What Kind of System? “Communism”? “Turbo Capitalism”? “State Capitalism”? “Socialist Market Economy”? “Autocracy”? Or What?—Sorting Out the Conceptual and Analytical Confusion

This chapter examines the main, across-the-board everyday labels that media, politics, and the everyday consumer impose on China in flawed ways, in an attempt to grasp what is difficult for them to understand and what would require deeper investigation. What in former decades, namely the second half of the twentieth century, was simply “communism”, a term sufficient to disqualify a country, state, and its people, has in the twenty-first century become the equally superficial but fashionable term “state (and/or turbo) capitalism”. Is China capitalist as a system? The chapter makes the distinction between China having capitalists and “markets” (capitalist ones?), strictly regulated and governed, and being capitalist as an overall system. Also, is China’s self-description as a “socialist market economy” correct and tenable upon deeper analysis? Is it primarily a kind of “mixed” system? In a more political dimension, Western media and politicians have decreed to distinguish “us” from “them” by “democracy” vs. “autocracy”. The latter means rule “by itself”, with no participation of the people. As earlier chapters have already explained Whole-Process People’s Democracy, this chapter examines and checks “autocracy” against a thousand-year-old Asian understanding of ruling with, by, and in favor of the people—a system of substantial participation, of maximum devolution to the grassroots village and residential levels, and of around-the-year self-organization and participation of people. Finally, the chapter examines the conception of an “early stage of a socialist democracy”, as developed by Chinese social scientists and party schools: a socialism with, again, Chinese characteristics (some even say “Chinistic”), a system that we still do not know exactly, but which apparently will be anything but the old Eurocentrist conception of a state socialism.