On the Top Ten Political Economy Logic Errors in China

Economist Zhang Weiying once told a fable:

China's reform is a process from painting a white road on horseback to turning into a real zebra. In a village that uses horses as livestock, the horses are lazy and do not work. The village chief heard that the zebras in the neighboring village were very suitable for work, and wanted to replace the horses in the village with zebras, but he was opposed by most of the villagers. One method of the village chief is to paint some white lines on the backs of some horses at night after the villagers fall asleep. The next day, the villagers asked the village chief why he had replaced his horse with a zebra. The village chief explained that there was no such thing as the original horse, and he just painted it. The villagers took a closer look and found that it was indeed the case, so they didn't take it seriously. The village chief continued to do the same thing every night, and the villagers got used to it. Until one day, the villagers suddenly discovered that their original horses had been replaced by real zebras, but they were indeed better than the previous horses, and they recognized it. Whether our reform is price reform or state-owned enterprise reform, it is a process of replacing horses with fake zebras and then with real zebras. This should be a good inspiration for our future reforms

Hello everyone, I'm Marley, video owners like us, from the media, are often criticized by Wumao Pink as titles such as "Leading Party", "Hate the National Party", and "traitor". I have long been used to this. Under the comments on our content, I found that there are often some seemingly rational and highly dialectical views to refute, which are very representative. My previous channel had an issue on whether China abides by the WTO rules, which once sparked heated discussions, with more than 2,000 comments. It also attracted many keyboard political and economic experts to express their opinions. Unfortunately, that channel was killed by YouTube. For the specific reasons, you can watch this video.

Well, today I will try to talk about the ten most confusing "political economy" logical fallacies that often appear from a "logical" perspective. If you are a fool who just jumped over the wall, I suggest you study hard. Since there are many viewpoints, it is impossible for me to discuss each one. I hope to use my shallow knowledge to help you as much as possible. Well, without further ado, let's get started.

Fallacy —Marxism is right (social development and commodity values)

When it comes to dialectics, many people argue that what Marx said is how and how, so let's start with the grandfather of dialectical methodology, Master Marx and Ma. We all know that the core ideas of Marxism are dialectical materialism and historical materialism. This discipline, which was almost abandoned by domestic academic circles, has actually begun to return in recent years. Dialectical materialism simply means that everything is full of contradictions and opposites, which is called dialectics, and everything has certain laws, which is called decisiveness. Let’s take economics as an example. In Europe, in the middle and lower pages of the 19th century, Marx was in the period of the second industrial revolution and the flourishing of capitalism. A pure research scholar, most of Marx's theories come from his imagination and the reality he is in, lacking basic cases and data support. The Austrian School, one of the mainstream economic schools in the West, has thoroughly refuted Marx's theory.

Let’s take a simple example. The core view of Marxist economics is to borrow David Ricardo’s “labor theory of value”, but Marx believes that the value of a commodity is determined by its objective labor attributes, that is, once the commodity is produced, It has value, and deduces all the theories that follow him. This theory itself has a strong "idealism" color. As for Karl Menger, a representative of the Austrian School, he pointed out that the value of a commodity actually depends on its "actual utility". For example, if you produce a computer that cannot be turned on, even if you spend a lot of effort, then this thing has no value, or if this thing can't meet a certain demand of the market and people, how can it be worthwhile? What about the system. Once the absolute value system produced by labor is not established, then the theory of surplus value, the theory of exploitation, and the theory of the collapse of capitalism derived by Marx will be impossible to talk about.

If the theory of economics is still worth discussing, then his historical materialism has poisoned the worldview of a generation of Chinese people. The most influential one is the so-called capitalist-socialist-communist development syllogism, whether you recognize it or not It is believed that Marx's materialism is not determinism, but his theory always emphasizes a necessary relationship and causal relationship, and defines the development of human society as a linear curve, which itself goes against the existing sociology, plus Later, the development of "chaos science" and "quantum mechanics" further proved the randomness and uncertainty of the world we live in. Where does the inevitability of history come from? I once said in a video "Should We Believe in History?" In fact, since the birth of Marxism, capitalists have been tirelessly studying Marx's theory, even if what he said was right, considering the crisis of their own existence , capitalists have also been trying to deal with these crises. For example, if you say that the workers who occupy the means of production are going to rebel, how about we take full ownership of the shares? You say I exploit you, right? How about we build a union? The most obvious is that the powerful trade unions of the lighthouse country have almost become a tool for workers to squeeze capitalists, thus indirectly promoting the development of the global division of labor system.

