China’s aggressive measures have slowed the coronavirus. They may not work in other countries

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Other countries can take lessons from China’s handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, the World Health Organization’s Bruce Aylward told reporters in Geneva on 25 February 2020. Countries around the world need to follow China's example when fighting and preparing for COVID-19, Aylward said on Tuesday upon returning from the epicenter of the outbreak. Describing the response as "striking," Bruce Aylward, head of the joint WHO-China mission, said: "In 30 years of doing this business, I've not seen this before, nor was I sure it would work." Aylward warned that the rest of world "was not ready" to deal with the virus, although "they could get ready fast" should they replicate responses undertaken by China. (TGP screenshot)

China’s aggressive measures have slowed the coronavirus. They may not work in other countries

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hinese hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients a few weeks ago now have empty beds. Trials of experimental drugs are having difficulty enrolling enough eligible patients. And the number of new cases reported each day has plummeted the past few weeks.

These are some of the startling observations in a report released on 28 February from a mission organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government that allowed 13 foreigners to join 12 Chinese scientists on a tour of five cities in China to study the state of the COVID-19 epidemic and the effectiveness of the country’s response. The findings surprised several of the visiting scientists. “I thought there was no way those numbers could be real,” says epidemiologist Tim Eckmanns of the Robert Koch Institute, who was part of the mission.

But the report is unequivocal. “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” it says. “This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real.”

The question now is whether the world can take lessons from China’s apparent success—and whether the massive lockdowns and electronic surveillance measures imposed by an authoritarian (sic) government would work in other countries. “When you spend 20, 30 years in this business it’s like, ‘Seriously, you’re going to try and change that with those tactics?’” says Bruce Aylward, a Canadian WHO epidemiologist who led the international team and briefed journalists about its findings in Beijing and Geneva last week. “Hundreds of thousands of people in China did not get COVID-19 because of this aggressive response.”

 “This report poses difficult questions for all countries currently considering their response to COVID-19,” says Steven Riley, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London. “The joint mission was highly productive and gave a unique insight into China’s efforts to stem the virus from spread within mainland China and globally,” adds Lawrence Gostin, a global health law scholar at Georgetown University. But Gostin warns against applying the model elsewhere. “I think there are very good reasons for countries to hesitate using these kinds of extreme measures.”

There’s also uncertainty about what the virus, dubbed SARS-CoV-2, will do in China after the country inevitably lifts some of its strictest control measures and restarts its economy. COVID-19 cases may well increase again.

    • CDC’s laboratory test kit for coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

      CDC photo

The report comes at a critical time in what many epidemiologists now consider a pandemic. Just this past week, the number of affected countries shot up from 29 to 61. Several countries have discovered that they already have community spread of the virus—as opposed to cases only in travelers from affected areas or people who were in direct contact with them—and the numbers of reported cases are growing exponentially.

The opposite has happened in China. On 10 February, when the advance team of the WHO-China Joint Mission began its work, China reported 2478 new cases. Two weeks later, when the foreign exerts packed their bags, that number had dropped to 409 cases. (Yesterday, China reported only 206 new cases, and the rest of the world combined had almost nine times that number.) The epidemic in China appears to have peaked in late January, according to the report.

Ambitious, agile, and aggressive

The team began in Beijing and then split into two groups that, all told, traveled to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and the hardest hit city, Wuhan. They visited hospitals, laboratories, companies, wet markets selling live animals, train stations, and local government offices. “Everywhere you went, anyone you spoke to, there was a sense of responsibility and collective action, and there’s war footing to get things done,” Aylward says.

Chinese hospital ward. China has made enormous strides in a matter of weeks, including the construction of full-fledged special medical facilities. (TGP/ CGTN)

The group also reviewed the massive data set that Chinese scientists have compiled. (The country still accounts for more than 90% of the global total of the 90,000 confirmed cases.) They learned that about 80% of infected people had mild to moderate disease, 13.8% had severe symptoms, and 6.1% had life-threatening episodes of respiratory failure, septic shock, or organ failure. The case fatality rate was highest for people over age 80 (21.9%), and people who had heart disease, diabetes, or hypertension. Fever and dry cough were the most common symptoms. Surprisingly, only 4.8% of infected people had runny noses. Children made up a mere 2.4% of the cases, and almost none was severely ill. For the mild and moderate cases, it took 2 weeks on average to recover.

A critical unknown is how many mild or asymptomatic cases occur. If large numbers of infections are below the radar, that complicates attempts to isolate infectious people and slow spread of the virus. But on the positive side, if the virus causes few, if any, symptoms in many infected people, the current estimated case fatality rate is too high. (The report says that rate varies greatly, from 5.8% in Wuhan, whose health system was overwhelmed, to 0.7% in other regions.)

To get at this question, the report notes that so-called fever clinics in Guangdong province screened approximately 320,000 people for COVID-19 and only found 0.14% of them to be positive. “That was really interesting, because we were hoping and maybe expecting to see a large burden of mild and asymptomatic cases,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That piece of data suggests that’s not happening, which would imply that the case fatality risk might be more or less as we currently have.” But Guangdong province was not a heavily affected area, so it is not clear whether the same holds in Hubei province, which was the hardest hit, Rivers cautions.

Much of the report focuses on understanding how China achieved what many public health experts thought was impossible: containing the spread of a widely circulating respiratory virus. “China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” the report notes.

The most dramatic—and controversial—measure was the lockdown of Wuhan and nearby cities in Hubei province, which has put at least 50 million people under a mandatory quarantine since 23 January. That has “effectively prevented further exportation of infected individuals to the rest of the country,” the report concludes. In other regions of mainland China, people voluntarily quarantined and were monitored by appointed leaders in neighborhoods.

