Is it really? I don’t think so.

This seems like “what if ‘Birth of a Nation’ could be narratively reclaimed somehow as a film celebrating black liberation and condemning white supremacy” territory of discourse. I’m not interested in it because it’s plainly not how the majority of people would reasonably see it and that’s the only thing that matters in a consequentialist media analysis. The author’s intention, whether they somehow actually intended this to be a 500 IQ veiled critique against the bourgeoisie, are irrelevant. Most people see the “demons” in the same uncritical and unambiguous light as they see every DnD “ontologically evil,” which DnD itself lifted from Tolkien.

This confusion seems to appear because people hardly ever actually take a look at the rhetorical structure of that kind of racial and intercultural discourse. There’s two levels. There’s the level at ontology, which is that “this external group is weak and inferior and deserves to be taken advantage of by us.” Then there’s the level at epistemology, which that “this external group is a bunch of bloodthirsty savages because they only know violence and are the actual aggressors.” This is actually the definition of fascism as laid out by Umberto Eco, which is that “the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” In real terms, they are weak (which justifies attacking them on a material basis), but in cognitive terms, they are strong (which justifies attacking them on a ideological basis, as it would be an act of bravery and heroism).

Take a look at the American Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t say “the ‘Indians’ are weak and therefore their inferiority justifies our conquest of their lands,” it frames the case against them in the exact precise terms you’ve laid out, where all the characteristics and qualities of the aggressor are projected upon their victim: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Never get between online leftists and their treats. Scratch a lib and a fascist bleeds; scratch a online leftist’s favorite media and a lib bleeds.

This fictional concept of a “ontological evil” species is obviously not supported by any real-world “ontological” basis. The application of “evil” as an exonym to appellate against external cultures or races has had monstrous historical and present-day consequences. The unfalsifiable idea that a certain race or culture is merely pretending to be civilized and sentient “while in reality, as we all know wink wink they are actually evil and un-persons” has such an abundance of parallels to historical racial discourse, genocide and prejudice that it’s comical and unsettling in equal measure that people would use it as apologia for their fictional media.

I said this years ago in a discussion about Tolkien (a racist POS) and his characterization of the orcs:

It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkien in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization (that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples, as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples), simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkien admitted).

Please tell me what are these external pressures

Imperialism. It’s a real doozy of a thing.

I think anti-“dengists” prefer to say “le mao.”

You’ve become so irony-pilled that I’ve no idea what to make of you talking in the third-person means. If I knew about Zero Covid in 2018, I’d stock up on some face masks for my IRL mutual aid group to use in 2 years time rather than commenting some esoteric “dengist parody” on the bear site.

I do think it’s a monstrous thing that Gaza is subjected to all it has while the rest of the world pretends to go about its day and China’s non-interventionism has a share of the blame. It’s incredible that some people give China the same level of animosity as they should reserve for the US or Israel in this regard, but that’s still understandable.

If you’re claiming that the majority of a country of 1.4 billion people are xenophobes without evidence, I’d stop you right there, however.

You write a lot of convoluted words, but continues to miss the point.

A kettle meets a pot.

The issue is that I hold imperialism as the primary contradiction, not “neoliberalism.” We’ve seen socialist states with comprehensive socialist welfare be destroyed by counter revolution. China itself undid most Mao era socialist welfare in the Opening Up period. There’s a reason why all that happened and it primarily entails with the external conditions imposed onto the given socialist state.

This sort of Last Tuesdayism argumentation strains your premise. Yes, taking aside the prior economic growth, the still reasonable economic growth (China is still pulling away from the US on a PPP not nominal measure), poverty alleviation, the existing social welfare systems, “China does not provide a basic guarantee of welfare.”

If the point is actually “provide a sufficient guarantee”, then I’d agree. Then the issue is “why is it not so” and our disagreement is that I’d imagine you predominantly would prefer to shift the onus inwards onto the CPC (which is not to say the presence of individuals like Li Qiang in the CC does not give me unease) while I’d say that the external pressures are overriding.

It’s more that we’ve been here before. Surmising that is the whole point of historical materialism, which isn’t just the name of some Western Marxist slop journal but an actually useful mode of analysis.

Never mind the examples of other 20th century socialist states, Mao’s China had much of the safety nets in question. The question to ask is what happened to them?

The answer you might form to that question will inevitably color your perception of the material conditions in present day China.

