A top economist has joined the growing list of China’s elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China’s cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a “body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership.”
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China’s sluggish economy and criticizing Xi’s leadership in a private group on WeChat.
The most ridiculous I have heard is that when I pointed out that people had to wait for years to get a car, and bread lines were common, I got told that the scarcity in communist states is by design.
SuRe yOu lIvE iN tHe CoUnTrYsIdE, bUt YoU dOn’T nEeD a CaR. JuSt WaLk oR gEt A bUgGy.
Breadlines weren’t common. Breadlines never took place in the USSR between WW2 ending and Perestroika taking place, you’re being ahistorical. Food supply wasn’t secure for all the population in any nation until the green revolution, the USSR being no exception to that.
Regarding waiting for a car, the soviet economy simply didn’t prioritize car manufacturing. The planning didn’t intend for every citizen to have a car in the 70s or 80s, they didn’t intend to make so many cars, so naturally, the people who had the wealth to buy a car, had to wait in waiting lists to get one, it’s not so hard to understand. There are no waiting lists in capitalism because you can segregate 99% of the population from consuming a particular good simply by making it expensive. In socialism, when you don’t have extreme inequality, most people will have access to purchase power for the vast majority of goods you produce. This in turn means that either you manufacture literally from the start one product for every citizen, or there will be waiting lists, it’s really as simple as that.
When you can’t afford a house in capitalism until you’re 35 (if you can ever afford it) you aren’t technically in a waiting list, so even if there’s only new housing for 5% of the population every year, there will be no “waiting list” because simply the prices will go up until only 5% can afford it. In socialism, the same 5% of housing can be afforded by 50% of people, so the way to allocate the goods is a waiting list instead of priority through wealth accumulation.
Do you really fail to understand this?
Access to transport is as important as housing, man. Do you really fail to understand this?
Transport and a personal vehicle are two different things, go to any country outside the US, car ownership is reserved for the upper classes globally.
So I, a resident of Europe, am an upper class for owning a 2004 1.3 litre petrol engine Toyota Yaris.
We started this comment chain poking fun at the most laughable arguments by tankies… And you guys keep on giving.
Yes given you statistically don’t have a reason to own the car as you have well designed cities and functional public transport, the latter almost exclusively due to the socialist movement.
Dublin is nowhere near a socialist city, nor having a “functional public transport”. Many people in Ireland still live in hinterlands and rural areas with sparse public transport that comes only an hour or so. Ireland is ranked as having one of the worst public transports along with Poland, the latter being a former communist country!
Lol, you give the worst cope I have seen from a tankie. Even tried to gaslight me that I don’t need a car! I wish so I don’t have to spend ludicrous amount of money! I can tell you’re an edgelord Yank who thinks capitalism oppresses you personally, even though you are typing this from a computer or smartphone, developed thanks to capitalism, and while sipping hot cocoa that is not being rationed. And expressing opinions safe and sound protected by the rule of law of wherever you are.
Tankies keep on giving the most absurd responses and cracks me up. Thanks for giving me a quick chuckle!
If you are so enamoured by communism, go to Cuba, China or North Korea and let’s see if you won’t return begging for your passport back!
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And reported for racism.
And access to transport was widely available to the overwhelming majority of the population through trains, trams, buses and trolleybuses. Even if your American mind can’t comprehend this fact, owning a car isn’t the ultimate form of mobility, there are alternatives that are arguably better. City design was centered around walkability, density and public transit; metro systems were luxurious and a predicament all out of themselves, and housing being generally obtained through the worker’s union implied that workers usually lived in relative proximity to their workplaces.
The soviet economy was a developing, centrally planned economy, not running under the premise of overproduction and surplus but running under the premise of 5-year plans of production. There was full employment, and almost complete usage of the raw materials extracted and industrial goods produced. Making twice as many cars, implied removing all of that labor and those resources from another sector of the economy. When the premise isn’t to “make money selling cars to rich people”, but to “grant adequate material conditions and welfare to every citizen”, you have to make decisions like that. More cars could have implied, for example, fewer hospital beds or fewer trams, but my point is that making more private cars would have NECESSARILY meant making less of something else of which there’s also no surplus (because the premise of the USSR was the non-existence of surplus). It’s very easy to have surpluses in a capitalist economy when you don’t care about 80% of the population not having access to the goods and services available, when you want everyone to have access it’s a different story.
Tell that to people living in the countryside, lol. Even if your wannabe-communist, Western-born, city dwelling, mindset tell you otherwise, those on the country have limited access to transportation and infrastructures that city folks take for granted.
Data says otherwise. Since the end of the soviet block, there’s been a massive migration outwards from the countryside in favour of urban life all over the former socialist republics. Maybe the idea of subsidizing the infrastructure of the countryside despite it not making sense within capitalism wasn’t such a bad idea after all… Please, try to respond to that: why are people flocking from the degrading countryside in post soviet countries
“I don’t understand why people live in cities.” - Peak Tankie Analysis, apparently
We’re talking about during communist era, you goal-post moving dong head.
You are literally just did what this comment chain is criticising lol.
Think harder. I’m not “moving goalposts”, I’m saying, if life in the countryside was so bad during soviet times, why are people from the countryside moving out now and not before… You said “tell that to the people living on the countryside”, the reality is that the people in the countryside were forced to leave the countryside after communism. So why don’t you go ask them?
Yeah over production of goods is a problem but the ussr was built different. Hungary(where im from) has the second best land for agriculture in all of europe only after ukraine and somehow we still had food rations. Same in ukraine too. They had it even worse.
Ukraine’e famine was likely intentional (or at the very least, it was controlled in a way to only affect that one area that happened to have a burgeoning independence movement).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Yeah ukraine probably was but i still dont understand what kind of brain rot happened in hungary. The ussr (almost) always went easy on us but they decided that a country with excellent agriculture and absolutely no ores and heavy industry should prioritise the latter.
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I think I gave more than enough of the benefit of the doubt in my original comment… I am not an expert or scholar on this, but it would seem as though there is some contention as to whether or not this fits the clarification of “genocide,” but that majority of experts on the subject seem to think it is impossible to deny the intentionality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
I know you have some need to defend the USSR at all costs, which means ignoring or attempting to explain away the very real, very awful things that they did in the name of Marxism. And I think that’s a shitty thing to do, and it makes leftists who aren’t accelerationist psychopaths look bad.
Impossible? Really?
So is it safe to assume that you are a scholar on the subject? Or just another rando on the internet that creates elaborate rationales to quell the cognitive dissonance that comes with believing that a nation (any nation) can do no wrong?
Stalin was a shitstain. Again, not an expert, but based on what I’ve read this morning, “impossible” is not the word I would use.
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Neither of those things are true, unless you’re extremely poor, in which case why are you trying to buy an extreme luxury like a private car?