Panic buying at CostCo: Media induced fears have triggered a run on many supermarkets. (TGP)

Chinese authorities also built two dedicated hospitals in Wuhan in just over 1 week. Health care workers from all over China were sent to the outbreak’s center. The government launched an unprecedented effort to trace contacts of confirmed cases. In Wuhan alone, more than 1800 teams of five or more people traced tens of thousands of contacts.

Aggressive “social distancing” measures implemented in the entire country included canceling sporting events and shuttering theaters. Schools extended breaks that began in mid-January for the Lunar New Year. Many businesses closed shop. Anyone who went outdoors had to wear a mask.

Two widely used mobile phone apps, AliPay and WeChat—which in recent years have replaced cash in China—helped enforce the restrictions, because they allow the government to keep track of people’s movements and even stop people with confirmed infections from traveling. “Every person has sort of a traffic light system,” says mission member Gabriel Leung, dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Color codes on mobile phones—in which green, yellow, or red designate a person’s health status—let guards at train stations and other checkpoints know who to let through.

“As a consequence of all of these measures, public life is very reduced,” the report notes. But the measures worked. In the end, infected people rarely spread the virus to anyone but members of their own household, Leung says. Once all the people in an apartment or home were exposed, the virus had nowhere else to go and chains of transmission ended. “That’s how the epidemic truly came under control,” Leung says. In sum, he says, there was a combination of “good old social distancing and quarantining very effectively done because of that on-the-ground machinery at the neighborhood level, facilitated by AI [artificial intelligence] big data.”

Deep commitment to collective action

How feasible these kinds of stringent measures are in other countries is debatable. “China is unique in that it has a political system that can gain public compliance with extreme measures,” Gostin says. “But its use of social control and intrusive surveillance are not a good model for other countries.” The country also has an extraordinary ability to do labor-intensive, large-scale projects quickly, says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development: “No one else in the world really can do what China just did.”

Nor should they, says lawyer Alexandra Phelan, a China specialist at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “Whether it works is not the only measure of whether something is a good public health control measure,” Phelan says. “There are plenty of things that would work to stop an outbreak that we would consider abhorrent in a just and free society.”

The report does mention some areas where China needs to improve, including the need “to more clearly communicate key data and developments internationally.” But it is mum on the coercive nature of its control measures and the toll they have exacted. “The one thing that’s completely glossed over is the whole human rights dimension,” says Devi Sridhar, an expert on global public health at the University of Edinburgh. Instead, the report praises the “deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat.”

“To me, as somebody who has spent a lot of time in China, it comes across as incredibly naïve—and if not naïve, then willfully blind to some of the approaches being taken,” Phelan says. Singapore and Hong Kong may be better examples to follow, Konyndyk says: “There has been a similar degree of rigor and discipline but applied in a much less draconian manner.”

The report doesn’t mention other downsides of China’s strategy, says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, who wonders what impact it had on, say, the treatment of cancer or HIV patients. “I think it’s important when evaluating the impact of these approaches to consider secondary, tertiary consequences,” Nuzzo says.

And even China’s massive efforts may still turn out to have only temporarily slowed the epidemic. “There’s no question they suppressed the outbreak,” says Mike Osterholm, head of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “That’s like suppressing a forest fire, but not putting it out. It’ll come roaring right back.” But that, too, may teach the world new lessons, Riley says. “We now have the opportunity to see how China manages a possible resurgence of COVID-19,” he says.

Aylward stresses that China’s successes so far should give other countries confidence that they can get a jump on COVID-19. “We’re getting new reports daily of new outbreaks in new areas, and people have a sense of, ‘Oh, we can’t do anything,’ and people are arguing is it a pandemic or not,” Aylward says. “Well, sorry. There are really practical things you can do to be ready to be able to respond to this, and that’s where the focus will need to be.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kai is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine based in Berlin, Germany. He is writing a book about the color blue, to be published this autumn. 


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Slavoj Zizek: Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism

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Slavoj Zizek
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OpEds

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 Dir: Quentin Tarantino (2004) © Miramax

 
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he ongoing spread of the coronavirus epidemic has also triggered vast epidemics of ideological viruses which were laying dormant in our societies: fake news, paranoiac conspiracy theories, explosions of racism.

The well-grounded medical need for quarantines found an echo in the ideological pressure to establish clear borders and to quarantine enemies that pose a threat to our identity.

But maybe another – and much more beneficial – ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation. 

Speculation is often heard today that the coronavirus may lead to the fall of communist rule in China, in the same way that (as Gorbachev himself admitted) the Chernobyl catastrophe was the event which triggered the end of the Soviet communism. But there is a paradox here: the coronavirus will also compel us to re-invent communism based on trust in the people and in science.

In the final scene of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill 2,’ Beatrix disables the evil Bill and strikes him with the “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” – the most deadly blow in all of martial arts. The move consists of a combination of five strikes with one’s fingertips to five different pressure points on the target’s body. After the target walks away and has taken five steps, their heart explodes in their body and they fall to the ground.

This attack is part of martial arts mythology and is not possible in real hand-to-hand combat. But, back to the film, after Beatrix does it, Bill calmly makes his peace with her, takes five steps and dies… 

What makes this attack so fascinating is the time between being hit and the moment of death: I can have a nice conversation as long as I sit calmly, but I am all this time aware that the moment I start to walk, my heart will explode and I will drop dead.

