CAPITAL THEFT IN CHINA
At a crossroad, China finally adopts a law to stop rural land theft and plunder by an Anglophile cabal of Hong Kong, Shanghai property moguls and their bankers. It's an ominous sign – for the cabal.
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Mandate of Capital
In another world, or tianxia 天下, capital had a purpose different from the way the West (and, later, their Anglophiles) had made of it ever since the century before Adam Smith (1723-1790). Then, as it is today, capital was for, the West, a way of expropriating rent income and for profit accumulation.
In China though, until as recent as Qing China (1644-1911), capital meant power. It still is, and hence has remained the monopoly of the state. As power it is harnessed for capital works (roads, canals, opening farm land, buildings and palaces, the Great Wall), for the national defense and especially to be used as reserve to be withdrawn to stabilize prices (via 常平倉 changpingcang or grain stockpiles, five types 五谷 of which were a must) and in national emergencies as famines and natural disasters.
Thus, the economic and capital history of China was this millennia-long narrative in husbanding production and then converting and diverting its surpluses into stores of physical capital from which state power was wielded. That is, capital was always generated internally, not imported, and only after that is it treated as a part of national resources.
In its etymological beginnings, capital was never treated as a factor of production. It was treated instead as an outcome, and this made economic sense. Once regarded as outcome, capital became not the primary driver of, or a device for, state planning and policy construction but as an arbiter and as object of planning in the service of a larger cause, to wit, national welfare and, in its turn, the state's prestige and power.
As a measure of success, or failure, of governance, capital would therefore determine, and be determined by, the direction in the Mandate of Heaven, or tianming 天命 to which all rulers (and emperors) swear to uphold. For thousands of years, the Mandate's operative words had never changed: peace and prosperity. Ever since the Zhou era (周 c.1046 BCE-256 BCE) those words became the benchmark into how well the state had delivered on the Mandate declared to all Chinese under it, that is, tianxia天下.
This – both the tianxia and its corollary the tianming – remains true to and are valid as conceptual instruments of China today under the Communist Party of China, CPC, through the party's constitution which functions in both the letter and the spirit of the Mandate.
Socialism with Chinese characteristics is, of course, an offhand label of China's present day development agenda. But this label is highly misleading, when not downright false because (a) what's so Chinese about the socialism in China, and (b) there is no socialism in China without, first, the Chinese development model.
That label has to presume that socialism preceded a particular way of Chinese development when this sequence is patently false. The pair of Chinese conceptual tools, namely tianxia and tianming, not only preceded socialism by at least 3,000 years but the pair is also central to and instrumental in how China is governed today, exactly as it was carried out conceptually under dynastic China.
Regardless of the label, socialist or capitalist, China today is the inheritor of the China under the Zhou, Han, Tang dynasty eras and so on, and the present governance model flows direct from those earlier eras. Why individual westerners, whether Marxists or capitalists, are never able to see this point is hardly surprising: they belong to no history nor civilization; they don't know how to read Chinese, don't know how appreciate Chinese culture but are only loyal to ideologies that they had turn into some personal crusade.
We Chinese have no other way to manage our nation except for that which had been passed down through the ages, in writing, and which had been put to use for millennia and successfully at that. Why western commentators should presume otherwise, that a Chinese system of government must follow the West, left or right, is obvious, given their ideological indoctrination and individual racist prejudices and bigotry.
In the 周禮 zhouli, which described the organization of an existing government 3,000 years ago, one chapter records the ministry named as 冬官 dongguan or Winter Office. Its function, the zhouli says is as 司空 sikong, that is, an 'Overseer of Public Works (Minister of Works)', managing 事官 shiguan or 'the office affairs' of 30 officials who, in their turn, shall look after dykes, canals, irrigation and all other public works. In the zhouli are detailed descriptions of duties of more than three hundred bureaucratic offices gathered under six ministries.* All these historical and empirical facts make the western Left-Right debate (also see this) about whether China is socialist and capitalist totally stupid and beside the point, the babbling of useless White men and women with nothing else better to do.
