COMMUNIST CHINA IS NOW A POSSIBLE NEOFASCIST STATE

There it is a growing discussion between experts and political historians about the changes that are happening in modern comunist China, a country that used to be a "maoist" (or stalinist) state after WW2. China -as we all know- was a country (under the leadeship of the harsh dictator Mao-tse-tung) where the worst extremism of the communism ideology was being developed in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. And Mao rejected every link with the fascist regime of the "Kuomintang", a Chinese nationalist political party that had an alleged history of fascism under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership.

In blue the map area of China controlled by the fascist Kuomintang in the mid 1930s

Indeed we all know that communism in eastern Europe and Russia/URSS disappeared in the early 1990s, but remained in China and other countries (like Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, etc...). Consequently, in China there has been an evolution in the local communist party in order to survive. And this evolution seems to have created a country with characteristics similar to the ones that existed in fascist Italy.

Let me explain better: fascism is ruled by a party that controls the economy with "corporativism" (that is made by huge state companies with monopoly in their area of activity) but allows capitalism and the existence of religions to every citizen, communism is ruled by a party and has a state owned economy without allowing capitalism and religion existense. Both political ideologies of communism and fascism promote nationalism and a moderate local ethnicity/racism, with the consequence of promoting militarism. The huge growth of the italian (& german) economy in the 1930s impressioned the actual leaders of China (like Xi Jinping), who commented that without military expansionism (that provoked WW2) the fascist regime in Italy -with corporate government companies (ruling the economy without opposition) and capitalism plus religions- probably would be in power even today.....and this kind of fascist corporativism is exactly what is happening in communist China today!


Of course we have to see in the next decades if the leaders of communist China have learned the lesson of not going to war, risking the end of fascist Italy.....

Furthermore, allow me to remember that years ago I have read an article (written in 2012 by Didi Kirsten Tatlow) of the New Youk Times that questioned if "China is a fascist state". Here it is some interesting excerpts:

Chinese politics is controlled by the Communist Party and its powerful families and factions, so when the son of a former party chief says the state is virtually “fascist,” it’s worth listening.That’s what Hu Deping, son of the late Hu Yaobang, the party general secretary forced to resign in 1987 for being too reform-minded, said to a group of mostly Chinese businesspeople and environmentalists in late 2005, in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square....Is today’s China fascist? To cite a few characteristics, starting with the one-party state: Since the economic reforms that followed the death of Mao Tse Tung, it has grown immensely wealthy through its state-owned companies, some of which rank among the world’s richest. What was once a poor, authoritarian state has become a rich, authoritarian state.The rights to speak and associate freely remain tightly hobbled despite some relaxation, and some top officials openly scorn democracy. The courts obey the party’s directives.Official slogans increasingly exhort nationalism and “national rejuvenation,” a concept rooted in a mystical sense of nationhood popular with fascist thinkers in the last century.“The signs have long been there,” said Wang Lixiong, a prominent writer and scholar. “I feel there is a very clear trend toward fascism, and the source of fascism comes from the ever-growing power of the power holders.” China is “a police state,” he said, where power rules for power’s sake.The passing of Mao did not lead to power-sharing, it just stripped China of its Communist ideology, and no convincing value system has filled the gap, he said.

Indeed there was a time when China was referred to as a society which was Communist or Post-Communist; today, the terms Authoritarian Capitalist or Capitalist with Asian/Chinese Characteristics are more common. However, there is a new term that appears to be increasingly applicable to the operation of the Chinese state and its impact on the lives of Chinese people and, above all, the education of Chinese youth born in the 1990s and later: "NEO-FASCIST CHINA".

It is increasingly clear that China is the most powerful, mature and internationally accepted "fascist state" in global history and its status as such should cause us all a great deal of studies but also worries.

China communist economy is actually booming, as can be seen in this 2022 skyline of Shanghai

To call contemporary China a fascist state is nothing particularly new. In March 2010, the Taipei Times published an editorial by a J. Michael Cole, which refers to the writings of italian Umberto Eco and english Robert Paxton to match accepted definitions of fascism with the socio-political realities in China. Cole points to the realities of emphasizing the role of the nation in all matters, including sports; a sense of national grievance as the core of national identity; the paranoid control of any potential opposition; and the rise of a "moderate" Han Chinese racism. Cole is right in much of his analysis. But for all its correctness, his analysis from Taipei cannot compare to the sadness & preoccupation that is the lived reality of watching this fascist state unfold before one's very eyes in the center of Chinese power in Beijing.

