China: Capitalist or Socialist? A Perennial Problem with Definitions
Debate in the political sciences when it comes to the People's Republic of China is marked by disagreement about the nature of China's sociopolitical system. The distinguishing feature in this heated discussion is the debate as to whether China to be regarded as a capitalist nation or a socialist nation. However, I contend it is the latter — and that the problem is more deep than it appears: because it touches on a perennial problem in philosophy and the physical sciences about definitions and classification. Whether to taxatomize a new species into the Mollusca or Brachiopod appears to be an almost arbitrary practice when the lines are so blurred. Richard Dawkins has mentioned a phenomena with humans: if, for example, we imagine thumbing a book that shows the evolutionary history of humans, does it make sense to ask: what is the first human? And if we locate the first human, what if we scale the evolutionary timeline 0.0...
