You also oppose “global market success” to “socialist internationalism” as if socialist internationalism means loudly exporting revolution while leaving one’s own people poor and militarily vulnerable. China’s international role is not reducible to charity or rhetoric. It provides an alternative pole of development finance, trade, infrastructure, technology transfer, and diplomatic space for countries suffocated by imperialist conditionality. It protects strategic space for states such as the DPRK, supports multipolarity, and weakens the monopoly of the imperialist bloc. You may dislike that this does not look like your fantasy of permanent insurrectionary theater, but serious anti-imperialism is measured by changes in the balance of world power, not by slogans shouted from safe countries.

Your section on “democratic workers’ control” is perhaps the most revealing. You define democracy as liberal pluralism, then declare China undemocratic because it does not reproduce liberal pluralism. That is not an argument; it is a preference. China has grassroots elections, village self-governance, people’s congresses, consultative mechanisms, mass organizations, petitioning, internal Party discipline, cadre evaluation, and a system in which officials rise through demonstrated administrative capacity rather than television charisma and donor patronage. At the lower levels, people directly elect deputies and participate in local governance. Higher bodies are formed through structured indirect election and appointment systems tied to performance, consultation, and Party leadership.

Is this the same as Western multiparty competition? No. That is the point. Western liberal democracy is not class-neutral democracy. It is a political form adapted to capitalist rule: money controls media, parties, lobbying, think tanks, universities, NGOs, and the boundaries of acceptable debate. You call that “free speech” because capitalists are free to manufacture consent. China does not grant capitalists, separatists, comprador forces, or reactionaries an unlimited right to organize the restoration of bourgeois rule. Good. A socialist state that allows its class enemies to dismantle it in the name of abstract freedom is not democratic; it is suicidal.

Finally, your use of Deng’s “black cat, white cat” line is a spectacular misreading. Deng was not saying China was not socialist. He was arguing that planning and markets are tools, not class essences. A planned mechanism can exist under capitalism; a market mechanism can exist under socialism. The decisive question is what social project these tools serve. Deng’s point was not “capitalism is fine.” It was that socialist construction in a poor country must develop the productive forces, and that mechanisms should be judged by whether they serve that task. This is basic. The fact that you turned it into “even Deng didn’t believe China was socialist” suggests you have quoted a sentence without understanding the debate it belongs to.

You have not shown that China is “not socialist by any stretch of the imagination.” You have on the other hand shown that your understanding is embarrassingly shallow. You define socialism as an already purified society without markets, without inequality, without labor conflicts, without foreign trade, without bureaucracy, without contradiction, and without the need for historical development. Such a society has never existed. It is not socialism; it is a moral cartoon.

China is socialist not because it has solved every contradiction, but because the dominant political power remains organized around Communist Party leadership, public ownership of the commanding heights, national planning, land socialization, poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, technological sovereignty, and the subordination of capital to national and social development. Its contradictions are real. Some are dangerous. Some require sharper struggle. But contradictions inside socialist construction are not evidence that socialism is absent. They are the very material through which socialism develops or fails.

The difference between us is simple: I analyze China as a historical society moving through real contradictions under pressure from imperialism, underdevelopment, class struggle, and uneven development. You analyze it as a checklist you copied from liberal anti-communism and then delivered with the smugness of someone who thinks condescension is a substitute for study. Before telling Chinese communists that we do not understand our own country, perhaps do the minimum work of understanding what socialism actually means.

Split into sections due to length.

Firstly, I do not “love my government.” Love is not a category one applies to a state. I support the People’s Republic (just like 90+% of my countrymen according to Harvard) because I judge states by historical function, class orientation, developmental outcome, and the material transformation of people’s lives. That may sound strange if your political imagination is limited to liberal consumer preference, where a government is either a brand one likes or a boot one licks. But for people whose villages, families, and regions were actually transformed by socialist construction, the question is not whether the state gives us sentimental feelings. The question is what social forces it represents, what historical tasks it has accomplished, and whether it continues to push society toward collective development rather than private domination. You sneer at Chinese people supporting their own system as if we are all hypnotized, bribed, or afraid. That is a convenient colonial habit: when Westerners support their institutions, it is “democratic legitimacy”; when Chinese people support ours, it must be servility.

Your remarks on Marxism are even weaker. Nobody (except maybe you) says Marx is the endpoint. Marxism is not a religious attachment to one nineteenth-century writer. It is a developing body of analysis that has passed through Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng, and into contemporary Marxist political economy and philosophy. If you had even a basic familiarity with the field, names such as Cheng Enfu, Wang Weiguang, Zhang Yibing, Yang Geng, Li Shenming, and other contemporary Marxist scholars would not be invisible to you. The fact that you think “Marxism” means stopping at Marx shows exactly why you should lower your tone when speaking with others.

Calling Marxism “outdated” while treating modern bourgeois economics as neutral is also not the devastating critique you think it is. Bourgeois economics is very good at formal modeling, price signals, and technical management; it is much weaker when asked to explain class power, imperialism, unequal exchange, historical development, ownership, crisis, and the political character of production. Marxism did not become obsolete because marginalists learned to draw curves. A science is not abandoned because the world changes; it develops because the world changes. “Orthodox Marxism” frozen in the nineteenth century would indeed be useless. But that is not Marxism as a living method. That is your straw man, and frankly not a very sturdy one.