That sounds like a very classically Hobbesian sort of argument that the mere deprivation of socialist guarantees and the subsidence of the fastest GDP rate in human history would turn a collective society into a bunched up ball of xenophobia. I think it’s important not to attribute undue weight onto minority positions, unless they can be substantively demonstrated as being a majority view.

The issue in the DDR was specifically that, following capitalist restoration, with the left politically censored and historiographically maligned, it was inevitable that people would move rightwards as the only visible alternative, which is precisely what is happening slow boiling frog-style across Europe and the West. The issue in the post-USSR states is that with the capitalist regimes in the former SSRs’ legitimacy contingent on being a “superior” choice to its socialist predecessor, similarly, the only alternative was rightwards. This was compounded in the non-RSFSR SSRs, where national historiography was rewritten so that the entire experience of being in the USSR was warped into a “victimhood” narrative of “occupation” under the “Soviet empire.” The resistors of that Soviet regime were naturally the fascist puppet freaks in WW2 and this is the primary reason why Ukraine was hijacked (against the consent of the majority) by Neo-Nazism.

History and context matters, which I suppose is why they dubbed the analysis historical materialism. The principal issue with Maoism (which is to say, not MZT) is that it is idealism in service of socialism. A fine idea, but it’s just that. I take issue with the “woe is me, living in modern China is suffering” narrative because no man is an island, including China. It’s evident that the West is unable to copy-paste the same ideological propaganda of material disparity it used against the USSR in the New Cold War and spamming “communism no blue jeans” due to China’s position as the world factory, so it gets by with gaslighting about China’s economic growth (the orientalist assumption is that a single half year of negative growth, a mere “technical recession” in the West, would immediately cause the CPC to lose its legitimacy, always framed as the “mandate of heaven” by some China “expert” talking head, and be “finally” spontaneously overthrown so that the West is finally rid of this meddlesome priest).

History shows that socialist welfare is less than relevant so long as the state is capable of being subverted and all that work is capable of being undone. Most 20th century socialist states met all those qualities that give Maoists the starry-eyed glimmer, yet those states don’t exist anymore. To assume that China can achieve that “socialism in one country” label and become “Fortress Communism” is frankly chauvinistic conceit that ignores the lessons provided by 20th century AES.

It’s equally non-dialectical to pull one’s hair at China’s socioeconomic condition without considering that China doesn’t need to outdo itself, just others in relativistic terms. When the rest of the world is in the shitter, it’s unrealistic to expect China to wholly avoid getting some mud splashed on it. Europe and North America’s economic conditions are far more dire than anything looming on China’s horizon, which bears reminding.

The lesson from the hubristic notion of the “end of history” is that history never ends. China’s goal should be to ensure that it can create the domestic and global conditions for a sustainable and long-lasting socialist socio-economy. That involves the primary contradiction of imperialism. So long as progress is made towards that goal, however slow it is, I see no reason why the “things are so bad in China, it’s literally Taiping 2.0 right now” narrative should be given oxygen or credence.

But - is that making your life easier?

Lmao. The Maoist argumentation is wrong because it deliberately misses the forest for the trees in a facile “but what have the Romans done for me?” style of argumentation that Chinese online rhetoric often have this rather peculiarly unique characteristic of framing as if they’re the first people in history to try such a sophistic stunt. China has objectively in all parameters gone through the greatest collective mass poverty alleviation campaign in human history. The Economist, RAND, The Atlantic all have articles where they admit this with gritted teeth yet you can’t even say the same about Chinese Maoist/Ultra/Libs, which is interesting. I’ve lately come to understand this style of Socratic-aping Chinese rhetorical style much better after discovering Chinese Maoist forums like v2.redchinacn.org, which has incidentally gone off the deep end with Kirk apologia recently.

In any case, the anti-immigration sentiment is simply a continuation of the same movement from 2020, where online backlash quashed the Chinese permanent residency reform project. Similarly, this K visa initiative is essentially a second attempt that follows in the footsteps of that 2020 draft proposal which aimed at: “China would formally expand the pool of immigrants that could qualify for P.R. to a still select but larger group of high-income or highly educated long-term migrants.” K visa would be the 0.5 version, where the goal is merely to get visa holders rather than broach the subject of permanent residency.

There’s a decent article in Routledge’s Journal of Contemporary China analyzing that episode though it has the typical “they have nationalists, we have patriots” sort of academic orientalism. The author notes the typical emotionally-overwrought sort of nakedly manipulative discourse that is profuse on the Chinese internet being used: “As a Han Chinese, I am crying softly,”; “I am here! 1.4 billion compatriots are here! As a Chinese, if it is necessary, there will be action on May 4!”

