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 0.001%—a slight reduction in, say, the prefrontal cortex? Does that also count as a human? 

     Eventually, it becomes clear that categories have some degree of arbitrary-ness, but human pragmatism settles for sake of convenience — we can know 10:00am is not midnight with a 100% certainty, but we can't quite say for certain that 11:59.999pm doesn't embody the same midnight-ness. My contention, that China is indeed socialist, comes down to this: China is to capitalism what Homo Erectus is to Ape. If one is pressed to pinpoint what historical environment is capitalism, it would be similar to asking what exact ancestral progenitor of modern humans is considered Human. 

     The most decisive hallmark to evaluate a nation's sociopolitical system is if the development of productive forces within their respective mode of production is under a rational jurisprudence towards the ideal socialism. A bruised, squished and peel-less banana does not cease to be a banana just because it doesn't conform to the Platonic perfection of banana-ness as we conceive of it. So, we cannot make our criterion too stringent and parse particular hairs, or we lose sight of something more fundamental. Likewise, the United States is the Ape — since there is no intent for further development: history hitherto has ended thusly (unless that is changed). China is analogous to the Homo Erectus — as Chinese jurisprudence is, at least nominally, marked by the rational command of profits to develop socialism, rather than profits in command of society. So when someone says  that China is capitalist, this is a lack of nuance. Whether China truly lives up to their commitment will be determined by them.