Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Andrew Batson — Blog China’s fiscal policy and the new rhetoric of inequality

The Chinese Communist Party is now ideologically committed to reducing income inequality. That the previous sentence is not in fact a meaningless circular statement says a lot about the peculiar evolution of socialism in China since 1978. But after dodging around that part of its socialist ideological heritage for the last few decades, China’s leadership is now grappling with the issue of inequality more directly, at least in its rhetoric. The 14th Five-Year Plan adopted in March includes a section that calls for “proactively narrowing regional, urban-rural and income gaps.” And Xi Jinping himself has recently been highlighting the goal of “common prosperity,” a term that has deep political resonance in China because of its use by Deng Xiaoping....
Andrew Batson's Blog
China’s fiscal policy and the new rhetoric of inequality
Andrew

6 comments:

Andrew Anderson said...

I see China inching toward ethical finance - a key missing ingredient from a just economic system.

lastgreek said...
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lastgreek said...

Something like a billion and a half Chinese people: 1,500,000,000! How do you govern/manage a country with such a large/diverse population?

Anyways,read some article where Greek farmers are trying to market their products to China because of the EU sanctions against Russia, and I am thinking to myself... if the Chinese develop a taste for Greek olive oil, I'm finished :(

Tom Hickey said...

1,500,000,000! How do you govern/manage a country with such a large/diverse population?

They start locally with neighborhood committee staffed by volunteers from the community and work up from there. The government also makes use of polls and trials before scaling. It's a highly tuned system that has shown itself to work pretty well based on third-party polling of government approval showing 90% approval rating of overall satisfaction with CCP governance.

Compare with India, the other country with a comparable population in numbers — but different in governance, tradition, history, and peoples, so a bit apples to oranges.

Calgacus said...

Yes, it's been clear for a while that Red China is going Commie.

What is more, even the Chinese Communist Party is going Red!

What's the world coming to?!!

My wife and I have a friend who's a party secretary for his company, moving up the ranks of the CCP and the corporation. We've been slowly nudging him towards socialism, away from the naive Ayn Rand capitalism worship so common among the intelligentsia of socialist states. And we - along with his rise, he knows which side his bread is buttered on - along with the negative example of today's USA - have been successful.

This is the kind of second revolution that Engels said was the real test, the time when gains are made permanent and irrevocable, the time when gains of the older revolution show they have withstood the inevitable reaction. He was following Marx and a passage from Hegel's Phenomenology that basically said when a revolution is betrayed is when it shows its success - his contemporary the British Idealist Edward Caird liked that passage too, can find it in his excellent short book on Hegel.

Peter Pan said...

Nothing like Billionaire Communism to convert the Ayn Rand types.