Branco Milanovic on Chinese capitalism

 “…we can see the current Chinese state capitalism as a protracted NEP that began in 1978 and continues until today. But Lenin seems to overlook the possibility that with a very long NEP the economic and political power will gradually seep from under the Party and the very nature of the state would change. Those who have money will dictate things as in capitalist countries. The state may not be able to control them and the commanding heights of the economy may change ownership. This happened under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao: the development of state capitalism under socialist conditions led to the increasing influence of rich people and capitalists, including their inclusion in most of the party organs, and through the idea of “The Three Represents”, it gave a pretense of ideological acceptability to such evolution. The change in the elite composition, evident in a study done by Li Yang, Filip Novokmet and myself, is another product of such policies. The social structure of the Chinese elite had enormously evolved between the late 1980s and 2013 (when our study ends). While the private sector was marginal among the elite (the top 5 percent) in 1988, twenty-five year later almost one-third of the people in the elite were private businessmen (owners of small enterprises and large scale capitalists). If one includes professionals who are employed in the private sector, a bit over one-half of the elite is private-sector dependent.

It is in this context that one can look at Xi Jinping’s policies: as an attempt at the reassertion of the power of the state vs. the capitalist sector and the rich. Or to use Lenin’s distinction between the two, as an attempt to move from state capitalism to state capitalism. It is an adjustment in the political power between the two sectors: the state, ruled by a bureaucratic stratum, and the rich. It represents the analog of the populist reaction in the Western democracies: the feeling that the business elite has become too powerful, has no discernible interest in the problems of ordinary people, and has to be reined in. We can thus see Xi Jinping as both a heir to Lenin’s New Economic Policy and in much more contemporary terms as a populist response to the excesses of the new rich. ”

From http://glineq.blogspot.com/2023/06/state-capitalism-one-hundred-years-ago.html