From my base in Hong Kong, I set out on a Pearl River Delta loop, hitting Shenzhen and Dongguan and then Guangzhou, Zhuhai and Macau.
Why? Because this unprecedented, interconnected story of breakneck urbanization, technological innovation and post-modern megacity sprawl showcases no less than the future dreamed up by the collective leadership in Beijing. And it doesn’t hurt that southern China is the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.
I was very privileged to visit Shenzhen and Guangzhou only a few days after the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping, then 88, embarked on his legendary six-week “southern tour” in January-February 1992. His target at the time was to turbo-charge the “get rich is glorious” Chinese manufacturing miracle, still in its infancy.
In the early 1990s, agriculture, mining and fishing were responsible for 27 percent of the Chinese economy, while manufacturing and construction accounted for 40 percent, and services for 30 percent, according to Hong Kong banking sources. At the start of the 2010s, agriculture was already down to only 10 percent, with manufacturing at 46 percent and services at 44 percent. A generation of business leaders often referred to as the “Gang of 92” – when many of them started – were imprinting their mark on a new China.
Now the Pearl River Delta – China’s number one hub of labor-intensive manufacturing – is in the process of replacing workers with robots on a large scale, a further sign that China is about to take off technologically, big time. And that’s all part of a “Made in China 2025” strategy announced only two months ago by Beijing, centered on relentless innovation – and commercialization. The China 2.0 new industrial revolution is a go – with a bang.
The megacity confederation
China today, on the ground, looks and feels like a confederation of megacities fiercely competing with each other for everything; investment (internal and foreign), industries, tech talent, global visibility. Beijing does support provinces and regions – much as the Song dynasty did – but up to a point. China, de facto, is already federalized. It’s up to each province to determine its own economic strategy.
That’s a long and winding road since the 1960s – when China was under the yoke of the Cultural Revolution (to seize the seismic shift, check out The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976, by University of Hong Kong professor Frank Dikotter, based on previously classified party documents). It’s also enlightening to compare it with the fact that the UN, during the 1960s, was starting to promote the concept of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) as an infrastructure and growth template.
Now there are more than 4,000 SEZs scattered all across the world – living and breathing experiments of strategic investment bound to absorb working masses and turbo-charge modernity. And Shenzhen, of course, is the mother of all SEZs.
In 1979 Deng designated Shenzhen, then a mere sleepy fishing village north of Hong Kong, as China’s first SEZ. Now it’s home to up to 18 million people – and counting. Shenzhen started as a somewhat unregulated hub for low-cost labor, very handy for a China that badly needed foreign investment to create jobs, train a massive workforce, and import skills and technology. It turned out as a major win-win. What took the West 200 years to accomplish China did in only 20.
Between them, Greater Shanghai and Guangdong province – home of the Pearl River Delta – account for 80 percent of China’s exports. Now China’s new “urbanization drive” strategy reaches beyond Shenzhen, aiming to decentralize into new megacities or even brand new cities, all self-sustaining. The emphasis is to create a vicious circle; up and up in the value chain; more productivity; more consumption; higher wages. Both Hong Kong and Singapore– key models for Beijing – neatly graduated from a vicious trade circle to first-class global cities. Now it’s up to places inside China, from Shenzhen to the Suzhou Industrial Park near Shanghai, to show the way.
It’s this urbanization drive that is at the heart of the Chinese Dream. And the lab where the idea was conceived is the Pearl River Delta – with its confluence of capital, technology and knowledge industries.
Knowledge is power
Guangzhou, less than two hours north of Hong Kong, is the capital of the Pearl River Delta manufacturing miracle. Way beyond the free trade zone set up in 1992, the Guangzhou Nansha Export Processing Zone (automotive assembly, biotech, heavy machinery) seamlessly connects in only a few minutes to the airport as well as Shenzhen’s ultra-modern port.
Being close to Hong Kong was always a Guangzhou plus – even before the 1997 handover. As much as Hong Kong was the seminal source for all foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, the Delta export machine progressively harnessed all this investment to build ultra-modern infrastructure in competition with Hong Kong. Shenzhen for all practical purposes may now be overtaking Hong Kong in many aspects – but officially it’s all about the emergence of a world-class Hong Kong-Shenzhen megalopolis.
