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**SEPTEMBER 9, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

The U.S. and China: Two Peas in a Pod

Even as China and the United States duke it out to determine which shall
dominate the 21st century, these two world powers actually resemble each
other in some surprising ways.

Those ways, perhaps even more surprisingly, are economic. That's
because both nations have been becoming more capitalistic in the worst
way. Since the beginning of the century, income and wealth have been
concentrated at the top in both.

Today, according to a study from the Credit Suisse Research Institute
,
the wealthiest 1 percent of the Chinese own 31 percent of the nation's
wealth, up from 21 percent in 2000. In the U.S., that figure stands at
35 percent, also up by roughly that much since 2000.

According to Yao Yang, a professor of economics

at Peking University, "China is one of the worst countries in terms of
redistribution, despite being a socialist country. Public spending is
overly concentrated in cities, elite schools and so on."

If that diagnosis also sounds considerably applicable to the good old
USA, minus the "despite socialism" stuff, perhaps that's because
China isn't really a socialist country. It's state capitalist, but
that still begs the question of how to describe the state. Until
recently, I've favored the term "Leninist capitalist." But with
President Xi's personalization of authority, the unprecedented growth
of the nation's digital surveillance system, and now its move to
reward or penalize its citizens with a system of "social credits"
(expressions of loyalty as monitored by its surveillance technology), I
think "Stalinist capitalism" comes nearer the mark. And Stalinism,
back in the day, was also profoundly nationalistic, at least toward its
homeland-much more so than Leninism, much less Trotskyism, ever was.

History is hard on the categorical models that the sages have said
should guide our understanding. Here at home, Joe Biden is struggling to
transform us into something closer to social democracy, along the lines
that the indispensable Bernie Sanders has been laying out for decades.
Of course, as any Marxist or even any political scientist will tell you,
the force behind social democracy is invariably a powerful labor
movement, of which the U.S. is singularly devoid. Then again, if we were
less devoid, there would be more Democratic senators to overrule Joe
Manchin and push the Biden agenda forward.

And therein lies another similarity between the U.S. and China: Both
nations suppress unions, which is a primary reason why both nations have
such towering levels of economic inequality. To be sure, more Americans
now support unions, which had a 68 percent approval rating in last
week's Pew poll, than at any time in the past half-century. And given
the level of unauthorized strikes that regularly beset China, we can
only assume, in the absence of polling, that a lot of Chinese think well
of unions, too. Due to the anti-democratic features of both the Chinese
and American governmental systems, however, even supermajority support
for workers' rights doesn't translate into official tolerance, much
less support, for workers' rights. Yes, the Biden administration is
doing all it can to increase those rights, but in the absence of
legislative reform, which requires ditching the filibuster, there's
only so much it can do.

At the root of both nations' domestic ills, then, are their democratic
deficiencies. China clearly leads us in this, of course, but we both
have a long way to go.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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