Default to Chinese characteristics has limits
Over the last 35 years, China has gone through great changes. This period of change presented major challenges to the Communist Partys ideology. Many challenges were dealt with through redefinition and ambiguity.
For example, Deng Xiaoping adroitly redefined workers to include intellectuals, arguing that while they worked with their minds and not their muscles, they were still workers.
Jiang Zemin went a step further by accepting capitalists into the Communist Party through his Three Represents theory, which says the party represents advanced social productive forces.
Through all the ideological turmoil, the party has claimed to be guided by Marxism-Leninism, though the tent has been enlarged by including Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of the Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development. The last is the contribution of Hu Jintao, who stepped down as party leader in 2012 and was succeeded by Xi Jinping.
Although theoreticians had traditionally considered a planned economy to be a hallmark of socialism while the market economy characterized capitalism, the pragmatic Deng known for saying that it doesnt matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice decided that China needed to jettison its old economic model and make use of the market economy. He did this by asserting that planning and market forces are not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism.
A planned economy is not the definition of socialism as there is planning under capitalism, he said. The market economy happens under socialism, too. Planning and market forces are both ways of controlling economic activity.
And so the market was incorporated into what was ostensibly still a socialist economy, first as being only complementary but, at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the party held in 2013, it was decided that the market would play a decisive role in the allocation of resources.
Deng called what he created a socialist market economy, differentiating it from a full market economy.
Deng no doubt did not foresee that, in the 21st century, 13 years after China joined the World Trade Organization, the United States and the European Union would continue to refuse to recognize what exists in China today as a genuine market economy.
In addition to using socialist, the Communist authorities also like to hang the phrase with Chinese characteristics on their ideas and actions.
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Default to Chinese characteristics has limits