"The extent to which Xi’s reading of classical Marxist texts has inspired this campaign is not clear."
It seems the article's author has not read Xi Jinping's multi-volume series "The Governance of China," which very clearly lays China's path toward building a "moderately prosperous socialist nation" using fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist thought adapted to China's material conditions -- i.e. "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."
It's not a big secret. You can buy an English translation on Amazon or even get a free copy from your local embassy/consulate.
> This talk of peaceful development needs to be taken seriously. So I set about combing through my two English volumes of Xi Jinping’s Governance of China looking for the phrase and sentiments similar to it. Occasionally I would consult the Chinese edition of the same books when I wanted to see how a certain phrase or idea was conveyed in the original. I then tried to think of major events in the years since Volume II was published where Xi would have had cause to touch on these themes, and eventually realized that the most important certainly would have been the 2018 Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, which gathered together the politburo, the heads of the intelligence, united front, and foreign affairs bureaucracies, and all of China’s ambassadors under one roof to learn about “Xi Jinping Thought on Foreign Work.” Xi’s speech at that event has not yet been published, but I spent some time going through the Xinhua read-outs of it, as well as reading Yang Jiechi’s two lengthy precis of XJP Thought on Foreign Work for Qiushi.
And what jumps out at me from that longer article is how religious the CCP position is. "We have the revealed truth, have faith in it." It's not open to criticism by anyone other than the prophet Xi. And, since it's his revelation, he of course does not criticize it.
Amusingly, the book's website has a "how to buy" button that... links directly to the Amazon product page: http://www.china.org.cn/china/node_7214554.htm What, the Party can't run its own shipping operation?
If the Gideons can put a bible in every hotel room in the United States, you'd hope the biggest country in the world could ship a couple books. You don't charge people to view advertisements!
What you are saying makes no sense to me at all. Like, I just don't even remotely grok the logic of this.
Just because you have the money / resources to do something yourself, does not mean that you should do that thing. Generally speaking, a bookseller will be more efficient at selling and delivering books to people who want books. Why on earth would you expect a political party to try and duplicate that effort? There are tons of good reasons why so much effort is outsourced to third parties these days.
Second, it is downright common to charge people to view advertisements. That's what magazines are. Magazines are a bit dead now, but the way they work is you get a bunch of advertisements, bundle it up with some content, and then charge people for it. They're not paying for the content (the content is already funded by the advertisements) and they're not paying for the physical copy, they're paying because the advertisers demand that it be so. Not all magazines work this way, but this is the general idea.
It turns out that people are more receptive to advertising if you make them pay for it first.
While I know nothing about Tanner Greer, the author of that article, it would not surprise me in the least if he had not read Xi's books. The intro callout is from Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia. While I'd give his opinions some weight, I'd hardly consider him an expert on the inner workings of the CCP. And the book highlighted in the article "Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom" was written by Andrzej Walicki, that wikipedia describes as a prof at Notre Dame who "specialized in philosophy of sociopolitics, history of Polish and Russian philosophy, Marxism and liberal thought".
I can't recall who it was, but I recall viewing a lecture by a china-scholar maybe 10 years ago who was ranting about how the fall of the soviet union had spurred many economic-socio-political academic types to switch to china. And how most of them could not read chinese so could not read original sources. And how many of them had never visited china. Or communicated with any chinese officials, much less citizens. But that didn't stop them from pontificating about what china was like, what china would do and what china was thinking. I don't know if it's just me, but both western political leadership and media just seem... less than knowledgeable about China.
I think the problem is a bit like when you're reading western accademic's take on what some USSR marxist, or some Chinese marxist is saying. There's a good chance the accademic has read a bit of marx, maybe even most of marx, but it's just nothing in comparison to the degree of inculcation you get by actually being a marxist surrounded by other marxists.
Everything that's influential in China is like that. You don't learn it in school in the west, it's deep and difficult and takes a lifetime to learn (for instance, if you try to get into eastern philosophy, even with prior philosophy training, it's pretty hard). The history, even the parts of Chinese history europeans had a hand in, is not taught or generally remembered. So the ignorance becomes so compounded and pervasive that you get the situation where even domain experts end up having quite limited expertise, because they're missing deep proficiency in one of the many traditions that makes modern China make sense.
It's a bit like when you hear a non-programmer talk about programming. No matter how clever they are, it's always sort of immediately obvious.