And it’s not only about Foxconn. The “factory of the world” churns out a non-stop electronic tsunami, essentially assembled in Shenzhen, from Apple to Microsoft, from Sony to Samsung. Chinese tech giants Huawei and Tencent are Shenzhen-based. The stock exchange is among the worlds’ busiest – boasting heavy trading on both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and tech start-ups.
Guangzhou, meanwhile, excels as a major knowledge center, via Knowledge City, managed by Singaporeans, and especially the Guangzhou Science City – which rivals Samsung Digital City in Suwon, South Korea; they are a sort of Chinese version of Silicon Valley. Singapore also contributed to what is taught at the South China University of Technology, which feeds China’s top digital start-ups in everything from cloud computing to materials engineering, renewable energy and biotechnology.
Ma versus Ma
One of China’s top secrets lies with a small army of savvy businessmen redefining the boundaries of innovation not only in China but across the world. And this is not driven by Beijing; on the contrary, the seat of power cannot control – and really does not want to control – all this very rational exuberance. The story of Shenzhen-based Haier embodies the process of private, world-class companies as drivers of China’s economy.
China’s biggest companies – banks, insurance, energy, telecom, airlines, leading steel, auto and construction firms – are all state-owned or controlled. But that’s not the major story. It is private business leaders who are transforming their industries, with little government control. By now China boasts over 12 million privately held companies and 24 million so-called “proprietorships” – companies owned by individuals or a family.
As I learned at Science City, the private sector accounts for over 75 percent of China’s economic output, and privately controlled companies now offer no less than two-thirds of all urban employment in China.
These business people are really tough cookies – from Alibaba’s Jack Ma to Tencent’s Pony Ma, from Baidu’s Robin Li to Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei, from Xiaomi’s Lei Jun to Yihaodian’s Yu Gang. They survived virtually everything: the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998; the fierce competition from the flood of foreign actors after China was admitted in the WTO in the 2000s; and last but not least the Wall Street-generated 2008 global financial crisis. Their “secret” is very simple; faultless consumer service.
Alibaba is the most notorious of them all largely because of its 2014 IPO, which netted a cool $25 billion. But Tencent, China’s top internet portal, founded by Pony Ma in 1998, is even bigger, in revenue and profits.
Education meets infrastructure
The Pearl River Delta is also a story of top-class education flowing through top-notch infrastructure – from high-speed rail to impeccable highways to fast hovercraft connections. It puts anything available in the US to shame – configuring, in every detail, a seamless megacity corridor that will boast a population of 80 million and a GDP of $2 trillion by 2030.
Once the Pearl River Delta’s strategic role in the global division of labor was configured, now we’ve come to the point where Alibaba, for instance, is partially delocalizing to Hainan Island to boost cloud computing and an e-government platform plus a branch of Taobao University focused on e-commerce.
Investment in higher education has always been key. In China, out of seven million students graduating from college annually 1.2 million have science degrees, or in engineering-related subjects. China’s colleges and universities constantly churn out an army of hyper-connected, fluent English speakers. As Edward Tse observes in China’s Disruptors, by 2020 they will be part of a total graduate workforce of an astonishing 200 million – more than the entire US workforce.
Global expansion, of course, comes with the territory. Chicago, for instance, has branded itself as the top American city for Chinese business. The Chinese are building Shenzhen-style final assembly lines of industrial supply chains inside the US to avoid import tariffs. China’s Minsheng Investment and Advance Business Park are overhauling the Royal Albert Dock in east London, conveniently near London City airport, as a tax-free hub for Chinese business. Huawei is building an R&D center in Thailand.
Financially, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect – the equities trading link between both bourses – has already been through a system-wide test run earlier this week. The target, as excited Hong Kong traders tell it, is to “pump liquidity into the cross-border equity markets and serve as a steppingstone for the further opening up of the capital markets on the Chinese mainland.”
So what about the pivot to Asia?
