It Could Happen Here - The Chinese Economy Demystified: The State Owned Enterprise

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Mia discusses the emerging expert consensus on the Chinese economy and how the actual structure and function of Chinese State Owned Enterprises confounds and refutes it. You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. In the last half decade, a growing political focus on China has transformed a cottage industry of American China watchers into a sprawling metropolis of pseudo-analysis,

a veritable machine that churns out racialized fear of the Chinese other, and transforms it into economic papers that close with quote-unquote policy solutions, about the so-called China problem. In these circles, a consensus is emerging about what they call Chinese state capitalism and its supposed risk to the United States. China's economy, they argue, is not a free market economy like that of the United States. Instead, China's large array of state-owned industries and its willingness to use investments to incentivize specific kinds of research while protecting companies from pure market competition means that the state, and not the market, dictates the course of the Chinese economy. Under these assumptions, the Chinese economy poses two major threats to American companies and the American security state.

First, state-owned industries subsidized by the state will inevitably out-compete American companies because American companies can't match the sheer quantity of capital held by the Chinese state, which violates the fairness and competitiveness of the free market by making companies compete on unequal grounds. Second, the close ties between the Chinese government and state-owned industries, and even private Chinese companies, means that their technology will be used by the CCP to strengthen its military by stealing American technology. The problem with this consensus at a fundamental level is that it's utterly uninterested in how Chinese state-owned enterprises, known as SOEs, actually function. And this is a real problem, because Chinese SOEs are not what you, or the people writing American foreign policy, think they are. So today, we're going to take a dive into the belly of the state and figure out how SOEs actually function, and determine what this actually does to the prevailing theories about how Chinese economy works, and what it means for both the American and Chinese working classes.

But before we get into the structure of the SOE, we need to talk about state capitalism. State capitalism is an old term. Most of the people writing about it will trace it back to Lenin's new economic policy, a massive shift towards the market in the Soviet economy of the early 20s. The new economic policy re-legalized private capitalist firms, albeit in a much reduced capacity, with a very large state sector driving the economy as a whole, a condition Lenin dubbed state capitalism. But even using state capitalism to describe both the new economic plan and the current situation in China reveals a profound misunderstanding of both Lenin's NEP and the modern Chinese economy. For one thing, during the NEP,

modern Chinese economy. For one thing, during the NEP, state-owned industries accounted for at least 70% of Soviet industrial output, increasing to 77% by the end of the policy. Meanwhile, despite the hype behind Chinese state capitalism, China's state sector represents a measly 40% of China's economy, uniquely high for a capitalist economy, but quite literally the inverse of the relationship between capitalist firms and the state in the USSR. That 60% of China's GDP is private and only 40% is generated by the state, and don't look too closely at that 40% because only 30% of it is from actual state industries, the other 10% resulting from the regular function of the state itself, shows what actually drives the Chinese economy. Not the state at all, but the market.

This is very important, because the story of the Chinese economy in the last 40 years is not simply the story of a state-run command economy transforming into a market economy. It is also, and arguably primarily, the story of the market consuming the state from the inside out. This becomes more clear the closer you look at how state-owned enterprises are actually structured. And it is here the weakness of the very term state-owned enterprise comes into focus. Academics and journalists write about state-owned enterprises as if the word means one specific thing, but the reality is that there are an enormous number of different kinds of SOEs with different structures and different relationships to the state. When regular people think about state ownership, it tends to invoke the specter of the USSR. In a Soviet-style SOE, and we'll take as an example of Chinese SOE in the socialist period, which functions similarly, the firm is literally a government department.

For example, in 1979, China established the Bureau of Non-Ferrous Metals. This is the best name you're going to get out of the CCP in this entire episode. That bureau was in charge of running aluminum production. The government ministry simply ran the mines and the refineries and the factories directly, and everyone working in the factory was a direct government employee paid by the state. This is also pretty close to how the American post office is structured. But Soviet SOEs, crucially, were not firms that competed for money in the market. They worked towards a production plan and were assigned resources based on their output.