> There's a good chance the accademic has read a bit of marx, maybe even most of marx, but it's just nothing in comparison to the degree of inculcation you get by actually being a marxist surrounded by other marxists.
He's also definitely read "Governance of China", the book series droptablemain suggests he should read (he references it occasionally https://scholars-stage.org/?s=Governance%20of%20China ) Suffice to say he knows his stuff.
I guess the kind of immersion he's talking about doesn't give me much confidence. If you imagine party propaganda is like the most peripheral part of the entire discourse, and there's this gigantic machinery of ideas that makes the propaganda make sense, it's a bit hopeless just reading this kind of peripheral material with a skeptical eye - because skepticism itself stems from the ability to distinguish common sense from illusion, so if you don't have the right common sense, a lot of the time you'll think someobody is talking nonsense or being cynical when they're not, and vice versa.
"he must crack the code of the Communist political jargon and translate into ordinary speech this secret language full of symbols, riddles, cryptograms, hints, traps, dark allusions, and red herrings."
This, for instance, seems a bad way to understand ideology. If you see an ideology as just a jargon, ultimately translatable to 'ordinary speech', then you're never going to get to grips with ideology that's fundamentally different to your own. If you're a hegelian, for instance, your view of the world is fundamentally different to that of an empricist. You can't just call that jargon and translate it to ordinary speech. Ideas don't work like that.
My view is that Xi Jinping is basically practicing the classic technique of re-interpreting accepted texts to mean what you want, as a way of making your point while appearing to 'stay the course'. I think Strauss described and practiced this very well in "Persecution and the Art of Writing".[1]
Regardless of whether the method has some origin in classic technique, it is indeed a strategy that the vast majority of AES (actually existing socialism) states have done. That's why Soviet ideology was Marxism-Leninism vs...well...Marxism.
The Sandanistas, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. have done this as well. Also the Bolivarian socialists.
But Lenin viewed the NEP as a compromise with capitalism to gain time awaiting the world revolution, a dangerous one because it breed a new capitalist class out of peasants. Simultaneously with the NEP, Bolsheviks tried to help the world revolution (the policy of the third international before Stalin). China is not trying to foster any revolution, they have 100 billionaries as parliament members! China policy seems one of restoration of capitalism, not of compromise.
My favourite point when dealing with USSR sympathiers is that Chinese success is owed to 40 years of NEP, which was shut down in the USSR and doomed it.
(And this is due to Soviet distrust of its own Russian population, and also due to habit of siphoning money out of consumer economy)
Edit: The thing is, USSR was doomed after winning WW2.
It had to compete with the rest of the world economically without having adequate economy. USA just had to choose the relevant weapon (consumer economy) to win this one.
It's not so clear that the shut-down of the NEP doomed the USSR. The argument that without Stalin's focus on heavy industry the USSR would have lost WW2 is a good one.
Naturally the NEP developed light industry much more strongly than Stalin has and neglected the heavy industry necessary to win WW2 relatively.
As someone who's lived in Shanghai for over a decade the idea of describing China as having less inequality than the US is hilarious. China isn't that poor. People were very close to equal in 1970 or 1980. They were poor in Tianjin. They were poor in Shanghai, They were poor in Hefei. Now large portions of the counytry are as well off as Poland and there are significant numbers of very wealthy people.
China is not poor enough to be equal. It's not Chad. It's developing rapidly economically.
It also does not resemble post WW2 USA in the pay structure. That artificially compressed pay structure, with doctors only earning 3 times what people in low level manufacturing make, requires a level of labor scarcity China still hasn't reached after 40 years of economic growth.
Stalin had "socialism in one country," and yes, that has significant material and historical meaning, as opposed to being generic fluff.
Because it was generally believed that building socialism required a number of successful workers' revolutions around the world. But basically every revolution at the time failed, other than the Bolshevik revolution. So they found themselves in an awkward position. Hence the strategy and policy of Stalin to build "socialism in one country."
This is one of the major breaks between Stalin and Trotsky.
Yup. Trotsky was a perpetual world-wide revolutionary. Revolution was a constant state in Trotsky's mind. Stalin just wasn't. Stalin was much more nationalist in his thinking.
It seems the article's author has not read Xi Jinping's multi-volume series "The Governance of China," which very clearly lays China's path toward building a "moderately prosperous socialist nation" using fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist thought adapted to China's material conditions -- i.e. "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."
It's not a big secret. You can buy an English translation on Amazon or even get a free copy from your local embassy/consulate.