China’s e-commerce giants are now moving into finance – offering money-market products with higher interest rates than banks. Telecom equipment giant Huawei wants to become a major global smartphone player. BYD, which makes batteries for mobile phones, is getting into the auto business. It’s a business cross-pollination frenzy. Bets can be made that Chinese companies will come up with the $50 iPhone, cost-effective solar energy, mass-produced, affordable electric cars and, why not, your own personal robot; China is already the world’s biggest industrial robot market, although most work in the auto industry.
China’s obsession with innovation, to a large extent nurtured in the Pearl River Delta, coupled with the urbanization drive, is leading to a new socioeconomic paradigm, a nation of several hundred cities housing from one million to tens of millions of people – nothing the world has even seen, except for Deng Xiaoping in his vision of “a thousand Singapores”.
As 25 percent of US exports and 40 percent of US imports involve Asia, a case could be made that the “pivoting to Asia” so dear to the Obama administration and the Pentagon is basically about protecting the US supply chain. But the same also applies to China. The question is whether the Beltway will ever admit that supply chain geopolitics is much more important than humanitarian imperialism.
Access to natural resources and infrastructure are now geostrategic conditions. And Beijing knows it better than anyone – thus the Eurasian reach of the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR). A pivot to Asia to deter “Chinese aggression” is thus meaningless. Expanding the Pearl River Delta model, China is building massive infrastructure with its neighbors – and beyond. Infrastructure trumps “security”.
So building a Eurasian resource corridor must run in parallel with all the Chinese action in the East and South China Seas, where the master game plan is to build massive Indian Ocean and Pacific infrastructure to avoid the bottleneck of the Strait of Malacca. The Trans-Eurasia high speed rail, maritime canals in Southeast Asia, the Maritime Silk Road, they all hark back to that day in 1979 when Deng Xiaoping invented Shenzhen. No question; the 21st century Chinese Dream did start as a Pearl River Delta dream.
It’s true. Just came back from Shenzhen. Very impressed. America is in denial. And decline. I mean, I can’t even use my phone on the subway in NYC. In China I can use it to pay the fare.
I find this article extremely confusing. I like and encourage the Chinese developing and growing, but many of the concepts seem like everything I fought against all of my life…. Please give me a reason to retire….
Agree, and more than confusing I find it a singing of Capitalism and Private Enterprise.
I did not know what Pepe Escobar´s political filiation was, I have always thought he was an anti-stablishment guy for his articles, but sounds much like a Liberal in this article.
This flourished environment he describes could be the reality in Singapore and Hong Kong, although I doubt this is so even there for most of the people, but the reality of Capitalism and private enterprise everywhere is people subjected to exhausting inacabable working days for wages of misery, without rights of any kind, even hating a job chosen by vocation, embittered and unhealthy at early ages ( sometimes prematurely died ) because they are obliged to always eating out or even not eating at all till dinner, and because they have no time for leisure, less for to care of themselves at physical and mental level.
These islands of prosperity based only on the level of the wages for a priviledged minority ( this is the origin of the class of “princes” of China ) are based on the same we are supposedly fighting here and we are criticizing in that other thread about Milennials, namely, a concept of life where happiness consist only in having a level of income in order to spend on superfluities and individualism. A concept of life where those who are not called to participate in the party ( in this economic model, simply, this kind of prosperity exist, precisely, because it is not shared by everybody ) are seen as” loosers”, and so, the “winners”, can only exist if they are absolutely blind enough to the reality of the rest of humans beings surrounding them.
West/USA style of life anywhere?
Elsi, I recommend that you explore the works of Deendayal Upadhyaya. He was an Indian economist and philosopher.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deendayal_Upadhyaya
He believed that both communism and capitalism were flawed, and thus he formulated a different path, drawing on India’s heritage.
elsi,
This post of mine is not to defend Escobar. I will also not comment on your observations that China deviated from the path of what could be termed as proletariat-led society.
Today, if anyone debates whether Marxism/communism is at work in China, I feel, that’s wastage of time. Since Deng took over, China has been on the capitalist road skirted by strict government regulations, also China is ruled by communist party elites coupled with PLA. And, as a result, the socio-cultural and economical vectors are rapidly shifting towards western style.
