xiaohongshu

To be clear, I am not criticizing the poster’s English here. I am criticizing the sophistry that simply does not address the points I made, but instead presented a lot of beautiful words strung together without coherency.

Read this paragraph for example:

The resemblance is structural, not genealogical. On gaokao: yes, there is historical resonance. But resonance is not determination. The gaokao functions today as a labor-allocation mechanism under industrial conditions. Its brutality comes from scarcity and competition, not Confucian morality. If economic structure changed such that upward mobility was not concentrated into narrow credential channels, the social meaning of education would change accordingly, just as it already has for segments of the urban middle class.

Read it again and see if it even addresses my argument.

Its brutality comes from scarcity and competition, not Confucian morality.

Have I ever said that the Imperial Court Examination was about Confucian morality? No. I clearly stated that it was a class mobility mechanism that evolved out of deeply rooted traditions and entrenched elements continue to operate in its modern form.

In fact, I never even used the word “Confucian” once, and based my argument solely from the perspective of class analysis. If LLM is being used, then I can see why it got confused and associated with Confucianism because that’s what the examination is often associated with (hence my initial suspicion), but clearly has nothing to do with what I wrote.

There is no argument here, no evidence being presented here, only words. It doesn’t even correctly address what I wrote in my previous comment. You literally cannot respond because there is no argument here.

If economic structure changed such that upward mobility was not concentrated into narrow credential channels, the social meaning of education would change accordingly, just as it already has for segments of the urban middle class.

Again, pure sophistry. If anything, the statement confirms what I said about the gaokao being an extension of Imperial Court Examination that provides a class mobility mechanism that continues to this very day. The statement is saying that after 1300 years, we’re still at the same spot (the examination provides upward mobility to the court officials in the past and the urban middle class today), until something changes (which I don’t even agree with). It even contradicts the poster’s own comment that gaokao is an independent invention of the Imperial Court Examination, which is ahistorical to begin with.

As you can see, these are sophistry made up of beautiful words strung together but do not correspond to reality. There is no historical evidence being presented to support these arguments. Anyone can make vague statements like this, and LLM is especially good at it (“it is X, not Y” that are littered across the paragraphs), regardless of whether the poster is using it or not.

I don’t expect everyone to exercise the same academic rigor as I do, but be careful when you read words like these that don’t make coherent sense.

Finally, if you’re truly interested in actual academic text on the evolution of Chinese bureaucracy, start with the book I recommended above by Prof. Zhou Xueguang.

Sorry I really don’t want to accuse you of anything, but the way you write is all ChatGPT-style sophistry.

“It’s not this, but that…” “This is precisely where it matters.”

Lots and lots of these circular statements. There is no concrete example or evidence being presented here. It’s all vague statements you typically get from chatting with an LLM. I spent the last hour trying to write a detailed response but I don’t even know how to respond when the statements are sufficiently vague that you can write any answers and they still fit and continue to go in circles.

Also, I don’t mean to accuse: I am getting ChatGPT vibes here. Are these posts assisted with LLM in some ways?

I am trying to compose a detailed response to your long comment and it took more than an hour just to write the outlines, whereas yours took mere minutes to respond. The more I read, the less these arguments make sense to me.

There are a lot of circular ChatGPT-like arguments (“it’s not this, it’s that”) so I don’t even know how to respond without concrete examples being presented. I feel like I am arguing with an LLM lol (no offense, but maybe you do write like that).

If you’re interested in furthering the discussion, we need concrete examples beyond the vague LLM-style sophistry where we can go in depth and dissect in detail the historical progression of the Chinese bureaucratic system. Otherwise the answers are always going to be vague and we go in circles.

Correct. I should not have used the word reversion but to illustrate how the entire New Soviet man project has failed as soon as those institutions collapsed despite years of cultivation. The argument here is that institutions simply curb the excesses, but to completely rewire human behavior lies deeper in the sociocultural traditions of the people itself.

I think we are talking past each other. You seem to think that I am insisting the entire feudal institutions are inherited without changes, while I have clearly said that these evolved out of the traditional institutions and repurposed under capitalist mode of production.

