Chinese and American flags flying together
When I originally formulated this article it was just “Why does the CCP accomplish its goals?”
But that’s a stupid article. Certainly there are governments which fail to accomplish their goals, in countries which lacks state capacity or are in constrained positions. But for most of my life most Western governments haven’t been all that constrained, they just acted as if they were.
The truth is that Western governments have mostly accomplished their goals over the last 45 years: it’s just that their ur-goal was to make the rich richer. If that meant burning everything else down, they were OK with that. There are a number of reasons for this, but basically political elites were bought: do what the rich want and even if you lose office you’ll be very well taken care of. Instead of viewing government as “theirs” and their countries as “belonging to them” they viewed political office as a way to get rich. Instead of viewing the rich as their competitors for power, to be kept under control, they viewed them as their benefactors and as the ones who could put them into office. Or, put another way, most elected representatives saw themselves as de-facto employees, or contractors, of the rich and corporations.
This view has explanatory power: politicians do what you’d expect them to do if it were true. Take a look at Trump: his budget has 4 trillion in tax cuts for the rich, and to partially pay for those cuts, it is getting rid of 800 billion in Medicare funding. The idea that he’s some sort of economic populist is laughable. He’s making the rich get richer, just like every other President since Carter (though Reagan was the real inflection point.)
This wasn’t always the case. From 33 till around 68 or so, the primary policy goal in America was the growth and prosperity of the middle class, and most politicians, while they’d take the money of corporations and rich to some extent, saw them as the enemy, to be kept under control.
So, let’s turn to the CCP. They have lifted more people out of poverty than every other country combined. The one-child policy, whether you agree with it or not, did get China’s population growth under control. They are ahead in 80% of techs, when 20 years ago that number belonged to the US. They have the largest industrial economy in the world. They are reducing housing prices, which was their goal. They are reducing inequality and smashing the number of billionaires. They are installing more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. They are building industrial stacks so that nothing they actually need comes from the rest of the world—they’re not quite there yet but they will be. (Don’t invest in TMSC long term, their near monopoly position is almost over and they will soon be overtaken by the Chinese. Three to five years at most is my guess.)
The CCP accomplishes its goals. Its primary goal is:
The Preservation of its own power. There are two branches to this: avoidance of foreign military conquest or regime change, and avoidance of domestic collapse or revolt.
To be powerful, and thus not be at the mercy of foreigners (one of Mao’s main goals) requires an educated, prosperous population and an industrial economy, because military power post-industrial revolution is primarily a result of technology plus industry. If another country can defeat you militarily, you won’t stay in power if they don’t want you to.
Domestically if the population loves you (and all polling shows vast support for the CCP) you will keep power. If they despise you, you will eventually lose power. The Soviets, with all their tanks and soldiers, fell in part because neither the people nor the elites believed in rule by the Party any more. So making the people prosperous is job one for protecting the CCP’s rule. Prosperous people don’t revolt. The Chinese believe this more than any other civilization. The entire “Mandate of Heaven” is based on this, and for over two thousand years the Chinese have regarded the government as responsible for prosperity. When it can no longer provide it, not only is overthrowing it justified, it is even virtuous. On the other hand, to overthrow a government which takes care of the people is vile, and understood as such.
Likewise, if one doesn’t want a change in which elites control the country, one can’t allow domestic power centers other than the party to spring up. This is why the CCP has been crushing billionaires. This is why the CCP banned the Falun Gong (who had widespread membership, including members in the CCP.) Bilionaires were particularly pernicious, because they corrupted party members, and those members goals changed from keeping the CCP in power by making China stronger and people more prosperous, to making a small number of people rich at the cost of general prosperity.
Xi was absolutely correct to make going after corruption his first and most important goal, because the CCP had split into factions and those factions were putting their own prosperity and strength above those of the party and the country. Left unchecked China would have fallen into a corruption spiral, inequality would have spiralled out of control and even if the CCP existed in form, it would no longer be its own power center, but controlled by others.