Having said that, let me pose three questions:
(1) Did any European Marxist leader showed empathy and conscience when Khruschev (first AZ lackey in post WW II USSR) pulled out entire Soviet engineer-scientist team from China around 1958 who were involved in infrastructure-industry-research etc. specially arranged by Stalin after Mao visited him with requests for modernization of Chinese society and economy ?
(2) Did any Marxist leader (except Fidel) worth their name raise any objection when Gorbachev (the most important AZ mole in post WW II USSR) staged the biggest shows of ‘colour revolutions’ across USSR, east Europe and China between 1988 and 1992, out of which only China government survived because of Deng’s far-sightedness ?
(3) Did any leader anywhere in the world ever set the target that 50% of the population should get basic necessities of life fulfilled with minimum decency, which the Chinese leaders set for themselves in 1990s ?
The answer to above 3 questions will be ‘no’.
Hence, all of us, who wish to see 90% of the population leaving a decent life, all of us who believes Marx as modern-age revolutionary, should accept the anomalies of current state of affairs run by Chinese communist party, and wish them speedy return to the path of moral-virtuous life away from materialist greed … which they must – in order to save their society, culture, language, environment and Marxist ideals.
I think, there are three significant changes over past 3 decades in Chinese direction:
(1) Deng’s broad policy and single-point agenda of high rate of economic growth through cheap export that drove the Chinese government actions till 2010, got transformed into Xi’s modest economic growth through domestic consumption
(2) Deng period’s over-emphasis on low-end product manufacturing got transformed in Hu era to sophisticated technology based product manufacturing
(3) Xi’s vision of One Belt One Road, if successful, will bring unprecedented deployment of technology to impact common peoples life and result in economic prosperity in Asia-Eurasia-Africa
While AZ world order indulges in destruction and warfare across the world, the Chinese are busy in constructive economy to bring prosperity in every region !
(only worry- Chinese government needs to tackle the credit and hence, bad debt problem as quickly as possible).
Chinese humor pulling a pun on westerners with that name Tencent internet portal— I guess by then the rapper had already locked up & copyrighted ’50 Cent’.
Goes back to the nickel-odeon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_(movie_theater)
In fact, when it was current in the early 20th century, it was used only to refer to a small five-cent theater and not to any coin-in-the-slot machine, including amusement arcade motion picture viewers such as the Kinetoscope and Mutoscope.
Other widely used terms in the US then for “discount stores” were ” Ten cent stores” and the “five (cent) and dime” stores. Today its the “Dollar” stores (though many of them aren’t “really” just one dollar priced stores.
I don’t share Escobar’s breathless enthusiasm for the Chinese “vision.” Our options: the Anglo-Zionists triumph and we become a world of indentured serfs, or the Chinese “vision” triumphs and humanity becomes like nothing more than a world of worker bees or an ant heap. There’s no difference between the two outcomes; they converge on the same horrible nothingness.
Of course, the Neocons might set the world afire with a nuclear war….
Our times are what the Bible has called “the abomination of desolation,” and what the Prophet Joel termed a “famine” of the spirit.
Better?
Publicly, China has lamented Britain’s decision to walk out on the EU. “A lose-lose situation is already emerging,” the Global Times, a Communist party controlled tabloid, argued after last Thursday’s vote.
But Tsang said there was a definite silver lining for Xi’s increasingly authoritarian China, “[and] it won’t have taken them more than 30 seconds to realise”.
“The referendum shows that democracy really sucks – that democracy does not deliver stability, prosperity [or] responsible government,” Tsang said.
“The first priority of the Communist party and of Xi Jinping is the perpetuation of the Communist party’s rule in China. They are fundamentally anti-democratic … And what better illustration of how democracy doesn’t work than to have the oldest, most respected democracy – through a democratic process – get itself into arguably, potentially the biggest mess that the UK has self-generated since the second world war? It is a gift.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/30/china-britain-and-brexit-vote-to-leave-eu-robs-golden-relationship-of-its-lustre
No empathy.
No conscience.
One Hundred “Royal” families comprise the communist elite – “to gain the world and lose their soul”.
All the rest are Bernays Propaganda, Media Censored, Mind Controlled, Human Robots.
Buddhism practised in the park gets you jailed and subject to organ harvesting execution.
