When debating with my sister about the pros and cons of the reform and opening-up policy, she believed that it brought economic development (being able to make money) and an improvement in living standards (being able to eat enough and not go hungry).
This idea has also existed in me for a long time. After careful consideration, I think this mindset may exist among the majority of the masses, so I am opening a post for comrades to criticize and refute, in order to facilitate later ideological struggles among comrades.
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Attempt to analyze using the particularities of both conflicting sides:
When debating the pros and cons of reform and opening up, the pros mainly refer to the improvement of people’s living standards; the cons mainly refer to phenomena such as the widening gap between the rich and the poor, moral decline in society, and increased oppression of the people. However, the improvement in people’s living standards is primarily due to the abundance of means of production and the development of productive forces (accumulated through the development of heavy and light industries during the socialist period), not because of reform and opening up; on the contrary, as reform and opening up deepen, the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to widen, social morals will deteriorate to an extreme, and the oppression of the people will deepen further. From this, it is evident that the ‘benefits’ of reform and opening up are merely a label the bourgeois government has pasted on itself. Without reform and opening up, under socialist conditions, people’s living standards can still be further improved, or even better than they are now. The true consequence of reform and opening up is its disadvantages, which are beneficial to the bourgeoisie but are a real harm to the proletariat.
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You should specifically ask her which parts of the population have become rich due to reform and opening up, and which parts have benefited from economic development. The lives of workers today are precarious, much worse than during the socialist period. It has only been over twenty years since the large-scale layoffs. Most farmers now have an annual income of just over ten thousand yuan, with no support at all, and most are elderly widows who cannot go out to work in the cities. Now, rural people are almost all leaving; if reform and opening up were truly a paradise, why would people in the countryside all want to rush to the cities?
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Can you make money? Then what about the workers in Northeast who were laid off? When they were being exploited by capitalists’ children like Qu Wan Ting, did they have a penny in their hands? The small Gang Village, which the Nazis kept promoting, was still a poor village until the Nazis announced complete poverty alleviation. Can this be said to be the result of reform and opening up making people rich? Previously, Li Keqiang admitted that 600 million people in China had an income of less than 1,000 yuan. Can this be considered as becoming rich? It’s true that there is more meat now and people have phones, but what is all this built on? It is built on the foundation of socialist construction, not the achievements of the Nazis themselves. On the contrary, capitalism has only intensified the gap between the rich and the poor, and the bourgeoisie indulges in extravagance. Although there is more meat, people still have to weigh whether they can afford it, and some poor people can’t even buy it. You’ve probably seen the online talk about “Second Brother Pig’s price soaring to the sky.” How can this be called becoming rich?
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