Now it should be understood that the CCP’s basic ideology isn’t “stay in power at all costs”. Like all ideologies it justifies it otherwise. It would say, and many party members, probably including Xi, would say that the party wants to stay in power because it can make China powerful and prosperous.
Given China’s progress since the party took over (and there was plenty of progress under Mao, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — education and lifespand went way up), the CCP feels entirely justified in this belief.
Of course all things pass, and at some point the CCP will fail and be replaced, either in form (abolished) or by takeover. The Democratic party still exists in America, after all, but FDR or even LBJ would not recognize it, nor have any respect for it. Even Carter, the original neoliberal, by the end of his life, found it abominable. (I suspect young President Carter didn’t fully understand the consequences of what he helped birth.)
But for now, the CCP stands in its glory, having accomplished much of what it originally set out to do. It kicked out foreign occupiers. It made China strong enough that it could no longer be pushed around or occupied. It made the Chinese people prosperous. It gained the technological and industrial lead over the West.
It did so because it regards China as belonging to it, and believes that it has a responsibility to the people of China and that it deserves and will keep its power only if it delivers for the people of China: not for a minority, but for the masses.
None of this is to say the CCP is perfect, just that it’s an effective government which actually wants a prosperous population.
Our governments are effective, but what they want is richer rich people. As a result they will become ineffective and at some point they will either fall and change form and rise again, or they will devolve into full-on failed states.
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cc
Yes, what we have here in The West, especially the US but also Canada, is plutocracy: government of the wealthy elite for the wealthy elite by the wealthy elite.
The likes of Obama and Justin Trudeau serve the elites and after leaving office rake in millions in payments/rewards from book deals, speaking fees, board of directorships, etc.
We here in the West, The Golden Billion, are programmed to believe that we have “democracy” but we are run by the 0.1%.
In *The People’s* republic of China, the CPC seems to try harder than our bought governments to be government of the people, for the people, by the people. The fact that “The People’s” is right at the start of the name of the country shows the importance and primacy that they attach to governing for the sake of the people.
What the West refers to as “authoritarianism” around the world is primarily a forced, necessary self-defense mechanism in response to the constant, relentless Anglo/MI6/CIA/Five Eyes/Mossad/Perfidious Albion attempts to infiltrate, subvert, destabilize, and overthrow via “color revolutions” and regime change. (Calling the CPC the “CPP” is part of those efforts, imo.) For the Western plutocracy, examples of countries that actually try to govern for the people can’t be allowed to be seen.
cc
typo: “Calling the CPC the “CPP”” should have been “Calling the CPC the “CCP”” …
bruce wilder
For the neoliberals, especially left neoliberals, nationalism is repugnant. In a mixed economy — whatever the details of the mix— performance requires that some people take up roles as champions of public purpose. Libertarian rhetoric, which permeates neoliberal ideology, hides the necessity of institutions of strong (competent) public purpose behind b .s. about the magic of “free (competitive) markets”.
In my experience, enthusiasm for “free markets” correlates with a worldview that favors predatory/parasitic capitalism. ymmv
My personal acquaintance with Chinese nationals is that they are commonly imbued with patriotic nationalism of a fairly extreme sort. Or at least a passionate sort. This should not be discounted as a supplement to whatever remains of Marxist-Leninist socialism.
Feral Finster
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to “the people” who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so. The technical term for this is a “beard”.
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don’t even want to stand for election because they don’t want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind .
Getting down to cases – you may recall the protests in China demanding the ending of COVID restrictions. The Chinese government responded by ending the restrictions.
Contrast to the Trudeau government’s response to the Trucker Protests.
NR
I’m curious what your source on this is, Ian, because I’ve never heard anything like this. Not saying I don’t believe it necessarily.
