Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

https://www.neican.org/p/to-firmly-drive-common-prosperity

by ilamont • 5 years ago

69 56 5 years ago

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally? Is it a sincerely held (but misguided) belief? Is it simply a preview of how China plans to ultimately take (forceful) public ownership of the fruits of private industry and innovation? Or is all of this planning and adoption of market economies just a means to birth a socialist end state into existence?

I also found the following portion chilling, as it has all the undertones of propaganda and the worst of the Cultural Revolution, except it’s all being admitted in the open:

Fifth, we must promote common prosperity in the spiritual [and moral] lives of the people. The promotion of common prosperity is highly integrated with the promotion of all-round human development. We must strengthen the guidance of the Socialist Core Values, and education on patriotism, collectivism and socialism. We must develop [our] public culture enterprise, improve the public culture service system, and continuously meet the diverse, multi-levelled, and multi-faceted spiritual, moral and cultural needs of the people.
We must strengthen public opinion guidance on driving common prosperity to provide a favourable public opinion environment. In doing so, we should clarify various fuzzy understandings, and guard against impatience and fear of difficulties.

shadilay2• 5 years ago

'Common Prosperity' seems to mean that there are too many rich people in China that are giving too little money to the central government as their wealth usurps the power of the CCP.

jimmygrapes• 5 years ago

Yeah, Tax the Rich. This essay could have come from any given Twitter "intelligentsia" in America today with only a select few terms changed.

fenderbluesjr• 5 years ago

Stephen Kotkin is an interesting historian that (I think) would argue that China's govt is still very much communist and perhaps that their adoption of capitalist ideas were a necessary compromise and not a rejection of their former ideals

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

Well, the pure communism was leading to very slow development and many people still in poverty. Communism wasn't getting them to a socialist paradise. So they adopted capitalism to get their economy going, and that got people wanting capitalism and operating in a capitalist way and with a capitalist mindset. Now they want to keep the capitalist prosperity but have everyone want socialism, think socialism and do socialism.

It remains to be seen whether that is possible; I suspect that the answer is "no". I suspect that they're going to kill the capitalist prosperity by this. But we'll see.

mensetmanusman3• 5 years ago

Communist ideals didn’t work because of free loaders. They had to adopt capitalism because they were starving to death by the millions.

Eventually reasoned ideology bows to reality.

rsj_hn• 5 years ago

I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime.

In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity.

Now liberalism starts by people who no longer want to be bound by the old morality, which they deem as intrusive or blocking them from realizing their happiness. In the beginning, they just want to be left alone to ignore the old morality. But then the liberalism turns into decadence -- they mock the old morality with increasing intensity. Then the mocking becomes stronger until the old morality is declared evil. As all of this is happening, people turn to hedonism.

But the old morality was keeping the society together, and when it is gone, the society collapses, to be replaced by some new illiberal regime that enforces something else. That is basically the US right now -- we are undergoing social collapse, and everyone except Americans see the collapse happening.

But the west had a strong strain of Christianity that withstood liberalism for a good 200-300 years before decadence really took hold in the lives of ordinary people. That coexistence with liberalism created enormous economic growth. China doesn't have 200 years because as a socialist revolutionary government, they already swept away a lot of the old accumulated cultural capital that allowed Chinese civilization to continue, and they didn't really have anything convincing to replace it with. Then they allowed liberalism in order to also benefit from economic growth. Now, they see the decadence starting to take root, and are really worried.

Really all they have to keep the society together is national pride and a quest for making money.

They have tried to do things like revive an interest in Confucius, for example, but they can't seriously be trying to resurrect that old civilization. So China's morality is extremely weak, and isn't in a position to hold out as long as the west did against decadence, so they are really in a lot of trouble.

Thus China is fighting like mad -- e.g banning effeminate men on TV, trying to ban excess consumption and put a lid on consumer culture, maintaing strict control of media to ensure patriotic content and limit ironic/satiric portrayals of cherished values, etc.

It does not want to allow the cultural shift that happened in the 60s in the west to happen in China. Basically, China is fighting the kulturkampf that Bismark fought in Germany.

And just like that cultural war, China is trying to strengthen the social safety net to make sure that everyone has a place in their society, in order to inculcate loyalty to the system and extinguish the "outerclass" consisting of those who are enemies of the current morality. The carrot is a stronger safety net, the stick is pretty strong, too -- public figures are being dissappeared not because they openly opposed CCP rule, but because they embody decadent values.

