The second economy in the world: what China learned from the Soviet Union

In a new iteration of the Cold War, the United States has designated China as its No. 1 adversary, not Russia. The reason is simple - the American elites are more afraid not of Russian missiles, but of the colossal financial and industrial power of the Celestial Empire, which in just a few decades has become a real competitor to the "hegemon". What can we learn from the Chinese comrades?

When talking about the "Chinese economic miracle", as a rule, they list the following factors: cheap labor, a capacious domestic market of China with great growth potential, huge investments of Western capital and a free attitude to someone else's intellectual property. All this is true, but it is not the whole truth. According to this logic, at the click of a finger, India or Vietnam should become a new “world factory”, but for some reason it just doesn’t work out that way, which we will discuss in detail told earlier.



The truth is that Beijing has done work on the mistakes of the USSR, and now the CCP is leading the country to build socialism in its own, Chinese way.

NEP in Chinese

This topic we concerned, discussing how applicable the Chinese experience is when trying to build a new superpower based on the Union State. Appeal to the PRC as a good example caused a clear misunderstanding among some readers. How so? What kind of socialism can there be in a country where the market system operates? economy, there is private ownership of the means of production and more dollar billionaires than in the capitalist Russian Federation?

Indeed, all this is rather strange. Socialism and capitalism are two essentially opposite socio-economic formations, the fundamental difference between which lies in their attitude towards the means of production. Under socialism, they are in state, more precisely, in public ownership, under capitalism - in private. The means of production is a set of means of labor and objects of labor used in the production of material goods (plants, factories, steamships, etc.). Note that under socialism personal property is allowed - property used for personal purposes without the purpose of generating income. Therefore, the liberal propaganda myth that the Bolsheviks supposedly wanted to take everything away from people and socialize it is false.

Strange, at first glance, the contradiction between the leading role of the Communist Party of China, its declared goal of building socialism with Chinese characteristics, and the de facto capitalist mode of production can be explained quite simply. The fact is that China is now in a transitional period, the NEP, which Deng Xiaoping spied on in the USSR. And this NEP seems to be coming to an end.

In the Soviet Union, the new economic policy operated from 1921 to 1924 (formally - until 1931, when private trade was banned in the USSR), which was caused by the need to overcome the Devastation. A banking and monetary reform was carried out, the ruble became a freely convertible currency. In the villages devastated by the Civil War, the surplus appropriation was replaced by a food tax, radically reducing fees. The free market was returned, and foreign capital began to flow in the form of concessions. Joint-stock companies were created to invest in industry. Previously nationalized enterprises were leased out to private owners, including their former owners. Small businesses with up to 20 employees remained inviolable in private ownership. Industry was consolidated into trusts and syndicates. Cooperation developed rapidly, and a flow of labor from abroad began to flow into the USSR.

In fact, the restoration of capitalism began, which caused disappointment among many ideological Bolsheviks. However, in the conditions of the post-war Devastation, the NEP was an exceptionally necessary measure, since it was necessary to quickly relieve tension in society and strengthen the social base of the RCP (b) in the form of an alliance of workers and peasants. It was necessary to create an economic basis for the further construction of a socialist state, which was done.

The results of the NEP are evaluated in different ways. In just a few years, significant economic growth has been achieved, but liberal-minded researchers complain that it could have been much more if "effective private owners" were allowed to "command heights in the economy." For us, it is interesting that the experience of the Soviet NEP had a huge impact on modern China.

The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was very impressed with the works of N.I. Bukharin, who substantiated the possibility of combining planned state regulation and a market economy, and supported the creation of the "Institute of Marxism-Leninism and Mao's Ideas". In fact, now the PRC has its own version of the NEP, aimed at building socialism with Chinese characteristics and a "prosperous society." This is precisely what explains the apparent contradiction between the capitalist "base" and the socialist "superstructure" in the form of the leading role of the Communist Party and state ideology. At the same time, the new economic policy will obviously undergo a serious transformation.

Colleagues from RIA News at the end of 2021 year drew attention to how all the leading Chinese state-controlled media reprinted an article by a certain Li Guangman, editor-in-chief of a small newspaper, where he published the following theses:


It was about the fact that in China they began to tighten the screws, taking by the bridle who knows what about themselves oligarchs like Jack Ma, introducing censorship and new standards in the field of culture and show business, restricting children and teenagers' access to American computer games. The next step is to strengthen state control in the field of education and medicine in order to increase their accessibility to the population. The CCP will intensify the fight against social inequality through "property reform", as Guangman argued:


The era of the Chinese NEP is objectively coming to an end. Ahead is either the victory of the ideas of building socialism and subsequently communism, or the restoration of capitalism as a result of the inner-party struggle in the CCP. However, Beijing claims to have learned a bitter Soviet lesson. Why are we so interested in the experience of the Middle Kingdom?

Because this is an evolutionary path that can be acceptable both to our “tops”, who are deathly afraid of nationalization, and to the “bottoms”, who dream of real social justice. This "revolution from above" is the only sane and acceptable alternative to "revolution from below" for building socialism in Russia, more precisely, the future Union State.