I would say that they skipped it perhaps in the sense that they stripped away the bourgeois class’s power and the apparatus of enforcement that would position them as the sole owners of the economy and main beneficiaries to the accumulation of capital. The market economic aspects are very much present, along with the billionaire class (class contradictions still very much exist in China, along with the glaring contradiction of income inequality; this is one of the great contradictions of modern China that was identified by Xi Jinping and the Party plans to tackle it further throughout the current 5 Year Plan. I don’t remember which year was mentioned, could be 2030 or 2050, but based on the trajectory of China’s development, they plan to enter into the stage of actual socialism. As it stands, the PRC is currently not a socialist country, but is developing towards it).

I think the West’s grave misunderstanding of what “capitalism” entails is what left them blindsided for decades and ultimately, got them into the economic and inescapable black hole that they’re in (the black hole being that the capitalists cannot fathom abandoning their almost entire dependence on Chinese manufacturing and cheap materials and restarting manufacturing back in their respective nations. Because of the costs, of course). They trusted that China was abandoning socialism and was going to transition to an actual capitalist society with a complete dictatorship of their own bourgeoisie, opening up the country to the Western vultures and their mass exploitation of the land and people. What happened instead was the utilization of market economics and China’s subsequent admission into the Western, global capitalist market. Here, they leveraged, among many things, “cheap” labor (dangled as a sort of carrot on a stick) as a way to entice the greed of the West to outsource their ENTIRE manufacturing capabilities. It made the West tremendously rich, but it also made the PRC tremendously rich, and since China had NOT abandoned the path to socialism, they utilized that massive influx of wealth and capital to bring China to exactly what we’re witnessing today. Meanwhile, the West continued to enrich their ruling minority while subjecting their colonies in the periphery to their imperialist terror and at-home, fascist brutality and economic austerity.

The global demand for cheap goods from cheap labor, boosted production in China and bolstered the overall strength of its labor production forces, which is a necessity for socialism.

Essentially, capitalism was used to expedite, at an unprecedented level, the development of China. Mind you, this was done entirely under the guidance and leadership of the CPC as the people’s vanguard party. China is on track to becoming a moderately wealthy, actual socialist country and they’ll probably do so according to their plans.

The West and the entire world need China, especially now more than ever. The West cannot afford to deviate from the influence that they helped create, back when they incorrectly thought that China was a revisionist state. Well, until the events of the most recent years up until presently, at least. They’re flailing about trying to reorder and restructure the world, reestablish their dominion in every corner of the globe, trying to stop or, at the very least, curtail China’s ever-growing influence. The more vicious the reaction of the West is, the greater the desperation to hold onto their dying order.

We know that capitalism is in major decline across the West. In China, they’re still on the path to improving prosperity for the people and with BRICS, they’re sharing that prosperity. There’s been a socialist revolution on a global scale the entire time. Sure, it wasn’t exported in the familiar form, with armies and tanks, but it was done in a way that improved the material reality of millions of lives in the global South, especially in colonies where some of the most brutal atrocities were committed by the liberal democracies of the West. This interpretation of revolution was a necessary adjustment from the types exported by previous socialist experiments, like the Soviet Union’s. The character of socialism and communism had been thoroughly tarnished by a number of things, including revisionism and deviation from Marxist-Leninism and its dialectical materialist framework, and Western bourgeois propaganda and Red Scare smear campaigns. The solution was to export prosperity, without any or hardly any strings attached. The West, as it does, continued and tried to disparage these humanitarian efforts. It’s worked within its own borders among the chauvinists and even some of the most “leftist” of its citizens, but that image becomes very difficult to enforce among the actual beneficiaries of the shared prosperity in the global South.

It’s becoming more and more difficult for the West and its ministries of propaganda to paint socialism as a “violent” movement of upstarts and usurpers, when socialism exports or “shares” the prosperity of their own with the most “underdeveloped” or, more accurately, over-exploited countries. The propaganda becomes nothing more than useless noise and drivel, at best, or insult to injury, at worst, as it has been resorting to austerity along with fascist violence against unarmed activists and protesters. It has no moral authority. Well, it never did, but it had an illusion and that illusion is becoming evermore frail when the reality is that denizens of the imperial core are subjected to their own countries’ violence, that which was the supposed character of the “vicious”, socialist countries!

Sorry, I know I deviated a lot from the main topic of “capitalism in China”, but I felt like the rest needed to be said since it’s a consequence of the economic development of China via market economics. There is a ton that I still don’t know, but I try to read here and there whenever I come across any relevant texts. This is more of a “broad” over-simplification and I’ve no doubt that far more studious and diligent comrades have more accurate insights than I do, presently.

Here. Ken Hammond has researched and written a lot about the Chinese history.

Pt 1: The Taiping & Boxer Rebellions.

Part 2: The Chinese Revolution & Civil War .

Part 3: The Great Leap Forward & Cultural Revolution.

Part 4: The Deng Reform Period to Today.

But I have to say, that you missed out imo. RedPen makes great content.

Think of your favorite lemmygrad in-depth theory poster. Red Pen is that but for youtube.

You missed the best one out of all four. 😭

Motherfucker tells people to read Lenin and then proceeds to do everything Lenin roasted Bernstein and Kautsky for.

He is not stupid, he knows about all this, but insists on the entryism (he will deny it is entryism) into the Democratic Party as a harm reductive strategy, or to turn the party leftwards (which is unironically a Trotskyist thing to do). One time during a stream, he remarks on how his strategy has “Historically never worked” before continuing his bullshit lol. He is not naive or stupid, he genuinely believes (and he will tell you this, though through fanciful rhetoric) that the blame of the low revolutionary fervor present in the Statesian masses is their fault- not ours (as Marxists-Leninists).

Yikes, being pro-Ukraine and being anti-Zionist is just a liberal-minded combination (very bad). I never knew of a Ukrainian organization as horrible as the Zionists (I never even heard of the people you mentioned). If I do recall, he is a wealthy streamer that has a large fanbase, so it makes sense that he might be unwilling to alienate their viewers too much (supporting the Democratic Party in that way does so while also allowing him to claim “lesser evil” as a justification, though this does not work with principled communists).

Ooof do I even want to know?

hmm… it seems that Hasan would qualify as an opportunist then.