Note that this is a chronic problem for communist regimes or any regime that takes hold after a leftist revolt, and the USSR had the same problem. Once you destroy a thousand years of what kept the society together, what new glue can you use to keep the society together? It's something Marx discounted because of his robotic materialism -- to him man was a stomach with legs -- it was all a battle about material means, and burning down all the churches and rewriting history a small price to pay in order win the battle of economic distribution. Until you are actually in charge of the society and realize that all those churches were really important, and you can't just ginny up a fake state pseudo-religion that actually has the strength of Christianity to keep the society together. By not taking religion seriously, they just assumed they could replace it, and it was only too late that they realized that this isn't something you can just cook up when needed. The state insta-morality is paper thin. Remember the USSR fell apart not because it was bankrupt, but because the elite didn't believe in it anymore. It became the butt of jokes. People were tired of it and mocked it. Whereas Christianity kept society together for over 1000 years, communism was an effective glue for about 40.

So China is scrambling to avoid that fate, trying to defend the paper-thin "socialist core values" that it sees as the glue holding society together. Of course almost no one believes in socialist core values, not in a way anyone is loyal to, so what Xi ends up doing in practice is arresting boy bands.

Now, with this perspective in mind, if you re-read the statement, it should make a lot more sense.

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

Whereas Christianity kept society together for over 1000 years

Only if you ignore all the wars.

cromwellian2• 5 years ago

Crackdown on capitalists didn't start recently. It's been going on for a long time, and often just amounts to a war among CCP factions, as invariably different guanxi networks are allied with different party bigwigs.

Prior to Deng's reforms, Mao was persecuting anyone with a hint of capitalist influence, often seizing family wealth and sending them for re-education to work in the countryside.

I don't buy this decadence angle, this seems like an argument from someone with a religious axe to grind. The reality is, China has serious systemic economic problems built up from mismanagement and corruption. They've got a population of 400 million migrant workers who used to make decent money with the construction boom, but now face an apocalypse as the real estate market may implode, many of them will resort to being delivery drivers, etc. They've got a looming demographic timebomb, as the one child policy is going to make China end up with a significantly older population than their competitors -- all of which will heavily impact surplus productivity need to take care of them. Then there's debt, China's "on the books" debt-to-GDP is 270% but no one knows the real figure. Then there's the education crisis, as China has been graduating far more advance degree candidates than they need, which has lead to high unemployment among college graduates, and the absurdity of people with masters degrees working on the assembly line in factories. There's also a huge "tofu-dreg" construction debt as a lot of buildings and infrastructure were built by contractors who scammed away money and used substandard materials. Who knows how much it will cost to fix this stuff.

Xi Jinping is aware of all of these looming crises, and so all of the recent control mechanisms are essentially an attempt at self protection for the CCP to prevent blame, because when the shit hits the fan, they want to write the story that the public reads about who is really at fault for bank failures, and real estate failures, etc. It'll be a nationalist populist -- fascist story that lays the blame on capitalists, international actors, anyone but party corruption and mismanagement.

massn• 5 years ago

Christianity never kept society together unless you are totally oblivious to the number of wars fought on European soil during this so called 1000 years of stability.

There were periods of stabilty because rivals balanced each other out in terms of power that lasted a generation or two here and there but you will be hard pressed to find a Western Historian who says there is a 1000 year period of stability.

randomopining2• 5 years ago

Good deconstruction, but do you really think the CCP is against western decadence? If that was so, why did they allow Western media/social media to completely infiltrate for decades?

They just want economic control of everything. You really think if the US was this pure christian-type nation, they would be buddy buddy and let our audit-based economic system encroach and then take hold?

The autocrats can't exist in a world with checks and balances -- namely democracy and audit-based corporations.

huetius5• 5 years ago

People wishing to dismiss this should look up Wang Huning. It is (as far as I can tell as a non-Chinese person relying on translations and secondary sources), a good summary of his thought.

