Andrew Murray recommends that rare thing - a study of the country’s economy that comes from China

As the late Giovanni Arrighi stated: “If China is socialist or capitalist it is not like any previously encountered model of either,” and there are few more important endeavours for the international left than understanding China’s extraordinary development and its meaning for world socialism.

Such work is often bedevilled by an over-reliance on Western-generated analyses of China, as if the studies and understandings of Chinese scholars and the Communist Party of China themselves were of little use.

Cheng Enfu’s book is extremely helpful in this context. Cheng is a leading Chinese Marxist academic who has clearly thought deeply about China’s development as a socialist state.

His book examines economic policy in China from a variety of angles.

He locates the present mix of public ownership with substantial private enterprise and preponderant market relationships as appropriate for the primary stage of socialism, but looks forward to advancing to a fully public model to be attained under advanced socialism and finally communism.

Correctly, he claims that “the tremendous achievements China has realised during its 30 years of reform and opening up are not the result of following Western mainstream economics, or of implementing policies the derive from it”, and not least in respect of making the finance sector serve the productive economy.

More public ownership over the medium to long term is the solution Cheng favours. “A future socialist society must fundamentally eliminate capitalism by rooting out the system of private property ownership on which social exploitation depends,” he writes.

He also champions, rightly in my view, the policy of “common prosperity” as being synonymous with the basic premises of socialism. It is “a realistic path for China’s socialist modernisation drive and a concrete manifestation of the institutional advantages China has achieved through the establishment of our socialist system.”

One issue that Cheng repeatedly raises but that requires further examination is his belief that public ownership guarantees distribution according to work. It is clear that the latter cannot be attained except through public ownership, but it is not so clear, to this reviewer at least, that public ownership is sufficient in itself to secure distribution by work if it is operating in a commodity exchange economy.

China today, he argues, is a “planned commodity economy”, yet in another passage he asserts that “a decisive role must be assigned to the invisible hand in the allocation of general resources, at the same time recognising the leading role of governments at all levels.”

Here is an inherent and continuing struggle, which Cheng sees as ultimately resolved in the transition to a “planned product economy” in which the law of value is no longer operative.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Liu Tingting

From: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/china%E2%80%99s-route-advanced-socialism（2023-2-17）