China does have state control of property but then it appears china is wealthy.
How do we explain this apparent contradiction? Is China really Socialist ?Fascist ?
Is it really so wealthy? Is it inflationary measures?
At least in many coastal cities, China is much freer economically than most people give it credit for. Then there’s the countless small entrepreneurs that operate without fully paying taxes or following all regulations. And of course there is the tremendous productivity burst from every company having almost any software they want installed for free.
Like the company my wife works at, every workstation (hundreds of them) has photoshop, 3dsmax, and many other very expensive software packages installed and they didn’t pay a dime for them. They make games for QQ (the chat software everyone in China has) and you can imagine that if they had to pay for the software they wouldn’t be profitable.
Or whenever I went to make purchases of some kind of custom item - the shopowners would either not give you an official receipt, or would give you two prices - one with the official receipt (that they have to pay money to purchase, it’s like a VAT), one without. Many small restaurants are the same - they don’t give you an official receipt unless you ask for it, so save money in that way.
And you would not believe the amount of small entrepreneurs with shops in China - again, my guess is most of them operate by not paying what they are supposed to in taxes.
Also, there’s the fact that Chinese people save a tremendous portion of their income. Savings = more resources available for capital investment = real growth.
And then there are foreign companies that have set up city-like factories in special economic zones throughout China. One “factory” I used to pass by regularly when visiting customers had 80,000 employees. The legal and tax environment in these special economic zones (as well as the still low cost of labor) has attracted a ton of investment over the years.
Of course, much of the economy is still under government control, so you have to look outside of this to see the tremendous growth taking place. As to whether those parts of the economy are more socialist or fascist, I’d say fascist because nearly everyone in today’s China is interested in making money, even government officials. A small and terrible example of this was a company that was making bricks, and most of their workers (according to the media) were children kidnapped and made into virtual slaves - something that would not be possible without the local government not prosecuting the company - obviously a kind of fascism.
You can also look into how much of the loans of the big four state owned banks in China (Bank of China, Construction Bank of China, Industrial Bank of China, and Agricultural Bank of China) go to State Owned Enterprises, I think it’s a rather large percentage. That’s fascism at its best, especially with much of the newly created money from the central bank (used largely to buy up dollars deposited in the big four by exporters) being lent to State Owned Enterprises first.
But most people look at the latter and mostly ignore the former, the fact that there is a surprising amount of economic freedom in many of China’s cities today. Also remember that per capita income in China is still pretty low, so the fact that “China” is wealthy is more a measure of its enormous population than it is a measure of the average Chinese person’s wealth. And all of the State’s accumulated wealth (dollars mostly) is obtained by printing money and buying it from the banks, not a very helpful policy to the average Chinese worker or farmer (although obviously very helpful to anyone with a stake in companies that export from China)
Not that it makes much of a difference, but I’ve been in China for six years now.
China gave up Communism and embraced State Capitalism, which is basically following the same route as the Soviet Union. I wouldn’t call it Socialism because not much of it really exists anymore, and I wouldn’t call it Fascism because there isn’t some person with ultimate authority over life. I would term it as an Authoritarian-undemocratic-state-capitalist country.
Why don’t they pay for software? Do they steal it?
It’s not stealing if it’s given to you for free by the actual owner of the software.
Why don’t they pay for software? Do they steal it?
Ha, it’s far easier to find a pirated version of software in China than the real thing; there are dozens of vendors of pirated software for every legitimate one (although the legitimate ones are much larger and nicer stalls or shops).
Why pay for the real thing when there’s almost no crack down on having illegal copies?
So are they stealing it (pirating) or is it being given to them for free by developers?
Pirating it, of course =0