Sorry for my late reply. Note that I raised major reservations regarding Martinez’s discussion of Chinese socialism. See https://johnriddell.com/2020/05/03/china-sets-the-pace/. I posted the Martinez article for discussion not as an expression of my views, and thank you for the discussion. But in my view the Covid-19 experience also shows up a qualitative difference between the Chinese state and what we have in Canada and the United States.

Our govenments are not willing to even consider a campaign to eradicate the virus such as that which took place in China. They seem incapable of doing so. They cannot even solve the challenge of PPE. They may go over to an “eradication” response later on — but only after grievous and unneccessary human and social losses.

Their response to China’s achievement is a campaign of abuse and blame and a curtain of silence regarding China’s achievements. In surveys of Covid-19 infection, China is simply omitted.

There seems to be some basic incompatibility here, going beyond mere capitalist rivalries. I contended that the factor “x” that differentiates China is the legacy of the Chinese revolution.

There is a precedent for this discussion in our 20th-century experience with the Soviet Union. I believe Lenin was right in 1922 to speak of “state capitalism” growing up within the framework of a workers’ state — which he specified was marked by bureaucratic distortions. And I go with Trotsky in contending that even under Stalin, the fundamental gains of the Russian revolution were not lost. The definitive counterrevolution took place in conjunction with the fall of the Soviet Union.

I see no such counterrevolution in China. Instead, following the wild instability and brutality and destructiveness of the late Mao era, recent Chinese history seems to me to represent, in part, a revolutionary consolidation.

It would be interesting to know more regarding your views.

Socialism without democracy is simply not socialism, and there is very little in China that can be described as or looked to as democratic. We can surely discuss the amazing work the state has done in the past couple of months combatting the COVID-19 outbreak (while also acknowledging its deplorable initial response), and compare this to the criminal responses to the pandemic in the West. What China has done is incredible, to say the least, and I cringe every time I read or hear about what the US leadership is saying/doing where the rest of my family lives now.

However, does that mean we need to attribute the Chinese state’s behavior to the notion that it is a workers’ or a socialist state? Of course not. This would be an unforgivable betrayal of the majority of its citizens, those journalists who have vanished in recent years for their critical writing against the party apparatus and the bureaucracy, those in the northwest being “re-educated,” and those millions more who have demonstrated so bravely in recent months and years in the south (and across the country). It’s also just shoddy social and political analysis.

The Chinese state behaves the way it does not because it represents the interests of the majority, but because at various moments workers (and their organizations to a lesser extent) have been able to wrench concessions from the party and the state through threats, strikes, and mass action.

This article presents these victories as just being the result of the benevolence of a socialist state and party leadership. This doesn’t seem like a very Marxist analysis to me! Shouldn’t the socialist internationalist Left be avoiding this kind of uncritical use of the term “socialist” in this day and age? I’m no expert, but I would just like to say that I expected a higher level of critical analysis of the situation here in China from a website like this one.