China is technically a multi party democracy, however the CPC does control the PLA (imagine if Republicans controlled the military, and that would be like China).
This is well outside my area of expertise, so please correct me if I'm wrong. But my understanding was that the legal parties are all subservient to the CCP and acknowledge their primacy.
So functionally maybe a little like Albertson's is the only legal party, but if you prefer your region can have a subsidiary of Albertson's like Safeway or Shaw's.
Officially no, effectively yes. It is not like they have meaningful elections, so a lot of power brokering is done behind doors. They do, however, provide minority parties with a quota of seats, although they effectively don't have decision making power (like the governor of a province vs. the CPC chairman of the province).
China is authoritarian no doubt, but clearly there are different forms of authoritarianism. Monarchy isn’t communism either. In principle, communism can’t exist under an authoritarian state, since that would create two classes; you’d be looking at some kind of socialism. Either way, I’d just point out that China has a brutal capitalist market. I feel like that kinda precludes communism.
Communism is whatever someone says it to be, so it isn't a very meaningful label. The term socialism is used a lot more than communism these days, although the party hasn't changed their name.
If you read Marx, communism isn't possible to achieve until after capitalism has run its course, so the way things are in China ATM are perfectly at harmony with that.
Communism has a definition. In the same vein, when someone says “democracy,” you can know roughly what they mean without knowing, eg, is it a representative democracy, is it a republic, does everyone vote together on all issues in a town square. Communism has basic characteristics involving the abolition of private property (not the same as property) and class. China has moved away from socialism to a kind of state capitalism over decades, and I don’t remotely understand why we’d call it communist.
Again, if you read Marx he claims that successful communism comes after capitalistic development. The communist party can take communism as an eventual goal instead of as a necessary truth right now, since the latter has always ended in disaster and the former puts off communism until later. The communist party is most definitely focused on communism as a goal, its goal is turn China to communism when its ready, China is not communist ATM.
Yes, that’s why I said at the outset that the CCP doesn’t run a communist country. That’s also a pretty funny idea; the CCP is cultivating a brutal capitalism to encourage a worker revolution into socialism against, uhh, themselves? By this logic the US is communist.
I think the same way we can talk about monkeys or squirrels. It's a family tree of related ideas. But there's no official checklist of features it has to have.
To give an example for comparison, a lot of people want to say socialism is about workers controlling the means of production. But that doesn't come close to covering all of the things that were called socialism that existed before someone proposed that definition.
With communism it's similar but at least I'm not aware of any one jingle that people are pushing as the one true definition.
But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc. it's a way to preserve an identity as a communist without having to admit there are any downsides.
For what it's worth I'd argue that capitalism is even less well defined and I've heard it used to describe every economic system that's ever existed including all communist countries.
>it's a way to preserve an identity as a communist without having to admit there are any downsides.
That’s not what I did, and I’m not a communist. I’m specifically talking about China because people use the label, deeply incorrectly, to portray them as a threatening other, as though they work in a super different way to us and threaten our way of life.
> But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc.
Im no scholar, but I’m pretty damn certain you can’t have a strong free market, alongside the consequent wealthy capitalists, under communism. Words have meanings, and that’s not what anyone or their mother would think of as communism.
It’s not a hidden statement about anything. China is not communist; communist means something. North Korea isn’t a democratic republic; that also means something. We can go into definitions if you want, but I think this is trivial to observe for China.
Edit: I think the distinction is important because the US has a tendency to label things communist before it goes to war with them, whether cold or hot.
