Cuba eat your heart out

 Staunch Marxist leftists believe that CCP state-owned enterprises (SOEs) embody the alleged socialism. In reality, SOEs today are as capitalist as it gets.

The SOEs take on a variety of forms. Some of them are analogous to nationalized firms in Great Britain after World War Two, in France under DeGaulle, and in Japan during its rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 70s.

Many SOEs were privatized entirely. “During the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, the state sold around two-thirds of SOEs and state assets to non-state owned firms.”xl The new owners were typically Party officials who had been managers in the SOE. They “bought” the firm on credit, paying the debt out of the profits of the enterprise.

LENIN FOR STATE CAPITALISM

The remaining SOEs became part of the overall capitalist economy. They were no longer run according to a state plan, because there is no such plan.xli SOEs are corporations; units of the state own all or most of the shares.

Various central government agencies own around a hundred large SOEs. Their industries range from petroleum to power grids, metal ores, telecommunications, shipping and more. One of them is China National Tobacco Corporation, which produces 46 percent of all cigarettes in the world, 2.5 trillion per year. It buys tobacco leaf from Argentina, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia.xlii CNTC made $214 billion profit in 2021.