The community is the dictatorship of the proletariat that follows the leadership of the CPC.
That does not answer the question. The question is how China's system puts the regulation in the hands of the masses more than any Western/capitalist system. The community is no more a dictator in China than the West and the people follow the leadership in China just like in the West.
How is it drifting away from socialism?
Previously answered:
I said:
"The Chinese people are more and more hungry for personal success and wealth. They had given up when China was fully socialist under Mao; now you have people dying to get rich and eager to buy luxury items to show it off. This is clearly a cultural trend towards capitalism."
You did not answer.
I said:
"State-owned industries are crucial to China's growth but they are becoming a smaller and smaller piece of the pie as China's private industries boom and its billionaires sprout, putting more and more wealth in private rather than collective hands."
You responded that function is more important than size as SOEs control the crucial functions. I rebutted that those crucial functions have always been state-controlled; they are just smaller now in economic proportion so that is still drifting away from collective hands into private hands. You did not rebut.
I said:
"Wealth inequality has decreased in the short term but actually increased in the long term. China, in its olden full socialist days, was full of poor people who dressed in uniform with a red star and wealth-flaunting was non-existent. Then, as you said, in the frenzy of the 90's and 2000's, the wealth gap exploded due to lack of regulation. Now, it is narrowing back as a modern economy but the gap today is still far larger than it was when China was fully socialist. We still have people working 16 hour assembly lines who share an underground apartment with 5 other guys and we have the rich who eat meals that are more expensive than the monthly salary of the poor. (It's a wealth gap still greater than the majority of the developed nations in the West.) This does not point to a nation moving away from capitalism towards socialism but it points to a country that was first completely socialist, then opened up to the free market as a young economy, but then started to get the hang of things and regulate more and more like a modern mature economy."
You responded that private wealth accumulation does not go against socialism. But you also said that the main goal of socialism is to close the social inequality gap. I am rebutting now that that means that private wealth accumulation of epic proportions such as in the form of billionaires, then does in face go against socialism because creating billionaires is creating social inequality.
What China does fits the definition of socialism.
No it does not. It does not fit the definition, as we are discussing, because the masses hold no special control in China that is not present in the West; if anything the masses have one less mechanism in China than they do in the West which is voting out representatives. China's modern trend also does not fit the spirit of socialism, which, as you said, is to close social inequality, and if you let the hyper-rich boom in China, that antagonizes social equality. It might be better than in the early 2000's, but a slow closing of the wealth gap up to a certain point is normal for a relatively free market as it matures and becomes more regulated.
That's a typically capitalist view of socialism, because capitalists want people to believe the only way to reduce social inequality is to make everyone poor. That's basically a scaremongering tactic.
As China has demonstrated, this is simply not true. If you compare the 90's to the present day, you might find that the wealth gap has increased just because China has so many more billionaires.
However, for anyone who has spent time in those two periods, it is quite clear that SOCIAL INEQUALITY has been massively reduced.
In the 90s we had migrant workers living in shacks, their children left behind in villages with no education prospects. We had entire villages with cancer due to nearby factories polluting the water. We had corrupt officials openly displaying their affluence with extravagant weddings and wasting public funds with dinners costing tens of thousands of yuan on the public tab.
None of those things are happening anymore. Migrant workers have now returned to their villages of settled down in cities with their family. Pollution has been tamped down and environmental laws stringently enforced. Corrupt officials have been sacked and executed.
That's what I'm talking about. The wealth gap by itself doesn't reflect social inequality.
I do not accept that argument because the closing of the social inequality gap, as you define it, is really just the natural advancement and improvement of society in general. It is not a socialist thing; Western capitalist economies also had periods where people were getting cancer and poisoned by the chemicals dumped into the environment and times where miners/workers left their families for prolonged periods for work exhausting hours at dangerous jobs, phenomenons which are all vastly reduced now due to improved scientific understanding and improved regulation. What you describe is natural evolution of society that is independent of economic/political model.
The main determinant of social inequality today is still the wealth gap and with the boom of Chinese uber rich and private enterprise, the wealth gap is not being addressed in a way that is adherent to basic socialist philosophy.