Also, you mentioned 4 billion in tax cuts when what I think you meant is 4 trillion.
joey_n
Hi @cc,
Care to elaborate on why CCP has a more negative connotation than CPC?
Thanks.
cc
Hi @joey_n, I can only speculate that perhaps for the old Cold War propagandists, “CCP” is somehow meant to evoke “CCCP” (USSR) and therefore trigger a negative association in the large segment of the population that falls for the Cold War propaganda, so that they’re seen as a threat, as a bogeyman.
The other part of course is that it’s just basic respect to call someone by the name they prefer to go by.
When you know very well how someone likes to be called but deliberately always withhold that and instead use a mangling or variation they don’t like, it’s a way to diss or disrespect them, denigrate them, annoy or spite them – rather juvenile, I think, unless there’s a very good reason for it (ex. IOF or IGF or just plain “Israeli military” intead of you know what.)
Generally speaking, the pattern that I’ve observed is that biased sources that are anti-China (ex. “The Epoch Times”) will make it a rule to always use “CCP”, while sources that I find fairer and objective will use the official name and acronym “CPC”. When encountering an article from an author or source that’s new to me, whether they use “CPC” or “CCP” is often a sign of how much credibility and attention I’ll give their views.
Another telltale sign of propaganda bias is the use of the term “regime” instead of “government”. We can see that in how Western establishment media will typically use the word “regime” for governments that the West wants to overthrow. So they’ll refer to the “Iranian regime”, but never to the “Israeli regime”, the “Assad regime” but never the “Netanyahu regime”. So Epoch Times articles will often use “CCP regime”. It’s a way to manipulatively signal to the listener or reader, “this is how you should think of them” …
Jan Wiklund
The real question I make out of this is Why don’t Western politicians think like the Chinese? That “If I am nice to people, they would be nice to me”?
They used to do, most of the time. Why did everything change in the 1970s-80s?
It seems that Peter Turchin’s idea is that the marvellous post-war boom pumped so much wealth into the billionaires’ coffers that they became almost all-powerful. So it could have been avoided if the post-war supertaxes on fortunes and inheritancs had been retained.
Another idea I read about once was that there started a kind of trade war between the US and the UK in the 70s, where both supported its own finance magnates not to be overtaken by the other’s. A game where the only winners were the finance magnates.
Other ideas?
Jessica
Jan Wiklund,
The change was so thorough and so widespread in the West that I think explanation(s) are required that cover the entire West and for a prolonged span of time. It is not that things went off the track in one country under one leader or party. They went off everywhere and stayed off the track for decades. (Counter-argument: It really just was the US and the US was powerful enough to drag the rest of the West along.) There are many attempts to blame this all on one choice by one set of folks. For example that the professional management class betrayed everyone else or that one US court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010) allowed right-wing billionaires to buy all the politicians. These limited-scope explanations always beg the question “But why?”
One theory is that global infrastructure and stability and more advanced communication and coordination technology reached a point at which 3rd world workers could be integrated into first world economies and crush the Western working class. Furthermore, the collapse of external competition when communism fell intensified the balance of power between classes in the West. Third, the moves to crush any future student movements (at least in the US) bore fruit by converting universities (and their graduates) from sources of resistance into pacified minions.
Another deeper but more speculative theory: Industrial capitalism in the West matured. The next step was for knowledge in a broad sense to become the main economic driver. To organize society around knowledge rather than capital/plant and infrastructure (or before that land and manual labor) requires that knowledge flow freely but that at the same time, knowledge workers (again in a broad sense) must be compensated. No one has figured out a way to have free-flowing knowledge, fairly compensated knowledge workers, and private ownership of the means of production of knowledge. Another one of those “pick two of three” situations.
Rather than giving up private ownership of the means of production of knowledge, the powers that be gave up free-flowing knowledge. This has had two results. First, that what we know of now as a knowledge economy is at best a bonsai version, at worst a toxic mimic parasite. Not the real thing. [A real knowledge economy: Everyone is given all the training they need to fully utilize whatever their talents are. Intellectual, mechanical, care-giving, whatever and we organize the economy around those developed capacities.]