I will give you an example: patriarchy is a feudal institution, yet it continues to perpetuate in modern day society to serve a different purpose under capitalism. This does not negate the fact that patriarchy emerges out of its feudal past and retains (“inherits”) many elements, reactionary and destructive, that hold back socioeconomic progress.

This is the essence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao saw the need for a complete and decisive break with the past traditions and saw it as a necessity towards building socialism. Of course, the liberal reformers disagree, we all know that. I am not saying Mao is completely right here but you are ignoring an important aspect of how modern Chinese bureaucracy is shaped by dismissing them all out of hand. Traditions don’t simply disappear, they evolve and stay latent in how we interact with the world every day.

China is the only civilization in the world today that has retained a continuity of its institutions for over 2200 years. To ignore that role and impact of such long-lasting traditions and equate them with the much younger, modern Western states is to ignore the historical role of such institutions in the sociopolitical and economic spheres of modern day China.

Similarly, gaokao is not the exact same institution as the Imperial Court Examination, but it is an extension and an evolution of such system. The tradition of “lineage” that has been so dominant throughout Chinese history is very much alive in modern day China’s academia, private sector and government bureaucracy.

I don’t know if you are Chinese or not, but anyone who grows up in the culture knows just how such “unwritten rules” remain in modern Chinese society, whether you are interacting with family members and at the workplace with your superiors etc.

Answering some questions from last week’s discussion that I was unable to get to:

@QinShiHuangsShlong@hexbear.net

The imperial examination system was not an abstract cultural mechanism. It was a superstructure rooted in a landlord economy based on agrarian surplus extraction. That economic base was fundamentally destroyed in the twentieth century. Land reform eliminated the landlord class. Collectivization dismantled hereditary property relations. Socialist industrialization replaced agrarian production as the dominant foundation of society.

What remains today is not the continuation of that system, but a modern bureaucratic structure necessary to govern an industrialized society of 1.4 billion people. Bureaucracy is not uniquely Chinese. The Soviet Union developed similar contradictions without Confucianism, dynasties, or imperial examinations. To explain modern governance primarily through ancient lineage systems is not materialist it is a prime example of cultural determinism.

Chairman Mao understood Chinese history deeply, yes. But he did not conclude that socialism was threatened by “thousands of years of tradition.” He concluded that new bourgeois elements emerge within socialist society itself.

The danger lay not in ancient habits, but in the material conditions of socialist transition: unequal authority, division of labor, persistence of commodity relations, and the separation of cadres from the masses. That is why Mao spoke of “capitalist roaders,” not “imperial bureaucrats.” His analysis was forward-looking, not civilizationally fatalistic. If the problem were simply inherited culture, socialism would be impossible by definition.

Following your reasoning, Mao must be an extremist who simply wanted to cause maximum chaos and destruction, which is essentially the narrative pushed by Western propaganda.

Because why would Mao want to completely break with thousands of years of tradition with the Cultural Revolution? Perhaps he had identified crucial elements within the Chinese societal traditions that are responsible for propagating such reactionary features in the contemporary socialist movement? Otherwise the entire logic behind Cultural Revolution would not make sense if it is just to correct for some mistake about capitalist restoration.

He was labeled as an extremist and a radical, yes, but he was probably not completely wrong. Look at what happened after the collapse of the USSR - 70 years of institutions simply went down the drain, and the society reverted to its past, reactionary form, just like that. It demonstrates that 70 years of institutions by themselves had failed to transform human behavior. Mao probably was on to something about culture and tradition.

(Note: personally, I am not onboard with the Cultural Revolution like the ultra-left does, but I am starting to see the point)

Understanding this, you will realize that the prioritization of East Asian culture on education did not just appear out of nowhere. It has clear ties with class mobility that goes back thousands of years. I guarantee you it’s not because people in East Asia like to study and read books lol. It has more to do with how you (and your entire family) can leap into a higher class and leave behind generations of poverty, a tradition that is still very much alive in modern day China.

Dialectical materialism does not promise purity. It explains motion. And motion means struggle, correction, instability, and transformation.