The organ harvesting mobile vans harvest your organs at the airport ready for the organs to be immediately transported by aeroplanes to the body failing western satanic oligarchic elite who can pay more.
Anonymous on June 30, 8:48 pm UTC,
While the collective morality and social ethics have taken a beating in China ever since Deng started ‘get rich’ through industrial capitalism (as he said colour of cat is not important as long as it catches mice) mid-80s, you have now screened a horror film in front of us about present-day China. Thanks for taking so much pain.
Fortunately I have my friend who visits China often and portrays a picture which is not that grim:
government control – yes; anti-government gathering – no;
entertainment – yes; hunger – no.
@elsi
In the good old times, when my best friend at school had become an american shpitzel playing a german communist and urged me again and again to join his party, the nazi-allowed version of the in Westgermany forbidden KP, I escaped this uncomfortable demand by pointing out truthfully that in my understanding becoming and being a communist would be to have read the classics – the Complete Works of Marx, Engels,Stalin, Walter Ulbricht and Mao – and understood them, and after that having found out that I completely agreed with them, therefore wanted to spend the rest of my life striving to realise what these gentlemen had depicted as absolutely necessary as well as overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone on this planet except some dirty supressors who would be dealt with by some specialised folks. Later the general opinion switched, the american shpitzel left the party and became an internet truther with his own website (where he mostly let others denounce themselves by writing the articles), and by now he is into theatre – yes, german amatörtheater is an ideal training ground for polizeishpitzels who must learn anyway how to look natural while pretending to be your friend or a commie or whatever. All the classics from Marx to Mao got debunked (except for you and Martin SEB), and we lived the dream of „freedom and democracy“ (debunked long before by Brecht in a poem modeled after another one by Shelley), which these days turned out to be a nightmare, too, so that we are now all for a revolution but have no idea how and for achieving what exactly etc. etc. During all these times I never changed my mind that communism was probably a good thing except that little ole me was not well enough equipped to endorse it completely and know exactly what to think and to say and to do under which circumstances.
I did not forget, however, that my thinking was partially shaped by a little red book, which in the country of its origin (or anywhere else) is no longer à la mode, but served us all well in ca. 1968, opening up „new“ dimensions of thinking which in reality are the everlasting foundations of thought, which tend to get forgotten and then have to be rediscovered again and again. In 1968, that little red book did that: „Some comrades at arriving at a new place immediately start giving commands without first getting acqainted with what is the case there and then…“ Yeah, taking reality into account is really important… a revolutionary act.
In this spirit I do travel from time to time, when circumstances allow it, and I make a point of looking for the local realities, hoping to find them agreeable and offering something to take home with. In my youth, starting to become a typical lovely german, I had earmarked two European countries for being wiped off the map because they presented anomalies which I found unacceptable. When I visited one of them decades later it took me about one hour or so of inhaling the local realities before I started becoming a fan and a prophet of that country whose anomalies exist, yes, but are very positive. I made day trips into the second one, too, and it was completely normal, too, and lovely.
In this spirit I also travelled twice by now into the land of origin of the little red book, and, because of the virtues of the aforementioned first anomal country started with Macao, adding HK, Zhuhai, and later also Guangzhou. I got asked since then why I choose these forlorn points on the map instead of going to see Beijing, Shanghai, The Great Wall. I knew no better answer than to say that I liked it, but in the future I‘ll refer them to this article by Pepe Escobar. Macao was once the only point where the West could enter China, and the Pearl River Delta seems now the point from where China acquires the rest of the world. Probably Macao is a global anomaly, a mystical wormhole for cultural exchange.
While I was there, without all the detailed insight of this article, I asked myself whether all I saw was ok, and if yes, why, or if not, why not. Thus I tried to escape the trap for very good comrades, to know everything before having had the first look, and to let reality speak for itself. An overwhelming impression at all the places I saw was the friendliness of the persons one met – they were neither knowing already all about us before having the first contact, nor did they make the impression of being best described as …
„…people subjected to exhausting inacabable working days for wages of misery, without rights of any kind, even hating a job chosen by vocation, embittered and unhealthy at early ages ( sometimes prematurely died ) because they are obliged to always eating out or even not eating at all till dinner, and because they have no time for leisure, less for to care of themselves at physical and mental level.“
… even though this might be „the reality of Capitalism and private enterprise everywhere“ – yes, according to the book. To the Books. To the Classics. How come?
