China’s Common Prosperity from a Class Perspective

Combining Marxian and Chinese lineages together, common prosperity is a result projected by the Communist Party of China (CCP) as China’s postcapitalist socialist alternative in the twenty-first century. However, the rapidly growing discourse on common prosperity lacks two angles foregrounded in this essay: a class process of surplus labor and attention given to overdetermination. After a brief historical exposition of China’s transition to set the context of this intervention, the essay’s class-focused analytical frame distils the combined class and nonclass effects in Xi Jinping’s primary, secondary, and tertiary distribution to uncover new angles in China’s effort to bring the pursuit of material affluence and spiritual needs together. The essay uncovers that class matters and that, due to contradictory class and nonclass processes, the composition and movement of common prosperity is better understood as uneven and unpredictable, thus also revealing its inability to address appropriative injustice qua exploitation and its problematic invocation of spirituality.