China Builds Socialism "With a Capitalist Hand"

Communisn is dead in China-we all know that. Therefore it is safe to invest there, to build factories and trade with Beijing.

We needn't worry about China's huge military build-up or her alliance with Russia or increasing political clout accross the globe, because China is becoming more like the West every day.

What if that isn't actually true?

From French Communist Party paper L'Humanite

By Zeng Zhisheng, professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing. Contributions to a recent Marxist International Congress;

Globalization is the result of capitalism. This is an inescapable historical fact. You can fight against globalization, but you can’t annihilate it. On the other hand, according to Marxist dialectics, you can study globalization, and learn to understand it and to control it. We are far from being pessimistic. We think it is in our power to adjust the tendencies of the movement to obtain better results.

Globalization is the result of the development of capitalism. At first glance, capitalist production appears flourishing. In reality, its contradictions are still not resolved. Quite to the contrary: there are more and more contradictions and, as these contradictions become bigger, social revolution approaches. What is China’s attitude facing globalization?

We have a realistic attitude with respect to the economical aspects of globalization. Not panicked, nor blinded by optimism, we must be careful in this situation and analyse what has happened in the past. Socialism has been carried into the wave of capitalist globalization. But we must be active participants in this wave, not passive observers. Our aim is to take advantage of globalization in order to develop our country: the capitalist economy is more advanced. Its production techniques and management methods are better than the socialist ones. There is no reason to reject them. To the contrary, we have, in all modesty, to learn from capitalist experts. As Lenin said, we build socialism with a capitalist hand.

It is important to understand that theoretically, the difference between capitalism and socialism is not a matter of planning or markets. In a socialist society, there is a market economy; in a capitalist society, planning is also present. It is wrong to believe that, because we engage in a market economy, we are on the path of capitalism. We need planning and markets...

Through a market economy, we open the doors of the country and use the economical, scientific and technical method that globalization offers.

This does not mean that we kneel down before capitalism. We understand that market economy is not perfect – it is rather a chopping block. If we take a nonchalant attitude, we will be crushed and ground to pieces.