Well, I don't see the joke anywhere. China is quite capitalist in its economy. What happens is that political power still retains the typical communist authoritarianism, but in general there is a lot of freedom to do business and get rich.
The first person to open up China's economy after Mao was Deng Xiaoping, and a long time has passed since that first opening, which has been getting bigger and bigger.
For many years (may no longer be actual though) if a western company wanted to enter China, they could do that only as a joint venture / partnership with Chinese company.
Even now, the owners of the big companies have to be "approved" by the party and if they say something wrong they can too easily disappear.
China looks better than in the past, I do agree with that, but let's not consider as full story only the part China allows to be shown/said publicly.
By the way, I just saw something about the aforementioned 12-hour shift reform in Argentina, and I think it's much more sensible than the mainstream media and the protesting Peronists are making it out to be.
It doesn’t automatically force all workers to do 12-hour days, but it enables much longer daily shifts under new flexible systems.
I didn't know this for sure, but it's not unexpected it has this form. Imho it's still bad, because of poverty and the herd mentality.
Imho even the "western way" to
just allow multiple jobs is already bad (the pay should be better, and no money support for various cases, since we know that such scheme is instantly abused).
The 12h is now "a flexible system", but when most of your co-workers agree to work 12h, you will either do the same or get sacked, because the company will want to optimize their flow too.
So no, this 12h thing is imho a trap unfolding. And if we compare this to the trend in the Netherlands I've read about some (well, not few) years ago = people starting to switch to 4-6h working days or 4-days working week to have more time for themselves... the difference is staggering.