In this way, they're closer to a municipal water service than most modern SOEs. Their job, in theory, was to make a thing or a service, not make money. Modern Chinese SOEs, despite sharing the same name as their socialist period predecessors, are very different. For one thing, modern Chinese SOEs, as well as a lot of other state-owned companies like the Saudi government's oil company, Saudi Aramco, are not directly part of the government at all. Instead, they're structured as regular corporations whose stock happens to be owned by the governments. This shareholding relationship is one of the most common kinds of modern SOEs. But, as we'll see, they make ownership and management structures increasingly complex.

The other major difference from Soviet firms is that companies like Saudi Aramco and modern Chinese SOEs are for-profit companies. They don't exist to provide a service, they exist to make money. This gets very weird very quickly. For one thing, while we tend to think of state-owned enterprises as belonging to the national government, municipal, provincial, and even district and county governments in China have their own SOEs. On a conceptual level, this makes sense. China's economy is the size of a continent, and individual provinces have the geographic size, population, natural resources,

and economy of entire nations, which means that provincial SOEs can rival national firms. But this also means that state-owned industries from different levels of government are directly competing with each other on the market. This is something beyond the experience of previous theorists of the state and capitalism. Frederick Engels, the close friend of Karl Marx, was able to predict the rise of capitalist state-owned industries, writing, quote, at a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. The official representative of the capitalist state will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication, the post office, the telegrams, the railways.

any longer modern productive forces the transformation of the great establishment for production and distribution into joint stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose all the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees the capitalist has no social function than that of pocketing dividends tearing off coupons and gambling at the stock exchange with the different capitalists to spoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. But Engels imagined the state as a collective capitalist replacing the individual capitalist. What no one could have foreseen was capitalism breaking the

collective nature of the state entirely, hollowing it out until its chunks competed with each other on the market. This is the state of modern Chinese SOEs. These SOEs are capitalist firms subject to market discipline. They can and will fail and go under if they aren't making enough money And the government can and will tear them apart and force the still state-owned pieces to compete against each other These state-owned industries also largely are not supposed to be monopolies Firms that get too large and powerful can and will be broken up and the parts, once again, set to compete against each other. Weirder still, these SOEs are also listed on the stock market, meaning individual capitalists, and as we'll see later, even foreign firms, can buy 49% stakes in nominally state-owned industries.

Now, if the state doing market competition against itself wasn't weird enough for you, let me introduce another complication. The State-Owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council. And no, the State-Owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council is not a name that sounds any better in Chinese. If you have a bureaucracy rooted in Leninism, the product is a veritable cornucopia of the most absolutely dogshit names you've ever heard in your entire life. This commission is better known for obvious reasons as SASAC, and it is the government body that owns the shares of most of the largest firms in China, which are known as the national champions. Now, you could be forgiven for thinking you now understand the structure of Chinese SOEs. SASAC, which is a part of the state,

owns the SOEs, bobs your uncle, everyone goes home for the night, and the episode ends right here. Unfortunately, it is way more convoluted than that. When I said SASAC owns the shares of the largest firms in China, that's only true in a technical sense. What SASAC actually owns are the shares of massive holding companies, companies that exist on paper, but whose existence is purely dedicated to owning the shares of other companies. These holding companies own the shares of the publicly traded companies you might have heard of, like Sinopec, China's state-owned oil companies. traded companies you might have heard of, like Sinopec, China's state-owned oil companies. And this is where the simplistic narrative of the Chinese SOE, a single firm owned by the state under its direct political control, completely falls apart. Because again, the state doesn't really own these firms directly. What they own is a holding company that owns the stock of the SOEs.

That holding company, however, is the actual basis of the organization of Chinese state ownership. The building blocks of the Chinese state economy aren't single state owned enterprises at all. The economy is actually composed of what are called business groups. American listeners may not be very familiar with business groups, but they're a common sight in what became known as the Tiger economies, a series of economies that saw rabid industrial development in the post-World War II era, largely fueled by the demands of American military supply lines for its wars in Korea and Vietnam. The two most infamous are the Japanese Keretsu, the successor to the old Japanese Zaibatsu that dominated the pre-war Japanese economy, and which were

to some extent broken up after the war, and Korean chaebol conglomerates. These massive groups of businesses are either owned by the same people or families, in the case of the chaebol, or linked by mutual shareholding of each other's companies, like keretsu. The groups cooperate and coordinate their business strategy instead of competing against each other, which allows them to carry out a level of long-term planning that's sometimes difficult for individual for-profit companies. Chinese economists sent to Japan to study Keretsu in the 70s and 80s returned with policy in hand. But the business groups that eventually emerged in the Chinese economy after an extended process of trial and error are different than their Korean or Japanese counterparts.