In the hands of the Chinese private sector, capital was purely, and remains so, as an incidental outcome, a beneficiary of a tianxia national agenda. Private capital is and has never been the target nor is it the purpose of fiscal or monetary policies. Which explains why national or state-sponsored programs, endeavors and projects never ever turns to or involves private capital. The political rationale for this harks back to tianxia and tianming.
One result in this (Chinese) model of development is continuity, from 3,000 years ago until the present. Without exception, all of China's development activities had their traceable origins and drew their inspiration directly from the Han era, 2,200 years ago: the Silk Road, Grand Canal, the 5G communications and rail and road transport networks, the South China Sea Great Wall, State-owned enterprises, greening the desert, buffer stockpiles, US Treasury bills, gold reserves, the PLA navy modernization, space exploration....
The point in all these efforts was, as the Mandate requires, peace and prosperity. Capital was the means to those goals. In today's economic parlance, this agenda is called development.
China has been practising economic development for 3,000 years and has no need for the West, Left or Right, IMF or World Bank, to tell the Chinese how to proceed. China's economic rise since 1980 is hardly a “miracle”, as whitey pundits and commentators like to call it. China is simply picking up from where it had left off after a century of interruption by relentless western intrusions, conquest and plunder.
Today, attempts at that interruption continues but these are conducted by Anglophiles, their bankers and media propagandists, and thanks to western ideological doctrine. This is a sea change in tactics since the days of Smith. The change being that western markets and state functions are wholly privatized and, worse for it, made entirely the preserve of, first, the merchants and today the bankers and fund managers.
For a while, between circa 1980 to 2000, China national capital policy which for 3,000 years had served it so well was also hijacked to serve the profits of a select private group who brand themselves as “liberals”. One such outfit present in Hong Kong and Shanghai calls itself the Center for China and Globalization. What do they want from the Chinese? Answer, the last bastion of China's economic model, namely land with which to cream off profits for their cabal of bankers and real estate developers (below).
Or, in another way of looking at the same thing, the cabal is trying to hijack a political instrument of state power – capital – to serve their own, private interests.
This will never be permitted.
Here, hence, is China's final reply, delivered recently to this pro-imperialist, pro-US rent-seeking group: There will be reforms in the rural economy because they are necessary. But those reforms – the lifting of restrictions on land use – won't be used to generate capital for the Anglophile cabal of thieves and bankers. Instead, rural land use by individuals will be expanded, as a collective endeavor. And within this expanded realm, all existing structures of ownership will be preserved by law from plunder and thievery by property developers. Capital is protected from capital.
Called the "Law of the People's Republic of China on Rural Collective Economic Organizations", it was adopted at the 10th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress on June 28, 2024. (2024年6月28日第十四届全国人民代表大会常务委员会第十次会议通过的《中华人民共和国农村集体经济组织法》。)
These liberals can now shut the fuck up, and fuck off. (Re: 鼓吹私有化的公知们该闭嘴了, Red Culture 红色文化网 2024 July 4.) We, the descendants of the Dragon, no longer want to hear from them or, if they continue with their propaganda and subversive activities, we swear, in the name of our forefathers, they won’t be an inch of Chinese property on which they will stand. This goes especially to those Hongkie Ronnie Chans and their academic propagandists. Don't tread on us, Chinaman!
Notes
*The zhouli 周禮 or Rites of Zhou is very modern in its depiction of government functions, no different from China's existing set-up or of any nation worldwide. In it is the world's first description of how a government, in this case, the Zhou government was organized, 西周, 11th century-770 BCE. That was China's first political/governance model laid out top down, as a system, 3,000 years ago. For the original Chinese text, see: https://ctext.org/rites-of-zhou. For a partial English version taken not from the original Chinese but translated from the French translation: “Translation of Édouard Biot's translation of Book/juan One of the Zhouli 周禮.” Also see, Liu Yucai and Luke Habberstad. A Summary of Textual Research on the Liji 禮記 (Rites Records), 2018.
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