My trouble with this view, and its Western equivalents, is that viewing religion (religio, that which binds) as something “good for the commoners,” while true in its own way, is also a religion’s undoing. When the primary perceived value of a religion becomes its visible benefits, it is not long before it becomes possible to dismiss it as a mere instrument of power, rather than a transcendent reality. As a Christian, I have no problem recognizing that this has happened to Christianity numerous times in its history, and we are suffering a particularly severe bout of it today in the West. Renewal requires reconnection (religio) with the infinite, and cannot be achieved by political will alone.

hnfong2• 5 years ago

You seem to believe that "Confucianism" is dead in China. It's really not. Officially the state follows some sort of Marxist/Communist-derived ideology, but culturally Confucian elements are very much still alive. You can read all about how the Chinese and CCP tried to discard the old ways in the 20th century, but that doesn't really capture the nuances of what actually happened. Japan and (South) Korea are good examples -- they're technically western-style democracies, and on the surface adopts a rather western lifestyle, but if you actually live there, you'd see that Confucian culture influences all aspects of their lives. The hierarchical social structures, the insistence on moral responsibility to the collective, the rigid social etiquette and rituals. China has a "light" version of this, but it's still there. And the ruling party has a much tighter grip of political ideology. Xi added "confidence in culture" to the "Four matters of confidence" a couple years ago. Check it out. It doesn't only mean rejecting "decadence", but also returning to traditional Chinese culture roots (i.e. Confucianism).

In fact the "socialist" narrative used by CCP isn't exactly the socialism you might understand it to be, but rather it would be more like the collective-norm-abiding ideology that Confucius would have approved of (yes the sage would have disapproved of feminine boy bands too, establishing moral standards for entertainment was a thing he was obsessed with). The CCP stresses that it practices "socialism with Chinese characteristics" for a reason.

Your theory, like a of people in the "West", tend to presume China would inevitably follow the footsteps of USSR because both were "communist" regimes. They are similar in name only. The China today is essentially how a Confucian nation would arrange its own affairs when given access to modern ideas but not necessarily encumbered by Western ideas of democracy.

I'm not saying that China is going to win in its fight against decadence. Most likely the social issues that have plagued Japan will happen in China once the economy starts to slow down. The lying flat phenomenon has a eerie resemblance to the Hikikomori situation in Japan.

xg15• 5 years ago

Dismissing the entire civil rights movement as "hedonism" and "decadence" is a lot of things but certainly not christian (except of the "prosperity gospel" or "guns&jesus" kinds, I guess)

Western liberal youth seem to have number of quite strong moral viewpoints if you view the struggle for minority rights, better social security, a honest reflection with colonialism and economic shift to stop climate change.

You can agree or disagree with those viewpoints, but it's certainly more than just hedonism.

I do agree with your analysis of the CCP though.

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism

Is that "correctly" yours, or are you paraphrasing some authoritarian tract? You make quite a few very strong assertions, without argument or evidence.

Maybe it depends on what you mean by "liberal"; one of the meanings is "generous". Another meaning is "permissive", and another is "opposed to authoritarianism". And then there's economic liberalism, which is roughly the same as red-blooded capitalism.

It's awkward here in the UK, where there used to be a political party called the Liberal Party, a remnant of the Whigs, whose own remnant became the Liberal Democrats. These so-called "liberals" have often been discounted as "wishy-washy pinkos", because they are centrists, triangulating for votes - neither fish nor fowl.

You say of Marx:

to him man was a stomach with legs

Really? Look up Marx's ideas about alienation. A reasonable definition is "the separation or estrangement of human beings from some essential aspect of their nature or from society, often resulting in feelings of powerlessness or helplessness." The "stomach with legs" business sounds more like Adam Smith to me. Marx didn't think of people as simply variables in some economic formula.

bigbillheck• 5 years ago

Would you mind naming a few examples of this 'decadence'? (Often times when people use that term, especially in the context of changes from the 60s, they mean things like 'begrudging acceptance of homosexuality' and 'women can open bank accounts' and 'race mixing').

sudosysgen5• 5 years ago

Christianity gave no one customs and held little together. Europe has its own customs before Christianity that served as glue just as well, and the morality brought forth by christianity was so tenuous that you could make a good argument that it is even weaker than we have now.

If you want to see what religion being used to hold a society together looks like, look at the Middle East. The Middle Eastern religious elites are far more decadent than your tirade would predict, and society at large is not much better.

For all of your Wikipedia-summary characterization of Marx, he made almost the same argument as you have in substance, but far better, over 150 years ago when he wrote of alienation of labour and of the revolutionary aspect of capitalism.

Unlike you he actually did diagnose the central issue with "decadence" to the right source. Morality historically as well as societal norms were held up by the community, and the community was held up by its interdependence and shared experience. Marx foresaw that capitalism morphing these relations of interdependence into market relations, such as that the actual people that you rely on through shared labour are no longer apparent, and instead only money and products remain. This weakens the first social basis of community. Then, he saw capitalism as a mode of production, being entirely dependent on market relations as we saw earlier, as materially unshackled by the morality and structure of its host society. This is by contrast to feudalism that relied on these relations to perpetuate itself. From that he found capitalism to be revolutionary - it would continuously remake society after itself and in the process progressively destroy cultural norms of the society, thus being a revolutionary process. Sometimes it does so positively, sometimes negatively.