Is the idea of those who speculate about how the coronavirus epidemic could lead to the fall of communist rule in China not similar? Like some kind of social “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” on the country’s communist regime, the authorities can sit, observe and go through the motions of quarantine, but any real change in the social order (like trusting the people) will result in their downfall. 

My modest opinion is much more radical: the coronavirus epidemic is a kind of “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” attack on the global capitalist system – a signal that we cannot go on the way we were up until now, that a radical change is needed.

Sad fact, we need a catastrophe 

Years ago, Fredric Jameson drew attention to the utopian potential in movies about a cosmic catastrophe (an asteroid threatening life on Earth, or a virus killing humanity). Such a global threat gives birth to global solidarity, our petty differences become insignificant, we all work together to find a solution – and here we are today, in real life. The point is not to sadistically enjoy widespread suffering insofar as it helps our cause – on the contrary, the point is to reflect upon a sad fact that we need a catastrophe to make us able to rethink the very basic features of the society in which we live.

The first vague model of such a global coordination is the World Health Organization, from which we are not getting the usual bureaucratic gibberish but precise warnings proclaimed without panic. Such organizations should be given more executive power. 

Bernie Sanders is mocked by skeptics for his advocacy of universal healthcare in the US – is the lesson of the coronavirus epidemic not that even more is needed, that we should start to put together some kind of GLOBAL healthcare network? 

Also on rt.com Iran’s VP for women and family affairs is latest official to test positive for coronavirus

A day after Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi appeared at a press conference in order to downplay the coronavirus spread and to assert that mass quarantines are not necessary, he made a short statement admitting that he has contracted the coronavirus and placed himself in isolation (already during his first TV appearance, he had shown signs of fever and weakness). Harirchi added: “This virus is democratic, and it doesn’t distinguish between poor and rich or between statesman and an ordinary citizen.” 

In this, he was right – we are all in the same boat. It is difficult to miss the supreme irony of the fact that what brought us all together and pushed us into global solidarity expresses itself at the level of everyday life in strict commands to avoid close contacts with others, even to self-isolate.

And we are not dealing only with viral threats – other catastrophes are looming on the horizon or already taking place: droughts, heatwaves, massive storms, etc. In all these cases, the answer is not panic but hard and urgent work to establish some kind of efficient global coordination.

Also on rt.com Weaponizing the coronavirus: Why US politicians & media suddenly care (hint: it’s about getting Trump)

Will we only be safe in virtual reality?

The first illusion to dispel is the one formulated by US President Donald Trump during his recent visit to India, where he said that the epidemic would recede quickly and we just have to wait for the spike and then life will return to normal. 

Against these all too easy hopes, the first thing to accept is that the threat is here to stay. Even if this wave recedes, it will reappear in new, maybe even more dangerous, forms.

For this reason, we can expect that viral epidemics will affect our most elementary interactions with other people and objects around us, including our own bodies – avoid touching things that may be (invisibly) dirty, don’t touch hooks, don’t sit on toilet seats or public benches, avoid embracing people or shaking their hands. We might even become more careful about spontaneous gestures: don’t touch your nose or rub your eyes.

So it’s not only the state and other agencies that will control us, we should also learn to control and discipline ourselves. Maybe only virtual reality will be considered safe, and moving freely in an open space will be restricted to the islands owned by the ultra-rich.

But even here, at the level of virtual reality and internet, we should remind ourselves that, in the last decades, the terms “virus” and “viral” were mostly used to designate digital viruses which were infecting our web-space and of which we were not aware, at least not until their destructive power (say, of destroying our data or our hard-drive) was unleashed. What we see now is a massive return to the original literal meaning of the term: viral infections work hand-in-hand in both dimensions, real and virtual.

Also on rt.com Slavoj Zizek: What the coronavirus & France protests have in common (and is it time for ORGIES yet?)

Return of capitalist animism 

Another weird phenomenon that we can observe is the triumphant return of capitalist animism, of treating social phenomena like markets or financial capital as living entities. If one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we should really worry about are not thousands who already died (and thousands more who will die) but the fact that “markets are getting nervous.” The coronavirus is increasingly disturbing the smooth running of the world market and, as we hear, growth may fall by two or three percent.

Does all this not clearly signal the urgent need for a reorganization of the global economy which will no longer be at the mercy of market mechanisms? We are not talking here about old-style communism, of course, just about some kind of global organization that can control and regulate the economy, as well as limit the sovereignty of nation-states when needed. Countries were able to do it against the backdrop of war in the past, and all of us are now effectively approaching a state of medical war.

Plus we should also not be afraid to note some potentially beneficial side effects of the epidemic. One of the symbols of the epidemic is passengers caught (quarantined) on large cruise ships – good riddance to the obscenity of such ships, I am tempted to say. (We only have to be careful that travel to lone islands or other exclusive resorts will not become again the privilege of the rich few, as it was decades ago with flying.) Car production is also seriously affected by the coronavirus – which is not too bad, as this may compel us to think about alternatives to our obsession with individual vehicles. The list goes on.

Also on rt.com Face off: Fights break out on streets of Japan amid surgical masks shortage (VIDEOS)

In a recent speech, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said: “There is no such thing as a liberal. A liberal is nothing more than a communist with a diploma.”

What if the opposite is true? If we designate as “liberals” all those who care for our freedoms, and as “communists”those who are aware that we can save these freedoms only with radical changes since global capitalism is approaching a crisis? Then we should say that, today, those who still recognize themselves as communists are liberals with a diploma – liberals who seriously studied why our liberal values are under threat and became aware that only radical change can save them.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.


