The most pressing current intellectual challenge for those who are disillusioned with capitalism is: what can one do to overcome the seemingly insurmountable problems of human conditions today? Be critical as you may of the prevailing neoliberal capitalist order that has given rise to, for instance, environmental destruction, increasing inequalityFootnote ¹ and a mounting alienation with party politics, it appears intellectually impossible to imagine a better solution. In short, this is the best we have: there is no alternative.

Lin Chun, in China and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, History and Contemporary Politics, reflects on this challenge and, by using China as the most relevant case, argues that there is a post-capitalist alternative. This post-capitalist and non-capitalist alternative may be and can be found in China. This is such an anti-mainstream and unorthodox idea that one may wonder whether Lin Chun knows what she is talking about.

Lin is aware of problems such as environmental destruction and corruption in China, and is critical of much of the post-Mao politics. But, whether you take China as capitalist with Chinese characteristics or socialist with Chinese characteristics, China has been saving or protracting global capitalism by importing pollution, by exporting deflation (via the never-ending supply of cheap commodities to the poor and rich alike), and by lending credit to developed countries through maintaining their currencies as reserves, while these countries keep printing money to reduce the value of the reserves (what a beautiful system of the poor subsidizing the rich). China seems to have the worst of both worlds: the worst of a political system under one-party rule, and the worst of economic exploitation by naked capitalism. No wonder virtually nobody, especially those from the Western Left, has anything good to say about China. Here comes Lin Chun who says that China may provide a possible alternative of the non-capitalist world. To take up the challenge of suggesting a viable Chinese alternative against seemingly overwhelming odds, Lin Chun must handle many crucial theoretical issues and conceptualizations.

Here I only have the space to discuss some of these issues, which are inter-related and cross-dependent. To address the issue of how to assess the current system in China, Lin has to deal with the Marxist interpretation of capitalism, concomitantly requiring an appraisal of the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the period of PRC during the era of Mao. In order to explain China's position in the system of global capitalism, Lin Chun has to address the origins of capitalism, as well as universalism versus particularism (or simply and crudely, the cultural West versus the East).

Lin Chun is critical of Marx's notion of the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) for being logically inconsistent (because Marx claims on the one hand that human progress is made by the internal dynamics of class interest and, on the other hand, that AMP is the exception) and empirically erroneous for China. But Lin at the same time redeems Marx for his argument postulating the possibility of a revolution in the East and the role of agency in revolution.

As for the question of China's current position in the world, while placing China firmly on the global system of capitalism Lin rejects the notion that China is a “transitional society” towards the “norm” of whatever one says about developed capitalist societies. In relation to this, Lin is critical of Marx for his teleological exclusion of the theoretical possibilities of both a non-capitalist modernity and non-Western modernity.

Lin points out that Marx dismissed the East via the concept of AMP because he was only trying to find a causal link for the development of capitalism, which was after all what he wanted to dissect. But by doing so, what is historically contingent (i.e. the historical development of capitalism in the West) was turned into inevitable: “‘History’ has become ‘nature’” (p. 27). As a result there are three crucial conflations at work: the conflation of capitalism with market, as if there would not be market without capitalism; the conflation of industrialization with capitalism, as if there would be no industrialization without capitalism, ipso facto as if industrialization in the era of Mao is nothing significant; and the conflation of capitalism and development, as if socialist or any other development are non-existent and cannot be existent.

Therefore, Lin emphasizes that it is not only important that China remains socialist, but that China must not totally abandon its socialist legacies while pursuing modernity. Also for this reason Lin remains positive on the achievements of socialism in the era of Mao. By quoting Chris Bramall that “it is fair to say that China uses its available land far more productively than any other large-scale agricultural producer on the planet”Footnote ² and Maurice Meisner, “few events in the world history have done more to better the lives of more people,”Footnote ³ Lin reminds us that China's road to modernity cannot copy Western countries, whose route to becoming developed societies, though not without internal dynamics, depended on colonialism.Footnote ⁴