That is why Marx is said to be a materialist - instead of predicting the changes in society purely because of ideas and abstract concepts, he thought that the actual material limits on society would eventually come to dominate the ideas that people have and mold them moreso than the reverse. He wasn't a materialist in the sense that he thought that literally nothing except stuff mattered, much to the contrary, the stuff matters only because of its effect on people.

Now with this perspective in mine, if you re-read the statement, it should make even more sense.

0dayz• 5 years ago

I don't really have the perfect word here to describe this post, but it's essentially the intersection of projection/posturing and arm-chair analysis. Not intended to be mean/personal, just an observation.

I get a sense rsj_hn is America due to how they vaguely point to "old morality", liberalism has its root in the Age of Enlightenment, which ironically enough was a reaction to the very stale and constricting status quo of an aristocratic elite whose rules was excused and exceptionalism compared to the common man/woman (i.e. it's okay for aristocrats to have a massive amount of wealth/decadence but not for anyone else).

Christianity was very "disruptive" in the west, since the original intention more or less from the roman's perspective was to have an institution closely affiliated with the elite/those in power to "control" the population, i.e. the catholic church.

Since before Europe was very much into their reformed-tribal polytheism (Asatru, Hellenism, etc.).

The ironic twist to blaming liberalism is that Christians themselves reacted negatively to this forced imposition, i.e. the protestant reformation, which was a reaction from the kings/queens that the pope should have no saying in how a king/queen should rule or start a war.

Hell your idea itself seems more compatible with the old tribal religions (pre-reformed tribal Greece had some very strict religious laws & for example believed that ancestors were tied to the land they settled on and thus you were not allowed to sell your land).

Lastly, liberalism itself has a foundation but it isn't "bundled" with decadence or with anything beyond its ethics and ideals, just like any other ideology.

Since otherwise please explain your logic over why then there is:

- Social liberalism

- Conservative liberalism

- Neoliberalism

- Classical liberalism

- National liberalism

- Country-specific liberalism (think Japan's Liberal Democratic Party or Constitution Democratic Party)

China's fight against "decadence" has more to with certain "ideals" Xi Jinping believes in (if you read his letter you'll notice he's quite nostalgic/hard believer in worker-oriented socialism instead of a more western interpretation of socialism) & pushing back against anything that isn't "home-grown", which is something Xi Jinping also is a very big supporter of (CCP does these patriotic displays of showing how patriotic/good it is to only buy national products only).

prewett• 5 years ago

If you think that’s chilling, read the essay “Engineering the Human Soul” (https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in), by a long-time Australian China-watcher. He asserts that Xi Jinping though follows in a direct line from Stalin and Mao.

everybodyknows• 5 years ago

"though" -> thought

a speech he gave at an internal Australian government seminar in August 2017.

So, a bit dated, but lays out cultural history in amazing detail.

AnimalMuppet3• 5 years ago

To the rest of us, "follows in a direct line from Stalin" is not a recommendation...

refurb• 5 years ago

An interesting contrast is Vietnam. On the surface it looks like they’ve gone full Gordon Gekko capitalism. But the party is managing everything in the background. They are happy to let foreign investment flow in and Vietnamese get rich…to a point.

Think of it like this: 1) we’ll extract as much value from the capitalist model, 2) but strip any power capitalists might gain from their business dealings. Anyone who gains enough economic power to threaten the party will be squashed.

This is all about winding in the heads that got too big. Think of people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They would never be tolerated in China unless they were firmly in the camp of the CCP.

ahepp2• 5 years ago

Look at what happened to Jack Ma. He made some measured but pointed criticism of the party's banking regulations and disappeared for a month. His IPOs got shut down and a host of new regulations were added that basically kill his ambitions in banking.

Vs in the USA, Zuck attempted to create his own currency.

tabtab• 5 years ago

One thing I find difficult to reconcile is China’s apparent success in adopting capitalist, free market principles set against manifestos like this, which talk about building a great “socialist state”. Is that label meaningless intentionally?