To sum up, if Marxism is defined as a kind of philosophy, it still has its academic value. Academically speaking, Marxism is a huge system, and I have no ability to refute them one by one. I am not denying Marxism completely, but With the development of modern sociology, economics, and political science, I don't think Ma's theory has any verifiability so far at least. Because of his excessive emphasis on materialist determinism, it can easily become a tool used by some centralized organizations to deceive people, and then develop various theoretical variants that everyone is familiar with. This kind of harm is no less than the influence of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's "God Worshiping Religion" on China at that time.

Fallacy 2 China's rise depends on the "China model" and institutional advantages

Once we have the foundation of the Marxist fallacy, we can better understand the "China Model". Although you rarely hear China's official channels mention the role of Marxism in the Chinese model, because it is too far-fetched, or the eight poles can't get together. Then we can only mention that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is the so-called "Chinese model".

OK, then let's talk about the "Chinese model". As we all know, China's economy has made great progress in the past 40 years, crushing other countries all the way and ranking second in the world.

Let's take a look at a Chinese economic take-off curve that everyone is very familiar with. We can see that from 1960 to 1980, there was almost no growth. From the 1980s, there was a slow growth, and it did not start to increase significantly until the mid-1990s. Until 2000, the growth rate increased, almost a pillar of growth.

We describe these points in time through a few short stories. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the whole universe knew what happened in China during this time period, so we will not go into details. Beginning in the 1980s, the world-renowned reform and opening up began, the so-called crossing the river by feeling the stones. Represented by the land contracting system in Xiaogang Village, a private economy or private contracting economy gradually began to emerge. The serf finally turned into a capitalist and could control some of the means of production by himself. Another major move is to slowly loosen the prices of some commodities and let the market set prices. In the past, if a box of matches wanted to increase by 1 cent, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee had to hold several meetings, and gradually the prices of small commodities that had little bearing on the national economy and people's livelihood were gradually liberalized. However, the price of important raw materials and means of production is still determined by the state. Therefore, at that time, the Chinese government adopted a so-called "dual regulation" pricing strategy, that is, the so-called planned commodity prices are set by the government, and the unplanned commodity prices are left to the market.

In 1981, the State Council established the Price Research Center, recruited a group of economic experts, bought the most powerful computers, and wanted to use the "theoretical price" of commodities calculated according to the economic model as a reference for the government's guide price. With my toes, I can think that this price has never been calculated, and even if it is calculated, it will not be recognized by everyone. According to current economic theory, if the government has the ability to calculate a reasonable price, does it still need reform? However, some commodities must have a guide price, which presents a problem. Some products have two prices, and those with power can get the planned indicators and re-sell them in the market to earn profits, which is the so-called "official fall". Marx only said that the capitalists are greedy, but he did not mention that the privileged class and the common people are also greedy, so the economic order was very chaotic and corruption was rampant.

It was not until the spring of 1992 that an old man said in the South China Sea that I wanted to develop a "market economy", and only then would the market be truly opened up. Uncle Ma was slapped in the face by Uncle Deng. (To say a little more here, because of the tragedy that everyone on earth knew in 1989, the West led by the United States began to impose economic sanctions on China, and it was not until the Clinton administration took office that the blockade was slowly lifted) So we only saw the beginning of the 1990s. The economy has grown significantly. Chinese people can finally buy what they like with free RMB.

Until 2001, a historic moment came. China joined the WTO with the support of the US imperialists. Speaking of which, don’t get excited, little pinks. I really want to thank the old pervert Clinton. I am in “state capitalism” The video also mentioned this matter, you can go to understand, I will not describe it too much.

