No subject

socio-economic regime in China is capitalist, but a peculiar sort of
capitalism, where a) you still have elements of economic planning and b) the
state itself retains a very significant portion of ownership in industry. 

But it isn't clear to me that the capitalists have really cohered as a
ruling class in the political sense. Instead, it seems the
bureaucratic-military-administrative apparatus inherited from the Mao era is
fostering this new capitalist class but at the same time preventing local
firms' subordinate economic relations with imperialist concerns from
transforming itself into the political subordination of China to imperialist
dictates. 

This is not an insignificant thing because China's real independence was a
conquest, and I would say the single most important conquest (because it was
the pre-requisite for any other advance) of the Chinese Revolution. Yet if
this central revolutionary conquest has not been reversed, then China
doesn't really fit into the "capitalist restoration" bucket, at least not in
the same way that, say, Poland does. Nevertheless, imperialist oppression
and exploitation today is not JUST a question of political subordination,
but also of the world economic system. As a country, I believe that China's
relation to that system is that of an exploited country.

Everyone wants to talk about class relations within China, yet it seems to
me that just as fundamental is China's relation to world imperialism as a
system.

All this talk of China being imperialist, in addition to representing people
on this list being taken in by the propaganda and just plain bad reporting
and bullshit analysis of the bourgeois media, is an attempt to conjure away
significant theoretical problems.

Even the name of this thread "the class nature of the Chinese state,"
meaning socio-economic regime, shows that most comrades don't even
understand some of the questions, never mind having adequate answers.

There is ONE point on which I would agree with Paula, at least to a very
large degree: "The value produced by Chinese workers keeps the world economy
going." But that is precisely because China is NOT an imperialist nation but
a Third World country. And by the mechanisms of the world market and
financial systems, much of the value Chinese workers produce is never
recognized by the market in those commodities, but instead feeds imperialist
super-profits. But that's been true about the Third World pretty much since
Christopher Columbus lost his way trying to get to India.

Joaquin