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Which is it, the Godless part, the Communist part, or both? The communist part is less and less true by the day, unless you're the communist plan trusters who think we'll get there eventually and all these reforms are just means to an end. I think there are true communists among the high echelons of the party, but if they keep going down the current economic path they're not going to get what they wished.
Which ends? What do you think the endgame for the godless communists is? World domination? World revolution? Spreading atheist ideology across the world?
I think most people in senior positions in the party, including Xi himself, are true believer communists in a ideological sense. Nothing the CCP has done since Deng really contradicts Marx and Engels, who were clear that a long capitalist phase was necessary (implicitly to drive down widget costs by competition) before socialism could be achieved. Amusingly this may be the best way of justifying the highly destructive involution / neijuan process going on now.
Even Lenin agreed with this, hence the NEP - only Stalin and those inspired by him (Mao, Castro) didn’t (and that ideological turn was largely self-serving in his battle to consolidate state power, eliminate Trotskyism, and prevent the emergence of anyone with influence or wealth who could challenge him domestically). The turn to capitalism was an about-face, sure, but it isn’t inherently a rejection of communism because communism is a process that in theory involves capitalism (and feudalism and so on).
In my understanding the idea that the communists are being ideologically sidelined in the party elite is more of a fantasy of very online Chinese nationalists who are more ambivalent on Marxism and the CCP (even if they’re often very careful to only imply this rather than say it outright) and who care more about a grander trajectory of Chinese civilization to which the ideology of 1947-present isn’t central. But to the actual rulers of China, the children and grandchildren, by and large, of the revolutionaries themselves, it is central.
I see that you read Tanner Greer perhaps, and those books from the red princelings.
I don't pretend to know what the Standing Committee of the Politburo thinks. But the fact is that China is less meaningfully communist, in both the ideological and material sense, than it was in Mao's era, and even less so than in Deng's era (yes, even that; Deng was surrounded by old guard revolutionaries, and of course he himself was one). If you read whatever documents they publish in Chinese now, they do invoke "socialism", "core values of socialism", and all sorts of jargon frequently. But what are these socialist core values? "爱国、敬业、诚信、友善 (Patriotism, Dedication, Integrity, Friendliness)." Tell me what's socialist about that. "Patriotism" is literally the first value they think individual Chinese citizens should have. The "Socialist Concepts of Honor and Grace"? "以热爱祖国为荣 以危害祖国为耻 (Love the motherland as an honor; harming the motherland as a disgrace)." Tell me again what's socialist about these values.
"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" is transparently a middle ground between communism and Chinese nationalism. The old aesthetics of red banners, "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution", and steel-jawed workers have been replaced by LED hellscapes, "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation", and steel-jawed workers. I understand that it is possible that none of the material conditions matter to the Great Man, as they have proven again and again. But even they cannot pretend that they will certainly, certainly get to their communist paradise one day. They will not live to see it; they cannot guarantee it. What they do know, perhaps, is that the Chinese nation will outlast them, for millennia to come. Mao himself certainly knows that and acknowledged that. I hope they realize this sooner rather than later, and I think they do.
I find the comparisons to the Soviets beside the point. I do not think we are as ideologically devoted as the Russians were, in fact that's partially what's charming about the Russians, that their populace truly believe those nonsense. China have not exported the ideology abroad since Mao, and even Mao himself was, like Stalin, a "socialism in one country first" type, less ideological fervor than proselytizing Trotskyites. Our people have been materialistic, or what I prefer, realistic, in the sense that actions are dictated by things on "this shore" (I believe this is a Buddhist term, "this shore" being our world, "the other shore" being the spiritual world).
Mao, megalomaniac as he was, and a sincere believer in communist ideology, was both a Chinese nationalist and a communist. He behaved like the emperors, he ruled like the emperors. He had communist ideals and aesthetics, but he was not meaningfully different from the First Emperor and many after him. He even compared himself to the first emperor, a lot in fact. I do not know if Stalin thought of himself as the latest repetition of the Tsar lineage, but Mao certainly did to some extent, as did his wife, who compared herself to Wu Zetian or Empress Lyu. He destroyed a huge fraction of meaningful Chinese culture, but that impulse was not atypical for 20th century Chinese intellectuals, who believed the root of all ills of the Chinese state was Chinese culture itself, who wanted to abandon Chinese characters, Chinese clothing, and Chinese ways of thinking. The Nationalist KMT is filled with those people too, who think Chinese culture is what's stopping China from being powerful. Are they communists too? All of them were still Chinese at their core. The Chinese communists did not reject communism; they did believe in it. But I have a hard time believing that they placed their ideology above the Chinese state.
The Chinese state is the Chinese religion. It is what people believe in. It is "the other shore" of the Chinese people.
Guilty as charged. I do not think the communists are being ideologically sidelined; I think they are less communist than you believe and more nationalist than you give them credit for.
How many very online Chinese nationalists have you actually interacted with? The majority of them practice a confusing and self-contradictory brand of Chinese nationalism, syncretic with socialist third-worldism. It is not a clean or coherent ideology and I do not like it.
It doesn't matter. Like the Manchus before them, they are surrounded by, and have to source talent from, a largely Han nationalist base. Are the revolutionary families breeding like rabbits? Unless they are, I don't see how they can maintain their true communist selves without being absorbed by the nationalism around them.
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The majority of senior leadership now lived through getting yeeted into the fields by the cultural revolution. They have nil interest in letting honest to God socialist zealots ever get anywhere near the steering wheel ever again.
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A nitpick: the turn was in essence an adoption of Trotskyism in all but name to counter Bukharinism (later reborn as Dengism). The only significant difference was Stalin's willingness to establish foreign relations with capitalist countries and jumpstart the industry by purchasing whole factories abroad.
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