I have to beg to differ with you here. I lived in China for eight years and worked for three different state-owned media organizations: People’s Daily, China Daily and the newspaper of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While China has made great strides in reaching near-universal insurance coverage, they don’t even have single payer health care. The primary mode of delivery is still through the employer.
Costs are relatively low, but there are still a lot of problems. People still die or because they can’t afford to pay. Then there’s the epidemic of violence against doctors.
As for the part about politicians not “being controlled by corporate money” that’s not exactly true either. Politicians make very little on paper, yet they are all rich as hell. They don’t get campaign finance money, but they all make “gray incomes,” including bribes and kickbacks, or they use their positions to enrich their families, as was the case with the saintly premier Wen Jiabao. Their kids drive sports cars and go to elite schools just like every single other ruling class on the planet. Do you think because some of them read Lenin, they’re any different?
Oh, and members of the capitalist class can also just wield state power directly. There are dozens of billionaires in the NPC. It cuts out the middleman. It’s basically like if Jeff Bezos were a Senator. To the extent that the CPC ever was a party of workers and peasants, it stopped being one under Jiang Zemin, with the Three Represents.
Furthermore, Chinese society is actually slightly more unequal than the United States, with a Gini coefficient of about .47 vs .41. In China, there is the rich and everyone else. A coworker of mine married a woman who was a member of the elite. She worked as a producer at CCTV. One of her friends killed someone while driving drunk. She had her cop boyfriend quash it and she just paid the guy off. Inequality is every bit as obscene in China.
Funny that every time Marxist-Leninists try to prove its superiority, they always use the same metrics that people like Steven Pinker use to validate the superiority of capitalism, i.e. “raised X number out of poverty,” “GDP grew by X percent.”
The success of socialism is judged by two criteria:
- Workers own and democratically control the means of production
- The abolition of class and private property.
To date, no Marxist-Leninist state has achieved this, so there has been no “triumph” that you speak of.