Paxton provides a useful definition of fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” And this is exactly what is happening in China actually

Fascist states have long relied upon their competitive advantage in attracting foreign investment. Authoritarian control of the labor force and national policymaking makes good business sense. Such was the case with Italy and Germany during the inter-war period and such is the case with China's dizzyingly rapid rise today. The ability of a totalitarian fascist state to control the labor force, suppress dissent and put investment over social welfare makes such states highly attractive to businesses. Such is the case today with China. Coca-Cola's CEO inadvertently demonstrated the fascist nature of the Chinese state when he lauded the “one-stop shop in terms of the Chinese foreign investment agency,” wherein the federal and local Chinese government agencies are competing for investment, with their population paying the cost in terms of reduced labor rights and environmental protections.

Chinese will often accept this as a necessary part of their national development, a development which seems increasingly to benefit only those with power and connections and to increasingly marginalize the common people. One need not look merely at the statements of business leaders, but much mainstream media attention has praised the “efficiency” of the Chinese fascist regime while deriding the clumsiness and inconvenience of states which remain nominal liberal democracies.

As written by Sam Hudson of the University of Cambridge, the issue of Chinese fascism is one which the people of the world must pay much greater attention than they have to date. Too much emphasis is placed on the economic power of China without thought to the origins of this power and the long-term sociopolitical consequences it may have for the world.

The roots of China’s descent into fascism can be traced back to Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to power and economic reforms that openly rejected central planning in favour of market-based economics. These reforms were instrumental in not only achieving China’s rapid economic growth, but also in ensuring a place on the world stage, through opening up the country to global markets. On the surface, these reforms relinquished state power over the economy; but by allowing private enterprise, they laid the foundations for an economy similar to those found in the fascist countries of the 1930s and 40s.

A core facet of fascism is the weaponisation of capitalism to help further the authority and interests of the government. As opposed to Soviet-style centrally planned economics, fascists are quite content with the development of private monopolies and the conglomeration of private businesses, enriching their owners – as long as it is in the interest of the government to do so. The tolerance of the Zaibatsu by the Imperial Japanese Militarist Government, the huge help to the Fiat and the Agnelli group done by Mussolini and the Nazi’s open support of powerful monopolies in Germany such as IG Farben, Krupp and Rheinmetall, pay testament to this. China’s economy is far closer to this form of fascistic weaponised capitalism, tolerating powerful monopolies such as Huawei as long as they continue to silently pledge fealty, than it is to a market-reformed Soviet Union along the lines of Gorbachev’s russian perestroika.

If Dengism laid the economic roots for the development of Chinese fascism, it is Xi Jinping that allowed it to blossom. In 1995, italian Umberto Eco provided one of the most comprehensive definitions of fascism in his essay “Ur-Fascism” - "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" (https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Eco-urfascism.pdf). By looking at China’s adherence to the properties that were laid out in his essay, we can quickly see that the Chinese government is at heart, fascist without any doubt.

Anyway, the improvements in this possible neofascist China in the last years are astonishing the world: Let's think -as an example- to the "Maglev" trains that are being created in the 2020s!

The Maglev train network studied for China at more than 600km/hour speed

Finally, what strikes me more is the question: if China has grown to the level of developing "futuristic" Maglev trains in just 30 years (in 1994 it was a mostly underdeveloped country!), what will be able to do in another 30 years, as a possible neofascist state?

"China has the largest network of high-speed railways in the world, covering 95 percent of cities with a population of more than a million, according to the Ministry of Transport. China aims to build 200,000 kilometers of railways, 460,000 kilometers of highways, and 25,000 kilometers of high-level sea lanes by 2035, according to a 15-year transport expansion guideline published in February this year. The network is designed to support the "National 123" transportation circle, which stands for one-hour commute within the city, two-hour trip between city clusters and three-hour travel to major cities nationwide, read the plan. Lu Huapu, director of the Transportation Research Institute of Tsinghua University, told the Global Times that the development of the high-speed transportation system helps China realize the "National 123 transportation circle," which was proposed in the national guideline." G.T.

In 2022 China created a prototype of a Maglev commercial train capable to reach -in theory- nearly 1000 km/hour (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1229097.shtml)