The discussions I've seen point more towards Legalism, a Chinese theory of governance that's similar to fascism. I guess "Fascism" is a decent analogy, but its probably more accurate to just call it Legalism. Especially because China has a long, cultural history with Legalism (while Fascism would be associated with WW2 Germany or Italy)
>Especially because China has a long, cultural history with Legalism
This is something that most people won't know without a detailed study of Chinese history. Legalism in China won the day against Confucianism a long time ago in 221 BC, when the First Emperor of China came to power, and has never quite lost its place in Chinese political thought since.
Hmm, perhaps the best approach is to use the official translated word from Chinese: Fajia, to represent the concept and minimize confusion.
Ex: We could translate "Samurai" into "Knight", except a Samurai code of feudalism was completely different than a Knight's code of feudalism (even if both were forms of feudalism). There are also major differences in how the aristocracy worked between Japan and Europe. At some point, its best to just stick with the native tongue.
How about we just use more specific terms? China remains very much Leninist, and to a lesser extent Maoist; it has however mostly ceased to be Marxist. They kept the basic political forms but moved to a relatively liberal economic model.
I'm curious as to how China is "Leninist" at all. The fact of rule by one party that claims to represent the working class does not a Leninist state make.
Perhaps Leninist in a historical sense of "thought violence to gain control in a type of region Marx himself thought wouldn't be viable".
Putting aside his philosophy's flaws he expected a feudalism to capitalism to communism progression more or less.
Lenin was not only part of ousting the czar but establishment of the party as a nominally proletariat peasant dictatorship. That attempted teological speedrunning to try to "skip to the end" is classic Lenin.
Even if the system later reforms there is still a legacy in the how. France and England are both parliamentary representative democracies who were once under monarchies but the UK has far more monarchist vestiges than France. While technically accurate to call France as monarchist legacied they would have far more grounds to object to the labeling given the purge of nobility and subsequent traditions - even when they fell into dictatorships again they certainly weren't kings.
To be pedantic we could describe these aspect vestiges as "x legacied". That the West uses latin as it does for mottos and species names is a Roman legacy for instance for it is a trace of their power as lasting influence even though it does not exist today. It does not imply current control any more than Byzantium had control over western Europe.
China may be better described amongst many other attributes as Leninist legacied, oligarchy legacied, Capitalist dictatorship until Xinjiang's inevitable demise.
The fact he consolidated control over Oligarchic and has no clear explicit succession line makes him dictatorial as opposed to mere Oligarchic "the remaining few interests will pick after him". If as the whispered snark of "Emperor Xi" holds and he successfully transmits power to offspring he will have founded an empire (if it dies quickly it wouldn't be the first Chinese dynasty to do so).
>I'm curious as to how China is "Leninist" at all.
China officially describe its ideology as Marxist-Leninism. I mean, depending on how strict your definition of "Leninist" is, even the USSR may not have been "'Leninist' at all".
>The fact of rule by one party that claims to represent the working class does not a Leninist state make.
The notion of the vanguard party is, in fact, a key concept in Leninism.[0] The vanguard party was conceived in opposition to forming trade unions, and was supposed to recruit from the working class. AFAIK trade unions don't exist in China, and the CPC does recruit widely, so it does satisfy the criteria of a vanguard party.
Marxist-Leninism also advocates atheism, another key aspect of Chinese policy.[1]
Also, I found this amusing: did you know Singapore is led by a party that was originally organised as a Leninist party? [2]
>In Singapore, the People's Action Party (PAP) was organised as a Leninist political party featuring internal democracy. The PAP initiated single-party dominance in the government and popular politics of Singapore.[3]
Of course, the PAP later expunged its leftist faction and swung to the right, but it still retains a lot of the Leninist structure.[4] Imagine, a billionaire's playground run by a centre-right party organised like a Leninist vanguard party.
Fascist is maybe not a good term, because fascism is actually quite specific and to some extent euro-centric (plus, nowadays it just means "bad people" without people necessarily understanding what fascism actually is).
But China seems to be a country run on a totalitarian and ethnic nationalist ideology.