My explanation – completely irresponsible for a good comrade which on the other hands I never was, due to my shortcomings – is that perhaps communism and its task and working was not well, understandably explained to us, or in any case to me. Communism was presented as the future of mankind, as the future of everything, so that everything in communism had to be communist: you would sleep in a communist bed, have a communist dream, wake up and eat a communist breakfast and take a communist bus for reaching your communist workplace etc etc, and the socialist countries of Europe I came to see, starting with SEB, did offer such impressions. What is wrong, not as imagined, is that in communism only a communist bus can bring you to your work, only a communist wurst will nourish you etc. This was not so even in the GDR. There were private shops which sold the same goods as the brave new state owned Handelsorganisation, the famous HO, and you could probably take language lessons with an old private teacher. This model extended to a larger scale means: if a country is politically communist, its politicians should be communists, i.e. people that DO care for all the things that you, elsi, and Martin SEB and even I find necessary (in short; look to it that the society is human and allows people to be human and live in human circumstances), while not bothering for everything they did not learn in the party school, e.g., how to sell socks or how to teach playing a violin or speaking Persian to ungifted pupils.
My problems with communism began with the name „party“ (meaning „one of several parts composing a larger something“) when there was to be only one of them. In modern terms, where everybody is taught everything in specialised schools (The Secrets of Sock Selling in 45 easy lessons!), „The Party“ would better be translated as „the profession of the politicians in this country“, and the completely new thing that communism brought about was that while in the new age of democracy (at the end of millenia of feudalism or grass root democracy at village or tribe level) the new profession of being a politician (an elected ruler) was understood to be exclusively an affair for hobbyists („everyone can do it! YOU should join us, too“), and everybody was entitled to bring forward his most beloved subject, and the voters also hobbyists (not knowing what was at stake and what the options were)… while this was and still is the official foundation of democrady in a Democracy… the commies started to professionalise politics. Marx wrote down what, according to him and in his days, it was all about, and what one should do, and the communists tried to accomplish this: the building of a better society not on personal likings of this or that führer, but on a scientific understanding of necessities, goals, methods etc. THEN, of course, the profession and the study leading to it would be a general and universal thing – a science and not a „party“… just as a well in a catholic monastery gets drilled according to the general professional knowledge of well drillers, and not according to the Bible. So, let professional work be done by professionals – for inventions, for economy, for wells, for health, for foreign politics… etc.
What I want to say is, in short, that the profession of doing politics should be treated like other professions, and my impression is that this is done now (today, and before, and hopefully also in the future) in China (through „The Party“) and in the same way also in Putin‘s Russia, for the same reasons, although „The Party“ does not exist anymore. But the profession does – and this is why during the last months everybody on sites like this one applauded Putin for his „professionalism“ or „realism“ in handling crises, while the general idiocy of the western world is its amateurishness, which is, among other faults, easily steerable from the outside, by professionals of other professions – like thieves, robbers etc with names like Soros, Rotzchild etc. What the Chinese professionals seem to have accomplished is building up a win-win situation for everyone, instead of the never ending European nightmare of counter-productivity by design, by obliging everybody to live out a rotten minority‘s dream of universal sadistic infamy.
Visiting a planet like China for e few weeks and then coming to basic conclusions may seem preposterous, but you need less than weeks for finding out that the Arctic is cold, and Africa is hot – so, finding China ok with so little experience is probably ok, too. My question marks are, however:
1. how immune will the Chinese Political Professionals be in the long run against infections by the Western Professional Criminals (when they have to deal with them all the time)? and
2. when with that speed of development, the whole world will be Chinese by 2050, where will the Chinese Political Professional continue to expand after that.?
bimboplumpe
@ Anonymous
You are long on verbiage and short on intelligibility my friend. Your vision of communism is what you absorbed from what is portrayed by the capitalist mind-set: a monolithic impersonal bureaucracy ruling over a zombiefied mass of uniformity by the intricate mysteries of dialectic materialism: the Orwellian proles.