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Is China Capitalist?

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S DISINFORMATION MACHINE IS UP TO YOU.

By Marc Vandepitte
CROSSPOST WITH GLOBAL RESEARCH

Judging by what has been said or written about China, both on the right and on the left, socialism there is finished. The country is assumed to have capitulated and become capitalist, whatever the Chinese leadership itself may say. It is this almost unanimous opinion that economists Rémy Herrera and Zhiming Long challenge with fervour in their book La Chine est-elle capitaliste?

Importance

For the left, the issue is of the utmost importance. First of all, it concerns almost a quarter of the world’s population and one of the few remaining states that have resulted from a socialist revolution. The direction that China is pursuing will help to determine the future of this planet.

In addition, that what is at stake is also very important for the battle of ideas here. China’s socio-economic development is an impressive success story. Now that capitalism shows unmistakable signs of decline, it has every interest to claim the Chinese success story as “capitalist”. This way it can both take some ideological credit and discourage the forces of dissent. Through neoliberal pensée unique, mainstream ideological conformism, no stone is left unturned in convincing people that socialism has no future. A “socialist China” does not fit into that framework.

In the eye of the beholder

For sure there are a number of eye-catching phenomena that speak in favour of assessing China as an example of capitalism: the increasing number of billionaires, the consumerism affecting large sections of the population, the introduction of a lot of market mechanisms after 1978, the implantation of just about all major Western companies trying to turn the country into a huge capitalist workshop based on low wages, the presence of the big banks on Chinese soil, and the ubiquitous presence of Chinese private companies on international markets.

But, as Herrera and Long argue, if France or another Western country were to collectivize all agricultural land and mining; nationalize the infrastructure of the country; transfer key industries to the government; set up a rigorous central planning; if the government strictly controlled the currency, all major banks and all financial institutions; if the government also closely monitored the behaviour of all domestic and foreign companies; and as if that were not enough, if there was a communist party at the top of the political pyramid to supervise it all, would we still, without inviting ridicule, speak of a “capitalist” country? Undoubtedly not. We would perhaps label it as “socialist” or “communist”. Yet it is odd that people stubbornly refuse to stick those labels on the political-economic system operative in China.

In order to understand the Chinese system properly and not get caught up in superficial observations, the authors state, you must take into account a number of extraordinary features of the country. First of all there is the enormous amount of people involved and the vastness and diversity of the territory.

You also have to look at it from a perspective of the secular eras in which the nation and culture have taken shape. For example, for two thousand years the state has appropriated the added value of the farmers, strongly restricted private initiative and transformed large production units into state monopolies. During all those centuries there was no question of capitalism.

Finally, you must take into account the colonial humiliations of the second half of the nineteenth century and the particularly turbulent first half of the twentieth century, with three revolutions and the same number of civil wars. To give an example, during thirty years of civil war the Communist Party carried out numerous experiments in “liberated territory”, in which a significant proportion of the private sector was left intact to let it compete with the new collective forms of production.

Beyond stereotypes

Before the authors analyse the characteristics of the system itself, they deal with two stubborn stereotypes about the Chinese success story. The first widespread cliché is that rapid economic growth has only come about since and thanks to the Deng Xiaoping reforms started in 1978. That is completely incorrect. In the ten years prior to that period, the economy had already experienced a very respectable growth rate of 6.8 percent, double the US growth in that period. If you look at the investments in production resources (capital stock) and know-how (educational resources) you see that the growth in both periods is about the same. In the first period growth in the field of Research & Development was even higher.

An essential element to explain the successes of China is its agricultural policy. China is one of the few countries in the world that has guaranteed access to agricultural land for its farming population. After the revolution, agricultural land came into government hands and every farmer was allocated a piece of land. That measure applies to this day. The agricultural issue in China is so pressing because the country has to feed almost 20 percent of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the fertile agricultural land. To give an idea of what this means: in China there is a quarter of a hectare of agricultural land per inhabitant, in India double that area and in the US 100 times as much.

China managed to feed its population fairly quickly, despite the blatant errors of the Great Leap Forward. Moreover, the added value created by agriculture was used in industry, thus laying the foundation for rapid industrial development. The spectacular growth of 9.9 percent in the post-reform period has only been possible on the basis of efforts and achievements during the first thirty years of the revolution. All in all, already under Mao the country developed in an impressive way. Under his leadership, per capita income tripled while the population nearly doubled. The authors also point out that in the initial phase the Chinese economy was not an autarky, nor did it deliberately fall back upon itself. Actually the country was suffering from an embargo from the West.

Then there is a second frequently heard cliché according to which the spectacular growth would be the natural and logical result of the opening up of the economy and of its integration into the capitalist world market, in particular since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. That view is untenable too. Long before that accession, China experienced a strong economic growth: between 1961 and 2001 the annual average growth was 8 percent. The opening up was advantageous to the economy indeed, but the immediate increase in growth was anything but spectacular. In the first fifteen years after the accession to the WTO, economic growth increased only slightly more than 2 percent extra.

Opening up the economy to foreign countries – trade, investment and financial capital flows – has had disastrous consequences in many third-world countries. In China, this opening has been successful because it was subordinate to domestic needs and objectives, and because it was fully integrated into a solid development strategy. According to Herrera and Long, the Chinese development strategy has a coherence that is unequalled in the countries of the South.

