The GPCR was Good (Pt. 2)

From Raymond Lotta's intro to the Shanghai Textbook (1994):

"China, it need hardly be said, is a very different society today. After Mao Tsetung died in 1976, rightist forces led by Deng Xiaoping staged a military coup. The systematic dismantling of socialism, the restoration of capitalism, and the resubordination of China to imperialism were to begin.

This sea-change is perhaps best captured in the slogan promoted in the early 1980s by the new leadership: 'to get rich is glorious.' And so it has been . . . for a few. Shanghai has opened a stock market; speculation in urban real estate is now legitimate economic activity; special economic zones have been carved out to serve multinational corporations. China's leaders have turned the country into a low-wage assembly complex and production base for domestic and foreign capital. In early 1992, an average of 45 new foreign-financed ventures were being contracted each day. Workers are told to keep their noses to the grindstone and out of politics. In the countryside, under the banner of reform, the communes were broken up and rural collective asserts grabbed up by the well-positioned. The resulting social polarization has forced millions of disadvantaged peasants to migrate to urban areas. Economic and social inequalities are widening rapidly between the favored coastal rim (where most of China's growth is taking place) and the vast inland regions of the country (where stagnation and poverty are the norm).

The economy now shows all the earmarks of boom-bust cyclical development. It is also on an ecological disaster course. Short-term interests of growth and profit have resulted in the neglect and abuse of irrigation and flood works, the chopping down of much of the country's mature forests, and massive industrial dumping that is polluting clean water sources. China's external debt and dependency are mounting. Old social ills have reemerged: in the countryside, the killing of girl babies (since male labor power is now viewed as a vital asset in the every-family-for-itself economy that is being foisted on the rural majority) and clan violence; in the cities, unemployment, beggary, and prostitution. Culturally, revolutionary images of women 'holding up half the sky' have given way to icons of women as dutiful housewives, 'dressed-for-success' consumers, and sex objects. Corruption is so widespread in Chinese society that it no longer arouses shock.

These are the economic and social realities behind China's vaunted growth rates. And the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of workers and students served to bring political reality into sharp focus. Such is the new (old) China. China today is socialist only in name. But the story run in the West is that the 'pragmatic' leaders grouped around Deng Xiaoping have brought sanity to a society that had been held in the grip of totalitarian Maoist madness. Yes, the apologetics continue, there are distasteful political practices, but when the octogenarians in charge die off, democratization (Western-style institutionalized control and deception) will then flower completely. The truth is that the rule of the workers and peasants has been crushed; property and hierarchy reenshrined; and profit put in command of economic development. A new exploiting class has restored not sanity but capitalism--exactly what Mao had warned would happen if the rightists within the Communist Party seized power."