“I Don’t Know It; I Don’t Need It!”A New and Significant Kind of Socialism for the Twenty-First Century: Different from What We Believe, Different from Anything We Knew Before, Different from What We Are Told …

This chapter investigates what China essentially is and where it is heading, if we accept the analytical framework of an “early-stage socialism”, with China’s specified socialist goals for 2035 and 2049 (100 years P.R.). China’s path toward these goals obviously embraces a comprehensive, inclusive growth and a sweeping broad distribution of the generated socio-economic surplus, broadly understood. The chapter, therefore, assumes the analytical frame and terminology of “productive forces” and “relations of production”. It finally develops a checklist of factors that tend to shift the Chinese system toward something that can seriously be considered a new type of “socialism for the 21st century” (a term generated in Latin America around Venezuelan Chavism in the 2000s). This will have little to do with what many Western left-leaning intellectuals still believe socialism must look like, or with what Eurocentrist top-down state socialism once was. China’s elites obviously are aware that the country stands on the shoulders of the Soviet Union, but also they had learned from Eurocentrist-socialist mistakes and collapse. Global conditions for Chinese socialism appear far better than they were for the Soviet Union, which in the long run could be overstretched by a Collective West that commanded far more resources globally at that time. But China has considerably helped improve the global conditions for its own development.