How does China work?

This video is an in depth explanation of the history of the people's republic of china, as well as an explanation of the Maoist theory and modern praxis. I go over Maoism and explain it's philosophy and origin, then I explain the ways Mao tried to implement these changes with the first and second 5 year plan, along with land reform and collectivization. I then in depth explain the history of the PRC since 1948 to gain an understanding of china and it's history before spending a long part of the video explaining the way the current Chinese government works. I explain the different administrative divisions and their purpose, along with how the elections work.

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:35 Maoist Theory
5:03 History
27:50 Modern China
38:16 Conclusion

Sources:

Transcript: (at least as much as yt allows me to add here)
Hello everybody. The people’s republic of china is one of the largest and most important nations on earth. And it just so happens to be that it’s a very controversial topic among leftists. In this video I cand the way the government and economy works right now. And yes, I will answer the long-asked question. “Is china a socialist nation?” Strap in, this is gonna be a long one.
To understand modern china, we must understand the man and the ideology that founded it. Between 1927 and 1949 there was a civil war raging in china. It was interrupted by a Japanese invasion but eventually the communists under Mao-tse tung won and took over all of china.
Maoism is an evolution of Leninism. Remember, Leninism is an ideology designed to create a socialist state without the people having a lot of class consciousness and without having late stage capitalism. To achieve this the people who have class consciousness form a vanguard party which then takes over, develops the industry, educates the people and eventually gives the control over the economy to the workers to reach socialism.
Mao took this theory and adapted it. His party wouldn’t only be made up of Marxist intellectuals, instead farmers and the few industrial workers, which were in china were invited to the party. This party is supposed to always stay in touch with the people, it’s called mass line, and it’s because Mao considered the communist party of the Soviet Union to be divorced from the masses. We’ll see the influence of this when we look at the current government structure.

[robifacche]

Oh boy oh boy I sure do hope this comment section will be full of only respectful comments and peaceful discussion of ideas

[alexsch]

As an agricultural engineering student this one dudes ideas in the "great leap forward" made me facepalm SO HARD! Did he seriously think "Oh, the seed depths and density of the planting that have been established by farmers experimenting with crops over generations is all bullishit, I can prove it with the ONE SINGULARLY EXPERIMENT I made" ?

[lijack]

as i chinese guy, im very sad china had stoped teaching the people about class consciousness and the idea of communism as well. the political class in schools are now just classes teaching you how to be a good person. and they dont encourage the people to vote

[bensparrow]

The Schrodingder's revolution joke was quality. Loved this!

[senorwhite]

it’s really weird thinking that no one has watched this all the way through yet! without even watching it though, great video again viki!!! ❤️

[Sahtoovi]

Genuinely I think that this is one of the most objective and in-depth analyses of China on Youtube. Very informative and interesting, thank you.

[mammothmk]

China is a sleeping giant; let him sleep, for if he wakes, *he will shake the World.*
Napoleon Bonaparte

Also, I hope you do a video like thia for Vietnam someday. ;)

[milo]

I’m glad you made a video on China’s inner workings similar to the one on the USSR since right now China is not only a hot topic for the left, but also the whole world. Thank you for spreading easily understandable information, I find it to be very helpful in my navigation of leftist thought. Keep up the good work, comrade!

[darrishawks]

I'm really glad you mentioned China's labor law because I always find myself fighting with people on the topic who say China doesn't have labor protections. When my wife's employer went out of business, they had to give the workers money based on how long the workers had been there. I think my wife got 4 months, but some people got a full year's salary. I wish we had that in the USA

[theananyo]

"I guess we just have to hope that these unelected officials, without public oversight, are good people and make the right choice."

