Canmoore:
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so basically you guys dont see an end to Chinese Communism in sight at all? Or do you see a possibility of Chinese Communism slowly eroding away in favour of the all might buck?
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China is still Communist in the sense that everything that happens is done for the benefit of the Communist Party and its members - as must be the case for a government that is answerable only to a self-appointed leadership. At the moment, the party has temporarily freed up certain markets in order to create the economic growth required to prevent the kind of economic problems that broke up the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Whether economic reforms persist - i.e. not the addition of new reforms, but the retention of old reforms - is an open question. Domestic industrialists are starting to demand that foreign manufacturers and service sector companies be excluded from the Chinese market. Policymakers have started to shackle foreign companies that have been in China for several years, while welcoming new foreign investors in. (The new restrictions and regulations on existing foreign companies in China are giving new foreign investors pause, of course. They realize they might be next in line for a thorough shafting).
China's real ideology no longer has to do with Marxism (if it ever did - I always saw it as cover for a new dynasty that carried out Robin Hood policies on a large scale - except unlike the case of Robin Hood, millions of Chinese property owners were executed to accomplish this, and Chinese peasants never actually got to own what was taken away from the deceased property owners - the Communist Party merely lent it to the peasants, i.e. the CCP owned it all). Rhetoric aside, the party's guiding principle is now mainly about saying and doing whatever it takes to keep the party in power. Some measure of economic freedom is currently the fashion. It appears to me that a large number of Chinese workers are now employed in the private sector. Some of this had to do with new business formation and new foreign investment and some of it had to do with the privatizations of state-owned companies.
But the real bottom line involves staying in power. My feeling is that whatever happens in the economic realm, the Party would no more relinquish power than the Last Emperor handed over the reins of power voluntarily. There is only one Chinese leader who has done so in recent Chinese history. His name is Lee Teng Hui, the former leader of Taiwan's Kuomintang dictatorship. It is possible that the Chinese Communist Party might follow in his footsteps, but the Party has bathed itself in blood in the 60 years (in a manner unprecedented even in China's blood-soaked history) since it won the jackpot and crowned itself emperor. The question is whether - if the Party gives up power - aggrieved friends and family members will start taking down party members much as Kurds and Shiites are going after Baath Party members in Iraq.