Where chaebol are organized around families and keretsu are organized around a commercial bank that provides financing for the companies in the group, Chinese businesses are organized by those holding companies 100% owned by SASAC and therefore the Chinese state. 100% owned by SASAC, and therefore the Chinese state. Those holding companies, also sometimes called core companies, own the majority of the stock of a variety of publicly traded companies. They also own a finance company, which finances the companies, and work with research institutes, which carry out scientific and research development for the entire group. These research institutes, which are often university-affiliated, are technically non-profit but take money from the core companies in exchange for the research development they do. Chinese business groups are often massive, organizing hundreds of companies who also maintain trade and supply relations with hundreds more companies technically outside the

group. These groups are organized by what's called articles of grouping, which the core holding company who owns the stock and the rest of the companies get those companies to sign. These articles form a top-down structure for the entire group that also includes council and management bodies for the entire group with representatives from each of the companies in the group. This structure, in theory, is how the CCP transmits policy down from single holding companies to all of their downstream subsidiaries and allies. And this is important because, at least in theory, business groups are supposed to carry out government industrial policy and economic development. But in the real world, this is

a significant challenge. Because, again, even individual business groups comprise hundreds of companies, and the state's grasp on them is often tenuous, as seen by a wave of state-owned companies that theoretically are supposed to make things getting into real estate speculation, a problem the CCP has been attempting to deal with since 2008 and only really has gotten under control in the last two years. But you know who will not do housing speculation instead of making ads for you? It is the companies and the products and services that support this podcast. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And we're back. So confronted with the enormity of the scale of Chinese business groups,

how does state control over these groups actually work? In theory, regulation operates around two channels. SASAC owns the holding companies, which allows it, in theory, to make decisions that a shareholder would be able to make in a private corporation. There's also a parallel corporate structure directly run by the party, and high-ranking people in the corporate structure become party members and are sent to cadre trainings at places like the Central Party School in Beijing. Meanwhile, people swap between SASAC and high-level manager positions, and the heads of large SOEs also have positions in the Chinese government itself. Trying to explain all of the positions they have and the councils they're on and their technical ministerial ranks is a

disaster because, oh boy, if you think the American government is confusing, try sorting out who does what in a party state. The moral of the story is that the CCP tries to keep control over the enormous number of companies it technically owns through control of who gets appointed as the head of SOEs, through SASAC, which is directly a part of the state, and by integrating SOE heads into various government and party bodies. They also are somewhat embarrassingly, given that they own these companies, forced to directly go after them through the law and through the court system, which works sometimes and also doesn't work other times. But this relationship is multidirectional. Li Wenlin and Curtis J. Milhaupt, two scholars who've written extensively about Chinese corporate structure, argue convincingly that the deep

integration of the party into SOEs after state-owned industries have been corporatized, that is, turned from direct state industries run by state employees to profit-seeking market corporations owned through shares, was a way to buy the party off and allow these firms to become more capitalist in ways that wouldn't have worked if the party wasn't also getting rich off of it. It's not just that China has state-owned industries, it's that the corporatization of state-owned industries has made the party and the Chinese state increasingly capitalist. And this raises another question. As the Chinese state grows more capitalist, are public and private Chinese firms even all that different? Private firms also have links to the state through equity, have joint ventures with

SOEs where private companies will own a part of a company and an SOE will own another part of a company. Private companies expand and get access to credit through partnering with local SOEs. In essence, many of the things that are supposed to make SOEs different from private companies are shared by both, from the profit motive to state affiliation. As Milhaupt put it, quote, functionally, SOEs and large POEs, private enterprises, in China share many similarities in the areas commonly thought to distinguish state-owned firms from privately owned firms. Market access, receipt of state subsidies, proximity to state power, and execution of the government's policy objectives. A complete account of Chinese state capitalism must explain these similarities.