Beyond that kind of nonsense, the actual substantive objections that the author summarizes are the same ones being reused five years later against this K visa initiative.

The draft regulations to many seemed to fit in a tradition of the state privileging foreign nationals, at a time when domestic employment and residential conditions for many Chinese citizens are considered far from adequate. Attracting larger numbers of immigrants to aid China’s development, also sounds inappropriate to some, given China’s recent history of government-enforced family planning. Some suggest revising the regulations to eliminate any loopholes for so-called ‘low-quality’ migrants and to include guarantees that P.R. holders would not be privileged over local Chinese.

Part of the contradiction is that these foreign workers are predominantly drawn to major urban locations like Shanghai known both for their Chinese liberal population and their deluded “I am a global citizen” type of multinational suit wearing capitalists. Both groups ideologically would favor foreign workers of select demographics and this creates the sort of imagery of privilege that provokes this sort of backlash, though it should be said that the Chinese online vocal minority commentariat often has this sort of self-orientalizing narcissism that assumes all other 1.4 billion people in their country are a hive mind that secretly share their personal political opinion, if only but for the dastardly Weibo censors preventing their posts’ true updoot numbers from coming to light, as seen by the cited “I am here! 1.4 billion compatriots are here!” style of comments.

Another one of the issues is the typical catch-22 associated with most socialist governments, which is that they are overly sensitive of their Western-propaganda maligned depiction as “repressive authoritarian regimes” which makes them excessively petrified by accusations of “authoritarianism” through alleged governmental overreach, rendering them particularly indecisive and obsequious in instances when they ought to be standing their ground and demonstrating some faith in their governing mandate and legitimacy. This makes socialist governments exceptionally vulnerable to groups that are aware of this contradiction and then deliberately take advantage of it. This is how the 2020 PR draft was shut down. This is how the “white paper” Shanghai lib protesters are credited with “ending” Zero Covid, as if they weren’t always a minority and the vast majority of people by all accounts silently still tolerated the policy.

In 20th century socialist states, this was how the DDR failed to react to the Berlin Wall breach debacle, totally capitulating to the BRD in spite of most East German citizens preferring a negotiated union rather than the total annexation by the West as it happened in reality. It was also how the CPSU (or what was left of it) tolerated the illegal secession of the Baltics and why the August putschists spinelessly dithered in 1991. Incidentally, the 1989 Tiananmen failed counter-revolution was the only major time a socialist government stood their ground against this sort of issue and that decision is why the People’s Republic still exists today.

Overall, it’s actually good for the xenophobia to make itself plain, because that’s the only way it can be ever addressed in the first place. While socialist states have promoted societal internationalist values of tolerance, we saw how easily they were subverted following the fall of those states. Superficial tolerance led to Khrushchev blathering about how the USSR “solved the nationality issue.” In the DDR, this gave way to Neo-Nazis and the AfD; in the USSR, this gave way to ethnic pogroms in the 90s and the current disastrous state of the former Soviet world. China has the privilege of those types outing themselves while the socialist state still holds power so it will be interesting to see if they concede once again to the vocal minority on this matter or push ahead forward.

It really depends on whether “TikTok” refers to TikTok Global, which is the entire worldwide platform beyond China, or some potential TikTok US entity geo-locked for Americans akin to Douyin.

If it’s the former, then China lost big time - no other way to put it. If it’s the latter, then it’s the next best case scenario other than taking the ball home entirely and eating the US ban threat. There would then be three TikToks: TikTok Global, TikTok US and Douyin.

To put it simply, China loses in every scenario because it’s important to remember that the US made up this TikTok threat out of nowhere. There’s no way something like this would have been tolerated in a UNO reverse card scenario and, in fact, it wasn’t with US social media forays in China. Facebook and Google chose to leave the Chinese market entirely rather than address basic Chinese concerns like “stop algorithmically boosting color revolution slop against us to your top results,” let alone concede to demands to access their core backend infrastructure. But this is the nature of being in a world subjected to US hegemony and the cost of doing business in a global system where the US market is held up as indispensable. Just like the tariffs, it’s a matter of fighting to concede and lose the least.

