The Continuing Adventures of the Dialectic: On Roland Boer's Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners (original) (raw)

Some distinctive aspects about socialism with Chinese characteristics

2019

Over the past 40 years the West has deluded itself that China's economic development was the manifestation of the adoption of the Western model, but Chinese reforms were instead a theory and a practice with a strong capacity to innovate Marxism, to adapt it to the peculiar conditions of China. There are many peculiar characteristics of Chinese Marxism but the paper analyses two: innovation in dialogue with tradition and the attitude to experimentation. On the first point, the article examines how Deng’s reforms takes into consideration both the basic inspiration of the political campaigns during Mao’s era and the teachings learned from the emperor's officers during the Qing dynasty. About the experimentation, is analysed the genesis of the reform from small village to the whole China, as made during soviet time by Lenin. Since those reforms has changed China very deep, the new leadership is called upon to build the foundations for China's role in the age that is opening up. This challenge is encapsulated in the theory of Chinese socialism entering the new era made up by Secretary Xi Jinping.

The Question of Socialism in China: An Introduction

Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2023

Heady days of the Soviet revolution mooted questions of the contours of socialism. However, following World War II, questions of socialism would reappear on the Left agenda as indications spread of the Soviet Union not living up to Marx’s sketches of what a socialist society should look like. Following the Soviet collapse, the global Left was forced to both rethink basic questions of socialism and consider whether other societies self-identifying as socialist could be upheld as really existing exemplars of Marx’s vision for the human future. China, under Mao, was initially embraced by the Left as the new representative of really existing socialism. But, following the 1978 reforms of its economy towards markets and opening to international capital it fell out of favour in Left circles. Yet, China’s unparalleled successes among Third World economies in economic growth and poverty alleviation had, by the early twenty-first century, placed it once again in the crosshairs of Left debate over socialism. While vigorous debate swirled around the question of socialism in the erstwhile Soviet Union there has been less sustained debate over the question of socialism in China. What follows in this article and the Feature Section of the journal is an attempt to remedy this deficit by bringing international Left scholarship to bear upon the important question of the kind of society and economy that is represented by China.

The Renewal of Chinese Marxism: Debates over the Character of the Political Economy

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies

This is a study of those Chinese political economists and political philosophers in the early 1950s who sought to distance China's transition to socialism from the Soviet model for development. Writing for the leading economic and philosophical journals, Xin Jianshe [New Construction] and Xuexi [Study], these theorists attempted to apply Mao's 1937 call for a sinified Marxism to their contemporary reality by insisting upon a national strategy for socialist construction. Their arguments provided a source for the later break with the Soviet command economy. And it is the emphasis upon Chinese solutions to national problems that forms a line that connects this past with China's present.

Chinese Socialism as Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

This paper follows the life of an idea, a fundamental concept in modern Chinese intellectual life: socialism. It explores this idea as an alternative form of Chinese cosmopolitanism, drawing from Pheng Cheah’s identification of two kinds of Chinese cosmopolitanism: mercantile and revolutionary. If part of what we mean by cosmopolitanism is the local use of an external, or international, or otherwise “independent” (relative to local power and practice) ideology or discourse to promote an agent’s sense of social good at home and connection to the world, then the ways that socialist thought, ideology and praxis have been employed in China in the twentieth century constitute one such strain of cosmopolitanism. Shehuizhuyi (socialism) meant related but significantly different things to Chinese in the twentieth century. This essay argues that Chinese socialism can be viewed as a version of vernacular cosmopolitanism through two examples: Wang Shiwei in the 1940s and Deng Tuo in the 1960s, as well as the discourse of Pan-Asianism before and after the Mao era. Chinese socialism was as much a terrain of debate and contestation about what it means to be “Chinese and modern” as it was a shared vocabulary and set of aspirations. All along it has been able to play the role of cosmopolitan thought for some influential Chinese thinkers and doers—connecting China to the world in order to pursue universal values.