Even figuring out what legally is an SOE, and what's technically still a private firm, gets very weird very fast. ZTE, for example, a giant Chinese telecom company, is owned by a bewildering array of shell and holding companies which are in turn owned by other companies, some of which are state-owned. This is the level of ownership confusion we're working at here. If the largest stake of a company is owned by a holding company that's owned in turn by a combination of two SOEs who own 51% of the stock and a private investor's company who owns 49% of the stock is the company state-owned. And it gets worse in ZTE's case, because even if you assume, okay, the majority stake

in this company is owned by an SOE, therefore it's state-owned, you would assume that the state or a state-owned company would manage the corporation, right? Wrong. In ZTE's case, the SOEs worked out an agreement with the other investor, such that ZTE is technically state-owned, but privately managed. And this, it turns out, is a very common arrangement. Because of laws about foreign ownership of companies operating in China, many state-owned enterprises are actually joint partnerships between SOEs and foreign corporations, where the SOE owns 51% of the stock and the foreign corporation owns 49% of the stock while running the actual company and extracting profits from it.

Even 100% Chinese firms, of which there are many, pose a challenge to the traditional conception of SOEs as run by the state for the good of the state and its political objectives. This goes back to their structure as corporations the state owns by shareholding. This means, as I've emphasized, that these SOEs aren't government ministries. They're companies trying to make a profit and are run by their own managers. These firms have a total workforce of 70 million people, which makes direct regulation very difficult. In practice, this means SOEs are a lot more autonomous from direct state control, even with all the safeguards put in place than you'd think

just from the word state-owned industry. Another thing that makes SOEs more like private companies is that money from SOEs goes back to the company and not to the state, to which it pays dividends but not much else. This means that SOEs have their own revenue stream that's not dependent on state budget allocations. Meanwhile, private firms, like SOEs, are operated by members of symbolic party congresses, and private firms also get state subsidies and access to loans from state banks. A common canard about the unfairness of anti-competitive Chinese SOEs that applies to private firms as well. And at this point, I must point out that any company anywhere in the world

can make money by allying with the state and getting access to state resources. The US does this too, especially state and local governments who are all too happy to give enormous tax breaks and even provide prison labor to private companies. Meanwhile, tech companies like Amazon and Google are kept afloat by massive government contracts, to say nothing of the American defense industry. In the US, we call this corruption, or at least we used to until it became legal to literally buy senators, a thing that Nazi dipshits always seem to forget when they talk about the uniqueness of the Chinese economy and its relation to subsidies. There are obviously differences between the US and Chinese economies, but arguing that businesses having ties to the state, which they extract benefits from, constitutes a unique form

of capitalism is incomprehensibly absurd. None of this has stopped China watchers from the most rabid reactionaries and the most stalwart or self-described stalwart communists to declare that China carries out something called industrial policy through its SOEs, which makes it different from other neoliberal states. So what is industrial policy? In theory, industrial policy refers to the state giving subsidies and funding to specific corporations in order to pursue specific economic objectives the market wouldn't normally have pursued. These writers point the preferential treatment that Chinese SOEs have to credit and subsidies that they receive from the government as evidence of the subordination of the market to the political. Conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories,

their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturno, Tales

from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

Which they also claim is essentially a form of socialist state planning. My response to this is that I will accept that an SOE getting a subsidy is socialist state planning the moment they agree that the US is a socialist state because of its corn subsidies. Despite writing about China somehow turning everyone into anarcho-capitalists, state subsidies in the form of direct cash transfers, tax breaks, preferential legal treatment technology transfers, and a thousand other forms of state aid are as old as capitalism itself and are pretty normal even under neoliberalism. People describe these measures as industrial policy, using state favor to promote certain industries. But corn subsidies put lie to the claim that industrial policy is some unique thing of a new era emerging in capitalism that had totally disappeared with

