China is Capitalist
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This was such a brilliant video I subtitled it so more people can watch it. Beijing students' response last night to accusations that there are 'foreign forces' at play in this weekend's protests
'The foreign forces you are talking about – are they Marx and Engels?' https://t.co/umdFaVhz2s pic.twitter.com/RoohkFaZgE
— Cindy Yu (@CindyXiaodanYu) November 28, 2022
Very useful video on the economic woes and impending crisis of Chinese capitalism
https://www.facebook.com/ColdFusionTV/videos/546950273464297
This is an interesting interview with Rebecca E. Karl, of New York University, on the recent protests
The Left Can Support Protesters in China Without Shilling for US Imperialism
“…There are those who believe themselves to be progressive — and proclaim it loudly — but who deny that there is anything untoward happening in Xinjiang to Uyghurs. They deny that the CPC is anything other than marvelously socialist and marvelously humane. They wish to pretend that Chinese capitalist governance is somehow so much better than any other capitalist governance. They proclaim all this in the name of condemning U.S. imperialism. And U.S. imperialism, to be sure, needs to be condemned in the loudest and deepest ways possible. The historic and contemporary treatment by the United States of those within its expansive territorial reach, and of the world’s people more generally, needs to be exposed to every critical denunciation we can muster. Yet that condemnation cannot lead to excusing the CPC from responsibility for the brutality of treatment of Uyghurs (and Tibetans, and others) today.
Capitalism is brutal no matter who practices it. For me, this is simply a principle of progressivism: We cannot relativize our view so as to erase the problems we don’t wish to see. That is simply ignorance and betrayal…”“…Xi Jinping is not a socialist; he is not a communist in any real sense of the concept, even if he is the leader of the Communist Party of China. Xi Jinping is a nationalist Chinese capitalist, who appears not to blink at destroying the possibilities of others’ lives in order to maintain his power and the rising supremacy of the Chinese nation-state. His desires are not so very different from those of many of our governing leaders in the Euro-American world, even if our leaders’ desires must be framed in different language and through different political rhetoric, at least for the time being. It is their similarities, not their differences, that will tell of the future…”
Local government debt is a “big headache” for the national economy.
Having spent more than £42bn last year on Covid-prevention measures, and hit by falling tax revenues, by December 2022 local governments had accumulated 35tn yuan (£4.2tn) in debt, up from 30.5tn yuan the previous year. That means that China’s provincial debt burden is roughly 20% bigger than Germany’s total GDP.
Local governments owe billions: last year 2.6tn yuan of refinancing bonds were issued, and more than 1tn yuan was paid in interest alone.
Revenue relating to land sales typically accounts for more than 30% of local government income and between 2019 and 2021 the share was about 40%. But last year land sale revenues declined by nearly one-third compared with 2021.
Hidden debts accumulated through local government financing vehicles, mechanisms that are used to fund infrastructure projects, could more than double the total debt burden.
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