Like any politician, they talk out of both sides of their mouth: promising the "best of both worlds" to try to make both sides happy. Dare I say it? "Synergy"...ugh, I need marketing shower now.

danrocks• 5 years ago

"Common Prosperity" is a marketing label to try to legitimize persecution of high tech billionaires who own platforms whose success/failure could destabilize the government. All of the major Chinese tech companies have created "Common Prosperity" funds now, which are essentially direct money transfers to the CCP for it to implement whatever agenda they have at the moment.

fxtentacle• 5 years ago

"persecution of billionaires whose success/failure could destabilize the government"

sounds like a very reasonable policy to me. After all, isn't the promise of triple down effects to share the prosperity to all one of the core ideas of why society as a whole accepts the existence of billionaires? At the very least, they shouldn't make things worse.

pydry• 5 years ago

It's historically sound. The US and Japan followed a variant of this policy in the 1950s and it led to an explosion of growth.

hakfoo• 5 years ago

Fundamentally, that seems like common sense. Government's utility and legitimacy is powered by its own mass and influence in society. Many states have done a very poor job of securing that position.

If you start to get individuals and businesses so wealthy or influential that they can make the state quiver, eventually the government's mandates are at risk. Can it effectively regulate businesses that are too big to fail? Does it maintain the monopoly on violence if the wealthy can DoS the legal system to escape prosecution for their wrongdoings?

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

TL;DR. Is there an executive summary?

m0llusk2• 5 years ago

Here is an attempt: We have work to do in order to achieve common prosperity.

Hard work should be the means to prosperity and there should be no excessively rich people or people being allowed to give up and "lie flat".

Communist economics will remain the backbone with the state owning all and allowing people and companies to lease, allocate, and trade properties only for constructive operations.

Economic growth should be scientifically optimized for the whole population, not leaving anyone behind while also not promising too much or allowing plentiful welfare to make people lazy.

China must commit to long term growth with a heavily managed economy and a focus on special economic zones and six principles:

1. Development must be smooth and even with companies of all sizes 2. Middle class people are happier and less trouble than extreme rich and poor. Increasing educated professionals will help with this and the government will hire many and pay them well. 3. Everyone should have access to good quality basic services like health care 4. Get rid of extreme wealth with taxation, confiscation, incarceration 5. Increase spiritual well being 6. Improve rural stagnation and poverty

denton-scratch4• 5 years ago

Thank you!

Sounds like it's mainly about soaking the rich, with a bit of "spiritual well being" goop thrown in.

with the state owning all and allowing people and companies to lease, allocate, and trade properties

Well, that's how it is in the UK - all land is ultimately owned by the queen. The rest of us are all vassals. I thought there was something similar in US land-ownership law.

But we're not communist.

ahepp2• 5 years ago

Previously, Xi says they were heavily focused on growth and didn't worry about inequality. Going forward they are claiming they will be a lot more concerned with the latter

timster3001• 5 years ago

I think this is a very thoughtful long term strategy for a country as big and as globally relevant as china. Looking at the US and the decline of the middle class and the rise of the donor class shows where a country is headed when inequality gets out of hand. Right now the US is arguably not a democracy anymore but an oligarchy - that the Party looks to avoid going down the same road is of course out of self-protection. But it is also the very interest of the hundrets of millions who were left out of the distribution of the dividend of "opening" the economy. So - compared to a descend into a potentially fascist donor-run society it might be a better strategy to simply distribute the wealth more aggressively.

dirtyid• 5 years ago

Speculative but tangential news on potential education reforms informed by common prosperity.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1449798894708305922.html

My 2C is Xi's diagnosis is basically correct. This paragraph in particular:

We must plan, and navigate between needs and possibilities. We must base the protection and improvement of the livelihood of the people on economic development and financial sustainability rather than unrealistic pursuits and expectations, and promises that cannot be fulfilled. The government cannot take care of everything. Its focus should be on strengthening the construction of people’s livelihood guarantees that are fundamental and universal. Even if we reach a higher level of development and acquire stronger financial resources in the future, we should not set aims that are excessively high, and/or provide excessive guarantees. We must resolutely prevent [ourselves] from falling into the trap of nurturing lazy people through “welfarism.”

PRC won't reach west's living standards any time soon. Trying to build culture for generating "strong men" in anticipation for increasingly "hard times" because "good times" will never be that good for majority of people. This was always reality, PRC has too many people to uplift, and difficult external conditions. Simply not enough resources in world to propel 1.4B to western living standards, not even considering geopolitics of securing that much resources. This is PRC planning to crush gilded age, proposing a New Deal and attempting to nurthure greatest generation.

Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay

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