Making Sense of China’s Ideology
A very common question people ask me is “What is it like living in a communist country?” And a lot of times I want to answer like Scarface from Half Baked and say “Yo, I don’t know, B!” Not because I don’t like to answer people’s questions about China, but because really, I don’t know B. China doesn’t really feel to me like communism or what I thought communism was. There’s nothing “classless” about today’s China. And although I hear people say and read people write all the time how China is becoming a capitalist society, I’m certain modern-day China is not capitalist. So then what is China? Is it Maoist? Socialist? Stalinist? All these big words, and no definitive answer. Bill Sharp in his “Looking East” column in Sunday’s Honolulu Star Bulletin clears up the question of China’s political ideology. While Sharp admits that China’s political ideology draws from a number of previous, mostly Soviet philosophies, he subscribes to the classification of Minxin Pei, the director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sharp writes:
Minxin Pei writes in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Policy, that China might best be described as a “neo-Leninist state.” Pei’s view is based on the strong role of the party-guided state in controlling key sectors of the economy and blocking democratic development. When necessary, the state uses coercion to preserve its economic and political dominance. Somewhat reluctantly, Pei acknowledges that China has successfully used market forces to achieve great growth; however, he states that China’s growth isn’t as impressive as Japan’s, South Korea’s or Taiwan’s.
Neo-Leninist state, eh? I like the sound of that. And what’s the part about Japan’s growth being more impressive than China’s? That surprised me. I wonder what the Chinese government thinks of all this. Anyway, the article goes through each political ideology commonly linked with the Chinese system and Sharp describes to what extent China fits each characterization. Pretty interesting stuff.
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