An excellent article!
<<The Chinese ruling elite is riding the whirlwind precisely because its own necessary reforms are quite visibly setting in motion social processes that could completely overwhelm it, namely a working-class and peasant insurrection which would necessarily assume a (truly) socialist content and would have to link up with the world working class in a similar development, or (as in Russia) be prone to lapsing back into some kind of closed authoritarian autarchy>>
This is the problem. For sure, the state capitalist (the nationalized industries) in China exploit the workers and peasantry big-time. "Communist Party" is a synonymous with exploitation for many workers. Socialism is a "tainted" word. As Loren says, these industries are filled with corrupt and greedy Communist Party bureaucrats living high on the hog. One high-ranking CPC member I know in China whose wife is a nurse have used their clout to set up clinics. They use the most unethical means to convince people to undertake treatments they dont need...Of course, those are for people who can afford such clinics. Better believe that these people are not setting them up to "serve the people".
Obviously the private sector also exploits the working class, but there is the perception (which may or may not be true...I dont know) that one is relatively better off working for one of these foreign private firms.
True that a bourgeois revolution might turn into something more...a peasant and worker insurrection. But it seems to me that it could very easily happen that any type of revolt of this nature (against the state-capitalists) could get co-opted by the private sector. In any case, it would be ridiculous for the Left to defend the Communist Party of China. It needs to go.
<<No assessment of the global role of China can neglect the fact that the Bank of China (the central bank) holds over half-a-trillion in dollar reserves, most of it recycled into U.S. government paper, and every day brings new speculation about when China will tire of holding these depreciating assets and “diversify” out of the dollar.>>
What exactly would happen if China diversified? Seems like the US would be up shit-creek. Why are they not doing this? What if they invaded Taiwan and used this as a means to keep the US at bay: "send your troops and we will unpeg".
<< Currents that view China as an “anti-imperialist” force in the world have to explain how China came to have such a role in world capitalist accumulation, and is now emerging as a foreign investor (e.g. in Canada, in South America and in Africa) in its own right. >>
Yes, I would like to hear this explanation.
-Thomas
<<Furthermore, we must ask what does the dialectician want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want? It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it-only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.>> -Gilles Deleuze "Nietzche & Philosophy"
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