Yet none of these are present in your arguments. They are mere rhetoric that did not tell us anything about the Chinese system. Your arguments essential boil down to: “China is building towards socialism, there are problems and they are being corrected”. Anyone can make those statements, but there is no explanatory and predictive power. It is not dialectics, it is at best, sophistry.

Let’s go over how dialectics work, using Marx’s classic example (in a very simplified form for illustration purpose):

1. Maximization of capital accumulation necessarily involves the abolishment of the feudal serfdoms to unleash the productive force of labor
2. The transformation of agrarian serfs into industrial workers emancipates the peasantry from being tied to their land, thereby unleashing the revolutionary potential of the newly formed proletariat class whose labor is no longer tied to land.

Marx identified a key contradiction in the industrialization process undertaken by the capitalist class.

To maximize capital accumulation, they had to destroy the feudal system that held back the productive capacity, yet in the process, it emancipates the peasantry from their land and tied their labor to production, not land as it did previously. To maximize profit, the industrialists needed to extract surplus value from labor; yet the process also caused the labor who is no longer attached to their land to have “nothing to lose but their chains”. Therefore, capitalism creates the necessary conditions for its own demise and paves the way towards socialism.

Note how the dialectical process captures the causal interactions between labor and capital under the process of capitalist industrialization. It has explanatory power. It has predictive value. It actually tells us something about the capital accumulation process that goes beyond mere rhetoric. It may not be entirely accurate, but it is a scientific form of socialism that goes far beyond what the utopians had attempted in their own analysis.

——

@thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net

This part is always so interesting to me, because on the face of it the imperial examination system is deeply egalitarian in a way no other ancient civilisation approached. The idea that it was not genes but effort and intelligence that would allow you access to a better life is astounding to see so far back. There's always been a tension between trying to co-opt that examination system for the already existing great families, but its existence at all is always so shocking to me.

As I had explained in the class mobility post, the Imperial Court Examination was a response to the feudal oligarchy, most famously the Guanlong group that had begun to erode the authority of the emperors by the 5th-8th century.

It was essentially a parallel track to promote court officials loyal to the emperors, acting as a counterbalance force against the feudal oligarchy in the imperial court.

By the time we get to Northern Song in the 10th-11th century, the feudal oligarchy in the form of menfa (门阀) had been completely purged (Huang Chao rebellion put the final nail in the coffin) and the Song emperors had assumed total control of the bureaucracy. Ironically, this caused the weakening of the state control over its peripheral vassals and eventually led to the invasion by the Jurchens (Jin) and the Mongols (Yuan).

See my recommendation below for Prof. Zhou Xueguang’s book that elaborates on the cyclical centralized and decentralized nature of the Chinese state political apparatuses.

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@truly@lemmygrad.ml

Please can you correct my understanding: Modern day China has a bureaucratic class, Mao has noted the tendency toward a new bureaucratic class, Ancient China had a bureaucratic class, we have not seen the system sustain itself without a cultural revolution.

While, yes, the bureaucratic tendency is real, are we not witnessing the system attempt to renew itself? We are having a discussion over an unsubstantiated article, all we know for sure is that they were removed as part of corruption investigations. We must simply wait and see.

I am as skeptical of the article as you are (whether it is about the nuclear secrets). However, the purge of the highest ranks in the CMC (and especially Zhang Youxia, who is noted for his close ties with Xi) is real and exposes a corruption problem within the military that has permeated even at the very top. We simply don’t know the details (and probably won’t get the true details, like ever) and the longer term consequences. But for sure, this isn’t some mid ranking officials who took money on the side.

For understanding the evolution of Chinese bureaucracy, the logic behind the cyclical centralization and decentralization of power, I strongly recommend Prof. Zhou Xueguang’s The Institutional Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach, who is professor of sociology at Stanford.

It is a very well researched and foundational academic text towards understanding how the enormous bureaucratic system operates at various levels. I know of plenty PhD students specializing in Chinese history and sociology who swear by it.

Still, none of what you’re saying addresses my point, which is that material analysis must necessarily come from understanding the historical progress.

