Chinopoly: in a game of political stratagem, China is using Western capital and know-how to further empower and enrich Communist Party members, but its commitment to communism may bring its downfall

New American, The, Jan 7, 2008 by William F. Jasper

How, Then, Does China Excel?

If China is still a socialist economy and socialism doesn't work, how does one explain the regime's stellar successes? Quite simply, a socialist system can be productive--if it allows external sources to provide the capital, technology, and expertise that it lacks, and if there are external sources able and willing (and foolish enough) to provide those things.

China simply drew on the experience of V.I. Lenin, who had faced a similar crisis in the early Bolshevik period in Russia. Having wrecked Russia's economy, the communists' new regime was facing imminent collapse in 1921. As a temporary measure, Lenin made peace with the hated capitalist West and invited foreign aid, foreign investment, and foreign expertise. His New Economic Policy (NEP) lasted for nearly a decade, including several years under his successor, Joseph Stalin.

By the late 1960s, China's communist leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were in about the same fix that Lenin had found himself in 1921. Their disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution programs had caused tens of millions of deaths and devastated China's economy and society. They needed help from the West to survive.

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Help was on the way. In July 1971, President Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Kissinger's assistant Winston Lord (later to be U.S. Ambassador to China and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR) made their now-famous secret trip to China to visit Mao and Zhou. That set up the much more famous Nixon-Kissinger trip to China in 1972, and the equally important trip a few months later of David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the CFR. Returning from his Beijing visit with Mao and Zhou, Rockefeller declared, "The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history." Mass murderer Mao's "social experiment" had by that time taken the lives of up to 64 million Chinese.

But those deaths did not deter Rockefeller. He began arranging loans and technology transfers for Mao's New Economic Policy, just as he had been doing for years for similar projects in the Soviet Union. However, even a banker and king maker as famous as he would not have been able to coax Western corporations and investors into Mao's communist "workers' paradise" without government guarantees to cover the risk of failure or expropriation. That is where the loans, grants, guarantees, subsidies, and insurance from the World Bank, Export-Import Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and other U.S. and UN entities came in. They not only provided billions of (taxpayer) dollars directly to China and/or the banks and companies doing business with her, but just as importantly, convinced the global business community and U.S. taxpayers that China was indeed "going capitalist."

They Admit It's True

While U.S. politicians, bankers, and corporate elitists have been selling the message of China's conversion from Maoism to "market socialism," the Communist Party of China and communist parties throughout the world have gone to great lengths to explain that this is just a replay of Lenin's NEP strategy, albeit on a longer timeline.