Communism is a theology of liberation where people are free from gods, rulers, apparatchiks, banksters, jews, privateers, armies, police and all parasitic specimens that feed on wars, oppression and misery. In contrast, capitalism has shown what it is capable of and likely to lead to extension of life on earth.
Is that your vision?
Kim
Re: Communism is a theology of liberation where people are free from gods, rulers, apparatchiks, banksters, jews, privateers, armies, police and all parasitic specimens that feed on wars, oppression and misery.
In other words a theology that pretends to offer what the devil offered: “you shall be as gods.” In reality it offers a perfectly soulless and eventually suicidal world that is definitively at odds with the real nature of the real. But of course, there are plenty of takers. “A sucker is born every minute.”
Kim, JamesW,
I am suggesting a small correction to Kim’s statement (to which JamesW raised an issue)
” Communism is a theology of liberation where people are free from gods, rulers, apparatchiks, banksters, jews, privateers, armies, police and all parasitic specimens that feed on wars, oppression and misery. ” >
In my opinion it should read like:
” Communism is a theology of liberation where people are free from oppression by institutions of religion, rulers, apparatchiks, banksters, jews, privateers, armies, police and all parasitic specimens that feed on wars, profiteering and misery. ”
My rational behind this suggestion:
(1) Marx bothered about (direct and indirect) oppression by religious institutions which is in the realm of social life. He did not have anything do with religion and spiritualism which is a matter of personal life and belief.
(2) The concept of continuously increase of profit, is one of the central theme of oppression by the capitalist AZ cabal. Marx nailed down the so-called ‘value’ of commodity (as sold in market) using the concept of profiteering
Hope Kim will accept the rationale.
What struck me the most about Guangzhou and Shenzhen was the number of small family owned – owner operator businesses. People friendly cheerfull friendly and optimistic. Looking forr ward to the future.
Move forward to the saker blog and a few worn out commies looking for utopia saying they cant be happy because thats not real communism.
Great comment! And these same people actually refer to themselves as being “sacrificed like Jesus” (in another thread.) Mix rigid ideology with a messiah complex and this is what you get.
@ Straight-Bat
I have no objection to the suggested alteration. I used the word “gods” (plural, lower case) to mean something; besides, I could not include a particular deity literally with those evildoers because I don’t believe in any deity anyway.
One can’t be too precise with language in the rush of ex-tempore utterances. For instance, I was going to say ” Communism is a teleology of liberation…”, which is my view of it as an ethical goal for saving humanity, but might be too “philosophical” for a comment in this blog.
I’m surprised no-one mentioned yet my boo-boo with “extension” instead of “extinction” as a cheap shot.
Thank you for your observation. I have a simple term to encapsulate all enemies of mankind: “institutional man”, an extension of Sartre’s characterisation in ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’.
Cheers. Kim
Kim,
Agree, “teleology of liberation” is more suitable, but as you mentioned, extempore utterances have some limitations.
I considered your use of “extension” word as a typo (even in my back of the mind, extinction word got relayed).
You are right in using the most simple term as ‘institutional man’ …
(However, frankly speaking, I tried but couldn’t digest perhaps, the most important work of Sartre: ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ which simultaneously addresses so many themes (Sartre’s original existentialism, invincibility of Marxism, criticism of historical determinism, emphasis on social perspective of human behavior, social freedom etc. etc.)
So China is joining the Western developed sht-whole of a world, and this is something to be impressed or proud of ?
So basically the Chinese will also become corporate and financial slaves, without the arrogance ?
I am not impressed at all……it is a natural process so it seems…..Why would you be impressed by a natural progressive process ?
Anyways…..all this so called economical prosper and technological advancement will either:
1. make them vulnerable to the global economic collapse
or
2. Easy populated targets to nuke
Anyways, sorry for the pessimism, lol…..all the best to China.
At the heart of the western economic system is the financial fraud of which the governments are a part of.
Here is a great interview by Max Keiser that describes that:
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/banksers-financial-crimes-prosecute-criminals-209/
As far as I can see the governments in China and other parts of Asia are not following this path.
