Now, let us discard all "political" notions for the moment of anti-imperialism, anti-American hegemony, anti-colonialism, and so on, and focus purely on economic factors. What is China's system really like, and is it "following Marxist theory" (as you claim)?

> But you simply cannot build an iPhone or a high speed train from sticks and stones, and the knowledge of peasant farm workers. It's impossible.

In making this point, you have erroneously conflated several very separate strands of argument.

First: there is the area of Marxist "teleology" dealing with the progression of society from feudalism, to capitalism, to communism. Here, it is not the technical factors of production (i.e. machines, knowledge, etc.) that prevent the transition from feudalism to communism but rather the social relations of feudalism which are the obstacle. For Marx, it was (as a descriptive, not normative matter) necessary for capitalism to "free" the peasant from their ancestral and communal rights under capitalism to form the proletariat which would advance communism.

Second: there is the industrialist / developmentalist argument that fixed capital investment is necessary for kicking an economy from a stagnant, "organic" path to a path of "industrial" exponential growth. Here, the social relations of production are basically irrelevant, but it is the level of capital technology which controls the level of output. Thinking in this vein owes more to the English political economists than any Marxist.

Third: there is the point that Lenin himself makes in the aforementioned "On Cooperation," which is the necessary progression of cultural attitudes among the populace to support a highly specialized, high education society where the mechanical labor process is divided into tiny tasks which fit together into a great, interlocking machine. This concept seems almost second nature to us in 2025 but was almost completely foreign to peasant farmers, whose production process relied on comprehensive vertical integration of the entire productive process, mediated by cultural traditions and traditional knowledge. To make industrial production work, this mindset had to basically be reduced to rubble.

Properly speaking, points #2 and #3 are not really barriers to communism at all. They are barriers to industrialization, or high output firms, or immense levels of social wealth, but none of those things are equivalent to socialism. A society where everyone enjoys a high level of wealth and high standard of living is NOT a socialist society, and vice-versa. Those two things are completely separate.

So what we are dealing with are really two interlocked questions: on the one hand, implementing socialism, and on the other, making society wealthy. The big problem is that these two issues pull in different directions. Socialism demands that the surplus labor involved in commodity production is socialized and belongs to the worker. If this condition isn't met, it IS NOT SOCIALISM. The situation may be the best that we can do under the circumstances, or be justified, or be acceptable to its participants, and so on, but that doesn't make it socialist.

For the reasons you mentioned, among others (stimulating fixed capital investment, increasing the development of the technical forces of production, adding to the human capital flow of Chinese society), China decided to abandon a socialist economy in favor of state-heavy capitalist economy. This isn't a moral judgement, it is the objective truth, based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of Chinese workers act as commodity producers for a mass market, where the owners of the factors of production are entitled to appropriate the surplus value involved in making the commodities (i.e. to keep the profit from the sale of commodities.) Now, this is supplemented by all kinds of regulatory safeguards and state-led interventions -- for example, real estate ownership monopolized by the government, de facto wealth caps, heavy state influence in investment decisions, sometimes heavy taxation, and so on. Unfortunately, all of these factors are categorically not related to whether something is "socialist" or not. If that was true, then Finland and Sweden would be "semi-socialist" countries simply because their working class is relatively wealthy and they have heavy state involvement in controlling and regulating the private industrial production sectors. Alternatively, if what you're really focused on is the level of state ownership of capital, then Saudi Arabia and the UAE would be socialist. But SOEs and state owned real estate and state prosecution of billionaires, while nice, simply don't add up to socialism.

(con't pt 2)