The second is that the still existing industrial capitalist ruling class lost all purpose and morale. It’s job was to build industrial society. More accurately, to make other folks build it. But it did get built, even in a clumsier and less humane way than many hoped and fought for. But once that was done, they had no purpose. That is why with the Reagan administration in the US, they stopped trying to build and started to plunder. Japan’s ruling class is not the plunderers we see in the West, but they have not the slightest idea how to more forward. China’s ruling class (CPC) is still building their industrial society. Whether they can make a shift to something beyond that remains to be seen. They are at least committed to building a more complete industrial society, one that includes a far larger proportion of their people than was the case in the West (well again, at least the US).
Going yet a level deeper, if it is true that Western society missed a crucial fork in the road some time in the 1960s and 1970s, it would also be true that precious few folks saw that fork or understood it at the time. Or even now. Owl of Minerva or no owl of Minerva*, the fact that the transition into decadence was so smooth suggests that something yet deeper was at work. The most obvious would be that after millennia of societies built on scarcity, humanity in the West was psychologically and spiritually incapable of envisioning true abundance. One might recall the scene in The Matrix in which the Smith explains to Morpheus that the Machines built the first matrix as a paradise, but the humans rejected it.
*Hegel’s notion that a phase of social development is only understood when it is winding down. “The Owl of Minerva flies only at twilight.”
Robin R Payne
“The one-child policy, whether you agree with it or not, did get China’s population growth under control.”
How is (or was) China’s population control a problem? Was that due to the number of people or allocation of resources or both?
In which we explore these questions below…but on a personal note I feel the planet itself could do without 7 billion or so people. I happen to have this list…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
The population control program had wide-ranging social effects, particularly for Chinese women. Patriarchal attitudes and a cultural preference for sons led to the abandonment of unwanted infant girls, some of whom died and others of whom were adopted abroad.[12][15] Over time, this skewed the country’s sex ratio toward men and created a generation of “missing women”.[15] However, the policy also resulted in greater workforce participation by women who would otherwise have been occupied with childrearing, and some girls received greater familial investment in their education.[16][17]
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) credits the program with contributing to the country’s economic ascendancy and says that it prevented 400 million births, although some scholars dispute that estimate.[18] Some have also questioned whether the drop in birth rate was caused more by other factors unrelated to the policy.[18] In the West, the policy has been widely criticized for human rights violations and other negative effects.[2]
…..
“None of this is to say the CCP is perfect, just that it’s an effective government which actually wants a prosperous population.
Our governments are effective, but what they want is richer rich people. As a result they will become ineffective and at some point they will either fall and change form and rise again, or they will devolve into full-on failed states.”
____________________________
I simply don’t see how the ‘State’ (via Locke and Rawls) regulating the natural right to reproduction (via CCP) can work without horrible oppression of women’s uteruses or, to telescope, without sex. Plato I think would have approved.
As so often, the devil is in the details: random selection? If not, how does it work? Are there exceptions? If so, who is excepted? By what criteria?
From an admittedly Western perspective, I honestly don’t know how that worked in China (ca 1980 – 2015) sans govt repression up to and including actual murder. OTOH, yes, it worked.
Also
“Our governments are effective, but what they want is richer rich people. As a result they will become ineffective…”
Perhaps democracy itself is ineffective at governing large populations over a large area across time. Civilization wasn’t built on equality.
Is there a human nature? Can it be applied to groups with n people?
cc
@Jan Wiklund, one thing that happened in the 70’s was the US going off the gold standard. According to Michael Hudson, that allowed for unlimited US militarism funded by the rest of the world:
“… the Defense Department gave the Hudson Institute an $85,000 grant, much more than I’d gotten as an advance for Super Imperialism, for me to go back and forth to the War College and to walk to the White House and other venues to explain what I just said. That the U.S. dollar standard, which I called the Treasury Bill Standard of international finance, had replaced the gold standard and that essentially locked other countries into the financial support of Americans spending abroad. And that going off gold essentially removed the limit on military spending.