TikTok could just take the example of its US counterparts and simply leave the US market. There would likely be a bandwagon effect where the app is blocked from much of the West, but would largely remain for the Global South. For an ephemeral moment, this would be an undeniable moral victory in demonstrating Western censorship and hypocrisy - until the NYT inevitably cooks up a damage-control narrative about TikTok requiring daily Aztec-style human sacrifices of [insert the West’s repressed Chinese minority of the week] to run and this allows global libs the excuse to own and celebrate the censorship, “morality” really seems to be that simple nowadays. Though it’s possible that TikTok de-burgerfied would become some unique Global South social media haven, I think it’s more likely that the loss of the US user base would cause a slow overall decline in TikTok because (as we saw with us Euro sheep flocking to XHS in January simply because the Americans went there) some sections of the worldwide user base would flock to alternate apps to remain with their dominant US-based influencers, causing decreased engagement on the platform, causing more of a user drain in a cyclical feedback loop.

For whatever reason, China has decided against that. It’s interesting that the government has explicitly stepped in to negotiate for TikTok since it’s been speculated that Xi had skipped the Brazil summit this year when Lula’s wife broke diplomatic protocol by requesting that he intervene against TikTok’s lack of moderation, basically insinuating that the Chinese government had control over a private company, which (may be true, but also) would have been great ammunition for the West.

In a sense, I’d say the Chinese government intervened because it came to see TikTok as a test case for how Chinese companies can be begrudgingly accepted with gritted teeth by the West in the geopolitical climate of the New Cold War. With the contemporary hostility, there’s been only two choices for such companies: complete surrender to the US or accept a total ban from Western markets. If China handles this well, it could set a working precedent for a third path, allowing the US to take its victory lap and claim a face-saving win, while still relying on a system built by China. On the surface, the company might get an American flag sticker slapped on it, under “licensing,” but the actual substance remains firmly in Chinese ownership. This modus vivendi is just how the game has to be played until the moment comes when such hegemonic expressions of asymmetry no longer can hold such sway.

The dynamics of unorganized mass protests is that the movement will bend, in its internal contradictions, to the direction of the most well organized, motivationally driven and materially supported element.

Take the classic Tiananmen color revolution. It was originally an outcry against the runaway inflation of the 1988-9 period caused by the package reformers winning out against the gradualists. This led to an introduction of shock therapy by primarily Deng Xiaoping’s (I would indeed argue that his role played a major part) and Zhao Ziyang’s urgings, which led to historically high prices unseen in the history of the People’s Republic. Price stability was then re-introduced in late 1988 to prevent economic catastrophe but this led to backlash both from parts of the population that were outraged at this poorly conceived obsession with a “big bang” reform having taking place at all in the first place and the incipient liberal comprador-aspirants who thought the price stability initiative meant the end of the liberalizing reforms and their profit-seeking opportunities.

Both elements were present in the initial protests. The former (the Western journalistic and academic trick at the time was to dub every socialist and leftist element in socialist state politics as “conservative” to deliberately obfuscate their identity) were the socialist contingents, including Maoists and Ultraleft elements, who wanted a return to the Mao era rather than some capitalist restoration. Obviously, the color revolution elements, backed up by the West’s unfettered media penetration in China (which is how they captured those pictures they wave around nowadays), won out. They constructed that tacky Statue of Liberty clone “to Democracy” in Tiananmen Square, which appropriated and hijacked the imagery and messaging of the protests once the Western media started proliferating pictures of it, and the entire movement became a full blown color revolution aiming at capitalist restoration, even though large contingents of the participants wanted nothing of the sort.

This is how it works. Victor Bevins (a soc-dem), wrote a book called “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” that essentially dissects the systematic co-option of every single unorganized mass protest movement in the 2010s. The most infamous being the Hong Kong color revolution attempt, where public frustration over the affordability housing and the dynamics of the frozen economic and political system of Hong Kong due to China’s concession to Britain with the 50 year “1C2S” policy preventing any substantive mainland intervention or introduction of socialist governance to Hong Kong, which boiled over through an extradition case of a murderer. This was then easily was hijacked by the Trump I admin and the Western NGOs operating in Hong Kong, and co-opted as a “democracy” and “independence” protest.

As for Nepal, I incidentally made a comment three months ago back in May:

… the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

It’s not to say that things will necessarily progress in that direction, but that the external interests have been clearly demonstrated and many of the requisite pieces have likely been set in place.

