From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners
Date November 18, 2021 1:20 AM
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[This book is written by a professor in the School of Marxism
Studies at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, and it aims
to explain the theory and practice of contemporary governance in that
country.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS: A GUIDE FOR FOREIGNERS  
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Tamara Prosic
June 21, 2021
Friends of Socialist China
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_ This book is written by a professor in the School of Marxism
Studies at Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China, and it aims
to explain the theory and practice of contemporary governance in that
country. _

,

 

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
A Guide for Foreigners
Roland Boer
Springer
ISBN: 978-981-16-1621-1

Ever since the reform and opening-up from 1978, and especially during
the last few decades, China has often been portrayed as an economic
and a political hybrid: an officially socialist country which has,
under the aegis of its Communist Party and its leaders’ continuing
declarations of allegiance to Marxism and building socialism, embraced
two key components of capitalist systems: private ownership over the
means of production and a market economy. For many, this hybridity is
also an insoluble contradiction which, similar to the classical liar
paradox, involves a range of mutually invalidating opposites lining up
with popular understanding of ‘authentically’
Marxist/socialist/communist economic and political values, practices,
etc., and respectively ‘authentically’
capitalist/liberal/neoliberal values, practices, etc. Overall, the
reasoning goes that if China is truly socialist and if its Communist
Party sincerely adheres to Marxism (as its theoretical and practical
guide for building socialism and eventually communism), then
introducing practices typical of capitalism constitutes a betrayal of
Marxism (or deviation from it) and introduction of capitalism. Based
on this essentialising dualistic logic, China has become ‘state
capitalism’, ‘bureaucratic capitalism’, ‘capitalist
socialism’, ‘neoliberalism/capitalism with Chinese
characteristics’, ‘crony capitalism’, ‘red capitalism’, and
many other capitalisms. Many of these ‘capitalist’ qualifications
come from non-Marxists and are often just poorly veiled attempts to
reassert Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ slogan and
Fukuyama’s ‘the end of history’ thesis. Unfortunately, many
Marxists, especially in the West, also succumb to the trap of
dualistic social ontology in thinking about China. The glaring fault
in their approach: disregard for the basic Marxist method, more
concretely, dialectics, which involves understanding reality,
including the reality of socialism, as the constant development of
contradictions and their resolutions through sublation.

_Socialism with Chinese Characteristics_ challenges the simplistic
mutually exclusive dualistic lens through which socialism in China is
often viewed and judged. Truthful to its title, the book is a guide to
Chinese socialism, both comprehensive and incisive, although not so
much for foreigners as for those who lost sight of Marxist dialectics
as theory, analytical method and most importantly, as a framework and
guide for social practice. For others, who like myself, grew up and
lived in a socialist country, reading _Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics_ is a journey simultaneously familiar and new:
familiar in recognising the language of specifically socialist Marxism
and new regarding the ways it has been applied in Chinese
circumstances.

It is not easy to provide a short overview of Boer’s book. It has
ten chapters (each one with many sections and subsections) which aim
to provide comprehensive answers and explanations to many different
questions one can ask about modern China. Some are more theoretical,
other more factual, but all of them draw on a variety of strands
involving history, Marxism, politics, law, linguistics, etc. The book
covers what some might consider the ‘big’ issues such as the
Marxist basis for the reform and opening up, the introduction of
private ownership and market economy (chapters 4 and 5), the
theoretical foundations and practical functioning of Chinese socialist
democracy (chapters 8 and 9) and ideas about sovereignty and human
rights and their practical applications (chapter 7). In dealing with
these ‘big’ issues, however, a number of other questions are also
clarified, such as the status of minority nationalities and their
involvement in the democratic process (section 8.5), the meaning of
‘legal system’ and ‘rule of law’ (subsection 8.6.1), the role
of the Party and the role of the government (subsection 9.6.2), views
on globalisation (subsection 10.4.8), etc. Every chapter also involves
quotes and references from Chinese sources, which include works and
speeches by Party leaders (Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Xi
Jinping), documents from congresses and conferences and an incredible
number of Chinese Marxist philosophers, political scientists,
economists, etc., most of which are unfortunately unknown outside of
China. The book also includes explanations of Chinese words,
expressions and characters which are part of the Chinese Marxist
discourse, such as _shishiqiushi_ (seeking truth from facts) (32),
_datong_ (unity, togetherness, harmony) and _xiaokang_ (moderately
well-off, healthy, peaceful and secure) (chapter 6), _baquan_
(hegemony) (256), etc.