neoliberalism. American corn and other agricultural subsidies are one of the largest and most expensive industrial policy regimes in the world, constituting half a trillion dollars spent since 1955. They are also written in as exceptions to most of the world's major free trade agreements. We also need to ask, what is the difference between industrial policy, which is state strategic investment in certain sectors to develop their economy, and regulatory capture, where control over agencies or even the legislature itself is taken over by special interest groups. This question sounds silly, but the results, a company in a sector getting handed a pile of money in various forms

by the state, looks exactly the same. Those corn subsidies arguably are industrial policy, they were technically originally designed to ensure that the U.S. would always have a supply of cheap food. But on the other hand, the real reason they exist has nothing to do with planning whatsoever. They exist because a cabal of legislatures from farming states have enough power to shut down both the House and the Senate if their demands aren't met. So every year, the state bows to the corn lobby and pays them billions of dollars. So, is this industrial policy policy or is it regulatory capture? And can the two even be distinguished in capitalist countries? This is a question we need to take very seriously in the Chinese case at the same time we ask

ourselves, what is the actual objective of the Chinese state? Is it decoupling and retrenchment from the West or is it making money? There is significant evidence that it's the latter. For one thing, China receives an enormous amount of foreign direct investment, something that everyone seems to conveniently forget, even though it was one of the key elements that fueled Chinese industrialization and plays a major role in the Chinese economy to this day. Meanwhile, U.S. affiliates in China alone had over half a trillion dollars of sales just in 2018. While the focus of most analysis has been in flashy disputes between the US and China over their attempts to produce their own semiconductors,

China has also liberalized its foreign investment laws in the last few years, and allowed foreign companies and industries like insurance to operate directly instead of running through joint partnerships with Chinese stakeholders. Even the chairman of SASAC gave a speech in February about how his goal was to increase the profitability of Chinese SOEs. China is, and will remain, deeply enmeshed in the global capitalist economy. And this, I think, is, as much as their unwillingness to grasp how SOEs actually work, the fatal flaw of analysis of the Chinese economy and its obsession with formal state ownership. These analyses are not a serious attempt to look at the actual structure of the economic system the entire world, including China, lives under. There are several kinds of arguments that we need to look beyond formal

ownership to understand capitalism more broadly. There is a somewhat complicated Marxist argument which holds that while we talk about capitalism as a system where the ruling class owns the means of production and the working class, which owns nothing, is forced to work for them, that's not all capitalism is. Capitalism is also a series of commodity production, in which objects confront each other in the market and appear as commodities with their own discrete values based on abstract labor time. Generalized commodity production, which is people producing commodities for market exchange that owns the holding company that owns the company that makes the commodity is owned by the state or a hedge fund or a bank or a sovereign wealth fund. It still reproduces commodity production, which means it's still just capitalism, but with more complex formal ownership mechanisms. There's also the David Graeber argument, which goes, okay goes okay sure state-owned property is technically the property of the people tm but try and actually go there and see how fast the cops show up and take you away just like private ownership you still don't own public property any substantive

sense it's just controlled by a different group of bureaucrats with guns and focusing purely on ownership to define an economic system gets you nowhere. And then there's my argument, which is that people are absolutely obsessed with looking at capitalism from the perspective of capital, which means that they are absolutely obsessed with the question of ownership. But what happens if you look at so-called state capitalism and the nature of state ownership from the perspective of the working class? Everything suddenly becomes a lot clearer. SOE workers are a bit better off than their non-SOE counterparts, but their jobs suck ass, their hours are long, and they don't make that much money. They are fully dependent on selling their labor to the market to survive. And all of these companies have hundreds of subsidiaries and

suppliers with a variety of levels of state ownership, and people who work for those companies' lives are even shittier. Meanwhile, the means of production and the physical infrastructure of so-called state capitalism was built by workers who were left with nothing but silicosis after turning places like Shenzhen from fishing villages to a city with a population of over 10 million people in less than 30 years. This is the ultimate truth of the Chinese economy, just as it is the ultimate truth of the American economy. We sell our lives for nothing, and our only reward in the end is to die amidst the wonders of a world that was never ours.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.