Given that Nepal is in the Western news, as can be expected, the kind of media coverage and narratives they’ll proliferate will be likely near entirely socialist-agnostic, with all the leftist elements of the given country’s historical background stripped out. So here’s a primer I wrote with some readings on the background of the Communist Parties in Nepal:

The entryist nature of the major Communist Parties in Nepal aside, the rarity of new leftist successes beyond AES following the end of the Cold War means that the condition of Nepal shouldn’t be entirely dismissed out of hand outright, despite their lack of significant achievements following the dissolution of the armed struggle.

The country was an absolute monarchy for most of the Cold War. It slowly transitioned into a constitutional monarchy, a deal where the royals could be expected to retreat to their palace and parasitize off the public budget just like their welfare leech counterparts in Europe. Then, in 2001, their crown prince did a Romanov by going on a shooting massacre against his own family and parents in their palace, gunning down his parents, the reigning king and queen. He then shot himself and his uncle became the new king. This uncle then quickly demonstrated an autocratic obsession with reconsolidating the monarchy’s institutional power but this attempt to assert monarchical authority stumbled against the shattered prestige of the Nepalese royalty from the self-inflicted extermination of the royal household. This ultimately led to the complete abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic in 2008.

Meanwhile, as this was happening, there was a Maoist People’s War conducted through the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, after the government’s violent suppression of attempted land reform in the 1990s. This period of armed struggle lasted twenty years from 1996 to 2006. In 2006, the CPN-M conceded to liberal reformers by agreeing to a bourgeois liberal republic and a constituent assembly, when the Maoists had the upper hand through its control of most of the countryside. This broke the party’s unity and some of its founding members left afterwards, who saw the party as having betrayed its goal of New Democracy. The armed wing of the Party, the People’s Liberation Army of Nepal was also disbanded and eventually integrated with the national army of the new bourgeois republic.

This is the major contradiction between the two major Communist Parties: CPN-UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and CPN-MC (Maoist Center). There’s also a rather plentiful amount of breakaway and splinter Communist Parties, who saw the 2006-8 establishment of the bourgeois republic as a betrayal of the armed struggle and comprador parliamentarianism.

You could say that the electoralist Communist Parties are merely working within the contradictions of the times. The establishment of a true New Democracy and an official Marxist-Leninist state during the 2000s right as the United States had its full attention on the region during its “War on Terror” nearby in Afghanistan would have been unwise. Nevertheless, despite the suppression of land reform in the 1990s having been the catalyst for the Nepalese People’s War, there is still no comprehensive land reform in Nepal to this day. This has been directly attributed to the concessions of the CPN-Maoists. Here is a criticism of the current “Land Bank” system, which is more akin to the liberal land reform of post-WW2 granted to Japan and Taiwan by the US’ permission as a concession to co-opt and destroy socialist sentiment (only the redistribution of land) than those of a socialist land reform (which entails a comprehensive breakdown of land relations, destruction of the landlord class and their intergenerational communal ties and power base).

Nevertheless, the difference between the Nepalese electoral entryism and that of the West’s leftists is their strong territorial control of the countryside and their military power prior to their swerve towards entryist politics which prevented the liberals in the bourgeois republic from suppressing them like what was done to the CPI in Italy and the KKE in Greece or from outright ignoring and sidelining them like what was recently done to the so-called French left coalition NPF by Macron. As such, the only way to suppress the various leftists by the liberals is through the parliamentary system itself. This original leading position in the parliamentary system has now indeed been slowly eroded with the liberal “soc-dem” Nepali Congress party ending with the most seats in the 2022 election.

As for geopolitics, Nepal is essentially the Mongolia of the Himalayas, a country between two larger ones, but with even worse geographical positioning. The majority of the country is near entirely on the southern side of the Himalayas, which means that it is almost completely dependent on India as a route to the sea and as a conduit for trade. It has been subjected to regular Indian interference, especially in its southern territories which are on the Gangetic plain and whose Madhesi ethnic minority population are said to be aligned more in interests with India than Kathmandu generally. India itself views Nepal as essentially a second Bhutan though slightly more “unruly,” the latter being essentially an Indian client monarchy whose foreign affairs are completely dictated by New Delhi. The Indian-manufactured annexation of the independent state of Sikkim right next door in 1973 has Nepal’s principal foreign policy objective being to avoid that exact same outcome.

