Some thoughts on and surrounding the topic.

Your use of terms like “Dengism” reveals your complete lack of understanding of China’s socialist project. It’s nothing more than a pseudo-concept cobbled together by Westerners. Using “theories” like “What would Stalin have done if he were alive?” and applying the Soviet Union’s experience under specific historical conditions to China, with its completely different level of productivity decades later, is plainly ridiculous.

You reference Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, but reduce a rigorous scientific definition to a moral label. Let’s clarify how Lenin actually defined financial capital. Lenin clearly pointed out that financial capital is oligopolistic capital formed by the fusion of industrial monopoly capital and banking monopoly capital. Its core characteristic is extracting excess profits from peripheral countries through capital export and political hegemony, thereby dividing up the world. Take a close look at China’s overseas investment structure, ownership distribution, and the flow of surplus value. China exports state-led infrastructure construction and production capacity cooperation, mutually beneficial and win-win projects without attached political conditions. Equating participation in international trade and national development interests with imperialism shows you haven’t even grasped Lenin’s most basic work.

Let’s move on to basic theory. Socialism is a transitional stage towards communism. In this stage, the state still exists as an instrument of class rule, its core task being to control the economic high ground. Lenin clearly stated that without seizing banks, merging them into a central bank, nationalizing insurance, and controlling large-scale industry and commodity circulation, it is impossible to truly move towards socialism. These commanding heights primarily lie in finance, transportation, energy, heavy industry, and sectors driving macroeconomic development. As long as the state firmly controls these lifelines, it can determine the overall direction of the economy through resource allocation. Professor Cheng Enfu, has repeatedly emphasized in his discussion of the basic economic system of socialism that the dominant position of public ownership is not only reflected in its quantity but also in its control, influence, and leading role over the national economic lifeline. As long as these commanding heights are in hand, the market mechanism and the non-public sector become tools serving the transitional goals of socialism.

Marxist criticism of private ownership has never stemmed from moral fastidiousness but from a scientific analysis of material production. If you turn to Capital, Marx points out that the material basis of private ownership is the dispersion of production. As production becomes more complex, it inevitably moves towards concentration, that is, the socialization of production. When highly socialized production combines with private ownership, it triggers periodic economic crises. Lenin explained how competition transforms into monopoly, and the socialization of production reaches an unprecedented level, but ownership remains private.

Therefore, the prerequisite for dismantling private ownership is that the industry has already achieved full socialization. If the state forcibly takes over sectors that are not yet socialized and are dominated by small-scale producers, it is tantamount to inheriting a mess lacking nationwide infrastructure and technology. Lenin clearly explained that in countries where small-scale production is dominant, attempting to directly prohibit private ownership using the laws of a proletarian state is economic suicide.

The Soviet model you are clearly so fond of was essentially a wartime and preparedness economy established to prepare for war in Europe. This was a specific historical choice made by Stalin in response to the material reality of imperialist encirclement and the approaching war. It was effective in the short term for the concentrated development of heavy industry, helping the Soviet Union win the war. However, when historical conditions changed, necessitating a shift towards light industry and complex consumer goods, the contradiction predicted by Marx was encountered. State-mandated planning was simply incapable of handling the massive, dispersed, and rapidly changing demands of light industry. The result was a widespread shortage economy.

The black market and small producers spontaneously emerged to fill the gaps. However, the Soviet legal framework forced the state to suppress these small producers who spontaneously addressed systemic inefficiencies. This suppression, in turn, fostered widespread corruption and a privileged class. Because these economic activities were fundamentally incompatible with nationwide nationalized production, the shadow economy, forced underground, ultimately used its influence to attempt to overthrow the Soviet government. The Soviet Union’s failure stemmed precisely from its violation of economic laws, forcibly suppressing objectively existing material demands through administrative orders.

China’s development path fully conforms to the objective material laws of social evolution. Retaining secondary market economy elements is not a deviation from socialism, but rather a legitimate and necessary means of developing the economy in a stage where productive forces are not yet fully socialized.

In fact, China has already experienced the kind of complete socialization you’re seemingly fantasizing about, and paid an extremely heavy price. The system implemented during the Gang of Four’s rule attempted to ignore the objective material basis, forcibly cutting off the capitalist tail, eliminating all private plots and small enterprises, and trying to achieve pure public ownership overnight through administrative orders. Forcibly imposing production relations that are ahead of their stage onto backward productive forces will only create economic stagnation and nothing else. The later reform and opening up and the introduction of market mechanisms were not a betrayal of socialism, but a complete rectification of this utopian fanaticism detached from the material basis, a return to the correct track of production relations adapted to the actual productive forces.

True socialism does not rely on moral legislation to forcibly eliminate private enterprises, but rather on developing highly developed public ownership conditions, allowing private ownership to be naturally superseded in the historical process. When state-owned enterprises are technologically and efficiently advanced enough to achieve absolute overwhelming advantages in key areas, private enterprises will naturally exit the historical stage due to a lack of competitiveness. What hinders you from starting a private enterprise is not the law, but the material conditions of the real world.

I suggest you put aside your subjective assumptions and dogmatic philosophy, and go back to reread the basic theories.