I gave one talk at the White House to Treasury officials with Herman Kahn, and we said, gold is, you can think of it as the peaceful metal, because if other countries have to pay their balance of payments deficits in gold, any country waging war, any country entailing a very major military expenditure abroad and to fight a war, always entails running a big deficit, is going to have to run out of gold and lose its power in a system that’s based on gold.
Well, immediately the Treasury people said, well, we don’t want that. We don’t want because it’s America that is going to war. It’s America that’s spending almost all of the world’s military budget. And we don’t want gold to play a role in any system that the United States cannot control. And we can’t control gold outflows if we have to convert our dollars into gold. So, actually, to deprive other countries of any ability to cash in their dollars into gold means they’ve been co-opted into a financial system.
And it’s at that point that America truly became an empire because the entire world’s financial system and it was therefore its tax system, its fiscal system, its money creation was basically directed by the U.S. Treasury to finance the costs of what America claimed were the needs of its empire in creating its 800 military bases all over the world and then waging the wars that it’s been fighting since the 1970s.”
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07/michael-hudson-the-collapse-of-americas-economic-empire.html
@NR, a few quotes from Jimmy Carter:
“America has no functioning democracy.”
“We’ve become now an oligarchy instead of a democracy.”
“Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None, and we have stayed at war.”
“China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”
“We are the most war-like country on Earth.”
elkern
Jan Wiklund –
I’d suggest that the difference in Chinese vs. Western governance is rooted in the difference between their respective core religious/philosophical (Confucian vs. Judeo-Christian) roots.
The Chinese ‘Mandate of Heaven’ does not refer to the approval of a singular Deity. They have no Uber-God, no single point of control of the Universe. (Hat tip to ‘Tor’s Curiosities’, a YouTuber who explains that ‘Mandate of Heaven’ could be more accurately translated as ‘Mandate of the Cosmos’).
For millenia, Western Kings have claimed that their power is ordained by [their] God. That has proven to be a powerful psychological weapon in the short run, but in the long run, it always turns out to be laughably false (name a Dynasty that hasn’t produced obviously incompetent rulers?). The framework only survives because Humans are remarkably good at adjusting their loyalties and ideologies to the power structures around (above?) them.
Western governance historically reflects the basic framework of Monotheism: Don’t Worry, The Big Guy is in charge, He will take care of everything. When things get bad, we just look for a different Big Guy (Great Man) to fix things.
Sans monotheism, Chinese culture doesn’t instill blind faith in Lords. Of course, authoritarian structures still evolve, as people submit to Warlords to avoid Death. Power *does* flow from the barrel of a gun, or the point of a spear, and submissions is usually preferable to death.
OTOH, Confucianism is strongly ‘conservative’ in its view of basic human relationships. Father rules the family (because he can beat the crap out of anyone who disagrees?). That Power structure extends upward all the way to the Emperor, but it is balanced by Responsibility. A Ruler who fails in his responsibility to protect and nourish ‘his’ people loses legitimacy; but Revolution is serious – deadly – business, so it should only be used as a last resort.
Ha, kinda cool that I write this on this day (July 4), in this country (USA)…
“…When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
somecomputerguy
Re; the destruction of the New Deal State.
The first foundation of that state was the rejection of markets.
(If we had continued down Hoover’s path and just let markets decide, the Great Depression would have become the Great American Famine.)
This was the ultimate demonstration of where markets go, when you just leave them alone.
Virtually every realm of economic activity had a government monitor, was actually supervised by some kind of commission or agency, or had active government participation, i.e., government was building it or providing it directly.