I’ll give you one example: I have heard so many “Western leftists” trying to argue why China should/should not have billionaires and despite all the rhetoric and the flowery language, they never approach it from the historical trajectory itself. They’ll tell you how the CPC controls the billionaires (lol, in that case, why do you need billionaires in the first place), but not the entire economic history since post-Mao reform, the decentralization of the economy, the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, the privatization wave of the mid-1990s, the end of welfare housing and the liberalization of real estate market under Zhu Rongji in 1998, the joining of WTO in 2001 etc.

Without understanding the historical progress, you cannot understand why we come to where we are today. The system and the policy framework evolve out of such historical events. No amount of rhetoric or flowery language can explain that.

As I have explained before, the Imperial Court Examination evolved out of the emperors attempting to curb the influence of the feudal haozu (豪族) since Emperor Han Wudi’s Northern Expedition, which later evolved into the feudal lords (menfa, 门阀) by the Northern Wei dynasty. Such bureaucratic system for class mobility (a core aspect of East Asian culture) is still very much alive in China today, albeit taking different forms.

As Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. To understand where we are today, we need to go way back in time and approach history from the perspective of class analysis. How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.

And if one cannot understand that, one cannot understand why Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution. Remember that Mao himself claimed to have read Zizhi Tongjian for at least 17 times (!!), I’m sure he knows very well how the deep bureaucracy of the Chinese society works.

(To be clear, I am not on board the CR stuff like the ultra-left, but I am starting to grasp the thinking behind it after re-reading a lot of Mao Selected Works lately lol).

There is no need to downplay the purging of all the highest ranking generals in the CMC. We know these are serious problems. If you think this is just removing a few leaders at the very top and that the core integrity of the chain-of-command is somehow going to remain unaffected, then I don’t know what else to say. This isn’t some mid ranking officials, these are the people commanding vast influence over the military corp.

EDIT: Just want to add that I don’t expect everyone here to exercise the same academic rigor as I do (which isn’t much, to be honest, since I’m not trying to publish in an academic journal), as this is a fringe shitposting forum, so having as much fun as possible while learning from real world events should be the priority.

But understand that flowery language, while nice for propaganda purpose, is both non-materialist (not rooted in class-based analysis) and ahistorical (does not confront historical evidence).

Anyone can say “China is working towards achieving socialism”, but the statement in itself is meaningless from a dialectic materialist standpoint.

If it succeeds, I can say “see, I told you so”, and if it doesn’t, I can also say “look, I never said when it will happen, there are many twists and turns before we get there”. It doesn’t help you abstract the core contradictions from a historical materialist perspective, does not provide any explanatory power for the current events, nor does it serve anything useful for material analysis as it doesn’t involve concrete and specific examples of historical evidence.

So, while I don’t pretend that everything I say is correct, I try to approach my analysis with these criteria in mind.

Not sure I believe this but this news from last week may corroborate: Ex-CNNC general manager faces disciplinary probe China Daily

Gu Jun, former deputy secretary of the Party Leadership Group and general manager of China National Nuclear Corporation, is suspected of serious violations of Party discipline and national laws and is currently under disciplinary review and supervisory investigation, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the National Supervisory Commission announced on Monday.

He took office as general manager of China Nuclear Engineering and Construction Corporation in April 2015, and in 2018, he transferred to the post of general manager of CNNC, a post he held until his retirement in 2024.

From wikipedia:

CNNC oversees all aspects of China's civilian and military nuclear programs.

Xi spent 10 years fighting corruption only to realize that it came from the people closest to him lol.

Zhang Youxia is considered a close ally to Xi because their fathers were close comrades and served together during the war. During the 20th CPC Congress in 2022, Zhang who was supposed to retire was given an extended appointment at the CMC.

The entire bureaucracy is deeply corrupted and with the recent news, likely the entire military chain-of-command as well. No amount of purge is going settle that, as is evident after 10 years of anti-corruption campaign. The system needs to be completely reformed.

