revolutions(or even just unaligned nations) experienced in terms of economic isolation, sanctions, embargoes, political destabilization, covert operations, military invasions etc.
Market dependency, foreign investment, private enterprise, and class dynamics were therefore treated as instruments of development rather than necessarily being incompatible with a socialist transition.
China considers itself to be in primitive socialism.
And i think there is a pretty passionate debate about whether some of the same capitalist relations used to develop productive forces also reproduce capitalist class interests, inequalities, and concentrations of economic power that may ultimately undermine the socialist transition itself.
because an “other” to be afraid of is necessary when convincing your own people its ok to be broke and sick under their current system. without this other called “communism” or whatever else fits at a time, the people will recognize it’s worse here than ever before and all across the world it’s the same.
I’m not familiar with Russia claiming to be communist. Are you sure that’s a thing?
Its a weird place to visit. Obviously rich in public works, infrastructure, even consumption in certain areas (BMWs, watches etc). But many of the prices of things are like third world. I was taking taxis for $1.50, eating meals for $2.50 and stayed in a nice modern high rise hotel for $27/night. You get the sense that prices are cheap due to a near inexhaustible source of labor from outside the rich cities.
Capitalism with maoist flavoring.
Before Mao, China was feudal. Under Mao, it was failed state capitalism.
Now, it’s made a partial transition from feudalism to a more robust form of state capitalism. There’s little to nothing of Maoism in the present CCP policies.
The only thing the west was wagering in 2001 was that China’s economy was facing imminent catastrophic collapse. Seems that didn’t pan out.
This is absolutely wrong. Western countries, including the U.S., strongly supported China’s WTO accession.
It was a huge benefit for China. Between 2001 and 2016, the share of China’s population living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than 1.90 US dollar/day) declined from 67% to 1%. Without the WTO accession and the West’s support, China would never have become the world’s largest exporter.
The Chinese economy, today around ten times larger than it was in 2001, would have never seen all this without the WTO and Western support.
China was the world’s factory long before 2001. You’re acting as if ascension to the WTO flipped a switch when China had actually begun experimenting with a heavy export model in the 70s and 80s. Same idea with poverty. It’s disingenuous to day Chinese poverty alleviation only started in 2001, when in actuality, they were doing massive public investment and rural reforms all the way back in the late 70s, and were seeing progress at the same time. Ascension to the WTO was indeed a catalyst in their economic development, but you’re absolutely misconstruing things by claiming all of their progress is due to the WTO.
China was the world’s factory long before 2001 … China had actually begun experimenting with a heavy export model in the 70s and 80s …
China’s share of global exports at the end of the 1970s was 0.8%, at the end of the 1980s it was 2%, according to UNCTAD.
Even in 2000, the year before the WTO accession, China’s share of global exports was below 4%. Far behind the U.S.with more than three times that share, and behind Germany, Japan, France, UK, Canada.
You can hardly say that China was “the world’s factory” at the time or had a “heavy export model.”
The WTO accession gave the country a new boost. In 2008, seven years after joining the WTO, China ranked top world exporter for the first time with a share of more 9% (in some industries, such as in the apparel market, China’s share of gobal exports rose to almost 50%).
By 2020, the country’s share of global exports rose to 15%.
Without the WTO, China wouldn’t be where it is economically, let alone the global top exporter.