Among the explanations offered for the failure of capitalism to emerge in China is the lack of clarity regarding private ownership of land, a view which is endorsed by both Marxists and their opponents. Significantly and unsurprisingly, land ownership is currently the most heatedly debated issue in China. For economic rationalists like Qin Hui,Footnote ⁵ land ownership privatization has to be carried out in order to solve not only the problems of land grabbing by the state agents but also the problem of productivity in the absence of large-scale commercial farming. But for Lin, like He XuefengFootnote ⁶ and Wen Tiejun,Footnote ⁷ public or collective ownership of land is crucial for China to maintain a socialist status and provide a basis for a non-capitalist alternative modernity. In other words, there should not be outright privatization of land in China. Large-scale commercial farming and urbanization as found in Western developed countries should be avoided, and the state should encourage, guide and assist the organization of small property-owning farmers within cooperatives or associations. Such organization of agriculture and the rural sector is the only way because China has limited arable land for a huge population. It is also the best way because productivity of small farming may not be the highest per labour person but is high in terms of production per unit of land. More importantly, it gives rural people a sense of ownership and agency. It benefits the environment and provides conditions for substantive democracy.

This is modernity without overwhelming urbanization and without proletarianization. In other words, the majority of the modern citizens don't have to move to the urban centres to live and do not have to become wage earners. It is not just that the Chinese do not have to be consumers to be modern; it is also that they (the rural Chinese) can all be small property owners, all can be petty bourgeois, so to speak.Footnote ⁸

This kind of alternative modernity is a possibility in China because it has the historical conditions. The uniqueness of China lies in its anti-capitalist posture in both imperial China and the era of Mao. China entered global capitalism only in the 30 years post Mao and it is still reversible. When China delinks global capitalism and develops its own model, and when local desire, local resource and local knowledge are both the means and ends, Chinese particularism is already universalism. Universalism consists of diverse particularism.

China's contribution to universalism requires China to revitalize the most democratic legacies of the Mao era. Again there are complex issues here. However critical one is of present-day China, one cannot deny the fact that its post-Mao economic development is phenomenal, and that China has pulled millions of people out of absolute poverty. The issue is how to interpret this historically world-changing phenomenon. For instance, Norman Webster, former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Globe and Mail, effortlessly declares that “At a stroke, it [‘to get rich is glorious,’ a saying dubiously attributed to Deng Xiaoping] set loose the formidable talents of the Chinese people and this desperately poor country, now a billion or so strong, was launched into the modern world.” This is one interpretation which basically asserts that Deng's one sentence had a biblical impact on China and the Chinese people. What happened before Deng's supposed utterance is non-existent, is “dead” past. This is the typical post-Mao “miracle” interpretation. Another interpretation reflected, for instance, by none other than the “end of history” dominant exponent Francis Fukuyama,Footnote ⁹ is that due to China's traditional cultural resource, a high-quality centralized bureaucratic government – built on impersonal recruitment – has been able to design and carry out effective economic and social policies. This is a traditional cultural value interpretation. However, nobody bothers to look at the 1949 Revolution interpretation. Even serious attempts at finding alternatives from China avoid treading the Revolution line. For example, in his otherwise excellent PhD thesis, Mark Triffitt from Melbourne University, while being critical of both liberal democracy and market economy, fails to find anything positive from the Chinese Revolution legacies to construct his Chinese alternative.Footnote ¹⁰