In 2015, the newly elected BJP Modi government of India blockaded Nepal following a constitutional reform that, according to it, disfavored the aforementioned Madhesi ethnic minority. India was outraged because its appropriation of ethnic minority constituencies was how it had been able to historically annex Sikkim and this reform weakened its ability to potentially repeat it in Nepal if it ever wanted to utilize that option. India then froze fuel and goods imports into Nepal, demanding that the constitution include clauses of self-determination and an autonomous territory for the Madhesi. This had the potential of a humanitarian disaster in the making as Nepal had just suffered an earthquake earlier in the year and it relied on fuel imports through India for heating in the winter months. It was at this point that Modi’s India outplayed its hand and Nepal reached out to China. Nepal agreed to the construction of a railway linking Kathmandu to China’s national rail system with China’s rail gauge standard as a result of this blackmail. Nevertheless, a near decade long bureaucratic stalling has delayed the railway negotiations and construction which still continues to the present day. It was only in July of 2024 that an agreement was finally signed. As such, over 64% of Nepalese imports come from India and only 13% from China as of 2022, meaning that Nepal is still deeply dependent on India.

It also recently signed, during the Trump I period, the US State Department/USAID program, the Millennium Challenge Compact (also the name of that Bush-era wargame against Iran), controversially allowing for US infiltration of Nepal against China in the New Cold War. It was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. Here’s a piece that the Tricontinental wrote on this: https://thetricontinental.org/asia/ticaa-issue-1-the-millennium-challenge-corporation/

This external dynamic has had a sizeable dampening influence on the internal willingness of Nepal’s Communist Parties to pursue more significant socialist reforms such as the comprehensive land reform that the People’s War had been fought for in the 1990s to early 2000s.

The full comprehensive answer you’re looking for is Hao Shiyuan’s books “How the Communist Party of China Manages the Issue of Nationality” and “China’s Solution to its Ethno-National Issues.”

In short, the original structural intent of the CPC for China was precisely that of a federal state based on the models of the USSR and the United States which had also influenced Sun Yat-sen’s “Republic of the Five Nationalites.” The contradiction was that China was a country that had always invited fantasies of partition. Churchill in 1901 during the Boxer Rebellion infamously said his “Aryan triumph” quote in the context of his own imagining of China’s partition: “I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe in the ultimate partition of China. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” That view for a federal system therefore evolved in the process of the historical and material conditions of the CPC’s experience within the disunited China of the Warlord, WW2 and Civil War eras, which saw the British attempts to legitimate the feudal Lamaist theocracy’s secession in Tibet, the Japanese attempts to carve away the Northeast as Manchukuo, the breakaway of Outer Mongolia, the incitement of the two Turkestan secessionist attempts propped by the Soviets in Xinjiang and the various warlord clique territories.

As such, one of the defining qualities of the Chinese polity as recognized by the CPC was its historical tradition of unity. This had largely preserved the territorial integrity, which is the sine qua non for all states, of the various Chinese governments throughout the torturous first half of the 20th century. In the materialist view that socialist governance must reflect the history and national conditions of the given state, this historical context was therefore instrumental in influencing the CPC’s decision against a federal system, as Hao explains in this excerpt and cites Zhou Enlai’s views on the matter in 1949:

Both the Chinese Soviet Republic founded by the Communist Party of China in 1931 and the Red Army’s political declaration of establishing a federal republic in China en route to the Long March can be identified as the Chinese Communists’ early attempts to inaugurate a federal republic in China. However, these symbolic advocacies and practices were unable to be realized due to their incompatibility with the national conditions of China.

Historical facts have testified that neither the American-style “one out of many” federalism nor the Soviet-style “union of constituent socialist republics” applies to China due to its unique ancient historical process and modern historical experience. Therefore, maintaining state unity and respect for diversity have been upheld as a national commitment by the people of all ethnic groups due to China’s time-honored history as a unified multi-ethnic state. Toward the modern era of China, which was heralded by the First Opium War in 1840, the state unity, political unification, ethnic solidarity, and territorial integrity of the country were seriously threatened and undermined by the foreign powers’ aggression. Neither the social conditions for Bourgeois Revolution nor the backbone forces for launching Proletarian Revolution were existent in Mongolia, Tibet or Xinjiang at that time. If these regions were factitiously facilitated for “national self-determination” and founding independent states, they would inevitably be reduced as imperialist powers’ colonies or spheres of influence. In addition, the Versailles Peace Conference in the wake of the First World War permitted no space for China’s national self-determination. Therefore, federalism is only a fantasy for China; it would only lead to national and state disintegration.

