The sinicization of Marxism

XULIO RIOS

Modern China has undergone a series of transformations since the CCP took power more than 75 years ago. Many of these changes are radical, even more so considering that they have been implemented in a short period of time and under the leadership of the same ruling party. This situation makes it difficult to categorize the policies established by the CCP into a classical theoretical economic model.

Another variable that makes it difficult to interpret the new changes is that China relies on the influence of international models, while maintaining its own sociocultural structures and dynamics. Beyond the process of modernization and the rise of the private sector, China maintains a dominant public sector in several sectors of its economy. It is evident that the State retains essential elements of a socialist model, but has gradually incorporated some elements of the free market to activate its economy and integrate it into the international arena. It is difficult to imagine China returning to the communist system promoted during the times of the revolution.

The strategy pursued by the CCP clearly expresses an attempt to demonstrate that the market, as an instrument of economic management, can also function in a liberal, non-capitalist society, or that a certain ownership structure need not impede the establishment of an effective socialist economic model. China incorporated the recognition of private property into its Constitution in 2004.

The contemporary mutation of the Chinese model reminds us of an unfinished transition, piloted by a particularly powerful Party-State. This clashes, first and foremost, with the notion that communism either exists or it doesn't; that is, it cannot be reformed, and any change of course represents a rift that shakes the system's values. The CCP embraces reforms, reforms that make it more powerful, not weaker, with each step taken, while continuing to demand a more social, modern state subject to the rule of law.

The CCP is the driving force of the state in Chinese society. The state-party fusion perpetuates the system institutionally, with supreme yet flexible decision-making bodies. The CCP shapes the system and affirms its nationalism while extending its membership based on the triple representation, which is no longer just the proletariat or the peasantry, but the people; it is a party of all society. It is, in short, the country's elite that organizes its life in every aspect, such that its broad reach makes it difficult for any political alternative to its leadership to take root.

Therefore, attempts to categorize China within Western theoretical frameworks are futile, inadequate, to the extent that they fail to reflect its originality and complexity. We can thus conceive of it based on the definition of this or that policy as Keynesian or social democratic, or its model as state capitalism. And China doesn't fit because its reality, so unknown in detail, transcends our categories. This is because it has largely invented its own model, a new scheme of economic, social, and political development, which draws as much on global inspiration, Marxist in particular, as on its own cultural and civilizational idiosyncrasies.

It's impossible to ignore the fact that its economy is still governed by five-year plans, that the Party retains control over strategic areas of the economy, that it persists in the supremacy of the state sector over the private sector, or that it establishes the role of public, state, or collective ownership as fundamental—all of which are modular in the conception and practice of the CCP. Politically, it promotes genuine formulas that prioritize consultation and cooperation as ways to generate consensus and stability.

And all of this persists without absolute dogmatic rigidities, that is, responding to the situation with a stable general scheme but allowing for variations in the substantial balance so that in certain circumstances the private sector may gain relevance while in others it is the public sector that experiences greater growth based on what is defined as best for the general interest and the progress of the economy.

The sinicization of Marxism is, therefore, a call to reinvent and adapt Marxism in each country, in each era, based on research and the systematization of social aspirations. It is the end of any automatism of a supposedly universal model and of blind copies of foreign models, whether or not they have worked in a given reality.