Only if words don't mean things, though you can see how the least charitable (which is not to say least accurate; who knows) reading of Chinese policy would lead you there. In particular, I think there's a trap where if you cherry pick from Maoist China and modern China, you can assembly a Frankenchina that meets some of the definitions.
There are some pretty obvious elements of most common academic definitions of fascism that China flunks, no matter how you read them; for instance, Chinese society has not been mass-mobilized and militarized by any reasonable definition of those terms. Modern China not only doesn't reject modernism, it wholeheartedly embraces it. If there's a secular civic religion, with ceremony and liturgy, it isn't powerful enough to crowd out other faiths; there is a national patriotic spirit, but it isn't articulated through quasi-mystical symbols and rituals. Violence isn't employed for its own cathartic sake, and is largely "professionalized".
People want to use fascism as a shorthand for "authoritarian nationalism", but it isn't; there are plenty of examples of authoritarian nationalist states that are demonstrably not fascist --- in fact, there are plenty of right-wing authoritarian nationalist states that aren't.
Maybe a good acid test for this: if you were living in a fascist state, you'd know it, in much the same you'd know if you were living in an actual according-to-Hoyle theocracy. China is a huge country and millions of people there live with a relationship between themselves and the state that we would recognize in the west.
I want also to acknowledge that it is kind of squicky to debate whether China is "fascist", in that it's an extremely loaded term that carries implications for ordinary Chinese people living their lives (that's part of the point of fascism). But a discussion about what fascism is or isn't is at least more in the spirit of HN than a lot of the other comments on these threads.
If you want to get technical it's a very advanced fascist dictatorship - the way it leverages elements of capitalism, for example. An innovative fascist dictatorship, even. But ideologically speaking, it's very simple.
Like most communist places there is either an infinite black market or eventually they give up on that whole "no private property" thing, at which point you're effectively just left with a shitty excuse for a corrupt government.
Communists killing and imprisoning other communists has happened since the ideology was first conceived so you will need a better argument than that to say they are not communist.
I really dont understand why so many people feel the need to post comments online distinguishing that China is not communist.
Its a disgusting authoritarian regime just like every other self proclaimed communist country in history.
Historically communist countries have been pretty fascist, but communism itself (in theory) is about workers' rights and the elevation of the little people. I don't know how genuine Mao was about those ideals, but Xi is dropping all pretense by intentionally targeting labor movements. So he shouldn't even get to hide behind a flawed idealism. He has no idealism except power.
You're just ascribing the negative aspects of communism-as-realized to fascism but this seems trivially ahistorical. The internecine conflicts in communist states were much more pronounced than in the fascist ones, perhaps in part because communism was always a more complex and developed movement ideologically.
Communism as a political theory is anti-nationalist, and fascism as a political phenomenon arose in part as a reaction to Marxism. One of Payne's Fascist Negations is "anti-Communism".
There are multiple species of authoritarian tyrannies; fascism is just one of them. I think people get in trouble trying to generalize and apply fascism to places it doesn't fit. "Communist are fascists" might be one of the text book instances of that problem.
"Communist are fascists" might be one of the text book instances of that problem.
Mildly amusing thingie - a Bulgarian dissident's dissidenting involved writing a book about fascism (titled, for clarity, Fascism) which was really an oblique critique of the communist regime. It got past the censors and was published and then fairly quickly recalled. He later became Bulgaria's first post-communist president.
US foreign policy is a big reason why only authoritarian communist governments have been able to survive.
Nicaragua is a great example of this. The Sadinistas lost power through free elections in which the US interferred. Now that the Sadinistas are back in power, the freedom of their elections has been rapidly decreasing.
"Communist" as a lable has been so misused and unclearly defined for so long that it is mostly useless as a descriptive term.
> or does every country that calls itself Communist fail the test
That's how I look at it, though I'm no expert.
> what precisely would be different about a true Communist country versus these pretend-Communist countries
True collective ownership/Marxism. It's unclear whether it's even possible to create this kind of society without it regressing to brutal authoritarianism, but that's the idea at least.
China in 2019 is a simple fascist dictatorship.
Edit: Fixed a broken link