Something has been quietly happening in China the past few decades and the political news has been strangely quiet about it. Changes in the Chinese economy seem to date from about the time of the death of Mao Zedong. The event I am referring to is the slow transformation of Communism into a mixed economic practice of Communism and Capitalism. Yes, that’s right, the Communists are coming around to Capitalist economic practices while continuing to give lip service to Communism and it seems, remarkably, that nobody’s noticing.
What is occurring is what the Chairman himself called, in endless, lambasting condemnations–revisionism, the departure from hard-line Marxist teachings to cope with economic realities. Mao said on that subject (among many other things), “The rise to power of revisionism means the rise to power of the bourgeoisie.”[1] And that to a hard core Marxist like Mao is anathema.
To the Chairman revisionism was poison. It was an intolerable departure from Marxist teachings. He often criticized Nikita Khrushchev for it. He did not allow so much as a revisionist thought in China. He is quoted saying:
Revisionism, or Right opportunism, is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the Right opportunists, pay lip-service to Marxism; they too attack “dogmatism”. But what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people’s democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party, and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. After the basic victory of the socialist revolution in our country, there are still a number of people who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and fight the working class on every front, including the ideological one. And their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists.
― Mao Zedong, in The Little Red Book
But today there are, in China, at least two stock markets in which citizens buy and sell property interests in the means of production. One is in Hong Kong, the other in Beijing, Mao’s capital. The Chairman must be rolling over in his mausoleum.
How could this happen in “Communist” China? The only explanation is of necessity. Mao’s casual attitude toward death on a mass scale notwithstanding[2] there is still more to life than just eking out a bare existence. Leaders crave power and in a Communist society all power is concentrated in a leader or a small oligarchy. But that power is severely limited when it’s limited by chronic, national poverty. This is the problem inherited by Deng Xiaoping and the others in the oligarchy that came to power on Mao’s death. The solution they found to their economic woes was obvious and inescapable, yet astounding in its context. The solution was Capitalism. The effect this has had on the Chinese economy is momentous.
Under the reign of Mao Zedong his goal for Chinese steel production was to catch up to the production volume of the United Kingdom. Today China is the world’s biggest steel producer with an output in 2025 of 960,800,000 tons, more than the output of the next twelve countries combined.[3] U.S. Steel production in that year was 82,000,000 tons, one twelfth as much as China’s. What can explain the fantastic and explosive growth of the Chinese economy? In one word: Capitalism.
In 1979 the GDP of China was $264.15 billion; the GDP per capita of the Chinese population was $273 per year. In 2025 those numbers had exploded to a GDP of $19.62619 trillion and a per capita GDP of $13,953.[4] Since the death of Mao China has been an economic miracle of a staggering magnitude. But only an economic one. The political mechanism is still Communistic and dictatorial. An odd mix but an increasingly dangerous one.
China today has a free market operating inside the country and its own class of billionaires, e.g. Jack Ma with an estimated net worth of $27,900,000,000. And, incredibly, those two stock markets. True, the Hong Kong stock market was inherited from the British rule of that colony but the Beijing stock market is home grown. This does ideological violence to everything Mao believed, thought, wrote and said. More interestingly it contradicts the Chairman’s dogmatic conclusion in one of the quotes in his “Little Red Book.”
“The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.”
― Mao Zedong, in The Little Red Book
The adoption of capitalistic markets and corporations in the exact opposite of Mao’s prediction.
But these ground-swell changes in the Chinese economy must be understood in context. They have only occurred in order to compete with the West. If Communism ruled the entire world the socialist economy could be held in place indefinitely, as it always is, with force and violence. Production would languish at socialist economic levels and people would live in suffocating poverty forever. The world would be a gigantic replica of Cuba and Venezuela. Competition, the driving force of Capitalism, also drives Communist countries into Capitalistic practices. The superiority of Capitalistic economics is manifest but it is always in danger of being destroyed politically.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/red-star-mao.htm
[2] “Deaths have benefits. They can fertilize the ground.” A quote from Chairman Mao that’s not in The Little Red Book. See at: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/927099
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-countries-that-produce-the-most-steel/?mc_cid=0ff1b7ab7d&mc_eid=6f545cc6f2
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China
© 2026 Thomas A. Nelson Sr
Front and Center 