On Wed, 25 Nov 1998, Henry C.K. Liu wrote:
> Louis Proyect:
>
> To be serious, the CCP is not suicidal. If the CCP really believes, as Sweeny
> concludes, that trade will bring about its eventual demise, it will shut it down
> in one week.
>
This kind of reasoning seems awfully voluntaristic. Whether or not China is able to or will complete a capitalist transition is less determined by the 'will' of the CCP than issues of political economic trends domestically and internatinally and balances of class power.
I'm not sure about the level of awareness of left criticisms of Chinese economic reforms, or how seriously they are taken, in China at least. Almost every important economics conference or polisci/sociological conference is strongly dominated by unself-critical liberal ideology, especially as it concerns how markets operate, originate,...
That is not to say there is no debate whatsoever, but leftists are. like their counterparts in the advanced capitalist regions of the world (of course this i s most especially the case in the US) marginalized in debates in China. And, of course, western Marxist criticisms can also be easily dismissed as 'western' and thereby uninformed, when no good arguments can be proffered to support one's embrace of liberal ideology. Thus, the serious research of people like Gerard Greenfield is generally regarded as 'western mudslinging' as though he were only critical of the abuse of labor in China, which any serious person knows tonot be the case.
One interesting countertrend that is making it dificulat to label every Marxist(ish) criticsms of China as 'western', especially as they concern labor rights is that, as occurred at an international confernce on labor law a few weeks ago, these types of criticisms are not only coming from Western caucasians, but are coming from people of color from non-western and less developed countries . At this conference, though a representative of the official Federation of Trade Unions tried to label the call for independent trade union rights as 'western', the tactic was not very successful or convincing, since the people who made some of the most eloquent arguments for this were from the Philiopines, indonesia, hong Kong, and Korea, hardly typical examples of western caucasians..
This is, of course, a countertrend that remains quite minor, but still worth noting.
mopre below
> Henry C.K. Liu > > Louis Proyect wrote: > > >
Henry Liu:
> > >China's is aware of the theoretical criticism of her policies from the
> > Left, and
> > >she is nor doctrinaire about defending them. But we should acknowledge
> > that China
> > >is still the most socialist system in the world as measured by any reasonable
> > >standard, and as compared to any other government in power.
> >
Precisely how would you support this argument? When I ask this, I don't
mean how would you support this from a "Chinese" perspective, but from a
Marxist analytical framework.
Cheers, Steve