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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Wouldn't go that far...
It's hard to pretend China is in any way communist when they have rampant wealth inequality and the wealthiest run the government.
China is socialist. Socialism is serving as the stepping stone on the path from the previous system to full Communism. Socialism serves as an important developmental stage as antagonisms from within (counter-revolutionary forces) and without (imperialist powers) are resolved.
First, China does have wealth inequality, but its middling in its severity.
(The key is on the linked Wikipedia page, but darker has higher income inequality).
China has a Gini index of 38.2% in 2019, putting them at 71 out of 168 in national rankings. The USA has a Gini index of 39.4% in 2020, putting them at 107 out of 168. (Lower Gini index, and lower ranking are better). The worst nation, South Africa, has a Gini index of 63.0% as of 2014; the best nation, the Faroe Islands, has a Gini index of 22.71% as of 2018^1.
Moreover, wealth inequality has been decreasing in China for about a decade^2, whereas our point of reference, the USA, has seen its inequality steadily increase over the same time span^3. Wealth inequality is also not unexpected in a rapidly developing economy such as China: initially, as the economy grows, certain people financially benefit more than others and wealth inequality increases; over time as the economic growth stabilizes, and with a concerted effort to combat it, wealth inequality levels out and then decreases, as we see happening. Income inequality is not automatically horrible: careful attention needs to be paid to the bottom of the income rankings; comparatively, high wealth inequality is less of a problem if the bottom is not in poverty than if they are. This ties in to my next point,
This is not true at all. Wealth does not buy political power or influence within the CPC (or indeed in the Chinese government overall); nor does having power or influence in the CPC enable one to amass more wealth. Those who are wealthy work with the party, as members, to further the goals of the Party to improve everyone's lives, rather than working selfishly against the party to further their own personal goals. To paraphrase Boer[^4], "The private entrepreneurs have not become a class in itself with associated class consciousness, but many have become CPC members or non-party supporters. The social and cultural assumption is that those that have benefited from wider support must contribute to the well-being of others". That is, those who are wealthy do not get to exert outsized influence by way of being wealthy, and do not sit back and glorify their wealth, but instead work by giving back and improving the well-being of others.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual "socialist responsibility reports" which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Socialism (and indeed communism) is a structural form that dictates a government's (and economy's) purpose and its relation to society and its members. The goal of a socialist government is to improve the material and cultural lives of its people. To a Westerner, it seems foreign or fantastical that a country could genuinely operate with this goal in mind, and so people would rather say "it's not real socialism", or say that "because it has some problems, it's all bad", than to acknowledge that no system is perfect and as long as the system works to fix its issues and help its people, it is on the right track.
The OP has a non-nuanced and seemingly uninformed opinion on China as well,
They are not capitalist. Infrastructure spending is also not what determines whether they are capitalist, socialist, or something else. Moreover, nobody is arguing that a strong central government determines whether they are communist or not. To say that China is capitalist is a category error and falls into the trap that dictates that using aspects of a market economy automatically negates socialism and makes a system capitalist. I've written a bit more in depth on it elsewhere, but plenty of sources dive in to why China is indeed socialist and why it is faulty to see them as capitalist. Chapter 5 ("China's Socialist Market Economy and Planned Economy") from Richard Boer's book I've cited above serves as a good overview of why it is a category error to call China capitalist.
[^4]: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Boer, Roland.
Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107. It's fair to say both countries have "rampant income inequality" right now. Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally "capitalist" countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.
Forgive me as you've written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about "working for the people". Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they're fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.
I'm not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it's 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn't do. My point was they're similar and middling in the ranking.
This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn't that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it's decreasing. The fact that it's steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they're facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You'll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the "free market") in part because the issue doesn't address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn't magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.
The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn't publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren't doing what they said they would. You're confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There's a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it's because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn't have so much support for the party.
(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it's ranking; inverting the sort order doesn't make the countries less similar, and since they're middling, inverting the sort order means they're still middling. I didn't make a claim that one was better than the other).
You literally have it backwards:
Sort Gini index by ascending: China is #98 at 38.2, US is #107 at 39.4
Sort Gini index by descending: US is #62 at 39.4 and China is #71 at 38.2.
It seems you're right. I will edit that part of my comment. But I will point out: I wasn't making a statement that one was worse than the other. I made the point that they're similar in ranking and like I said, even if you reverse ranking order they're still just as similar. And, since they were middling in their ranking like I originally said, if you invert the sorting, they're still middling.
There's no truly free market. Every country has some level of regulation. In the US, many people point to tax rates as the cause of (and solution to) inequality. I think they're correct but that's also really stretching the definition of "regulation".
Every government bigger than a village generally does this. Every politician talks up what they've done because they want to keep power. China should be proud of its accomplishments but I'm sorry, there's nothing unique or special to what you're saying here.
If there's a failure to follow through on campaign promises, it's because the legislation failed to pass but that's more about democracy than economics. I politely suggest we not go down that road in this thread :).