Neither communism nor capitalism

What exactly is this “socialism with Chinese characteristics”? For the authors it is certainly not about communism in the classical sense of the word. Marx and Engels understood communism as the abolition of wage labour, the disappearance of the state and the self-government of producers. In present-day China this is not what is happening, just as it never was in actually existing socialist countries. In China, this was less the result of an ideological choice than of the extremely difficult circumstances in which the revolution came about and had to live up to. In 1949, after a long-standing civil war, a state established itself as “communist” and gradually distanced itself from the Soviet model.

After the opening up and the reforms under Deng Xiaoping, according to Herrera and Long, “socialism has retreated enormously in China”. Today, Chinese society is “far removed from the communist egalitarian ideal”. The authors refer to a number of aspects such as individualism, consumerism, favouritism, careerism, the craving for luxury and glamour, corruption, etc. These aspects are certainly disturbing, but the Chinese leadership is doing its utmost to restore “socialist morality”.

It is certainly not communism, but neither is it capitalism. For Marx, capitalism presupposes a strong separation between labour on the one hand and ownership of the most important means of production on the other. The owners of capital tend to become collectives (shareholders) of people who no longer directly manage the production process, but leave that to managers. Earnings often take the form of dividends on shares.

The vast majority of the incredibly large number of small Chinese enterprises – mostly family or artisan owned businesses – certainly do not meet that criterion. Nor does the criterion apply to the many “collectively owned” companies where the workers own part of the production equipment and have a voice in its management, and it is not in the least applicable to the cooperatives. Even in public companies, the separation between labour and property is not that clear. Because there too there is a certain, albeit limited, form of participatory management for blue-collar and office workers. In short, the separation between labour and property is often very relative.

Another important criterion for a society to be capitalist is the maximization of individual profit. In any case, this does not apply to the large state-owned companies, where the most important means of production are allocated.

No capitalism, then, but perhaps state capitalism? According to the authors that concept comes close, but it is too vague and a catch-all term.[i]

If not, then what?

The top leaders of China do not deny the existence of capitalist elements in their economy, but they see this as one of the components of their hybrid system, the key sectors of which are in the hands of the government. For them, China is still in “the first phase of socialism, a stage considered essential to develop the productive forces”. The historical goal is and remains that of advanced socialism. Like Marx and Lenin, they refuse to regard communism as “the sharing of poverty”. Hence “their will to pursue a socialist transition during which a very large majority of the population will have the opportunity of accessing wealth”. “Wouldn’t we prove at the same time that socialism can, and must, surpass capitalism?” the authors wonder.

Herrera and Long describe the political-economic system in China as a system of “market socialism”. Such a system is based on ten pillars, which largely don’t exist in capitalism:

  1. A form of political democracy, clearly perfectible, but enabling the collective choices that are found to be the basis of this planning.
  2. The existence of very extensive public services, most of which remain outside the market.
  3. Ownership of land and natural resources that remain in the public domain.
  4. Diversified forms of property, suitable for the socialization of the productive forces: public enterprises, small individual private property or socialized property. Capitalist property is maintained during a long socialist transition, even encouraged, in order to stimulate overall economic activity and to encourage efficiency in other forms of property.
  5. A general labour policy of increasing wages relatively more rapidly compared to other sources of income.
  6. The stated desire for social justice from an egalitarian perspective promoted by the authorities, going against a several-decades-old trend towards social inequalities.
  7. Priority given to the preservation of the environment.
  8. A concept of economic interstate relations based on a win-win principle.
  9. Political interstate relations based on the systematic search for peace and more equitable relations between peoples.

Some of those pillars are addressed in more detail. We go through two of them here: the key role of state-owned companies and modernized planning. Moreover the book addresses the important issue of the relationship between political and economic power.

State-owned companies play a strategic role in the whole of the economy. They operate in a way that is not at the expense of the many small private companies and the industrial structure of the nation. They are focused on productive investments and can easily and inexpensively provide services to other companies and collective projects. In these companies, the government can also decide for itself which form of management is most appropriate. The key role that government companies play is one of the essential explanations for the good performance of the Chinese economy. They also play their role on a social level. The state-owned companies can give their employees higher wages and good social benefits. It is in that sector that the best opportunities are found to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.

Economic planning is “the actual space in which a nation chooses its common destiny and the means for a sovereign people to become the master of that destiny”. According to the authors, in China there is a “powerful” planning, the techniques of which have been relaxed, modernized and adapted to present-day requirements. In the planning of the past, which was overly centralized, a company had to accept products, regardless of the quality or real cost at which they had been produced. This mechanism greatly limited the initiative of companies and also the efficiency of the productive sector as a whole. Quality and cost were seen as “administrative” or “technocratic” problems and lost their capacity to stimulate the economy. The coercion and limitations in manufacturing manifested themselves through recurring crises of availability of goods and material resources.

From the 1990s onwards, planning has become more flexible, monetarized and decentralized. That planning was still drawn up under the direction of a central macroeconomic authority. The companies were given more autonomy to manage foreign currencies and to purchase goods. Thanks to this relaxation it has been possible to solve a number of deficiencies of the old planning and this has led to an economic development that is more intensive[ii] and more respectful of the environment.

Does the transition to socialism require that economic and political power coincide completely? The authors believe it does not. It is, however, necessary that the owners of economic power – the capitalists – come under the strict supervision of political power. The authors refer to a discussion between Mao Zedong and the then Soviet leadership in 1958. According to Mao, the Chinese revolution could continue its course, even though there were still capitalists in China. His argument was that the capitalist class no longer controlled the state, but that this was now done by the Communist Party.[iii] Today, according to Herrera and Long, the proprietors of national private capital are effectively restricted in their ambitions through a very powerful public ownership of the strategic sectors. Moreover, the Communist Party is still able to prevent the bourgeoisie from becoming a dominant class again.

