What Xi Jinping is saying is actually very simple, and people only get confused because they use lazy Western shortcuts.
Calling China “capitalist” just because it uses markets is a category error. Markets are a tool, not a system. Capitalism is defined by who commands capital and whose interests the system ultimately serves. In China, capital does not rule the state. The state rules capital. That single fact already breaks the capitalist label.
China opened up to markets to raise productivity, absorb technology, and accelerate development. That was a strategic decision, not an ideological conversion. Political power was never privatized. Macroeconomic control was never surrendered to finance. The commanding heights — land, energy, transport, banking, telecoms — remain under public control. Those are the levers that matter, and they are not in private hands.
Profit exists, yes. Private firms exist, yes. But profit is tolerated only within boundaries set by the state. When capital undermines social stability, national security, or long-term development, it gets reined in, sometimes brutally. That does not happen in capitalist systems, where capital captures the state and writes the rules.
Boring idiots who shout “state capitalism” or “technocratic capitalism” are projecting old Cold War binaries. They assume socialism must look like frozen 20th-century models or else it’s fake. That’s dogma, not theory.
What they miss is that this adaptability is the very nature of communism itself. Dialectical materialism does not freeze history. It starts from material conditions, reads contradictions as they actually exist, and changes methods as reality changes. Socialism is not a museum exhibit. It is a moving process.
Marx never argued for a single timeless form. He argued that systems evolve through contradiction, development, and concrete conditions. If the productive forces change, the superstructure must adjust. Refusing to adapt is not being “more socialist.” It is being anti-materialist.
Modern socialism uses markets, data, planning, and technology together because those are the instruments available at this stage of development. Updating the method does not change the destination. It is precisely how a materialist system survives, consolidates, and advances instead of collapsing into ritual and nostalgia.
China’s system is socialist because development is subordinated to collective goals, long-term planning overrides short-term profit, and political authority is not for sale. Reform adjusted the means. It did not replace the logic.
So Xi is right to dismiss those labels. They confuse surface mechanisms with underlying power. And once you look at who actually commands the system, the capitalism accusation collapses on its own.
China's Xi Jinping was quoted with saying that "In recent years commentators both at home and abroad have questioned whether the road pursued by China is truly socialist."
"Some have called our road 'Social Capitalism,' others 'State Capitalism,' and yet others 'Technocratic Capitalism.' These are all completely wrong."
"We respond that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, by which we mean that despite reform we adhere to the socialist road — our road, our theory, our system, and the goals we set out at the 18th National Party Congress."
Follow: @RTSG_News
