In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez responds to a recent Jacobin book review which presents China’s economic rise as a simple story of “brutal exploitation” indistinguishable from the horrors of Britain’s industrial revolution.
While not doubting the hardships described in the book under review, Carlos argues that Jacobin’s framing is ahistorical and idealist. China’s growth has not merely enriched a class of capitalists but transformed the lives of the majority, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and improving working class wages and conditions at an extraordinary pace.
The book review essentially compares China with an imagined socialist utopia, rather than comparing China with other destinations of outsourced production – where wages are lower, repression harsher, and no comparable rise in living standards is on offer.
Drawing on Friedrich Engels, Deng Xiaoping, Michael Parenti and John Smith, the article shows how China’s socialist land ownership system has protected living standards for hundreds of millions, and how the state is working to expand protections for workers in the “gig economy”. The article concludes:
At a moment when China is the largest and most developed socialist country on earth; when it is the leading proponent of a multipolar world order; and when it is the target of a systematic propaganda war designed to manufacture consent for a New Cold War (and ultimately hot war), for self-described socialists and anti-imperialists to offer this kind of context-free condemnation is, to say the least, deeply unhelpful.
Jacobin has published a review by Daniel Cheng of Adrift in the South, the memoir of the Chinese worker-poet Xiao Hai, detailing the harsh conditions he faced as a migrant worker in the megacities of southern China.
The book itself sounds interesting and worthwhile, and there is no reason to doubt the harshness of the conditions Xiao Hai describes. But the frame the review wraps around his story – that China’s economic miracle was “made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers”, and that China’s development and the dark satanic mills of Britain’s industrialisation can be comfortably placed together in a category of “the universal suffering of capitalism” – is ahistorical, idealist, and, in the present geopolitical conjuncture, actively unhelpful.
Exploitation has to be contextualised
The first thing to say is that China’s growth has not simply enriched a class of capitalists. It has transformed the lives of the great majority. Over the past half-century, China has lifted an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty – by the World Bank’s own reckoning, more than three-quarters of the entire reduction in global poverty over the same period. Chinese workers and farmers today live longer, eat better, are far better educated and enjoy a level of material security their grandparents could barely have imagined.
Manufacturing wages roughly trebled between 2005 and 2016, and real wages have continued to climb at an impressive clip. The rate of exploitation of Chinese labour has been falling, not rising.
Continue reading Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China