Of course this aversion to the 1949 Revolution and revolutions in general is not confined to Western intellectual discourse. In fact it relies on “the Chinese themselves say so.” A recent high profile debate in the field of China studies instigated by David Shambaugh,Footnote ¹¹ who predicts that the Chinese endgame has started, is very telling in this regard. Shambaugh, considered by some as the “insiders’” expert on China, has been positive about China for many years. The question therefore is why he has made this sudden U-turn? Apart from the decline of the economic growth rate (even though a 7.4 per cent growth rate in 2014 is the envy of many countries), every other problem Shambaugh lists has been in China for many years. If anything, China is doing better by cracking down on corruption recently. The explanation lies in the rising intellectual dissent against President Xi Jinping's more positive attitudes towards Mao. The “insiders’” expert's contacts in China, most likely in the Central Party School in Beijing, must have expressed serious misgivings about the direction that China is heading under Xi. Since the 1980s, most of the intellectual elite have condemned the Chinese 1949 Revolution and of course Mao. Even General Liu Yuan, one of Liu Shaoqi's sons, is reported to have said that on some websites these days you feel apologetic if you don't condemn the CCP and Mao.Footnote ¹² Those who want to talk about CCP and socialism have been marginalized and pushed underground.

In this picture of non-capitalist modernity, democracy is also important but not in the form of one person, one vote. A more substantive democracy is one in which policies and management at grassroots are in the hands of community members. An example of that is Mao's mass line: from the masses and to the masses,Footnote ¹³ or experiments carried out during the era of Mao such as the Angang xuanfa (Constitution of the Anshan Iron and Steel Factory)Footnote ¹⁴.

Is it possible for China to still return to its socialist path by “Mao's invisible hand”? Lin impressively attempts to visualize this possibility. It is a major task, probably doubted by even the sympathizers of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the coup in Beijing in late 1976 that overthrew Mao's followers, the so-called Gang of Four, it is intellectually fashionable and career-rewarding to condemn the Revolution and Mao. It must be appealing for Cold Warriors, religious and ideological fundamentalists to read Jung Chang and Frank Dikötter, who ideologically condemn all that is associated with Maoism. Even though history is not that simple, demonstrating the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of history is very difficult when you face the tremendous intellectual dominance of anti-revolution discourse.

Specifically, to rescue any positive legacies from the era of Mao, Lin has to face two significant stumbling blocks: the Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the Cultural Revolution (CR). Regarding the GLF, Lin makes the following points:

1. 1. the death toll figures calculated from official census data may have problems (Chinese scholars have only now started to question their own official census);Footnote ¹⁵

2. 2. there is a “famine industry” based on statistical manipulation;

3. 3. at best the famine toll is inconclusive;

4. 4. the mortality rates are consistently higher pre-1949 than after 1949, even including the worse years of GLF. In fact, the mortality rate in the worst year of the GLF, 1960, was about the “normal” rate during the Republic of China years;Footnote ¹⁶

5. 5. the mortality rate in the worst year of the GLF, 1960, was about the average rate of other developing countries at that time;Footnote ¹⁷

6. 6. the calculation of excess deaths based on estimated fertility rates (which allows “death” to happen without birth in the first place) “does not seem to have been ever applied by demographers and economists before, and never applied in contexts other than China.”Footnote ¹⁸

Similarly, regarding the Cultural Revolution Lin makes the following points:

1. 1. the CR was misconceived and also had the ironic consequence of losing future opportunities to fight the real “capitalist roaders” when they later emerged;

2. 2. during the CR (and GLF) the rural irrigation system and infrastructure improved;

3. 3. education and medical services improved;

4. 4. there were experiments with fuller and higher degrees of popular participation;

5. 5. failures and errors are highlighted, but successes and achievements are often sidelined in today's intellectual discourse.

Lin has dealt with these two events very briefly and these are probably the weakest sections in her otherwise excellent book. However, this is someway understandable. To start with, the reverse of the fashionable anti-revolution and pro-capitalist intellectual discourse has only just begun in China with the ascendance of Xi Jinping. Lin's argument for a China alternative has to be supported by a non-mainstream discursive language, which, if at all, is just emerging. For considerable time to come, “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate” for historical inquiries and political analysis in non-Western societies.Footnote ¹⁹ Lin and her colleagues in and outside China have been working on that inadequacy and the work reviewed here is just one of such endeavours. It is an admirable attempt at constructing an alternative vision for a non-capitalist future for China and perhaps beyond. For this reason alone it is an essential read to understand contemporary China and maybe the future of capitalism.