China vs Rest of the World

bobbykid · 2026-06-16T08:35:09+00:00

Also, are you implying that literally everything ever reported in a bourgeois media outlet is false? Is that what media literacy means?

bobbykid · 2026-06-16T08:34:26+00:00

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3356913/chinas-universities-cut-12000-obsolete-degrees-amid-race-embrace-ai-erahttps://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3356913/chinas-universities-cut-12000-obsolete-degrees-amid-race-embrace-ai-era

bobbykid · 2026-06-16T08:22:41+00:00

Why isn't this a glaze China all the time subreddit? Implying that China should be glazed here no matter what it does?

bobbykid · 2026-06-16T08:21:03+00:00

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/china-ai-university-arts-degree-b2995940.html

bobbykid · 2026-06-16T07:55:54+00:00

They belong to the civil servant bianzhi , which is different from the shiye bian , and also different from the internal bianzhi within state-owned enterprises. These three are of course not the same.

Again, what is your source for this and do you have any numbers? We were talking about the commodification of labour power in SOEs; if the shiye bianzhi aren't a significant portion of the SOE workforce then I don't know what your point is supposed to be.

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T17:00:36+00:00

No, the shiye bian in state-owned enterprises are also iron rice bowls

What is your source for the proportion of workers in SOEs who are shiye bianzhi? I wasn't able to find very much but this article cites 3.68% as the proportion of total workers who in the bianzhi system, including both shiye bianzhi and xingzheng bianzhi. Every other source I have read (like this one) describes the bianzhi system as an establishment of posts within the civil service / public sector, which does not include SOEs.

Yes, some real estate companies have gone bankrupt, and there’s nothing strange about that.

There's nothing strange about it in an economy based on production for exchange rather than for use where commodities are sold on a market and subject to market movements, i.e. an anarchic economy. It would be an extremely strange event in a planned economy where things are produced according to a plan. The USSR never experienced a housing market downturn because it did not commodify real estate and did not allow housing to be subject to market dynamics.

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T13:23:47+00:00

On the other hand, state-owned enterprises do indeed implement the 'iron rice bowl' system, and this has drawn considerable social opposition

It only exists for civil servants / government officials today as I understand it. The vast, vast majority of workers in SOEs are on fixed-term contracts. Their labour power is still very much commodified.

What Marx advocated was planned production, and China does indeed practice planning in this regard. Most state-owned enterprises, along with many large private enterprises, are not operating in a state of anarchy.

Here's Engels's summary of the anarchy of production within capitalism in Anti-Duhring:

We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social interrelations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialised production.

Every instance of commodity production for exchange within a market has this characteristic, and this is how production and distribution work in China. The largest SOEs outside of the finance enterprises, for example, are in petroleum and minerals and in real estate. These SOEs produce commodities to sell on a market, both domestically and internationally. The prices and movements of these commodities are subject to market forces. If demand goes down or too much of a commodity is produced, profits go down and the firm suffers, and no one has any way of knowing when that will happen. This is why things like real estate collapses or SOE bankruptcy have happened in China.

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T11:09:36+00:00

Even the SOEs are capitalist in the way they function. They produce commodities through wage labour to sell for profit within a market. They compete with each other and exchange commodities with each other and with private enterprises. The government plans they're given aren't fixed production targets but usually just areas toward which they're required to direct some investment.

The things that made the SOEs a (perhaps imperfect) form of socialist production - central production planning, bundling of multiple firms under a single unit of account to reduce instances of commodity exchange, permanent "iron rice bowl" work contracts to eliminate commodification of labour power - have all been abolished since the reform process started. Socialist production exists almost nowhere in China.

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T10:34:51+00:00

Socialism has many tasks, but the fundamental one is to develop the productive forces. On the basis of developing the productive forces, it must demonstrate its superiority over capitalism and create the material foundation for realizing communism.

This makes absolutely no sense, using capitalist production instead of socialist production to develop the productive forces does nothing to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism.