Famous last words

[simonshephard]

Honestly as a Chinese citizen I am glad with the nuance and also kinda confused about certain parts of the video.
Like private industries run by Chinese are pretty common in China and they are for the most part the worst offenders of workers' rights(Not saying all of them are, but they certainly generate most news-worthy worker rights violation and the infamous “996 work schedule” is kinda created and used by them, and oh, they to sell some patriotic/self-improvement narrative in the mix with how with your hard work for them, they will be able to outcompete lazyass westerners and stuff.).
Usually people associate working for State business and ironically foreign business with "good quality of life".
And the part about "Mao didn't expect citizens to understand politics beyond their local governments" and stuff, what I would like to bring up is our education system, political education is pretty important in China and we learn stuff about Marxism and Chinese revolutionary values pretty early. The thing is that most material you can access before college is, bad, it's not even streamlined/simplified explanation of those topics, they straight up read like propaganda.(And I seriously don't know if it's the textbook authors being low-effort leeches or the state restrict it somehow, the latter doesn't seem the case since college stuff is decent and actually explain things.)
Annnd boy, do Chinese people get confused about Socialism, we got our version of "Socialism is when government do stuff", "Socialism is when you reject any 'Western values', which include gender equality, racial equality, those are for feminized Western softies!'(And yes a lot of people are socially conservative and let's say LGBT+ people don't exactly have the best of the time here) "(And those types of people will cheer for people like Trump, for exposing "Western hypocrisy", they seriously simp for any foreign Nationalist leader, except the Japanese one of course.) "Socialism is when state rich" etc. Like the opposite of USA when every clueless Joe use Socialism for anything they don't like, we use Anti-Socialism for stuff we don't like. And like the US version, it's often used by reactionaries unfortunately.
One thing I am really worried is that, when the "promised time" of 2050 come, a lot of Chinese people probably won't really tell the difference. Whether the Communist party delivers their promise or not, it won't challenge them or force their hands.

[marinaneil]

Obvs I haven't seen the whole vid yet (though I like it so far), but Viki your voice sounds so nice here

[PatriotMapper]

Hope to see a video on Cuba eventually!

[Alevuss]

Thank you for making this! I'm glad you acknowledged how famines are often like...humanmade, since the issue is rarely that there's no food but that food isn't distributed to people who are starving. It's something I see acknowledged a lot in geography and history spaces, but not often when people are talking about praxis and theory! This is video is one of the better takes I've seen/read from people outside of China.

For folks watching this, I just want to add:
16:15 Most nat'l officials knew about the issues with the Great Leap Forward by late 1959, but their criticisms were either interpreted as personal attacks (makes sense in context) or they didn't speak up bc they believed unity was important during such a crucial time.

21:16 Deng Xiaoping was still alive and nominally in charge when the protests happened, which pushed him into retirement. It's hard to generalize the 1989 protests in China, but outside Beijing they were highly decentralized and socialist with local union support. They largely weren't looking to end Communism or cause chaos. In Beijing, pro-capitalist factions took control over the protests after the leftist leaders were demonized in the media. (none of this is to criticize her work, the thing about Deng dying in 1987 just stood out to me)
---
To the CCP's credit, I recognize that party hardliners were trying to protect a revolution that they saw slipping away and party reformists were in no position to compromise between hardliners and literal capitalists. I still believe that the gov't response to the 1989 protests was unnecessary. acab

I also recognize this video is 43 minutes long and you've already done of a ton of work! If someone came across this and had it as their intro to Chinese bureaucracy, it's a good start! Thank you again for doing this!

[a.agrayson]

The voice training is going great Vikki. I used to have to rewind a few times for technical terms but the slower pace has made it much easier to understand.

[DiscipleOfHeavyMeta]

12:20 Also, one other factor is that plowing deep into the soil liberates carbon and nitrogen and depletes it of nutrients over time. Scarcity of nutrients cause plants to compete for them - those that are more nutrient hungry at this point will not leave enough nutrients to other plants. But an abundance of nutrients renders this competition irrelevant as there are enough nutrients for all plants. The key is to maintain a healthy top soil by ensuring a rich soil microbiome that will ensure an effective nutrient cycle into the soil. The increase of organic matter concentration in the soil also improves its water retention, thereby lessening the overall quantity of water needed to maintain plant health. A rich soil also enables micorrhyzal fungi and rhizobacteria to develop and form symbiotic relationships with plant roots, thereby improving crop yields by improving nutrient as well as water intake to the plant.

