I must recommend the very readable paper, China’s Communist-Capitalist ecological apocalypse. While the paper is 45 pages long (with at least five pages of pictures of the pollution, collapses of substandard, but brand new, structures, and guilt-edge waste), I couldn't put it down. And, when I was done, I had learned a lot.
Before this article, by Richard Smith of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, my only knowledge of Deng Xiaopeng's neoliberal hijacking of Chinese communism came by way of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. This article has the benefit of eight years more history and a deep knowledge of Chinese politics.
Below the deadly orange cloud of Beijing smog, I will give the allowed four paragraphs of quotes. (Cut me some slack on the four paragraphs. It's a 45 page article.)
Let me begin with the abstract. (I think the abstract of an academic paper is a freebie for the four paragraph rule.)
This article seeks to explain why China’s environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse that “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China’s environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland,
and the proximate causes: overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants. I then discuss the
political-economic drivers and enablers of this destruction, the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid economy, noting how market reforms have compounded the irrationalities of the old bureaucratic collectivist system with the irrationalities of capitalism resulting in a diabolically ruinous “miracle” economy.
Mr. Smith explains that the Communist party is still in charge, and the "market" is quite different than a Western market:
China’s government still owns and controls the commanding heights of the economy: banking, large-scale mining and manufacturing, heavy industry, metallurgy, shipping...Plus all the land and natural resources: there is no private property in China. In key industries State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) own and control between 75 and 100 percent of assets...Communist Party members don’t own individual SOEs or shares in state companies like private investors. They collectively own the state which owns most of the economy. They’re bureaucratic collectivists who run a largely state-planned economy that also produces extensively for market. But producing for the market is not the same thing as capitalism.
The Communist Party keeps its domestic capitalists on a short leash. Successful entrepreneurs soon find they need a state “partner,” or the government sets up its own
competitors to suppress them, or they suffer forced buyouts. Those who cross the Party
disappear and their property is seized, and worse. Those whose names appear on Forbes
list of the world’s wealthiest citizens or the Hong Kong Hunrun Rich List sometimes vanish without a trace. Chinese call these the “pig-killing lists.” Middle-class Chinese speculate on apartments and suburban villas but the land they sit on is state-owned. Indeed, even title to the apartments and villas they’ve bought is never really secure because these can easily be seized by the state on a whim, with no recourse.
That gives some flavor for the economy. Now a taste of the politics:
Communist Party (CP) internal political machinations resemble nothing so much as The
Godfather or Game of Thrones. And how could it be otherwise? In the absence of the rule of law, without elections to choose government representatives, without intra-party democracy, without constitutional procedures to regularize succession to office, without an independent judiciary, justice department, attorneys general and police to systematically prosecute and punish corrupt politicians, in such a system no one owns their office, position or job on the basis of merit, professional qualification, fixed-year terms, or enforceable contracts...Life in the Communist Party is not so different from life in the Mafia: it’s a constant, treacherous, and highly dangerous non-stop factional struggle between crime family-based groupings in struggle with one another over top offices and treasure.
The party-state owned all land, resources, industries, controlled the banks and pension
funds, foreign trade and currency exchange, the courts, police, everything. The problem was that the only ways to profit from this were all illegal: bribery, smuggling, influence peddling, embezzling money from state industries, profiting from guandao (reselling state-owned raw materials and commodities on the free market at huge markups), asset stripping, currency manipulation, money laundering and so on. Risky, but how could they resist? Far from resisting, they led the way in what exiled economist He Qinglian called “the marketization of power.” Besides, since there was no independent judicial system, it was left to the party officials to police themselves. The very people who stood to gain the most from the coming market boom were supposed to refrain from self-dealing.
Doesn't that last sound just like what is happening in the US? The commodification/marketization of everything? The influence peddling, asset stripping, money-laundering? Reading this article was scary. First, I realized the Chinese are, at the moment, more screwed than we are; then I realized that we are heading down to their level as fast as our utterly corrupt neoliberal oligarchs can gut our Constitution, stack our courts, and turn the police and military into their private militia.
I have left out Mr. Smith's thorough coverage of the environmental devastation. He reports on toxic semiconductor waste dumped on farm fields, on rivers and lakes turned into polluted sewers. Also left out, the insane "catch up to the West" prestige projects that produce "ghost cities", "tofu construction", overbuilding of every imaginable asset from airports to ports to roads.
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But, enough. Go read the article. It is one of the most informative things I have ever read.