State ownership under a capitalist state is not socialism, correct. Private ownership under a socialist state is not capitalism either. You are entirely missing the point of Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Socialism is a transitional mode of production and distribution between capitalism and communism, characterized by social ownership as the principal aspect, ie rising and dominant, aspect of the economy and the working class as in control of the state. Both apply to China right now. The path of socialist construction in China utilizes a Marxist understanding of economics that sees the material basis of markets as decentralized and underdeveloped production, and the material basis of planned economy as highly developed and centralized production.
China maintains social ownership of the commanding heights of the economy which have already reached monopoly scale, and employs controlled marketization to accelerate the development of underdeveloped industry to create the basis for social ownership through development. The CPC stands at the top, a working class party with a strong basis in Marxism-Leninism with Xi Jinping Thought, and uses this dominance of the state to restrict the capitalists from forming a politically unified and coherent class that could undermine this socialist construction and derail it.
Here’s a diagram of that “stages of socialism:”
They are currently developing towards the intermediate stage, with plans to reach it by 2049. That means they are already socialist, just developing towards higher stages of socialism.
As for independent unions, why is the independence of a union from the socialist system a good thing? There is already a massive federation of trade unions, independence from this creates a fulcrum by which the capitalists could leverage against the system. You have a liberal idea of socialism that envisions it as just as disunified and disorganized as capitalism, but socialism is a process of collectivizing. Capitalists are barred from the highest levels of the CPC, and are prevented from ever having a large presence in it.
State ownership under a capitalist state is not socialism, correct. Private ownership under a socialist state is not capitalism either. You are entirely missing the point of Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Socialism is a transitional mode of production and distribution between capitalism and communism, characterized by social ownership as the principal aspect, ie rising and dominant, aspect of the economy and the working class as in control of the state. Both apply to China right now. The path of socialist construction in China utilizes a Marxist understanding of economics that sees the material basis of markets as decentralized and underdeveloped production, and the material basis of planned economy as highly developed and centralized production.
China maintains social ownership of the commanding heights of the economy which have already reached monopoly scale, and employs controlled marketization to accelerate the development of underdeveloped industry to create the basis for social ownership through development. The CPC stands at the top, a working class party with a strong basis in Marxism-Leninism with Xi Jinping Thought, and uses this dominance of the state to restrict the capitalists from forming a politically unified and coherent class that could undermine this socialist construction and derail it.
Here’s a diagram of that “stages of socialism:”
They are currently developing towards the intermediate stage, with plans to reach it by 2049. That means they are already socialist, just developing towards higher stages of socialism.
As for independent unions, why is the independence of a union from the socialist system a good thing? There is already a massive federation of trade unions, independence from this creates a fulcrum by which the capitalists could leverage against the system. You have a liberal idea of socialism that envisions it as just as disunified and disorganized as capitalism, but socialism is a process of collectivizing. Capitalists are barred from the highest levels of the CPC, and are prevented from ever having a large presence in it.