The Essence of China 2011-08-06 Source: Utopia

In the past three decades, a strange and incongruous situation has emerged in China: the upper body (government agencies, state-owned enterprises, etc.) has not been reformed at all and is still a pure socialism with super-national treatment; but the lower body (people, private enterprises, etc.) has been over-reformed and thrown into market-oriented capitalism to be left to fend for themselves.

Originally, pure socialism or pure capitalism both have their pros and cons, but the incompatibility of the two makes it impossible to see the pros, only the cons. On the one hand, the elites enjoy a win-win situation with both socialism and capitalism, while on the other hand, the people are deeply trapped in the dire situation of unemployment and the marketization of medical care, education, and housing.

The author attributes the cause of this incongruous situation to state capitalism, that is, while the country maintains the original socialist political system, it pursues GDPism in the economy, causing the entire society to present a pattern of a socialist country within a country inside and a capitalist fortress outside.

The so-called state capitalism is a GDP-oriented model that drives economic growth through government investment. The role of the market is not decisive. The government is the real decisive factor. However, the overreaching use of this state capacity can easily lead to negative effects and undermine the foundation on which the country depends for its survival. For example, it destroys the balance between state-owned enterprises and private enterprises; excessive money issuance accelerates inflation; and unnecessary infrastructure construction in fiscal investment and long-term disregard for and sacrifice of social public welfare. As netizen Zheng Yongnian pointed out, in this process, the benefits of economic development are monopolized by a small number of social groups. The faster the development, the faster the transfer of wealth (from the majority to the minority, from the poor to the rich). State-owned enterprises, as the main body of this process, have further facilitated the transfer of wealth from the private sector to government departments. And because state-owned enterprises do not truly belong to the state, but to agents of state-owned enterprises, this process is also a disguised internal privatization process.

Historically speaking, state capitalism can be traced back to the Byzantine theocratic subculture tradition of Eastern Rome, Byzantium, and Russia (we can completely understand capitalism as a kind of fetishism). In order to strengthen political rule, its rulers intervened in the religious (or economic) field with institutionalized political power; and in order to expand their influence and sphere of influence, religious (or economic) leaders also needed to unite with the rulers. There was both competition and mutual dependence between these two groups . We might as well understand this situation as a subculture hybrid between religious (or economic) and political cultures with state intervention. Its significance and impact remain to be evaluated.

Take Byzantium and Russian Orthodoxy as examples. There, the so-called king and pope system was formed, which means that church affairs were completely subject to the emperor\'s management. The church actually became a department of the government, and the church was subordinate to the royal power. In Byzantium, Orthodoxy was the state religion of the empire and was largely dependent on secular power. For example, the appointment and removal of archbishops, the convening of bishops\' conferences, and the interpretation of doctrines were all controlled by the emperor, and the patriarch was responsible for daily leadership. However, theologians who support Orthodoxy prefer to use the alternative term harmony, which means that religious and political power support each other.

The Isaurian dynasty founded by Leo III came to an end in the late 8th century, and a group of incompetent emperors who subsequently ruled the empire further deepened the disaster. The most famous of these was Empress Irene, who blinded her son Constantine VI, the legal heir, and imprisoned him in a monastery, becoming the first Byzantine empress to hold all the power. This move had a significant impact, leading Pope Leo III to crown King Charles of the Franks as Emperor of the Romans in 800 , giving the Western Empire an excuse to compete with Byzantium (under the historical conditions at the time, Europe and the Mediterranean world had not completely abandoned the orthodox idea of ??one Roman Empire and believed that Irene was a woman who illegally usurped power. The Pope did not dare to do this during the reign of the orthodox Byzantine emperor).

The relationship between religious power and secular power in the Byzantine Empire was very complicated. When the common interests of the empire were threatened, the church and the emperor could unite, but when conflicts of interest occurred, the church and the emperor would fight fiercely. In general, before the 9th century, due to the strict laws and efficient centralized administration of the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantine Church was deprived of the space to participate in state affairs. Church affairs became part of the state affairs of the empire, and the Byzantine emperor became the protector of the church, controlling the appointment and removal of bishops and archbishops in the two largest dioceses of Rome and Constantinople. From Constantine I to Justinian I, many bishops were dismissed from their posts by the emperor. The Bishop of Rome (later the Pope ) had to obey the Byzantine emperor before the middle of the 8th century. At the same time, no clergy had the right to excommunicate the emperor. However, after the 9th century, the power of the emperor gradually weakened, while the strength of the church gradually increased. The church began to intervene in the administrative affairs of the empire, including hearing any cases handled by secular courts, as well as taxation and judicial privileges.

After all, the equality of the two institutionalized forces mentioned above is not a long-term solution, especially when religious (or economic) forces become stronger. In the end, it is often at the cost of one political force giving up its value orientation and eventually disintegrating (such as the collapse of the Byzantine state religion model and the former Soviet Union\'s state capitalism model).

According to the author\'s analysis in Chinese Culture is a Political Culture, because state capitalism is purely a waste of time and blatantly violates the original purpose of our nation\'s 5,000-year-old political culture, it has caused problems in China\'s current political, economic and cultural aspects: politics is too materialistic, ignorant of the will of heaven and the way of the king, and far away from the path of social fairness and justice advocated by Confucian culture; while the economy is too metaphysical, following the materialism of Western culture - GDPism is a transcendental and materialized economy, while the people\'s livelihood economy is the traditional empirical human economy that can be felt by the people personally, that is, the so-called happiness index, which should be satisfied first; ideology has become a vacuum, leading to a moral decline in the whole society, which urgently needs to be filled.

And because of the country\'s strange and incongruous situation, the Chinese people are artificially divided into two major camps of socialism and capitalism. Each camp has its own winners and losers. This naturally forms two major factions of the left and the right, and each faction wants to completely eradicate the dissenting half. In addition, there is the status quo maintenance faction who takes advantage of the situation to gain vested interests from the above-mentioned incongruous situation.

In view of the above situation and the Soviet Union’s precedent, it remains to be seen how far China’s “state capitalism” that integrates politics and economy can go.

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