Communism
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Thanks, I like this explanation a lot.
I agree that this helped China a lot but IMO modern Chinese working life is just as bad as in America. That is not to say that life has not been improved at an insane rate. I hope the low to middle class worker can be less of a slave soon. A lot of my family has zero retirement plan other than betting on government insurance which barely pays half of what one needs to live.
I'm not sure if one should compare Chinese and US working life by focusing on the shop floor. Half of the US lives in luxury and the other half is in misery. For whom there is no retirement plan other than death. And that's not counting the billions of people outside the US who have to live in even worse misery to prop up the lifestyles of the wealthiest USians. Working life in the US cannot be understood in isolation from what the US is.
Then there is the fact that the US is crumbling. It's trains and underground and falling apart. It's workers have to commute for hours a day in a single car that they work to keep running. There might be parts of China that are not as futuristic and well maintained as it's high speed rail network but the fact that it's trying to improve infrastructure means people in China have the opportunity for something that most USians and it's oppressed billions will never have: hope.
Not to mention that the US way of life has depended on genocide and brutality for 400 years. That's where the wealth in the US comes from; and still it's working class lives in terrible, precarious conditions. Whatever working conditions are like in China, it's an improvement on being subjugated by imperialists and on committing genocide and becoming an imperialist itself to improve conditions more rapidly.
Finally, the radical increase in living standards in China is still increasing. The US hit it's peak decades ago and is now declining. With the transformation of quantity into quality, we can expect conditions in the US to disintegrate in leaps while those in China improve in leaps. In another 10–20 years it won't even be close.
Fully agree with you on the US crumbling and Chinese standards continuing to fly light years beyond but the standard Chinese worker’s life does suck. I say this from my experience. I know very few from the 20s to 50s that’s current happy working. Most work for little pay and barely can afford things. Again, I agree with the larger picture but if you live in China I think the person to person picture is full of capitalistic like stress.
That makes sense. I've seen a few videos about ordinary people in China and even though they were positive, they still described some things that were less than ideal. They were talking about how great it is for 'entrepreneurs' to do well and I was thinking, that sounds a lot like industrial capitalism before neoliberalism in the west and (a) that wasn't great for everyone else and (b) we know how that turned out. I'm really hoping that China gets the balance right over the next few years!
I hope so as well. Many western leftists act like China surpassing the US would be a bad thing. They aren't perfect but they've done a whole lot more for the common person than the US does.
Covid really made things hard. A lot of people lost money as companies and individuals couldn't pay their workers or lendees, making very few have savings they need. My immediate family's savings is my job.
But you do make a great point redtea, China is in a league of its own. Yes, life is still hard but the standard of living in most cities is so beyond that of the US. When I was getting insurance in the west and told them which cities in China I would be in, they thought it was a third world city... These are cities with over 2 million people, subway systems, multiple hospitals, and colleges... It is wild how big the different in social services is.
You're making good points, too, and I really like hearing from someone with first-hand experience. Most of what I read is theoretical or a news announcement about being ahead of schedule on a massive infrastructure project. It's easy for me to get a rosy picture because I'm a fan on the CPC and it's incredible to me that China can even start infrastructure and other projects, nevermind finish them or finish them ahead of schedule. It's like reading sci-fi sometimes. But the view of the ordinary worker is missing.
Do people use foodbanks in China / do you hear stories about parents going hungry to leave enough food to feed their children?