The first pillar was tax policy and an effective ‘maximum wage’. If you want rich people to invest in the society, the best way is to give them no choice; take it in taxes if they don’t.
There was the Brandisian competition regime; if you got too big you were split up, or Uncle Sam sat on your shoulder and made sure you played by the rules. If you had a world-changing invention, you were forced to license it to you competitors.
Every network-based industry, trucking, airlines, communications, had a government agency or commission setting the rules by which that industry operated.
Government paid to have things built, and built them itself, directly.
Rather the suffocate growth or innovation or prosperity, those things exploded.
We know how the Brandeisian competition policy was subverted (Bork). Carter made the start on the destruction of networked-industry supervision.
The problem with the tax policy, was that ’70’s oil-spike inflation was pushing upper-middle class tax brackets up into confiscatory territory.
Rather than tweak them, all these policies were just eliminated completely.
As a substitute, markets would be provided with incentives.
Here is how that worked for the information superhighway;
Instead of just having government build it, as the New Deal State would have done, the 1996 telecom act gave the telecom companies billions of dollars subsidies and tax breaks.
I thought at time;” If the government built it, we would probably have it in five years. Now it will take fifteen.”
It’s nearly thirty years later, and we are still waiting.
GM
I’ve listened to several interviews with him, and Turchin generally comes off as someone who bases deep ideas on fundamental misunderstandings of how the world works, i.e. he has no idea what he is talking about.
The reason things change in the 1970s-80s is, as usual, at its core biophysical.
The early 1970s is when conventional oil production in the US peaks. And if you go back, everything else inflects right around that time, in the wrong direction.
Sure, nobody can prove this is the deep reason. However, nobody can prove anything when it comes to the general course of history in general, and if there is one explanation that makes sense with respect to the core of how the system works (which is energy), it is that.
Conditions for the common man improved massively in the three decades post-WWII because energy was cheap and abundant, and growing in availability. In fact, they were improving even before that, and for the same reason, only much more slowly. But post-WWII you also had the added factor of millions of young men having returned from the war, i.e. millions of people who knew how to fight and expected to be taken care of, all that while there was a powerful ideological alternative in the form of the USSR.
Concessions had to be made under such very dangerous conditions (after all, WWI veterans had marched on the White House only a decade prior), and could be made because the pie of real wealth was growing, thanks to oil being pumped out of Texas, California and the Gulf in prodigious quantities.
But by the early 1970s you have:
1) US oil production peaks
2) Those young people who returned from the war in 1945 knowing well how to fight were now in their 50s, and thus no longer a threat
3) The older generation that saw the causes and effects of the Depression was phased out of power by natural biological reasons
4) The rich decided to go on the offensive because the pie was no longer growing and they were also no longer going to put up with the obscenity (from their perspective) of the redistributive system of the previous three decades.
What follows is well known.
P.S. When we speak of oil peaking, it is of course net energy that matters, not absolute volumes. Which are larger now for the US than they have ever been, but you don’t get 100 units of energy back for any unit you put in as investment as you did in Texas in the good old days, you get an order of magnitude less from fracking. Which means an order of magnitude less available for maintaining infrastructure and sharing with those below the top 1-10%.
P.P.S. All this is also the reason why the war on Russia was started — the looting of the former post-Soviet space is what bought the West another couple decades in the 1990s and 2000s, otherwise it would have long collapsed. Notice how movies and other fiction in the 1980s feature a lot of post-apocalyptic urban hellscapes. It is because that is exactly what US cities looked like. NYC was a burnt out warzone just a short distance away from Wall Street, a lot of other cities were no better, the crack epidemic was in full swing all over the country.
But the effects of that injection of real wealth wore off rather quickly, the Great Financial Crisis hit, and another such injection has been needed ever since, which necessitates the total dismemberment and looting of Russia. And everyone else not strong enough to resist.
They are that desperate at this point, to risk WWIII…