What will the future bring?

The authors’ judgement on the Chinese trajectory remains undecided. A continuation of the road towards socialism is possible, but a restoration of capitalism is not to be excluded. The outcome will be chiefly determined by class struggle. Class relations in today’s China are complex. On the one hand, you have the Communist Party that relies mainly on the middle class and the entrepreneurs. In recent decades both sections of the population benefited most from strong economic growth. On the other hand, you have the large strata of workers and peasants who continue to believe in the possibility of being masters of their collective future and who still have hope of a socialist future.

The question now is whether the party will succeed in extending its success story without changing the balance of power in favour of the workers and peasants. If the party takes the path of capitalism, it risks upsetting the fragile balance. This could lead to major political confrontations and a loss of control over the contradictions of the system, and at the same time to a failure of the long-term development strategy.

The outcome is uncertain. But for the authors there are a lot of aspects that distinguish China’s system from capitalism. In addition, there is also the long-term objective of socialism and there is a lot of potential to reactivate that project.

Another uncertain factor that may determine the future is financial monopoly capitalism, based on a US military hegemony which increasingly seeks confrontation with China, despite the strong economic interdependence between the two countries. Herrera and Long warn that people in the West must be well aware that world capitalism is at an impasse and “that in its decline it will cause nothing but social devastation in the North and wars in the South”.

We may add that it is to be hoped China’s capitalist logic can be checked. Otherwise we will almost certainly end up in a situation similar to that of the eve of WWI, where imperialist blocs were heading for a mutual showdown in order to expand or retain their spheres of influence.

The story sketched by the authors is not a triumphant one. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is by no means a “finished ideal of the communist project”. For it to be like that there are too many “shocking imbalances” in the project. Herrera and Long note that China is still a developing country and that it will therefore go through a “long and difficult process, full of contradictions and risks”. This should not come as a surprise, because capitalism also “took ages to consolidate”. Anyway, the many disparities and contradictions should discourage sympathizers from applying the Chinese recipe elsewhere.

A few comments

Herrera and Long are academics, but know how to present their arguments in a very readable and convincing way. The book contains strong and new figures and also a lot of useful graphs. In one of the annexes you will find a very interesting timeline of China’s history that starts at the beginning of human history. A downside is that not all argumentation is worked out equally well; the book is too concise for that.

The perspective is economic. The advantage of this is: a materialist approach, no woolliness. The disadvantage is that the authors may have a tendency to underrate the role of ideological struggle. Although Herrera and Long point out a number of negative aspects in this field, they underestimate the fact that the whole of society up to and including the Communist Party is permeated by capitalist propaganda. That came to light, for example, in the events surrounding Tiananmen. At the time China came very close to going the same way as the Soviet Union. Reducing capitalist ideology will be crucial for staying on course towards socialism.

In their argument about whether or not the system is capitalist, they focus on ownership relationships. That is correct, but only partly, because ownership relationships are not completely indicative of the government’s control over the economy. By either granting or not granting access to procurement contracts, tax breaks, to public investment funds, financial institutions and grants, etc., central government controls entire sectors including private companies, without having direct control over individual companies or holding shares in them.[iv]

For various reasons, China is one of the most misunderstood countries in the world. Therefore Herrera and Long’s work is more than welcome. It courageously goes against the tide and disproves a number of stubborn prejudices. In the light of the relative decline of capitalism, both economically and politically, the authors bring the ideological debate into focus. That is the second reason why the book is highly commendable.

*

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Notes

[i] The term state capitalism is by no means an unequivocal concept about which there is unanimous consent. Below are some systems that the term can refer to:

  • The state undertakes commercial and profitable activities, government companies exercise capitalist management (even though the state calls itself socialist).
  • Strong presence or dominance of state-owned companies in a capitalist economy.
  • The means of production are privately owned, but the economy is subject to economic planning or supervision. Cfr. New Economic Policy (NEP) under Lenin.
  • Variant: the state has considerable control over the allocation of credits and investments.
  • Another variant: the state intervenes to safeguard the interests of its monopolies (state monopoly capitalism).
  • The government manages the economy and behaves like a single large company that derives the added value from labour to reinvest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism.

[ii] Extensive development is quantitative growth, more of the same by deploying more people and machines or making them work more. Intensivedevelopment is qualitative growth based on higher productivity.

[iii] “There are still capitalists in China, but the state is under the leadership of the Communist Party”. Mao Zedong, On Diplomacy, Beijing 1998, p. 251.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44133948?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents.

The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Marc Vandepitte, Global Research, 2020

 

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Oops for Google Apps? Huawei seeks an alliance with other Chinese firms to push US giant out of Asia

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Seems like Google, a corporate giant that has eagerly collaborated with the US government in fighting "fake news" (read: silence dissident anti-imperialist news), and was happy to apply Trump's trade sanctions on China is now reaping the whirlwind, as it richly deserves.

TECHNOLOGY—
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hinese giants Huawei and Oppo plan to create an alternative to Google mobile services and seek cooperation with Indian developers. Their success may spell an end to Android’s market domination in Asia, and possibly beyond.

For now, the global dominance of the Google-owned Android mobile operating system (OS) may seem to be without challenge. It comfortably holds a share amounting to a whopping 76 percent of the mobile OS market worldwide. But clouds are already gathering over the US company and, if it gets shoved out of a massive segment of the market, it will only have itself to blame.

