The New Left in China: as bad as the New Left elsewhere (The Flemish Beerdrinker)

There appears to be a New Left in China, opposing market reforms. They seem to think that market reforms already have gone to far instead of not far enough. Simon World is not too much impressed with China’s new left:

The ’New Left’ are worried about China’s growing income gap but without any solutions. Is the income gap worth worrying about? No, with a but. If you think of an economy as a pie, it doesn’t matter if the allocation of the pie is uneven, so long as the pie itself is growing. Is that true in China’s case? Clearly the answer is yes. Witness the massive rise in living standards for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens. It is the most rapid poverty allieviation in history. Yes, there is still plenty of crushing poverty in China. But it is decreasing at a rapid rate, not thanks to trendy pop concerts or dollops of foreign aid, but thanks to a quasi-capitalist economic system. China’s system is far from perfect. Cronyism and nepotism are rife. Government interference and direction in enterprise is rampant. Rule of law (in both enforcement and courts) is patchy at best. Unsurprisingly this has been China’s economic way for much of its history (...). But in terms of results, the current one is working, and working in spades.

To paraphrase Deng Xiaoping: it doesn’t matter how corrupt the cat is, as long as it catches mouses. And this one does.