Teemu Ruskola’s The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: How Communism Built a Capitalist Superpower provides a detailed examination of the legal and institutional changes through which the People’s Republic of China altered its land system, labour policies, and urban–rural relations from 1949 onward. However, the book’s main theoretical claim that China’s rise as a capitalist superpower was “built by communism” is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Stalinist political logic. This essay contends that, despite its empirical strengths, Ruskola’s analysis is ultimately a liberal reading of a process better understood as a bureaucratic counter-revolution that led to capitalist restoration.

The exclusion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the portrayal of the CCP bureaucracy as a neutral entity, and the lack of a theory of the working class as a political agent make the book inadequate from a Marxist perspective. To truly understand China’s political transformation and the revolutionary capacity of its working class today, a more rigorous framework such as Leon Trotsky’s concept of the degenerated workers’ state is essential.

The problem of naming China’s transformation

Teemu Ruskola’s book explores a longstanding debate about China’s transformation after 1978. His core claim that “communism built a capitalist superpower” is deliberately provocative. It challenges both Western liberal triumphalist stories and the CCP’s defensive narrative. The book also reinterprets China’s change from a comparative standpoint, drawing on E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Karl Polanyi’s idea of land and labour as “fictitious commodities.”

Ruskola’s work makes significant empirical contributions. He thoroughly describes the hukou household-registration system, the legal separation between state-owned urban land and collectively owned rural land, and the hybrid nature of migrant labour. His original and persuasive argument that China’s transformation reversed the English process—prioritising labour commodification before land is both innovative and convincing.

However, the book’s theoretical approach is fundamentally flawed. It accepts the CCP’s self-identification as a communist regime and views the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as a paradoxical but ongoing development of “communism.” It overlooks the CCP bureaucracy as a distinct social layer with its own interests. Additionally, it fails to see the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as a pivotal political turning point and does not consider the working class as an active political subject.

This essay argues that Ruskola’s interpretation is a liberal mystification of a process that can only be understood as a bureaucratic counter‑revolution culminating in capitalist restoration.

The book’s strengths: land, labour, and the urban–rural divide

Ruskola’s analysis of China’s land system is one of the book’s major contributions. He correctly emphasises that the PRC’s dual structure of land ownership state-owned urban land and collectively owned rural land has no precedent in Chinese imperial history or Soviet practice. He shows how this duality underpinned both Maoist industrialisation and post‑1978 capitalist accumulation. “It is these workers’ ongoing reliance on the support of their rural kin that makes it possible for urban employers to pay them below-subsistence wages.”[1]

This insight is vital. Migrant workers’ continued access to rural land enables capital to pay wages that would otherwise be impossible in a wholly proletarianised society. The rural hinterland subsidises both domestic and international capital. Ruskola’s comparative approach, looking at England’s Enclosure Movement, the Soviet Union’s collapse, and China’s post-1949 development, also proves useful. His point that China compressed and reversed the English enclosure process is convincing. Additionally, his analysis of the hukou system as a way to divide the population into two unequal legal groups is crucial. These strengths, however, highlight the book’s main theoretical shortcoming.

Ruskola views the CCP primarily as a political body that manages land and labour, rather than as a bureaucratic caste, a social stratum with its own material interests that opposes independent working-class organisation and ultimately acts as an agent for capitalist restoration. This represents a critical theoretical mistake. The regime established in 1949 was not a Marxist workers’ state. Instead, it was a bureaucratic dictatorship based on nationalised property, modelled after Stalin’s Soviet Union. The working class did not hold political power; instead, a peasant-based army and a party apparatus ruled from the beginning, suppressing independent workers’ organisations.

Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state provides the necessary theoretical framework. A bureaucracy resting on nationalised property relations is inherently unstable. It tends toward capitalist restoration once it judges that this better secures its privileges. The CCP bureaucracy followed this logic with remarkable consistency.

Therefore, Ruskola’s account of China’s transition from equality to inequality and from socialist planning to capitalist accumulation is not a paradox, a drift, or a “contradiction of socialism.’ Instead, it reflects the inherent logic of Stalinism.

 Tiananmen Square as the decisive turning point

The most noticeable omission in Ruskola’s book is the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He references the subsequent fear of “social instability’ but mainly focuses on protests by workers and peasants over labour conditions and land seizures. However, he does not investigate the massacre itself or its crucial impact on the path he outlines. This gap is more than just regrettable; it is a critical flaw.

Tiananmen was more than just a “student protest”; it was a large-scale movement involving workers and students protesting corruption, demanding democratic control, and social equality. These demands directly challenged the CCP bureaucracy’s authority. The massacre became a political prerequisite for the market reforms of the 1990s, paving the way for the end of the iron rice bowl, the commodification of labour, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, China’s opening to global capital, and the emergence of a billionaire class.