The idea that natural selection and ecosystems are primarily defined and determined by competition is a bourgeois idea that has no scientific basis. Nature is full of examples of mutualistic relationships and even many if not most commensal relationships are indirectly beneficial to all species in an ecosystem. Although an anarchist, Peter Kropotkin was also a biologist and was well ahead of his time when he published his work _Mutual Aid: A Factor In Evolution_ . This brings us to the micorrhizae and rhizobacteria that I talked about. These are the various species of fungi and bacteria living in the soil that attach themselves to the roots of plants and enter a mutualistic relationship in which the fungi or bacteria will nourish themselves with decaying matter, which will create nutrients such as nitrogen as detritus that the plant readily absorbs through its root system and recieves in exchange carbohydrates that plants exude from their root systems as a result of photosynthesis as nourishment.

Not only are these relationship mutualistic, but also very complex. Evidence suggests that the mutualistic relationship between micorrhizae and plants even go as far as allow some form of communication and plant-to-plant nutrient and water transfer using micorrhizae as the mean of transportation. In Boreal biomes, micorrhizae have been observed to stockpile nitrogen that plants can default on in case of nitrogen scarcity.

This complex network is simply impossible with deep plowing and if this network exists, deep plowing will surely destroy it. Unfortunately, during these days, it was of the opinion of the Politburo of both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of China that ecology was a Western bourgeois imperialist ideology. If only they had taken cue from research in ecology, they could've improved their crop yields without depleting their top soils, avoided widespread crop failures, lessen the burden on irrigation and avoid causing as much damage to the environment. Millions of lives would've been preserved and the positions of International Communism would've been strengthened as a result.

[PedroLiveTv]

Uhm... Deng Xiaoping didn't die before the Tiananmen Square incident, he retired in 1992 and died in 1997.

[tasfa]

Wow, I can't imagine how many hours you put into this! Great job!!

[tofolcano]

And remember kiddos.
Revolutionary praxis > ideological orthodoxy

[auferstandenausruinen]

Thanks for your work, but there are several major inaccuracies:
1. The three reforms are the socialist transfromation of the agriculture, handicraft industry (non-agricultural petit bourgeoise) and larger capitalist businesses from 1953-1956. Laogai was just a part of the punishement system, which was never the focus of any economic reform, just like the gulags. The majority of Industry, especially the basis for heavy industry during the first five year plan were mostly built with soviet support. The nationalized private industries were mostly light industries like food and textile.
2. The Great Leap Forward was the CPC's effort to continue the industiralization without soviet support after the sino-soviet spilt. Under the guidance of the central govt, the local bureaucrats and communes were set to compete with each other, aiming to reach higher agricultural productivity to feed the increasing number of industiral workers. But the results were widespread fraudulant reports boasting about the skyrocketing productivity to get compliements from higher up offcials. The resulting disaster was a major lesson discussed and learned in a expanded party congress in 1962. Blaming the soviet expert's advice was kind of scapegoating.
3. Deng died in 1997 instead of 1987. And the 1989 upheaval was mainly due to failed economic policies. Initialy the students were protesting against the curropt cronies and family members of the high ranking officals profitting from the dual price system (one price adhered to rigid planning, the other fluctutated with the market, so there was a gap to proft from.) There was also a period of rapid inflation in the late 1980s due to overheating economy and the central governments' effort to cancel the dual price system and move to full market pricing. The protests were just a manifestation of this socio-economic upheaval. Deng was rumored to be the man who sided with the hardliners and made the decision to clear up the square by force in a secret politburo meeting.
4. The SEZs are the places where more radical reforms were initiated, primarily serving as risk reduction. If they worked, the reform would be further pushed across the whole nation. If they didn't then just stay where they are. So now in China private capitalism has rooted everywhere since mid 1990s, not only in the SEZs. Hyper exploitation is now a widespread phenomenon in private enterprises, especially in construction, manufacturing and tech companies, which is called ''996'' (9AM-9PM, 6 days a week) in China. Local governments often side with the capitalists in labor disbutes, because those mega firms are dominant taxpayers and officals don't want to piss them off.
5. Most conmunnes were dissolved after the agricultual counter-reform in the early 80s. Now the agricultural sector mostly comprises of individual farmers. Recently there has been a directive to let them form local coops to collectively bargain in the market but it's completely different from the communes, as the means of production, apart from the state owned land, are still privately owned.