Also on rt.com US steps up campaign to urge Europe to drop Huawei, says Chinese tech firm threatens British intelligence services

Google’s positions are about to be challenged by none other than China’s Huawei – a telecommunications giant and smartphone manufacturer which has recently become a target of constant US pressure. The company, which once used Google’s Android itself on its smartphones, was forced to develop an alternative after the US tech titan rushed to comply with Washington’s sanctions in May and became one of the first American companies to cut Huawei off from its services.

Double-edged sword

Being cut off from the world’s most popular mobile OS and being left with its open-source version at best was a blow for Huawei – but the split between the two tech giants is a sword that is capable of cutting both ways.

Just months after Google’s decision, Huawei unveiled its own Harmony mobile OS and rolled out a new flagship smartphone without any proprietary Google apps. It vowed to finalize the development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) – a replacement for popular Google apps – by the end of the year.

The Chinese giant did not stop at that, and entered into negotiations with India’s top 150 app developers to convince them to publish their products on HMS, which itself could offer up to 150 'own apps' to customers all over the world.

It is also worth remembering that it is not just Huawei that might lose customers after being stripped of access to the proprietary Android OS. Google is also about to lose a fair share of the smartphone market simply because Huawei holds it. The Chinese company is the second most popular smartphone producer; it controlled about 19 percent of the global market in the third quarter of 2019 – up from around 15 percent during the same period the previous year.

Challenging Google’s dominance

Benjamin Chiao, a co-author with Nobel Laureate French economist Jean Tirole, believes that Huawei – together with other Chinese companies – has every chance to challenge Google’s dominance with this new strategy.

Also on rt.com ‘5G now America-free’: China’s Huawei assembles latest phones without US parts

“Google has a first-mover advantage with a lot of loyal customers, but an alliance of Chinese companies will change it,” Chiao, a professor at Shanghai International Banking and Finance Institute and the Academic dean for Asia programs at the Paris School of Business, told RT.

In October, Forbes reported that Huawei, as well as other national tech titans, pushed Samsung – the world’s most popular smartphone manufacturer – out of China’s market. Most recently, it was also reported that Huawei and another Chinese company – Oppo – had joined their forces in talks with the Indian app developers.

“Google is already being replaced in China but not yet in Asia, as it is still highly competitive. Yet, it definitely won’t be dominating anymore,” Chiao said.

China is currently the world’s biggest smartphone market while India is the second and, for that matter, the fastest growing one. If Huawei manages to further solidify its positions in both of these markets, it could be very bad news for Google.

Genie is out of the bottle

“Huawei Mobile Services that is being developed right now is about to have a set of 150 apps, which already far outnumbers Google Apps,” German Shekhovtsev, a partner at leading Russian consulting company Althaus Group, told RT. “There is a fair chance that the Chinese manufacturer will succeed” in creating a viable alternative to Google services, he added.

Oleg Bogdanov, a senior analyst at the QBF Group – a Russian investment company operating in various markets all over the world, including the US stock exchange, warned that Huawei’s plans actually “pose a serious threat to Google.”

Also on rt.com US tech companies to lose $40 billion as China’s Huawei takes its business to Europe

“In the future, Chinese companies might push the American one from the entire Asian market,” he told RT. “Huawei’s indigenously developed services might soon replace Google services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Then, the US company will be in real trouble.”

In fact, Google might have virtually shot itself in the foot in its rush to comply with Washington’s political demands. By stripping Huawei of access to its services it was using for years, it harmed its own positions in two ways: the US giant lost its clout over its former customer and forced it to challenge Google’s positions on the software mobile market.

Now, the American tech titan might yet realize that it has let the genie out of the bottle – particularly because Huawei’s growing influence is unlikely to be limited only to Asia. Chiao believes it would spread to the four corners of the world, while the Western companies would hardly be able to do anything about this.

“China is unstoppable now. The huge size of the Chinese market provides the finance and all the opportunities the Chinese companies need to grow. Perhaps they will beat American companies in a very competitive way in a very short time.”

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The Teacher and the Unteachable

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The Teacher and the Unteachable. By Caren Black, Titanic Lifeboat Academy 191123

 

NOW IN 22 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. CLICK ON THE LOWER LEFT HAND CORNER “TRANSLATE” TAB TO FIND YOURS!

Jeff J. Brown

Pictured above: Titanic Lifeboat Academy’s inviting website logo.

Sixteen years with the people on the streets of China, Jeff

Note before starting: Patrice at The Greanville Post (https://www.greanvillepost.com) was kind enough to connect me to Ms. Caren Black at Titanic Lifeboat Academy (TLA- https://titaniclifeboatacademy.org/). And she was nice enough to republish a couple of my articles/podcasts and TLA definitely deserves a shout out. They have a wonderful stable of writers, aggregate excellent content and I just love going on their website, which is one of the nicest out there. My blood pressure goes down when I’m on it, since it so relaxing and calming to navigate. I subscribed to get their newsletter and hope you do too.

Like me, Caren is a professional teacher, so this is reflected in her article below. Enjoy a a wonderful and introspective essay. After reading it, I’m sure you will agree that it would be a blast to be in one of her classes…

The Teacher and the Unteachable

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he very best teachers will tackle the unteachable because…well, because they are the very best and to them it is always simply a matter of finding the right approach for the particular subject and student at a particular time. If one way isn’t effective, the choice of different approaches is limited only by imagination. One such person was my seventh grade algebra teacher “who never gave up until we understood” as I fondly remembered in the dedication to my first book on education.

