I read China's 15th Five-Year Plan so you don't have to. You can get the full downloads below. Reading Chinese policy is about as much fun as reading a lease, because that what this is. The Chinese people actually own their country and have leased it to the Communist Party, to develop it. A Chinese Five-Year Plan is a building contract, not a campaign document. Thus the slogan for 2030 is something really boring, “basically achieve socialist modernization.” I think they're really underselling it. If they do it—prove that socialism is superior to capitalism—China will make history.

Five Year Plan

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Some History

This isn't a Xi Jinping thing. Xi Jinping thought is very important, and they're lucky to have him, but he's just the latest captain of a ship that set course last century. Five-year plans are older than China itself. The USSR started five-year planning in 1928, using the Marxist theory of productive forces. Karl Marx described the importance of productive forces in 1845, saying

It is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse... [gap in manuscript]

Or as the Notorious B.I.G. said in the 1990s, real niggaz do real things. Remember as the notorious Marx said, that communism is a historical process. You don't just arrive at communism after revolution. You cannot put the cart before the horse, you must develop the technology (the cart) and then pull the people forward to communism.

The horse, in this case, is what Lenin established as a dictatorship of the proletariat. As Vladimir Lenin said (quoting Marx),

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thus the CPC Constitution refers to “a people’s democratic dictatorship.” This Chinese form of democracy is the highest rated in the world by its own citizens, what matters most democratically. The CPC is is still led by workers (engineers) rather than being bled by lawyers as in Western democracies, which are widely hated by their own citizenry, not to mention the people they're bombing. Dictatorship is not a bad word, if you read the Greeks. And communism requires a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you read Marx, which the Chinese have obviously.

The CPC's Constitution (revised in 2017) still sticks to the Four Cardinal Principles, which are,

The Four Cardinal Principles—to keep to the path of socialism, to uphold the people's democratic dictatorship, to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and to uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought—form the foundation for building the country. Throughout the whole course of socialist modernization, the Party must adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles and oppose bourgeois liberalization.

People (White people) always say China isn't communist, but I invite them to read any history. These same ideas are embedded in every policy document, they keep repeating, and you can see how the CPC behaves. The majority of firms are state-owned, and the other ones best behave.

The vital difference between communism and capitalism is not what but who controls the economy. Under communism, it's the people (via a dictatorship of the proletariat) and under communism it's the rich (via the dickheads of the stock market). That's the answer to the owl's question, who? For communism it's the community and for capitalism, it's the capitalists. Etymology can be ideology.

China is very much communist and very much following Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, Dengist, and Xi-ist thought. It's really one high-speed train of thought with different carriages. The CPC is very much a hive mind, thinking across generations. As the 15th Five-Year Plan says, quite consciously, “Socialist modernization can only be realized through a historical process of gradual and ongoing development. It requires the unremitting hard work of one generation after another.”

In this way, the rousing slogan of 2025 was really thought up in 1987 by Deng. As he said back then,

Poverty is not socialism. We must support socialism, but we must move ahead in building a socialism which is truly superior to capitalism. We must first rid ourselves of the socialism of poverty (pinkun shehuizhuyi); although everyone now says we are creating socialism, it is only in the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately-developed countries, that we will be able to say with assurance that socialism is really superior to capitalism and that we are really building socialism.

What was humility then sounds like a humblebrag when you say it now. Socialism already looks far superior to capitalism, which is currently eating children in its underwear, like Saturn, inter alia.

China's mission and vision for 2030 is the rousing “basically achieving socialist modernization.” To an outsider, it seems like they've done that already. China in 2025 already has zero extreme poverty and extremely high technology, fancy cars and no wars, and decent lives without genocides.

Viewed alongside the 14 other plans, however, you can catch the vibe. This Five-Year Plan is part of a 100-year planning cycle, and they're not getting ahead of themselves. It's been the same plan since 1949, and China's official centenary goal is to “build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious” by 2049. So we're still four planning cycles away from calling it a socialist day.

And it is true that China may take until 2030 to officially overtake US GDP (though US GDP is basically just fraud and crypto at this point, it's a fugazi). The irony is that China did use the Western world as a benchmark, but those dudes have gotten drunk and rolled off the bench and descended into rampant homelessness. Once there was a race between the commie tortoise and the capitalist hare, but the hare fell asleep in the 90s and is just waking up to reality, with the hair apparent just yelling at everybody, impotently. But make no mistake, there is no race between China and America this century. China is the only one racing forward, and America is just racist.

China has plans written by professionals while America has tweets written by a professional entertainer. These things are not the same. It's the tortoise vs. the hare, except the tortoise is on a high-speed train.

Next time: actual discussion of the actual Five-Year Plan. I'll stop now because it's a full moon tonight, which is a Buddhist holiday, and I need to spend time with my children and stop working.