Many people here have to ask again, why this miracle happened in China but not in other countries, this is very simple. First, China has a huge cheap labor market, and labor also needs to be consumed. If there is consumption, there will be a capital market. Second, the involvement of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and their returnee capitalists helped China to start quickly in the early stage of reform and opening up. They were the forerunners of Western capitalism. Due to their cultural and blood ties, they could quickly integrate into the local market. Third, the old beauty at that time was under huge ideological pressure. On the one hand, he wanted to corrupt socialism (totalitarianism) through the sugar-coated cannonballs of capital, thinking that everyone had money anyway, wouldn’t it be fragrant? On the other hand, they naively think that when the Chinese have money, they will begin to pursue democracy. Fourth, China's labor advantage has just taken over the gap in the industrial restructuring of the United States and the Four Tigers in Asia, filling this part of the gap and solving China's employment problem.

Well, the story ends here. Let's recall what we said at the beginning, and sum it up in one sentence, that is, the government has only made changes to respect the laws of the market and abandoned the original planned economy model. (Although I was reluctant at first, I wanted to forcefully adopt Chinese characteristics (dual-track system), but I felt that I would not be able to survive if I continued like this, so I finally let it go.) Coupled with the right time, place, and people, that's it.

The current research results and consensus of economics is that 97% of human wealth has been created in the past 250 years, which is 0.01% of the time. Why in the last 250 years? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Therefore, the rise of the Chinese economy has nothing to do with the so-called Chinese model, or the Chinese model is not a model, but depends on Marx's old rival - capitalist economics. If we have to talk about the Chinese model, the "national advance and private retreat" in recent years is one.

Fallacy Three Centralization is easy to develop, and democracy is easy to stagnate (good governance model)

This fallacy is the most frequently used example when talking about the economic take-off of the Asian Tigers, and some typical examples are the industrialization achievements of Roosevelt's New Deal and the Soviet Union's Great Leap Forward.

I believe that the background of the story is very clear to everyone, so I will not describe it too much. Take Taiwan as an example. Such commentators often compare the current growth rate of Taiwan's economy with that of the past era of Jiang's centralization.

This is a typical set of multiple logical fallacies, we briefly analyze several

1. Attribution fallacy, many people confuse the connection between things as a causal relationship between them, the connection may be just accidental, or just one of the reasons. For example, the example of the four Asian tigers we mentioned at the beginning, what they have in common is that there was indeed a political strongman who took some centralized measures in the historical bad situation at that time, and it also produced positive results. It does not mean that only this method works, and these methods of centralization are all different.

2. The fallacy of the established point of view question, this trick is particularly effective for diverting attention, trying to use inducing questions to force the other party to answer the low-level questions you raised, thereby destroying rational discussions. Let's go back to the beginning of this case. If you ask this question, why do you think that when the Four Asian Tigers took off, they were all led by a centralized government? This makes it very easy for the other party to fall into the trap of your preset problem. This trick can be said to be well used by Chinese public opinion. For example, you can often hear these questions. Why is China the only country with a GDP growth rate of over 10% in the past 10 years? You see so many people have died in the United States, what do you think of their system? If the EU is so good, why should the UK leave the EU?

3. The fallacy of composition, that is, if something is right in part or microscopically, it does not mean it is right in the whole. Suppose centralization and unified management allowed the Four Little Dragons to develop rapidly, but if all countries did this at that time, the Four Little Dragons would have no competitive advantage, and the goods and services might not find buyers, and there would be no such model. effective.

Therefore, from the perspective of the world, after countries have grown savagely, a relatively stable mode of checks and balances can be formed only when everyone tends to be in harmony politically and economically. If China wants to prove itself, it is not enough to convince itself with money. We might as well think about a question, why are countries that have experienced totalitarianism and democracy not willing to return to the past even if the economy is stagnant?

Fallacy 4 Hong Kong is a spoiled child

First of all, this fallacy is entirely from the perspective of a Chinese-style parent. Regarding this concept, domestic mainstream public opinion is divided into two aspects. On the one hand, young people in Hong Kong are venting their dissatisfaction with their lives, and on the other hand, Western hostile forces are taking advantage of it and fanning the flames. A further argument is that the development of the mainland has gradually surpassed that of Hong Kong, so Hong Kong's economic status is gradually losing, and the ensuing contradiction between fewer job opportunities and high living costs. The central government has already given Hong Kong the best resources. It's just you young people who don't want to make progress, and you have to collude with foreign reactionary forces.