Then you ask whether China’s economy is the same as it was in 1949. Of course it is not. This is such a childish point that it is embarrassing you presented it as education. China in 1949, China in 1956, China in 1978, China in 2001, and China today are not identical because societies develop. The Soviet Union in 1949 was not identical to China in 1949; both were socialist. The United States in 1949 is not identical to the United States today; both are capitalist. Britain, France, Japan, and the United States all have different institutional forms; all remain capitalist because capital retains social dominance. Political-economic systems are not defined by whether every policy, ownership form, or administrative mechanism remains frozen forever. They are defined by the dominant relations of power, the direction of development, and the class character of the state.

That brings us to your central error: you confuse the existence of contradictions with proof that the system is not socialist. This is the sort of mistake one makes after learning socialism as a moral aesthetic rather than as a historical transition. Socialism is not the instant abolition of every inherited contradiction. It is the period in which the working people, through their state and institutions, subordinate old and new social forces to a long process of transformation. It contains commodity production, uneven development, bureaucracy, class struggle, technical backwardness, market mechanisms, ideological struggle, and the remnants of older social relations.

On private ownership and capital accumulation, you again reduce socialism to a children’s diagram: private firm exists, therefore capitalism. But the question is not whether private capital exists. The question is whether private capital rules. In China, land is publicly owned. The banking system, energy, transport, telecommunications, heavy industry, military industry, strategic infrastructure, and macro-planning capacity remain under decisive state control. The private sector is important, but importance is not sovereignty, also the state sector still dominates the top 100 listed Chinese firms by market value, while the private share was only 37.2% in mid-2025. Private capital in China operates inside a political structure it does not command. It may accumulate, but it does not possess the state. When capital collides with the strategic direction of the socialist state, capital is disciplined.

That is the distinction you keep missing. In capitalism, the state is structurally subordinated to the reproduction of capital, even when it regulates individual capitalists. In China, capital is used, limited, corrected, and periodically struck when it threatens social priorities. The existence of billionaires is a contradiction. But the existence of a contradiction does not settle the class character of the state. If your argument is that billionaires create real dangers and pressures inside Chinese socialism, that is true. If your argument is that their existence automatically converts China into a capitalist state, that is crude formalism.

Your labor argument has the same problem. Yes, there are labor contradictions in China. Yes, overwork exists. Yes, private firms and even some state-linked entities can impose harsh conditions. But you bring up “996” as if you have discovered a permanent legal principle of Chinese socialism rather than a contested labor abuse that was concentrated in ~40 firms in the tech sector during the 2016-2019 tech boom that was explicitly ruled illegal by the Supreme People’s Court in 2021. The state’s direction has been toward limiting unlawful overtime, strengthening enforcement, expanding protections, and tying consumption policy to rest, paid leave, and work-life balance.

Your statement about “independent unions” is also shallow. The mere existence of formally independent unions does not prove workers’ power. Many Western unions are independent in form and politically domesticated in substance. They bargain over the terms of exploitation while the dictatorship of capital remains untouched. China’s system places unions within the broader political structure of the workers’ state, not outside it as separate civil-society pressure groups modeled on liberal pluralism. There are weaknesses in that model, especially where enterprise-level unions can become passive or bureaucratic.

On inequality, you again confuse socialism with the final goal of communism. China has serious inequalities: coastal and interior, urban and rural, skilled and unskilled, property owners and non-owners. These are real contradictions produced by uneven development and the use of market mechanisms. But to discuss inequality without discussing the starting point is intellectually dishonest. China was not a wealthy egalitarian society that market reform ruined. It was a poor, devastated, semi-feudal, semi-colonized country emerging from invasion, civil war, famine, blockade, and underdevelopment. The historical question is not whether Shenzhen developed faster than a mountain village. The question is whether the overall movement of society lifted the masses, expanded capacity, and created the basis for a higher stage of equality.

As someone from rural minority China, I have very little patience for Western lectures about what development means in our regions. Villages like mine did not experience socialism as an abstract slogan. We experienced roads, electricity, plumbing, schools, clinics, public transport links, poverty alleviation, subsidies, communications infrastructure, and the ability to participate in national life rather than remain trapped as picturesque poverty for foreign observers. No, this is not luxury communism. No, every problem is not solved. But the transformation from isolation and destitution to modern infrastructure and rising social provision is not a minor footnote. It is the material content of socialist legitimacy.

Your point about integration into the global market is equally mechanical. China exists in a capitalist world-system. It cannot develop by pretending the world market does not exist. Revolutionary purity that preserves poverty is not socialism; it is moral vanity. China used the world market, foreign investment, export manufacturing, and WTO accession tactically to develop productive forces, acquire technology, build industrial capacity, and strengthen national sovereignty. The question is not whether China touched the world market. The question is whether it was absorbed and politically subordinated by it. The answer is plainly no. Western capital entered China dreaming that markets would dissolve socialism. Instead China used that opening to become the central industrial power of the world while retaining Communist Party rule and state direction over the commanding heights. That historical outcome is precisely why Western states are now panicking.