"Chinese state capitalism is a hierarchy with the party and government at the top, state and private employers below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom. Western private capitalism has a slightly different hierarchy: private employers at the top, parties and government below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom.
A key lesson of Chinese development is that economic objectives are better met faster if a dominant social agency prioritizes achieving them and can mobilize the maximum resources, private as well as public, to that end. China’s party and government were that agency.
In Western capitalism, no comparably empowered social agency possessed that power. Private and public sectors stayed separate. Ideology and politics generally kept the public subordinate to the private. The private employers’ differing particular interests and profit-driven goals discouraged many kinds of coordinated behavior among them as did their system’s structures of competition. Party and state apparatuses depended on corporate donations and corporate-media supports. Thus, in Western capitalism, no social agency played the national resource-mobilizing role that the party and government played in China.
Thus, in Western capitalism, no social agency played the national resource-mobilizing role that the party and government played in China.
Some Western capitalist countries embraced social democracy (as in much of Western Europe). There states provided major social supports (national health insurance, subsidized schools, transport, housing, etc) that enabled some state-mobilized national resources for social priorities. The less capitalist countries embraced social democracy – the more committed to laissez-faire ideology and private-sector dominance – the less they could mobilize national resources. The United States and UK are prime examples of such countries; hence their poor preparations for and containments of the Covid-19 pandemic and the capitalist crash of 2020.
A second lesson China offers the world concerns the relationship between the basic structure its private and public enterprises share and the nature of its socialism. Almost all enterprises in China have an employer/employee internal structure; they differ in who the employers are. In state-owned and -operated enterprises, state officials occupy the employer position. In private enterprises, the employers are private citizens; they occupy no position within the state apparatus..."
