China isn't capitalist. Socialism isn't measured by what Apple pays a worker in Shenzhen. It's measured by who holds state power and where the economy is heading. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is just Marxism applied to the actual conditions China faced: a revolution that succeeded in a country with underdeveloped productive forces. You can't skip stages by decree. You have to develop the forces of production under proletarian control. The market is a tool. It has no class character of its own. What matters is who wields it. In China, the market runs inside a framework where public ownership dominates the strategic sectors and the state (the tool used by the masses to exert class power) can steer investment, fix imbalances, and put social stability ahead of capital accumulation.

The socialist market economy isn't drifting toward capitalism. Market mechanisms allocate resources in many sectors, but the commanding heights remain under public control. The state doesn't try to set every price. That mechanical approach caused problems before. So now it uses macro-control, industrial policy, credit guidance, and ownership stakes to keep development aligned with people's needs. But it also steps in at the micro level when necessary. When Ant Financial tried to bring in klarna style micro loans, the state reined it in. When platform companies threatened data security or labour rights, regulations followed. That's the system working. SOEs hold the vast majority of assets in energy, finance, telecoms, aviation, rail, heavy industry. They aren't passive. They're the levers of power. High-speed rail built in a decade. Rural electrification and broadband rolled out nationwide. Capital directed into renewables and chips even when monetary profits didn't justify it. That's socialism in motion.

Socialism is the transition. Communism isn't a switch you flip. It's the result of transforming the economic base and the social superstructure over time. Contradictions don't vanish. You have to work through them. Urban-rural gaps, efficiency versus equity, opening to global capital while defending sovereignty, individual incentive alongside collective welfare. These are the substance of the transition. Dialectics is a method. You find the principal contradiction at a given stage, mobilise to resolve it, and that creates the basis for the next step. That's why there's no calendar date for "end-stage communism". Asking for one while imperialism still sets the terms of the global economy, while finance and tech leverage sit in a few capitalist hands, is ultra leftist infantilism. It repeats the error of those who called the NEP a betrayal. The transition ends when the material and ideological conditions for communism are achieved globally. Not when a deadline arrives.

Public ownership of the commanding heights is the foundation. The biggest enterprises in China are state-owned or state-controlled. Ownership shapes control, and control shapes purpose. An SOE in China isn't a private firm with a government investor. It's an instrument of the people's democratic dictatorship. The state isn't neutral. It's the organised form of proletarian class power, exercised through the CPC and the mass line. When credit flows to strategic sectors, when prices on essentials are capped in a crisis, when resources mobilise for poverty alleviation that lifted nearly a billion out of absolute deprivation, that's class power doing work. Foreign capital operates in China under strict rules. Controlled engagement accelerates the development of productive forces, which strengthens the material basis for socialism. The risk of capitalist restoration is however real. That's why the Party pushes ideological struggle, anti-corruption, and working-class leadership. The risk is known and accounted for.

On Apple wages: workers in export zones earn less than in the US. That's not hidden. It's part of how global capitalism works: core states extract surplus from the periphery through unequal exchange. China's strategy has been to climb the value chain, not stay subordinate. The surplus from export manufacturing funds education, infrastructure, tech upgrading. Labour laws have tightened. Social insurance has expanded. Unionisation has support. Flexibility remains because competition is real. But the goal isn't to please foreign capital. It's to use globalisation's openings to build an independent, advanced, socialist economy. Judging China's socialism by a foreign corporation's wage sheet misses the point. The question isn't whether exploitation exists in the global system. It does. The question is whether state power exists to limit it, learn from it, and move beyond it. In China, that power exists. It's being used. And the results speak for themselves.