Excellent teaching is original, suited to the situation, and motivates students by stimulating their interest, camaraderie, personal pride and confidence. By leading students out of themselves to reach beyond what before was always “good enough”.  By asking provoking – but never leading – questions. By not  supplying answers.  By challenging students to think for themselves and create unique, out-of-the-box solutions.  By constructing a rich learning environment, then liberating students to discover meaning and concepts which they can then transfer to other situations, continuing to learn independently of the teacher.

Quite different from teacher-dependent directed learning of “correct answers”, Discovery Learning, based on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Bruner and Papert, provides context, not step-by-step instructions. Rather than the prerequisite to beginning one’s real life, education becomes an ongoing way of living one’s life, or as Dewey wrote, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

There is a Zen story of a scholar and a master teacher:

There was a Scholar who felt that studying with a renowned Master would be his crowning achievement. The Scholar traveled to the Master’s school and a meeting was arranged wherein the scholar listed his great number of degrees and past achievements to show himself worthy for such advanced study.

The Master served tea, pouring more and more into the scholar’s cup. “Please stop!” cried the scholar, “Can’t you see the cup is full to overflowing?”  The Master set down the teapot. “Like this cup, you nearly overflow with all you carry with you. If you would learn, first you must empty your cup.”

Expecting to be spoon-fed more “correct answers” in the traditional manner, not everyone responds at first to do-it-yourself learning (some assembly required).  And, unlike lecturing in a classroom, giving a one-shot presentation lacks the luxury of repeated long-term interaction with students which brings familiarity with new methods and expectations.

Perhaps particularly unsuited – even hostile – to an unfamiliar teaching style are today’s contemporary superficially intellectual pseudo-liberal, “politically correct” Left [sic].  Far from emptying their cups to new discoveries, they are likely to guard their pixilated niche personae as though those marketed constructs were actually their lives. Postmodern social [sic] media culture is all about buying into an off-the-rack IdentityTM and subsuming entirely into the group surrounding that brand. Like the traditional snap quiz, instant feedback in the form of Likes, comments and shares let participants know whether they got it right or failed. They have neither time nor patience for logic or deduction. They require on-the-spot validation. They want spontaneous simplistic answers they can text-while-you-talk to their hundreds of close personal friends for immediate response – because hundreds of people (largely strangers, trolls and algorithms) couldn’t possibly be wrong.

Woe to the presenter who doesn’t work that way!  Not only does an IdentityTM come accessorized with what to think, believe and do, it also provides a shield against all challenges and criticisms (and in doing so reinforces controlled behavior). Moreover, social [sic] media being customarily brief, incomplete, impulsive, rude, crude, spiteful and snarky, the IdentityTM provides a lethal full-spectrum weapon of Nuclear-Armed Exceptionalism, Righteousness and MyTruth® which can be used to ruthlessly cudgel any who see or do things differently.  The objective for these Exceptional® people in attending a class or presentation is to seek affirmation, strengthening one’s IdentityTM.  Challenges of any kind must be met by taking the challenger down.

You see where this is going:  We’re replicating the irresistible force meeting the immovable object:  the teacher and the unteachable student. And, we’ve not even broached the topic. These days, nearly any topic carries the potential to offend, to be deemed “fake”, to infringe on someone’s “rights” or impinge on their IdentityTM, or make them feel “unsafe”.  Language must be “politically correct”, i.e. utterly illogical, composed of Pavlovian triggers, e.g. MSM-saturated mnemonic phrases.  These magic phrases recur ad nauseam until rote memory and #cyber-alchemy change them into Received Wisdom.   Suffused with emotion-coated memes designed to bypass the neocortex and speed directly into long-term memory where, having skipped the neocortical screening for bullshit, thus deprived of synaptic connections to context or related content, they reside as unquestioned Truth, regardless of veracity, coherence or rationality.  Any topic diverging from them is not up for discussion, much less teaching.

*****

At the beginning of the 21st century, California’s Central Coast was still a bastion of liberalism where people were not afraid to move against the mainstream current.  Having called the area home since the ‘80s, I’d expected this culture to be permanent when I left in 2004.  So, I looked forward to Dr. Guy McPherson’s recent talk there on Near Term Human Extinction, confident that my old home was one island of counter-culture that would totally “get it”.

When a pendulum is far to one side, it tends not toward middle ground but toward its extreme opposite.  Counter-culture tragically replaced by full-on tweet-culture, the room pulsed with interruptions, nano-scaled attention spans, and sophomoric appeals for repetitions, rephrasings – even debate! – of Guy’s well substantiated points.

Breathtaking.  Like visiting a glacier that isn’t there anymore.

Humans have never, ever been more in need of acute neocortical functioning.  I fear it is no coincidence that our controlled and censored western culture precludes it.  Money, Power and Self-Glorification are our Easter Island statues.  Excellent teachers and disquieting topics stimulate critical thinking.  Critical thinkers ask the wrong questions.  They encumber the smooth functioning of highly successful capitalist oligarchies bent on turning the last living cell into $$$.  Carlin made it clear in “The American Dream” portion of his Showtime album “Life Is Worth Losing”,

“The real owners. The big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions…. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest.”

Thus, Guy McPherson’s compassionate “Carpe Diem!” met audience members whose teacups could not be emptied, being full to the brims with thick, sticky twitterpoo. After all, his topic, Near Term Human Extinction, is no doubt being already being considered for deletion from Facebook.  Then, it won’t exist, right?

They didn’t “get it” on the Central Coast.  Consider:  Could people where you live entertain ideas outside the current mainstream without resorting to blind criticism?

Doubly tragic when the last moments for much of humanity will not be teachable moments, but the braying and whining of Western puppets whose own Masters caused the converging crises beginning to envelope us all.

###

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

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