This phrase keeps showing up in one form or another in comments defending the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of their virus.
It is also worth noting that China is at least as capitalistic as the United States and their technology is quickly eclipsing ours…
The health system in China is actually a pure capitalist system…
China is dealing with a lot more humans in a confined area. Make no mistake, they are extreme capitalists.
I would rather live in a western style capitalist society than a Chinese state capitalist style society with its obnoxious and intrusive social credit system but let us not delude ourselves into thinking that the former represents some shining beacon of liberal democracy in the world.
I haven’t the patience here to debunk the appropriation of the word “capitalism” by these utopian naifs, and I won’t say they’re Chinese bots and shills. There are, after all, useful idiots. Witness Bernie Sanders’ voters.
I realize the use of “state capitalism” is perhaps necessary since the SJW’s ruined the word “fascism,” but this insistence that China has a capitalist, therefore free market, economy is just an “everything is relative” way to denigrate capitalism.
This moral equivalency trope is worse than yelling “racist” whenever anyone says “Wuhan virus.”
I saw somewhere a suggestion we call it the “CCP virus.” I like the idea.
If the United States public health system tolerated anything within two orders of magnitude of the virulent disease breeding Chinese “wet markets” there would be FDA officials hanging from street lamps. Where’s the Chinese Upton Sinclair when you need him?
If the United States, for example, practiced the same health policies as the Chinese Communists wouldn’t we expect doctors critical of the Administration to be disappeared? That happened in China to doctors reporting the CCP virus 5 months ago. The CCP covered it up from day one.
If the United States regarded their citizens with equal contempt, wouldn’t we deny human to human transmission was taking place? Well, maybe we can’t because the CCP already tried that. That, and travel restrictions employed 3 months late (5 million were able to leave Wuhan after CCP virus had been confirmed), and their unless-you-hug-a-Chinese-stranger-you’re-a-racist propaganda didn’t work out too well for Italy.
Wouldn’t the US have millions in Uighurs type re-education camps, ready to draft as forced labor? (Not that we don’t have re-education camps here, but people, including many Chinese, pay to go to them. They’re called universities.)
The airy comparison of the Chinese surveillance state economic system to Western democracies’ partially free markets is intended to hide all that.
Anytime you find people promoting China as capitalist, and especially if Chinese problems are blamed on capitalism, you are in a mess of ignoramuses, liars, or both. The only time the words “capitalism” and “China” (they always omit the word “Communist”) should be used in the same sentence is something of this order: “China is a surveillance Big Brother thugocracy which has appropriated some of the ideas of free-market capitalism in order to avoid total societal collapse.”
See also:
China Did This, and Saying So Isn’t Racist
China’s Real Disease: Not Coronavirus
China: Exploiting False Accusations of Racism
There are also false accusations of capitalism to be concerned with.