Well, let's see, any resource-intensive city, such as Beijing, Tokyo, and Taipei, has these problems. These are all appearances and rhetoric. There are many reasons for the Hong Kong problem. Today we will only talk about one aspect, which has been deliberately avoided, and that is the incompatibility between the system and the concept.

We have often heard the saying recently that one country comes before two systems. But no matter from the Sino-British Joint Declaration or the Basic Law, the understanding given to the international community and most Hong Kong people is that one country is based on two systems, or that the difference in systems is the basic promise of Hong Kong's return. There is a big logical deviation between these two understandings, so the one country, two systems under such deviation is bound to have problems.

For the central government, there is only one country before there are two systems. If the rulers feel that there is a problem with the two systems, or that the two systems threaten the sovereignty of a country, the two systems will be weakened and policies that benefit one country will be prioritized.

For the people of Hong Kong, if the two systems cannot be operated as promised and guaranteed by the law, the recognition of one country will naturally be greatly reduced, thus starting a vicious circle.

Why does this problem occur.

First, we started by saying that the understanding of the system was never agreed upon, or that the rule-makers were deliberately vague in the first place. At that time, China's system and economy were significantly different from Hong Kong's. The purpose of establishing "one country, two systems" was to try not to change Hong Kong too much, as long as you went home, so naturally the international understanding would think that one country is based on two systems.

More than 30 years have passed, and Hong Kong's position has not changed much from beginning to end. It is based on the fact that although we are a family, we are all adults with independent and complete personalities. You promised me what you wanted to do. do it. During this period, due to the rise of China's economy, its moral self-confidence has been greatly improved, so the concept of "wanting children to go home" has changed to "children should go home" or even "children should be filial." So this is the biggest problem between Hong Kong and the central government since the handover.

Second, although it has been more than 20 years since the handover, the Chinese government still lacks institutional confidence in Hong Kong. The basis for this lack of self-confidence is that, first, a government that has become accustomed to hierarchical centralization, from officials to citizens, has no way of understanding how an administrative region wants to be autonomous in a parallel line with the central government. Understand that Hong Kong is already a civil society consciousness, and their instinctive reaction is to get out of control and go independent. Second, the logic of the system and the law itself is flawed, because there is no clear binding clause in this regard. Therefore, the less confident you are, the more you promote patriotic education and speed up national security legislation, the more you do this, the more counterproductive you are.

Third, I personally think that the issue of identity and self-confidence is not a difficult problem, but requires the political wisdom and full patience of those in power. In fact, the entire Chinese society in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and its surrounding areas does not contradict the concept of Chinese in blood and culture. For historical and geographical reasons, even Hong Kong's "patriotism" has always been the most obvious. From the early aid to mainland refugees, to the June 4th series of solidarity in the pre-return era, the 91 East China flood disaster relief, and the 1993 "Disaster Reduction and Poverty Alleviation" charity performance. As well as the 98 floods and the Wenchuan earthquake after the handover, a large number of civil society organizations have organized a large number of non-governmental organizations to donate money and materials to the mainland compatriots, and donate generously. Another is that in the early days of reform and opening up, when China needed money the most, a large number of Hong Kong compatriots poured in to invest.

These unofficial and spontaneous acts of "patriotism" are actually the best proof that Hong Kong people are more likely to resonate with China on a primitive emotional level.

To sum up, the core of the Hong Kong issue is not the indulgence of the transition and the self-abandonment of the youth, nor the opinions of other governments. There are still flaws and incompatibility between the systems of the two places, but if the rulers could have less parental attitudes and more compromise and trust, Hong Kong could have become another classic case of reform and opening up.

Well, it has been said for so long without realizing it, so let's talk about this video first. We'll move on to the fallacy of those political economy in the next issue, the Soviet chapter. If you are interested in this topic, please leave your comments. If you think it's not bad, please like, forward and subscribe to support it. I'm Marley, see you next time, 88.