On the contrary, being prosecuted for financial fraud can lead to the death penalty: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323398204578488831032664720
China is harsh to financiers that commit white collar crime:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-financial-fraud-idUSKCN0W33C2
I agree that some mistakes were made in China’s economic development, like not allowing the RMB to appreciate. This may be due to geopolitics. But China is going to be a big power, and that is something to be hopeful for.
@ Serbian Girl
“But China is going to be a big power, and that is something to be hopeful for.”
By whom? As if “big power” is good for mankind.
A big power of different persuasion may be a good thing to maintain a balance and prevent abuses by the other, as during the 1945-90 period. But if the big powers are ruled solely by capitalist elites, driven by the demands of the capitalist mode of production for increasing capital accumulation and consumption, which can only be met by further expansion, obviously there will be the inevitable clash and, the bigger they are, the bigger will be the bang.
Besides that danger to humanity. who are they kidding? We got a country run by an elite who profess to be communist and who are part and parcel of capitalist elites who are gorging themselves with the product of exploitation. This farcical dichotomy is even more glaring than the USSR’s since 1956 and cannot be sustained for long, with disastrous consequences for all whichever way you look at it.
It’s true that a socialist state must be strong enough to resist the greed of capitalism but it is not true that the capitalist road is the only road to development. China was regularly visited by decimating famines (and so was Russia even during the early years of the USSR), and that was the top priority of their leadership. But to resist the capitalist threat, industrial development became a matter of survival for the USSR and Stalin rose to the occasion and showed that, from internal resources alone and facing enormous difficulties including blockades, it was possible and feasible, to develop and create the conditions for self defence and material prosperity for the people.
The Chinese leadership embarked on a deliberate course to integrate China’s economy with the capitalist elites of the West. Yet they carry on with the masquerade of pretending to be communist. They are not, and that hypocrisy and dishonesty, treachery and robbery should be stated any time the name China is mentioned. They are not communist, they use ‘communism’ to give it a bad name and a façade for their thievery and mendacity.
Kim
Hi Kim,
Actually, I meant it is something to be hopeful for geopolitically, as it would keep Pax Americana in check.
I appreciate your long explanation.
I disagree that the “Chinese leadership embarked on a deliberate course to integrate China’s economy with the capitalist elites of the West” . The RMB was not an international currency until after 2009. Now, they are bidding to become an international reserve currency. That’s not integration, it’s subversion.
They are also setting up a rival gold hubs & financial centres in Shanghai to compete with New York and London.
I don’t think you have to worry about anyone thinking China is a communist country. China is free-market economy with an authoritarian government. I do not believe there has been such a system like this in history (?) I don’t know how this will play out, a lot depends on the Chinese leadership.
If the Chinese government allows their currency to appreciate and eventually introduce democratic reforms, then the Chinese people will be big winners.
Behind Communism
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/Behind%20Communism.pdf
I really like Mr Escobar´s writing, as he is humorous, and informed in areas where I am not. After reading all of the comments, I have a few observations. The Chinese businesspeople I have met are very altruistic. I view a sense of altruism and humanitarianism as the core of a spiritual, religious, or communist sensibility. Having only just read Orwell´s Animal Farm, I concede that human (or in his fable, animal nature) can be pretty grim; self serving and manipulative.
My Chinese friends are generous, hard working, and express a joyous motivation for doing good. Their business ethics are impeccable. They remind me of the middle class milieu I grew up in in California in the 50´s. So all of this argument about communist vs capitalist seems a bit outdated.
My concerns with the development Mr Escobar describes is more structural. Big cities are not sustainable, nor in the long run very pleasant places to live. My ideal development at this point is a planned ecocommunity where permaculture provides a local, clean food sources, water, and shared recreation space. Most of the ones I´v seen online are very pricy, but I don´t see why we could´t do it on a more prole level. You can even design lighting systems that do not block out starlight at night. The other reservation I have, and wonder if anyone on the blog knows more about this, is that western criminal banks have been major operators in Chinese development for at least 16 years. That cannot be good for the Chinese people.
I´m not sure if my main point is clear. I think that having a good heart is at the core of any real spiritual, religious, or communist system. Thinking of others first, having goodwill to all beings sets in motion good in any sphere of life. We need to look at isms as tools, appropriate to certain situations, certain jobs, certain people, and not as ideological end alls.