The way in which all of this versatile material is woven together and
presented is clear and accessible, but the book is far from being a
simple descriptive journey as one would expect from a ‘guide’. It
is also a deeply analytical work which in order to highlight the
distinctiveness of Chinese Marxism and the complexities of building
socialism involves careful reading of Chinese textual material (and
their squaring up with actual practice), frequent comparisons with
Soviet and Western Marxism and Western liberal thought, constant
moving between the past and the present, zooming in on details and
zooming out to the big picture and frequent expositions about how
described practical aspects fit in with Chinese Marxist discourse. In
this sense, reading through _Socialism with Chinese Characteristics_
is not an easy ride. There is breadth and depth to it which requires
constant focus and, most importantly, also an open mind and readiness
towards accepting reconfigured, sometimes in a completely new way,
well-known Marxist ideas and concepts. 

The picture of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ that
emerges from this intense journey is of a vibrant, dynamic and complex
society which is in constant development and in a critical dialectical
dialogue within itself and with the rest of the world. Indeed, if I
were to summarise what ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’
entails without doing grave injustice to its complexity, it would be
that it exemplifies Marxist dialectics in real action. Dialectics was
the force behind the reform and opening up (chapters 2, 3, 4, section
5.3) and it is still the dominant theory and method that informs and
shapes development of Chinese socialism (section 1.2 and chapter 10).
What differentiates Chinese Marxist dialectics, however, from Marxist
dialectics in the classical sense is that it is referential to Chinese
history and conditions (subsection 1.3) and that its primary focus is
not anymore on contradictions arising from capitalism, but on
resolving contradictions that arise in socialism, that is, in a
post-revolution social reality where, as Marx would say, the
expropriators have already been expropriated (section 3.4 and
subsection 4.5.1). In other words, this is a type of
_socialist/socialistic_ dialectics whose main concern is development
of socialism as concrete social, economic and political practice.  

Dialectics is the dominant theme of the book, but the key to
understanding specifically Chinese socialist(ic) dialectics and
appreciating the intricacies of Chinese socialism and its functioning
are the first four chapters because most of the ideas they deal with
are, with an ever-growing complexity, further elaborated in the rest
of the book. In the introduction, Boer explains the role Marxism plays
in China, what is specifically Chinese about it and a number of
liberal and Western Marxists’ (mis)representations of Chinese
socialism, which Chinese scholars and Boer view as inadequate and
methodologically faulty since they try to understand China from the
perspective of Western history, Western intellectual traditions and
Western Marxism. The second chapter discusses Deng’s two principles
(liberating thought from dogmatism for the purpose of liberating the
forces of production, and seeking truth from facts as the basis of the
Marxist method) that were instrumental for the move from strictly
planned to mixed planned/market economy. The third chapter presents
‘contradiction analysis’ or dialectical materialism as it was
developed in the Soviet Union, namely, the understanding that
contradictions continue in socialism albeit in non-antagonistic form,
and its application in Chinese conditions. Finally, the fourth chapter
explains the reasons for the reform and the opening-up via
contradiction analysis in a series of opposites such as
collective/individual, equality/difference, revolution/reform,
self-reliance/globalisation and their recalibration within the Chinese
socialist economic and political context. From here, the book turns to
an extremely detailed discussion of more concrete aspects of Chinese
socialism, such as the economy, socialist modernisation, sovereignty,
human rights and democracy, ending with an exposition of Xi
Jinping’s thought. What all of these chapters clearly demonstrate is
the firm footing of Boer’s claim from the introduction, namely, that
Marxism is at the core of Chinese socialist project, although, as
mentioned before, this is Marxism that is primarily referential to and
applicable to problems arising in socialism.      

Does Boer’s book deliver on the promise to ‘redress the lack of
knowledge’ about the concept and practice of socialism with Chinese
characteristics? It certainly does and more so. For those who wonder
whether China is still socialist or suspect that Chinese Communist
Party abandoned Marxism, the book provides a lot of material on which
to base their answers. In fact, anyone who wants to engage seriously
and extensively with ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’
should read the book. As for me, I never doubted that China is
socialist. What _Socialism with Chinese Characteristics_ did for me
was to reaffirm that communism is indeed ‘the riddle of history
solved’, which I began to doubt after the Yugoslav and the Soviet
disaster, and to rekindle the hope that the world will come to that
solution sooner rather than later. China wants to lead towards
achieving this aim by example and Boer’s book certainly shines a
very bright light on the ins and the outs of that example.

_Tamara Prosic is a Senior Researcher with the School of
Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia._

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