Former president Dilma Rousseff (PT) made clear this Monday (22) her admiration for the Chinese model of society, which is controlled in a dictatorial way by the Communist Party.
“China represents a light in this situation of absolute decay and darkness that is traversed by Western societies,” said the former president, during a debate on the launch of the book “China, Socialism of the 21st Century” (publisher Boitempo).
The work, by Elias Jabbour (Uerj) and Alberto Gabriele (former economist at Unctad, the UN agency for trade and development), analyzes the Chinese development model, focusing above all on the role of the state and the communist party in the process.
For Dilma, the process of economic transformation in the Asian country deserves praise. “One cannot help but admire a country that leaves feudalism, the most brutal colonialist control, to become the second largest economy in the world and the first in purchasing power parity. And everything indicates that, by the end of the decade, we could see China become the biggest economy in the world,” he said.
The authors of the book and Silvio Almeida, professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas and columnist for the sheet.
China is a one-party regime, where there is no democracy or respect for freedom of expression, in addition to the systematic persecution of minorities such as Uighurs. None of this was the subject of the debate, however, which was marked by praise for the Asian country.
On the contrary, the former president said that there is prejudice and misinformation against the Chinese CP. “There is a whole range of prejudice and hidden subject in the case of China’s development, at least from the perspective of Western countries. We have to understand the relationship between the party and the State instruments for overcoming poverty.”
The former president’s comments follow other nods by the PT to leftist dictatorial regimes. On the 10th, for example, a party secretary issued a note about the covert election in Nicaragua, which dictator Daniel Ortega won, calling it a “great popular and democratic demonstration”. The election was marked by the arrest of opponents and the restriction to independent observers and journalists. The party is also not used to criticizing the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships.
According to Dilma, the Chinese managed to build an alternative model to the Washington Consensus, as the set of liberal measures applied from the 1990s onwards became known.
She praised the fact that local authorities regulate important sectors of the economy, which would have the merit of minimizing the risk of crises. “China doesn’t allow a situation like Lehman Brothers,” he said, referring to the US investment bank that went bankrupt in 2008, triggering an international financial crisis.
“It was important to watch the use of a State policy and the use of artificial intelligence in the fight against the pandemic. This explains why a country with 1.4 billion inhabitants had this result [em número de mortes].” According to data from the Our World in Data platform, China has so far registered less than 5,000 deaths from the coronavirus.
The Chinese economic model was described as innovative by Jabbour, one of the authors of the book, linked to the PC do B. “China carried out institutional innovations that were reallocating the role of the state. China in 2006 inaugurated active industrial policies, which led to innovations disruptive technologies like 5G,” he said.
A notable fact, the author asserted, is the party’s firm control over business. “We have a CEO [presidente-executivo] connected to the PCC [Partido Comunista Chinês] in every company, this is something very interesting.”
Almeida, in his speech, praised the fact that the book poses intriguing questions about an economic model that still generates perplexity. “China has become a mystery because it cannot be understood with the old keys of thinking,” he said.
For him, the country is “a place full of contradictions”. “China is a country forged in the contradictions of capitalism,” he declared.
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