I've been listening to "Blackshirts and Reds" on recommendation, but Parenti's view on China seems far more critical than I expected. What is the general opinion on China's post 1978 reforms?

I feel like I don't hear much internal critique about China from the ML side of things - is this more of a 'critical support' posture or are people just generally more optimistic about long-term socialization of their market?

edit: if there are more reading materials that discuss this topic in-depth, I am very interested in recommendations

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I mean this is the same Parenti who defended Gorbachev on cspan with the claim "he was making modern socialism" while Gorbachev was dismantling the USSR. As mentioned below Parenti had real connections to the USSR so this opinion makes sense, although it should be evident to people here that if Parenti's views were commonplace then that the modern incarnation of people defending china with little investigation is aberrant and regrettable in how limiting the AES horizon of thought is. We are on an explicitly leftist website, dispense with the arguments you make to your lib friends to justify china to them.
"Market socialism" as practiced by modern china is basically a couple arguments masquerading as justification for capitalist restoration. Either you have to let foreign capital into your nation in order to bamboozle them and acquire their leverage/tech/forex etc, and this is merely a tactic in crisis(and also completely breaks with lenin's work on how foreign trade should be conducted by socialist states, see "Red Globalization" and read up on the NEP more and how its practices used to justify the opening up while actually being completely flipped on their head). Commodity production but under state control, e.g. parts of cuba. At least this is honest about the capitalist production. If this is not the case then maybe capitalist markets are a stage in the development towards communism, especially in "underdeveloped" countries. E.g. Deng when he sometimes said that he didnt care if china was capitalist as long as the line went up. Yugoslavia tried this, and we saw how that went, although perhaps china's stalled attempts due to political gridlock has something to do with that.
Or perhaps the "market" is more efficient as a director of investment. profit allocates resources better than any state level bureaucrat. This is the most trite, especially looking into china's agricultural sector which saw almost no increases in efficiency when they were exposed to free market prices, they just started growing cash crops.
And all of this cant be removed from how advanced various aspects of the relations of production are in 2025. Amazon in and of itself removes any ability to say the "market" is a better planner of investment than a massively centralized system of management.
China's existing system is a series of contradictions defined by various powerful blocs within china that all fundamentally disagree on how it will continue. At least Xi and the various plenums reports are completely honest that the "market" will continue its dominance. It is now, more than ever, impossible to imagine the end of capitalism. www.news.cn/politics/20240721/cec09ea2bde840dfb99331c48ab5523a/c.html From a comrade doing some translating:
"Focus on building a high-level socialist market economic system, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources, give better play to the role of the government, adhere to and improve the basic socialist economic system, promote high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance, promote high-level opening-up, build a modern economic system, accelerate the construction of a new development pattern, and promote high-quality development"
They might damn well privatize what little remains of the SOE's within our lifetimes.
And to anyone who continues to defend the opening up period as some magical moment when state controlled capitalism was able to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, there is plenty of modern scholarship that challenges that conclusion. https://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/DSullivan-JHickel-CapitalismExtremePoverty.pdf
- So would you say that the animosity between China and "The West" is solely a realpolitik calculation between competing capitalist visions? Certainly the rhetoric between them is that they see their systems as incompatible, but that could just be theatre. And to be fair it's almost exclusively directed at China by the West, the inverse is much less hostile.
  
  It seems to me that modern china is ready to work with about anybody. a quick stroll through the BRICS countries would say so, India(one bad day away from a billion person religious war) a semi feudal and mildly fascist(although with a robust labor movement) country being a standout. But yes as you say the matter that seems hard to square is the USA's uncompromising belligerence. although its possible that is a strange but powerful cold war cultural artifact that just possesses the various higher ups in the military with a fanatic bloodlust. Obviously exceptions among the elite like Elon who clearly would like to benefit from chinas industrial capacity remain despite his incoherent libertarian ideals, Milei in Argentia talked a big talk and then when the chips were down decided he did like china, global capitalism was allowed to eat another day. somehow the USA persists in barreling towards war though. Although this probably should get squared into a proper analysis, Matt christman had a byline through his vlogs about capitalism "leaving behind" the need for the USA as its tool securing globalized markets, and now that it has locked itself into a role as the reserve currency while also producing a population with expectations about consumption/immigration/lots of other things that result in highly present and irreconcilable contradictions. But I am sure there is an even cleaner explanation, or one that better captures geopolitical complexities inside Lenin's break with the second internationale on how imperialism will always lead to war.
  Of course, if we believe that China is "capitalist" or at least obeys the law of value(which many metrics of its economy implicitly do, even the SOE's) then it also will run into many similar problems as the USA. I cant imagine the CPC is not aware of this, but it is in a genuinely delicate balancing act in the coming decades. And while its quality governance and prudent state investment has mellowed out the shocks and bumps, the future is worrisome. Someone else in the thread mentioned "jack ma is not the most powerful person in china" but that belies the reality that there are immensely powerful capitalist interests in china that also rapaciously desire profit, and will put up quite the struggle if xi did "press the communism button". how they will actually move away from commodity production, if it all, to avoid capitalism's contradictions remains illusive. Especially as they seem to be putting some aspect of their stability into the fortification of a robust middle class, not exactly a socialist ideal.
  
  A lot to process, thank you for your thoughtful response. I'll have to think about this stuff more.
  I'd hope that at the very least being a country with a communist history and national origin story would help with their handling of things, being educated and aware of Marxist theory would help you think of the economy as a tool you can manipulate rather than a god you are at the mercy of, although your assessment undermines that hope. Maybe if nothing else the masses can be more conscious there than westerners usually are of their class interests.

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