Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.

My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you've cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their's. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their's.

However I'm still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we've gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I'm not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It's also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I'm not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people's political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx's part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.

On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven't seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like 'exploitation can be good!') with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don't think it's just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak 'push the big red button'. I'm not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn't mean that I know that they won't. But something it's just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don't have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.

Of course I'm happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I've only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i'd be happy to see it.

This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.

I personally don't really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that's not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China's contemporary political system are divisive. I'm not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it's important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.

I'm not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you've clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I'm also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.