Tiananmen is central to China’s modern development. Without it, there would be no capitalist revival, no Foxconn, and no major tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, or Huawei. The so-called “Chinese miracle” is inseparable from Tiananmen’s influence. Ruskola’s silence on this matter reflects a structural issue. Recognising Tiananmen’s importance would mean accepting that the CCP bureaucracy acts as a counter-revolutionary force rather than true stewards of “communism.”

Ruskola states that the Chinese working class exists “in an objective sense” but has not yet developed a political self-awareness similar to Thompson’s concept of the English proletariat. This observation is accurate but incomplete. Over the past twenty years, Chinese workers have participated in numerous strikes, protests, factory occupations, and wildcat actions. They have built independent networks, circulated petitions, and faced both employers and local authorities. Although their struggles are often fragmented, suppressed, and localised, they undeniably exist.

Ruskola’s framework fails to incorporate these struggles because it views workers as mere objects within legal and demographic processes, rather than as a class capable of independent political action that challenges power structures. This reflects a defining trait of liberal scholarship: the working class is seen solely as a sociological category, never as a political agent.

By framing China’s transformation as “communism building a capitalist superpower,” Ruskola performs ideological work supporting both Beijing and Western liberal narratives. For Beijing, this phrase validates capitalist revival as a natural extension of “socialism.” For Western liberalism, it depicts China’s change as a technocratic evolution rather than a political upheaval. Consequently, the story suggests that the CCP bureaucracy isn’t a ruling class, capitalist revival isn’t a betrayal, Tiananmen isn’t a turning point, and the working class isn’t a political force. This isn’t analysis; it’s mystification.

China’s transformation mainly revolves around the actions of the CCP bureaucracy, not the legal land tenure, migrant worker demographics, or enclosure processes. Since 1949, this bureaucracy has seized political control from the working class, establishing a Stalinist regime modelled after the Soviet Union. It suppressed independent workers’ movements, including spontaneous committees during the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen protests. It also reintroduced capitalist property relations by dismantling communes, commodifying labour, and turning SOEs into corporations. Over time, it became integrated into global capital, forming a wealthy, corrupt ruling class hostile to workers. This is not “communism building a capitalist superpower” but Stalinism restoring capitalism.

Ruskola’s book offers a thorough overview of China’s land system, clearly explains the hukou regime, provides valuable insights into migrant labour, presents a useful comparative framework, and challenges China-exceptionalist narratives. However, it does not analyse the CCP bureaucracy as a social class, account for Tiananmen as a pivotal moment, develop a theory of capitalist restoration concerning the working class as a political agent, or offer a perspective on the future of Chinese socialism.

China and the Pseudo‑Lefts

Ruskola’s views align with numerous Pseudo-Left groups. The current political scene around China is filled with voices claiming to represent “the left.” However, most of these groups, both within China and abroad, are better described as pseudo-lefts: they use socialist language but actually support an authoritarian capitalist government and its bureaucratic elite.

Within China, the pseudo-left emerged alongside the CCP’s shift toward market reforms. It claims to defend “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Still, its politics are driven more by nationalism, reverence for the state, and resistance to democratic oversight than by efforts to emancipate the working class. Recent research indicates that the so-called “Chinese New Left” is not a unified Marxist movement but rather a loose collection of scholars and commentators whose views range from Maoist nostalgia and cultural conservatism to authoritarian developmentalism. Their primary role is ideological: to offer a left-leaning rationale for a regime responsible for one of the fastest and most brutal capitalist transformations in modern history.

The pseudo-left’s key political act was how it responded to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A true left would have seen the workers’ and students’ uprising as an early form of socialist democracy. Instead, the pseudo-left justified the massacre as a measure to maintain “stability,” siding with the bureaucracy against the working class. This stance has persisted. They dismiss strikes, independent unions, and labour protests as threats to national unity. They view surveillance, censorship, and repression as necessary to guard against “Western influence.” The pseudo-left’s version of socialism lacks real workers.

Globally, the pseudo-left reflects this decline. Parts of the Western left have supported the CCP as an “anti-imperialist” force, overlooking the fact that China’s ruling class is deeply embedded in global capitalism. They justify the regime’s authoritarian practices, downplay labour violations, and dismiss criticism as Western bias. This approach mirrors the main ideological stance of the Chinese pseudo-left: replacing internationalism with nationalism and prioritising state authority over working-class action.

The result is a political formation that speaks the language of socialism while rejecting its substance. The pseudo‑left is not a path toward socialist renewal in China or anywhere else. It is an obstacle. Its role is to obscure the class nature of the CCP bureaucracy, to delegitimise independent working‑class struggle, and to present capitalist restoration as a continuation of communism.

The large Chinese working class—whose development Ruskola explores in detail—won’t progress by depending on the CCP, nostalgia for Maoism, or liberal constitutionalism. Instead, its future relies on self-initiated political engagement, international worker solidarity, and opposition to both the CCP bureaucracy and the global capitalist system it currently upholds. This approach is essential for understanding China’s transformation and identifying the revolutionary opportunities that lie ahead.

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[1] newleftreview-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/issues/ii151/articles/teemu-ruskola-the-making-of-the-chinese-working-class