The federalism form of government tallies with the reality of the Russian Revolution at that time; however, it does not mean that the Soviet-style union of constituent republics is the only form of government for all the socialist states. Some federated states of Eastern Europe founded after the Second World War, for example, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, successively collapsed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, fundamentally speaking, the inevitable result of divorcing from their corresponding national conditions.

In addressing the first session of the CPPCC, Premier Zhou Enlai stated: “China is a multi-ethnic country in which the ethnic minorities make up less than 10% of the total population. Of course, all the ethnic groups, regardless of their population sizes and levels of economic development are on an equal footing. The Han people should respect the religious beliefs, languages, folkways, and customs of ethnic minorities. We advocate regional ethnic autonomy under the pre-condition of maintaining the territorial integrity of the country. Any ethnic group is undoubtedly entitled to the endowed right of self-determination. But today, the imperialists intend to divide China by fomenting the independence of Tibet, Taiwan or even Xinjiang. Against this backdrop, we hope people of all ethnic groups will not be incited by the provocations of the ill-conceived imperialist forces. For this very reason, the name of our new administration is called the People’s Republic of China, rather than the federal republic. We shall implement regional autonomy in the concentrated communities of ethnic minorities to ensure their right of autonomy”. Zhou Enlai added: “the policy of regional ethnic autonomy, by means of ethnic cooperation and assistance, aims to achieve a common development and prosperity of all ethnic groups. It will, in turn, contribute to a prosperous, culturally advanced and unified China”.

By comparing the historical conditions and developmental path of China with those of the Soviet Union, Zhou Enlai expounded the reasons why the Chinese government established the system of regional ethnic autonomy as a basic political system: “Historical conditions and the revolutionary movement development have provided a sound basis for ethnic cooperation in China; therefore, regional ethnic autonomy conforms to the national conditions of China”. Zhou Enlai added: “in addition to their obvious different appellations, the regional autonomy of China and the federalism of the Soviet Union are basically different; the former is an administrative division under unified state leadership, while the latter is a loosely-connected union of constituent republics, which are essentially ethnically-based proto-states.”

Though I get the chauvinistic name of that city is rather obnoxious, it would represent a failure of imagination if China merely wanted to map-paint and retake Vladivostok. Taking advantage of a Russian moment of weakness to reclaim Outer Manchuria, even if nuclear weapons are taken out from consideration, would validate all the Russian anxieties about China hiding under the surface and unless Russia disintegrates or is pushed past the Urals back into Europe, the Russian polity would still be a permanent neighbor of China’s and this would engender hostilities and resentment that would last for a long time.

The primary reason why, in spite of this “natural friction” that Trump, Western think tanks and the contemporary wannabe Kissingerites like Mearsheimer have shouted to the skies about since 2022, Russia and China are not presently enemies is precisely because they were once historical enemies.

The Sino-Soviet border (including Mongolia which based Soviet troops) was the longest border in the world (longer than the modern Canada-US + Alaska border) and it was also completely militarized during the Sino-Soviet Split. For the Soviets, they had spent the entire early 20th century re-establishing a massive “buffer” between itself and its adversaries through the Warsaw Pact countries and the Central Asian SSRs, which was especially important in the ballistic age (as can be seen today, where the possibility of NATO missiles in Ukraine is one of the leading factors of the Russian escalation in 2022). Suddenly, with the Sino-Soviet Split, the Kremlin found the entire underbelly of the USSR directly adjacent to a new adversary with only Mongolia as a buffer (the geographic significance of this paradigm shift can been seen through the CIA establishing several posts in Xinjiang, irony of ironies).

Inordinate amounts of resources and manpower had to be redirected by both sides to this border. All the Chinese leadership from Mao and Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping seemed to genuinely believe that the USSR was an existential threat that surpassed even the Chiang regime on Taiwan or the United States. The Sino-Vietnamese War was directly consequent of the Sino-Soviet Split and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which allowed the United States to trap the USSR in “its own Vietnam” quagmire and which was a contributing factor to the Soviet collapse, was largely due to Soviet pressure to respond to China’s demonstration of Soviet impotence in assisting its allies during its border conflict with Vietnam. In effect, the strategic agendas of both states ended up being completely hijacked by the military and security consequences of being right next to such a large adversarial state.

There’s a book on the Sino-Vietnamese War concludes that ‘If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor."’ One could say that the geo-strategic lesson that ought to be drawn from the Sino-Soviet Split is that both sides must similarly “learn how to live with their big neighbor.” This is the real pragmatic underlying reason why the “natural enemies” aren’t letting their “natural frictions” lead them by the nose, even more than any contemporary (and potentially ephemeral) geopolitical/anti-imperialist alignment or material economic relations.