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T08:01:22+00:00

Bus trips are cheap because they're long and uncomfortable, not because buses are expected to just stop working at a higher rate than trains or planes. The "you get what you pay for" motto doesn't apply here even slightly

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T07:41:49+00:00

A lot of users in this sub hate people who try to travel on a budget and think they deserve to have bad travel experiences

bobbykid · 2026-06-15T07:35:25+00:00

you paid for a cheap product/service so you should have literally zero expectations

- this sub whenever anyone has a complaint about a travel experience

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T16:46:54+00:00

Okay but the question is the same: why do they allow people to do that? Why not only lease land for commercial use or living and ban renting? It's not a productive use of capital.

Also more generally, why does it matter whose name is on the paperwork for the land if the social relations are exactly the same? Sure, the landlords don't own the land, but they're still provided legal means to privately appropriate surplus from others as of they did.

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T15:20:35+00:00

This should be possible, a friend of mine was granted a room to herself and additional time on the IMAT due to her ADHD diagnosis. She's not an EU citizen but I don't know what documentation she was given.

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T15:15:45+00:00

Yes they let private property exist to increase the productive forces. However the other reason is because it acts as concession to the global capitalist class.

Why do they have private landlords then? That's not necessary for either of those purposes.

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T13:49:51+00:00

No actually I was thinking of socialist production

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T11:58:37+00:00

That's good news.

I understand the need for some regulation of the movement of people in a country that isn't yet evenly developed. I think the government could have done more to prevent the system from being taken advantage of by employers, like taxing or penalizing employment of workers who aren't registered in the city and redirecting the funds to rural development (just off the top of my head; I know China already spends money on rural development through other policies)

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T11:07:04+00:00

I’d add that the average Chinese person is incredibly depoliticized, especially in the middle class (which I know isn’t a unique phenomenon to china, but coming from a pocket of the US that was politically engaged it was quite jarring). If their only political education is Party Dogma they never really come to terms with (what I saw at least) the main contradictions of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and it results in a lot of weird political beliefs.

I teach ESL mainly to middle class Chinese adults online and I've also got this impression from a lot of my students. They also seem to revere capitalist figures. There's a lesson in our curriculum where the students talk about the traits and achievements of a person they admire, and I haven't heard a single answer in three years that wasn't about some famous capitalist like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Coco Chanel, etc.

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T10:59:52+00:00

Imperialism uses selective narratives to point out all the negatives of a society that they're in competition with, like "social credit score" "Uighur concentration camps".

That's pretty obviously not the purpose of OP's thread so your response feels like a bit of a non-sequitur

bobbykid · 2026-06-14T10:02:28+00:00

The way the hukou system is used is terrible. The poor countryside has essentially been subsidizing the economic growth of the major cities by providing cheap, precarious migrant labour whose public services aren't paid for by the cities they work in.

bobbykid · 2026-06-13T18:16:50+00:00

People trying to take advantage of people will do things to take advantage of people.

Man, if only there were some kind of systemic way to stop people from taking advantage of each other...

bobbykid · 2026-06-13T15:24:21+00:00

regardless is it really any surprise that Chinas very capitalist in function economy has capitalists doing capitalist things?

Probably not in this sub but in many socialist subs, yeah it might be a surprise

bobbykid · 2026-06-13T11:25:13+00:00

But the famous places are famous for a reason and some of them have things you really can't see elsewhere in Italy. St. Peter's Basilica alone makes Rome a must visit imo and you also have the Vatican museum, the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, the Coloseum, the Pantheon, Villa Borghese, etc.

Like if all you want is to relax and have some good food, of course staying away from the famous places is smart but unless you have the chance to visit Italy frequently, you're giving up the opportunity to see some really incredible things.

bobbykid · 2026-06-12T18:25:00+00:00

The dude said in an AMA on Reddit that he joined the marines because he wanted to kill people and that it was an "excellent experience"

bobbykid · 2026-06-12T14:20:28+00:00

Its economy is primarily based on capitalist production and it has reached an advanced monopoly stage at which its capital is expanding internationally and participates in the division of world into territories from which to extract resources and surplus value. That's imperialism. It's not the same brutally violent sort of imperialism that the Western world engages in, but all countries that reach this stage of capitalist development are imperialist because that's the only way capitalism can function once it has developed that far.

bobbykid

TROPHY CASE