Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

THE BATTLE OF CHINA’ S HISTORY
contemporary counterparts have become the nouveaux riches by virtue
of their salaries, commissions, and exploitation; only a minority have
risen by virtue of their own business abilities. Like many of the famous
compradors who purchased official titles such as daotai (upper middle
rank official) during the Qing China, contemporary compradors are
also given titles such as representatives of the National People’s
Congress at county, city, province and central levels, and many of these
business elite actually hold CCP party membership cards. Not unlike
their predecessors, contemporary compradors want their children to
be educated in Western ways, and hundreds of thousands of young
students are being sent to the United States, the UK, Australia and
other Western countries to study.
Many of this comprador class hold or seek foreign passports or
residency status. Capital flight from China, according to some estimates,
has been exceeding the levels of FDI since the late 1990s.
According to a release by the Assistant Minister of the Chinese
Ministry of Public Security, 4,000 ‘corrupt’ Chinese officials had fled
the country with a total capital of $US50 billion by 2005 (Caoyan
Jushi 2005). In short, the role of the comprador in the chain of the
world capitalist system offers yet another demonstration that China
is basically a capitalist country
Capitalism with Chinese characteristics?
Wang Hui (2005), one of the sharpest observers of contemporary
Chinese politics and society in China, thinks that China is caught
between ‘misguided socialism and crony capitalism, and is suffering
from the worst of both systems’. While the Chinese authorities like to
claim that their path of development is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’,
some commentators think ‘capitalism with Chinese
characteristics’ is more appropriate (Chin 2003). Some commentators
would refer to China’s development since the 1980s as either crony
capitalism or gangster capitalism (Holmstrom and Smith 2000). One
veteran China watcher has defined it as ‘high-tech feudalism with
Chinese characteristics’ (Kwong 2006).
The Chinese authorities claim the PRC can still be considered
socialist because most of the important means of production are still
owned by the state. But state ownership per se does not necessarily
mean socialism. Many of the major means of production in capitalist
countries, such as France or the UK (before Margaret Thatcher), were
owned by the state. In any case the notion of state capitalism has been
frequently used to refer to the former Soviet Union (Chattopadhyay
1994, Fernandez 1997, Haynes 2002, Resnick and Wolff 2002), and the
notion can equally apply to China.
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