A young man who wanted to register his business name as "Capitalist Competition Advisory Company" had the name rejected by the Shanghai Industrial & Commercial Administration which claimed the word "capitalist" has negative social impact (Page 7, Shanghai Star).

　　Exactly what kind of negative social impact will it have today?

　　If someone told you 27 years ago that you were a "capitalist roader", it would scare the hell out of you because it simply meant that you were one of those few bad elements in society, which also included landlords, reactionaries and rightists. You would most probably be sent to a labour camp.

　　In the late 1960s and early 70s, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, both veteran Communists, were labelled the biggest "capitalist roaders" in China. Many prominent intellectuals were also grouped in this category.

　　Liu was persecuted to death during the leftist "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and Deng survived tenaciously to become the chief designer of China's reform and opening up process, which has made China what it is today.

　　During the arduous economic reform process, China has not been shy in learning from developed Western capitalist societies, introducing market competition and abolishing much of the former centralized planning.

　　Chinese farmers no longer work in Soviet-style communes, but instead plough their own piece of land, considered "capitalism tail" before 1978.

　　The once eliminated private businesses have flourished and the State-owned sector has accounted for a smaller part of the economy. All the businesses, including SOEs, are now market and profit-oriented today.

　　Private entrepreneurs have become the media stars and are even welcome to join the Communist Party of China - the vanguards of the proletariat.

　　Western multinationals have been asked to invest in China to "exploit" Chinese workers. Leading capitalists from those countries are serving as advisors to the mayors of Shanghai and Beijing.

　　All these things would have been regarded as sheer capitalism three decades ago.

　　Meanwhile, what had long been considered as the virtues of a socialist country have long gone. Chinese no longer get welfare housing distributed free by the government, but instead pay mortgages every month like their miserable capitalist brothers. Free education and medical care have been replaced by expensive fees and some corrupt "compulsory" donations.

　　Businesses and the news media in China are loudly promoting a consumption-based lifestyle that was considered "decadent bourgeois" decades ago, but young urban Chinese today are flattered of being called "petit bourgeois".

　　Before my colleague Nick Land, once a philosophy professor teaching Karl Marx, left yesterday for a holiday in Toronto, Canada, he said he was going to a place which is more socialist than China.

　　I don't know how true that is. But these days if you ask a Chinese what he thinks about capitalism, you might get a mixed answer of love, hate and never mind.

　　Why would someone still make a fuss of the word "capitalist" and remind us of the never-ending class struggle. What kind of a negative social impact could it have when most parts of our society have already embraced it in the past two decades.