The nonsense of the Chinese Communist Party began in earnest this past weekend as President Jiang Zemin(JZ) kicked off the 16th Party Congress with a message to “adapt or die.” His sense of urgency comes from the tumultuous changes brought about by capitalism in the special economic zones and the revolution against the revolution brewing in the countryside.
These changes have brought prosperity to a fraction of the country and nothing for everyone else. The party keeps control by controlling food. The party keeps control by controlling birthrate. The party keeps control by controlling information. The party keeps control by controlling justice. Above all, the party keeps control by controlling wealth.
While China has never been shy about controlling food, birthrate, information or justice, their communist facade and Maoist dogma of frugality and class equality has ideologically prevented them from acknowledging that a bourgeois mafia does indeed exist and makes life quite comfortable for corrupt politicians in what is essentially a gigantic lawless kleptocracy.
Prevented, that is, until JZ’s “Three Represents.”
The Three Represents are part of JZ’s ideological gift to the party law. Party law recognizes responsibilities to represent workers and peasants like good communist propaganda does. Jiang wants to add “advanced production forces” to the party. These “advanced production forces”, positively called “entrepreneurs” and negatively called “capitalists,” are the third group that China’s Communist Party has a duty to represent. Hence, Three Represents.
For the sake of clarity, let’s avoid the phrase “Three Represents” as much as possible and take the Party recommendation of using the term “entrepreneur” as a short way of saying “advanced production forces.”
Adding entrepreneurs just doesn’t sound very communistic. Adding entrepreneurs is closer to a complete abdication of the concept of class equality and a significant erosion to the concept of frugality. Perhaps the biggest problem of adding entrepreneurs to the ideology of a nominally communist system is the fact that, with all other aspects of Chinese government remaining the same, the party swings itself past capitalism, past even neoliberalism and into the realm of fascism.
Fascism makes itself clear in the new legal language,
“[The Communist Party is] the vanguard of the working class as well as the vanguard of the Chinese people and the Chinese race.”
While the historical differences between communists and fascists boil down to mere semantics, the communists tend to avoid rhetoric about race. Add a dash of entrepreneurs, a whole lot of layoffs along with the near-complete dismantling of government operations in deference to the private sector and what’s left is a Sino version of the United States with the political stability of Russia.
As in the US/Russia, the only way to distract people from how they are getting the shaft is to create a political environment that breeds racism, nationalism and other weapons of mass distraction.
There is no better or worse between a welfare-oriented society or a market-oriented society. The problems arise when certain actors violate the spirit of the system or attempt to mix elements of a market and welfare state.
The objective of a market is to generate profit. Greater and faster profit means higher levels of efficiency was achieved. Higher levels of efficiency means less resource were used. “Less resources” is almost always synonymous with less labor.
The objective of a welfare state is to guarantee basic needs of food, shelter, employment, justice and security. These objectives are not efficient by any measure, they must be accomplished with adequate competency and they cost money.
Corporations have goals that are antithetical to the goals of States and vice versa. The only time that the two see things the same way is when business is in control of government. This seems to be the case in China and, logic be damned, communism will include a class of people historically seen as an exploiting scourge worthy of death.
More businessmen, and Chinese people in general, died in China’s Cultural Revolution than any other populist movement in recorded history.
History, it seems, is something that the Chinese Communist Party has either forgotten or chosen not to remember. Imperial China sold out to foreigners, treated the working class like dogs and left the peasants to wallow in famine and ignorance.
JZ has put a bright red bow on China as a gift to Western business interest. State institutions will be thoroughly dismantled for the private sector down to infrastructure responsibility like building roads. People in the largest country in the world will lose their jobs en masse. Those who remain in gainful employment will have no recourse for being treated like dogs. The status of the peasants will remain unchanged.
Three Represents is a recipe for disaster.
