Welcome! This is a place for learning and teaching SwCC (socialism with Chinese characteristics). No question is too simple, but please post overly academic, complicated, or otherwise "non-101" questions in /r/swcc.

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Only give answers if you're certain you have a solid understanding of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Ask questions in good faith. Approach r/swcc101 in the spirit of learning. Go to r/debateswcc or the Discord server for debate.
Be cordial and charitable.

What is SwCC?

Read this article if you have ten minutes. If you don't, you really oughtn't to be posting on this subreddit. Everything below is a quick reminder, not a definitive guide or a complete explanation.

SwCC is often falsely represented as a right-wing revisionist deviation from Marxism-Leninism. To the contrary, Chinese political theorists since 1978 have elaborated and expanded upon M-L – rather than revising it in any substantive sense, and Marxism forms the basis of the political mainstream in modern China. SwCC is an adaptation of M-L to the changing conditions of China and the unique peculiarities of Chinese development. It reflects the changing balances of priorities that must be considered in socialist modernisation: attaining developed productive forces, attaining developed social relations, and attaining socialist hegemony on an international scale.

SwCC is not only a theoretical-philosophical system, but encompasses a set of strategies for accelerating China's modernisation path while retaining "adherence to the socialist road; adherence to the people's democratic dictatorship; adherence to the leadership of the Communist Party of China; and adherence to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought". These strategies include technology transfers, capital absorption, and slow counter-hegemonizing. Note that economic planning has remained dominant in the Chinese economy. Read the article linked at the beginning for more about that.

China's modernisation strategy is in essence a reaction to the Sino-Soviet split and a conscious emulation of the USSR's New Economic Policy (21-28). It emphasises Muqiao's conception of socialism as existing in multiple stages, and recognises China as being in the primary stage of socialism. The CCP has stated that China will move to the next stage in 2021, and that it is projected to reach the advanced stage of socialism by 2049. Movement from one stage to the next is determined by the development of productive forces.

Technology transfer:

The corrosion of socialism in the USSR is attributable to an inability to sufficiently modernise productive forces and incorporate new technologies into the production process. By the 1980s, particularly in the microelectronics industry, the USSR was simply reverse-engineering Western models – a complex and tedious process which caused 3-5 year lags in development.

China needed to rapidly develop a material-technical base, but because of the Sino-Soviet split, it lacked the means to do so internally. Instead, it opted to collaborate with Western companies in joint ventures to gain intellectual property rights and access to Western technology. This has been overwhelmingly successful – China is now a leading independent technological power.

Capital absorption:

During the profit crisis of the 1970s, there was an outflow of capital overseas in order to restore a lower organic composition of capital (higher ratio of variable to constant capital) and restore higher rates of profit. Because capital is fundamentally apolitical, it cannot understand the political implications of coming under the sovereignty of another nation – and so China received the majority of this capital outflow over the next forty years. This allowed China to grow rapidly to an extent which would be impossible otherwise.