China is becoming more liberal in the classical sense (more money accruing to regular "new money" entrepreneurs instead of to oligarchs); they just haven't hit the "borgeoisie-funded revolt against the aristocracy" phase of liberalization yet. Give them 50 years.
... That really wasn't what the Tienanmen Square Protests were about, at all.
The protest were a massive mixture of different ideologies, but the dominant ones were democratic politics, and communist economics, opposing the trend towards oligarchic/autocratic rule and liberalized economy.
They boiled the frog with the bourgeoisie. For a long time, there were workarounds if you're generally smart and educated. Nowadays its a hacker level operation to get on a VPN.
And even if you do get a VPN, the inconvenience and network effects push everyone towards censored Chinese alternatives like Weibo and Youku anyway. One thing I've seen working is western countries investing in high-quality media that caters to Chinese audiences. It's an uphill battle but it seems like a promising way for us to bridge the divide.
You're in a pipe dream. All the money accrued can and always will feed the ever bigger oligarchs and spreading their power around the world, effectively why the west are more like china in the question. It's already made sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china, not in another 500 years. And soon not in the west either.
Well, yes, money always feeds oligarchs along with the regular business owners.
The key thing to notice is that, in realpolitik terms, an "oligarch" is only aristocracy — rather than haute bourgeoisie — if they have a collegial relationship with the state. I.e. if their interests inherently align with the state's interests (or they can personally negotiate such alignment) such that that they have no reason to act against the state.
But if you have enough oligarchs who don't have such relationships with the state — disenfranchised oligarchs — then they will inevitably plot to manipulate the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat together into organizing a revolt; and will then — critically — sit back and collectively withhold their support from the state for implementing any suppression of said revolt.
(Look at what's happening in Russia right now. You think they'd have such shitty military equipment if the oligarch owners of their defense contractors believed in Putin and wanted him to stay in power?)
Every successful "populist" revolt/revolution in political history, has had an underlying set of disenfranchised oligarchs, who could have aided in the suppression of the revolt, but instead chose to stand by (or "work to rule") and let it happen, because the revolution would inevitably put them in a better, more powerful position.
Why does every politically-stable country — whether democracy, constitutional monarchy, etc. — have a senate? Because a senate is a body made up of (representatives of) oligarchs whose interests don't inherently align with the state, where the job of everyone in the room is to negotiate a group equilibrium between state interests and industrial interests that both the state and the oligarchs can be happy-enough with that the oligarchs will stop undermining state power.
China has a legislature (the NPC), but insofar as it is only a rubber-stamp — it cannot control the Party – seats there are worthless as an "enfranchisement" for oligarchs. They want a real hand in power.
China, obviously, makes friends with oligarchs whenever it can. But certain oligarchs' power bases are just inherently misaligned with Chinese state interests — in a way that a real senate body would solve, but which cannot otherwise be resolved peacefully.
For example: why did China push both Jack Ma out of ownership of Alibaba Group, and Colin Huang out of his chairman position of Pinduoduo, at around the same time? Well, both of these companies now own petit borgeoisie wealth-creation engines — AliExpress and Temu. But Temu didn't exist yet when Huang was ousted. And AliExpress (via Alibaba Group) is majority foreign-owned, while PDD is a domestic private company (and thereby likely implicitly highly state-invested.)
My interpretation of those facts: the state wanted to replace AliExpress — a company proven to both support foreign interference and the empowerment of local petit-bourgeoisie interests (that could eventually lead to destabilization of power) — with another company the state could control indefinitely: one that seemingly serves the same market function, but with tricks (profit-margin caps, distributor-set sale prices) that mean that Temu is not an engine of wealth-creation for the middle class in practice. (It tricks you into thinking that it is, and continues that illusion for the first few months, "going easy" on new sellers to get them to quit other channels, before coming down on you.)
Ma wouldn't stand for just giving up on the forward momentum of an entire business venture, so he was ousted. Huang wasn't interested in his B2B agrobusiness company being pivoted to focus on replacing AliExpress — so he was ousted too. China's replacement board seats of Alibaba acted to cut off new investment into AliExpress; while China's replacement board seats of PDD Holdings acted to get the company going toward building Temu.
Yes, you could describe this as 'making sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china'. But you can also describe it as disenfranchising some very rich people. Dumb move, tbh.
Or consider: every blockchain/cryptocurrency company in China. Again often foreign-funded, again usually highly successful — but at something that China just can't square with (enabling capital flight out of China, minimizing the state's economic hold over other oligarchs.) In a functioning/long-term-stable China, the Chinese cryptocurrency industry would form an industry body with a lobby, get that lobby represented in the senate, and then that lobby's interests would get carefully negotiated against state interests. In the China we have, these companies are just quashed... despite each shutdown generating new disenfranchised oligarchs by the dozens.
The owners of those public-invested private companies. The state didn't decide to buy a majority stake in company A over company B because company A was meritocratically superior; the state had a personal connection to the ownership of company A.
This is factually incorrect, or perhaps more generously: out of date. SOE market capitalization as a percentage of the total has been increasing for about two years now, and the CPC has stated their intention that SOEs will play a bigger role in the economy going forward.
> The owners of those public-invested private companies. The state didn't decide to buy a majority stake in company A over company B because company A was meritocratically superior; the state had a personal connection to the ownership of company A.
The CPC has nearly 100 million members. A hundred or so people who followed in the footsteps of their parents who were prominent party members in the past, does not make an "aristocracy." To compare this to a dynasty like the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds or the Astors is just beyond ridiculous.
