Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Smartphones are displayed on a large screen outside the Apple Store on Wangfujing Street in Beijing, September 4, 2021.
Even as China and the United States duke it out to determine which shall dominate the 21st century, these two world powers actually resemble each other in some surprising ways.
Those ways, perhaps even more surprisingly, are economic. That’s because both nations have been becoming more capitalistic in the worst way. Since the beginning of the century, income and wealth have been concentrated at the top in both.
Today, according to a study from the Credit Suisse Research Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent of the Chinese own 31 percent of the nation’s wealth, up from 21 percent in 2000. In the U.S., that figure stands at 35 percent, also up by roughly that much since 2000.
According to Yao Yang, a professor of economics at Peking University, “China is one of the worst countries in terms of redistribution, despite being a socialist country. Public spending is overly concentrated in cities, elite schools and so on.”
If that diagnosis also sounds considerably applicable to the good old USA, minus the “despite socialism” stuff, perhaps that’s because China isn’t really a socialist country. It’s state capitalist, but that still begs the question of how to describe the state. Until recently, I’ve favored the term “Leninist capitalist.” But with President Xi’s personalization of authority, the unprecedented growth of the nation’s digital surveillance system, and now its move to reward or penalize its citizens with a system of “social credits” (expressions of loyalty as monitored by its surveillance technology), I think “Stalinist capitalism” comes nearer the mark. And Stalinism, back in the day, was also profoundly nationalistic, at least toward its homeland—much more so than Leninism, much less Trotskyism, ever was.
History is hard on the categorical models that the sages have said should guide our understanding. Here at home, Joe Biden is struggling to transform us into something closer to social democracy, along the lines that the indispensable Bernie Sanders has been laying out for decades. Of course, as any Marxist or even any political scientist will tell you, the force behind social democracy is invariably a powerful labor movement, of which the U.S. is singularly devoid. Then again, if we were less devoid, there would be more Democratic senators to overrule Joe Manchin and push the Biden agenda forward.
And therein lies another similarity between the U.S. and China: Both nations suppress unions, which is a primary reason why both nations have such towering levels of economic inequality. To be sure, more Americans now support unions, which had a 68 percent approval rating in last week’s Pew poll, than at any time in the past half-century. And given the level of unauthorized strikes that regularly beset China, we can only assume, in the absence of polling, that a lot of Chinese think well of unions, too. Due to the anti-democratic features of both the Chinese and American governmental systems, however, even supermajority support for workers’ rights doesn’t translate into official tolerance, much less support, for workers’ rights. Yes, the Biden administration is doing all it can to increase those rights, but in the absence of legislative reform, which requires ditching the filibuster, there’s only so much it can do.
At the root of both nations’ domestic ills, then, are their democratic deficiencies. China clearly leads us in this, of course, but we both have a long way to go.
