i have it on good authority from about half of lemmy that china is a wonderful place where everyone feels safe and actually there never were any uyghurs, since that's just western propaganda

itt: people confirming the premise. ni hao baybeeee

Same reason the US has the most prisons even though it's aiming to be the freest country.

They aren't trying to be communist, they are trying to be "Communist with Chinese elements" which is just capitalism. Similar to how they are a "Democracy with Chinese elements" which is just a dictatorship.

China does not claim to be a fully communist society yet. Official ideology describes the country as being in a long-term developmental phase of socialism; communism is portrayed as a future goal. However, if they continue as they have been treating people like mere numbers, keeping them in poverty under total control, while billionaires amass wealth they will never achieve that anyway. In a society that ideologically advocates for overcoming class distinctions and capitalist exploitation, enormous private fortunes exist. Entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have at times amassed wealth running into the billions. At the same time, the Party controls key sectors of the economy and can exert massive pressure on companies. That transitional phase has gone spectacularly wrong. That is not how communism is defined. Private property is accepted only as long as it remains compatible with the Party's political interests. This is very convenient for the government: it can harness the productivity and innovation of capitalism without adopting the political power structures of a liberal political system.

They didn't used to have billionaires, when Mao was in power. Strangely, a lot of Westerners seem to hate what China is now, but also hate what China was before, which seems very strange to me. "The reforms were bad and China should be more Maoist" that is a coherent position, "The reforms were good but should have gone further and become even more capitalist" that is also a coherent position. But "China is bad now because they allow billionaires but they were also bad when they didn't allow billionaires" isn't really coherent, it just seems like knee-jerk opposition to whatever they do or don't do. Anyone who wants to offer critiques should be able to answer the simple question of whether the reforms were good or bad, whether they moved in the right or wrong direction.

On the off-chance that you actually want a serious answer to the question, let's start with some history. Before the revolution, China's average life expectancy was in the 30's, it experienced frequent famines, had no access to medicine, and had had similarly awful conditions for literally thousands of years with no improvement for the average person. The revolution brought about huge improvements in life expectancy and the basic necessities of life (with the failure of the Great Leap Forward being an exception to this general trend).

However, while central planning works for providing basic necessities because the demand for those necessities is very predictable, it is not the most efficient regarding consumer goods. This was one of the failures that caused the collapse of the USSR, the desire for consumer good and the inability to compete domestically. Furthermore, despite the increases in life expectancy, virtually everyone in China still lived in extreme poverty. The reforms in the 80s were intended to address this, and they were wildly successful at it:

In the words of Deng, it doesn't matter if the cat is white or black, so long as it catches mice. It doesn't really matter if a policy is ideologically "pure," so long as it provides clear material benefits for the common people.

Where I'm standing, the whole point of having any sort of political beliefs at all is to figure out which policies will improve people's lives. And lifting 800 million people out of extreme poverty over the span of 40 years, can you name a more successful policy, ever, in all of history?

Cos playing at communism at best. China is a totalitarian fascist state.

First and foremost, there's no such thing as a "communist country". Communism is a very late stage of socialist development when all class contradictions have been abolished. We don't know what that might look like, but the consensus is that we can't really talk about a country being communist but rather an overall state of the world.

Secondly, China has a fairly good grip over its billionaire class. They don't have the class power their class has in the US, Europe, or the rest of the western capitalist world. The capitalist class in China is subject to the wishes of the working class represented by the party with its over 100 million members.

Because "Communist States" are just State Capitalism with red branding, next question.

So much ignorance on display here in this thread. People talking out of their ass with no clue or care why and how China has implemented economic reforms and development policy. No clue what communists even are much less the details of how they manage the economy of a developing socialist state within a capitalist global economy. Just thought-terminating clichés about billionaires and so-called "state capitalism".

Fun fact: you can actually read the justifications for why socialist countries managed by proletariat governments have implemented limited market systems in their economies in China, Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, even Korea. Their thoughts are public!

Tankies are the greatest right-wing propaganda that lefties still fall for both by believing in it and by believing that it's actually coming from sincere leftists.

China has maintained enough of a market system to avoid our usual direct efforts at overthrow or embargo, as long as our billionaire ruling class sees their markets as an opportunity outweighing the threat of their government they'll block any push by our government to interfere with their access to those markets. Not only did that work perfectly but they actually managed to get their greatest global rival to voluntarily de-industrialize and hand the vast majority of our productive capacity over to them without a single shot fired. Every last bit of argument here and elsewhere about whether they're communist or not is just cope from people whose civilizations have never pulled off anything half that slick in their entire worthless existences.

Imagine living in Lebanon and not being a millionaire...

Even normal people there live in houses worth billions of Lebanese Pounds.

China's restrictions on free speech scare me... and I don't like all their policies... at all...

but, in China's defense...

Many countries that have tried to implement communism have been overthrown... and so if China is trying to position itself in a technologically dominant way to avoid being overthrown, embracing some limited capitalism to foster technological dominance may make sense. If you look at China, they make a lot of great tech and they are really excelling at robotics.

If someone is really good at making money, they sometimes use that capital to create more companies or push technological development further. So it may be a thought out policy choice to allow limited capitalism, even resulting in billionaires, so as to gain technological dominance, so as to not be overthrown?

We don't need donations, we just need to tax them at the same level we're taxing regular workers. And since their fortunes are growing at double digit rates, a small annual wealth tax wouldn't hurt them either.

Imo there should be a law that limits the sum of assets everyone is allowed to have, say 1M-10M

Because they're marxist leninist and think socialism is something you work towards and isn't achievable by pressing the big red communism button.

Worry about your own country, yank