Anyone with some familiarity of Chinese culture will known that corrupt bureaucracy is a latent feature that has run for thousands of years. When you’re inheriting thousands-years old civilization, you also inherit the deeply entrenched cronyism (euphemistically called guanxi, or “relationship”) that can be traced back to the rise of Imperial Court Examination during the 5th-8th century, the Northern Wei-Sui-Tang dynasties. The careers of court officials are tied to the examiners who promoted them from the examination in the first place, and become part of the cliques of the political factions their superiors are tied to. This is still how it works today in China, whether it is in academia, in the private sector or in the government bureaucracy. Coming from the right “lineage” (e.g. who did you serve under, who promoted you etc.) is very important when it comes to career promotion.

Mao already realized the gravity of the situation after purging the landlords in 1953, that the reactionary elements never went away but instead shapeshifted within the party. This was why he considered a Cultural Revolution necessary and an urgency, because according to Mao, a new socialist society could only emerge if it makes a complete and decisive break with its past, and rid of all the historical burdens.

Of course, Mao was fighting thousands-years old institution and it was too radical a move, and we all know how that turned out. The liberals won, and here we are.

This was the same problem that Stalin faced as well. After the great purge, the liberals still came back under Khrushchev as soon as he died.

There is no need for China to build up the trade surplus (accumulation of dollar-denominated assets) in order to build its industries. As Mosler said, the shipment of Chinese goods to the US could all sink at sea and it does not affect one bit for the monetary situation in China, because as a monetary sovereign state, the Chinese government can always create the RMB (its own currency) needed to drive investment.

The reason China accumulates dollar-denominated assets is because it is following the IMF export-led growth strategy, that in order to keep their government deficit down, they have to first accumulate foreign assets to offset the deficit spending by the government. So, Chinese labor and resources are converted into real goods and services that Westerners enjoy, before they are allowed to invest domestically after earning the foreign revenues.

Keen does not understand that the US dollars (or dollar-denominated assets) do not “leave” the US currency zone when China earns it, so in his model, China is accumulating those assets while the US has to lose them. This failure in understanding the monetary logic is behind his entire argument.

Put another way, MMT asserts that the Chinese government does not have to balance its budget per the IMF. It simply has to run up the deficit (like the Americans do) to keep its industries working and workers employed, but this time, instead of an export-oriented model, Chinese labor and resources will be used to fulfill the demands of its domestic economy. Similarly, the US does not have to de-industrialize itself to preserve the reserve currency status of the dollar, because the US government can always run the fiscal policy to ensure full employment, social welfare and free healthcare to all its citizens without losing the dollar hegemony.

That’s the point. These are all very senior people with vast connections and influence (you have to think about the entire factions/cliques under them), many of whom were promoted by Xi himself. You don’t shake up the entire command structure like this for no reason, because it will have many underlying and unexpected consequences on the military itself. Is it a Stalinist style purge, or is it something else?

I usually don’t try to speculate on the military stuff (because reasons), just reporting it because it is indeed unusual. Everyone is welcome to speculate what it means though.

I don’t disagree. I am just laying out the dynamics of the inherent contradictions of American capitalism. Whether it will go down a certain path and whether it will succeed are entirely different questions, and the new contradictions that will emerge in doing so. It’s like trying to model the weather - we know a lot about how air movement and pressure systems cause precipitation, but we can only forecast it (with some level of accuracy) no more than a few days out. It is a non-linear complex system.

Keen is very good as a heterodox economist (way better than the neoclassical economists) and his Debunking Economics book was foundational to my own understanding on economics many years ago.

However, he does not understand how international trade works - Keen believes that when a country earns trade surplus (say, China earns USD by selling stuff to the US), that foreign currency actually leaves the original currency zone (USD leaving the US banking system). This faulty understanding of the monetary system was fully exposed during his debate with Warren Mosler back in 2018. Bill Mitchell wrote an entire blog post debunking this misconception on trade. It still amazes me that even very smart people can have such fundamental misunderstanding about the topics within their own field of study.

Keen even admits that his Minsky software is based on the European central banking model, which does not reflect how fully monetary sovereign system actually works. In his model, the state (currency issuer) is merely one of the players rather than the principal actor that dictates how the financial system actually runs, as MMT has laid out very nicely.

His double-entry book keeping accounting stuff is very good though when it comes to understanding how the financial flow operates in between the institutions.