Through this, the situation is actually quite similar to that of post-WW2 Europe in that it was mutual self-interest after the experience of war (in typical European obstinancy, we had to learn that lesson twice) and learning the cost of enmity rather than any “enlightened inclusivity” that led to the multilateral initiatives which culminated in the European Union. This is now verging on serious bloomer territory, but I would say that imagining the prospects for a similar eventual Sino-Russian “Eurasian Union” in a century’s or two’s time, just maintaining the current bilateral relationship tempo, are actually more plausible than imagining the creation of the EU was in the 1800s.

China doesn’t need Vladivostok nor Outer Manchuria at the moment but the pace of climate change means that, in a century or two, large parts of China will potentially reach wet-bulb climate and China’s topography means that the entire Central China Plains is nearly at sea level and therefore will likely be one of the most endangered regions in the world for sea level rise. Even if China somehow managed to seize the entirety of Outer Manchuria, that would possibly not be sufficient.

However, large swathes of Siberia, in that trajectory, would likely become agriculturally viable and more climatically hospitable. Migration of large parts of China’s population into Siberia then would not only be sensible from a strategic sense but also likely a humanitarian necessity. I’d say it would therefore be more in China’s interests to think big and develop the course of Sino-Russian relations so that, in the far future, the implementation of a Eurasian “Schengen” for the whole of Siberia, rather than just Vladivostok, would be socio-politically feasible right at the time that Siberia actually becomes a region of serious importance through climate change.

Also, it would be a rather poetic way to restore socialism to Russia, though I’d be getting ahead of myself.

“[Russia and China] are basically natural enemies […] China needs Russia land (sic) […] but because of pure stupidity they were driven together,” laments Trump in an interview about the “natural friction” that even a “minor student of history” would have recognized and exploited.

Given that this was on Trump’s mind following the summit, I’d be pretty sure all that talk during the conference about “Arctic cooperation” was likely about US propositions of shutting out non-Arctic Sea states like China (and potentially others) from the region, since China potentially developing the Arctic corridor through the Siberian coast would completely bypass the whole Canada-Greenland-Panama annexations scheme to control global shipping lanes from the “roaming Chinese and Russian ships” that Trump had been publicly obsessed over back in January.

Strictly speaking, all these things already came to pass and this merely formalizes what was already the de facto situation on the ground. IIRC, some air assets transited through Armenian airspace into Azerbaijan during the attack on Iran in June.

As for the BRI, China was already presented with the fait accompli of having the West Asian BRI route locked out when Syria fell in December. The aim had been to establish a corridor from Iran to Iraq to Syria to the Mediterranean, bypassing NATO Turkey and its karma houdini Sultan-wannabe leadership. This has been squashed and now the only option is the Azerbaijan/Turkey route; the so-called “Middle Corridor” that all the Western geopolitics commentators have been drooling over (media like Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Diplomat, etc. all have been openly talking about this).

As already seen with Azerbaijan, Turkey gets to parasitize the BRI by co-opting the trade infrastructure China builds to extend its influence (and Turanist fantasies) towards its “Turkic brethren” across the Caspian, which it incidentally had never been able to penetrate historically even under the Ottomans, due to Tsarist Russian and British counter-influence, so this is genuinely quite the coup for Erdogan. The West gets to tag along and so the real goal here for all co-conspirators is Central Asia, which the West had been locked out of since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Having been shut out, the West and Turkey are priming to re-enter through the very road that China will be “trapped” into building for them via the “Middle Corridor.”

All this had been previously irrelevant because China plainly had been more interested in rebuilding war-torn Iraq and Syria as its West Asian BRI route rather than going through a direction that Western think tanks were publicly gloating about, but now the choice has been taken out of their hands because that direction has now been intentionally set up to be the only “viable” option. Some responses I encountered back in December were to scoff at the notion that the West’s (and Turkey’s) flipping of “insignificant Assadist Syria” could in any way detrimentally affect the “great anti-imperialist keikaku” but I think it’s becoming evident that the fall of Syria really is an immensely consequential paradigm shift in the region.

Marx actually also mentioned the Economist.

The reason why they probably don’t similarly post a cutesy little Twitter post about him “@ing them” is because he was denouncing their stance in lobbying for the Second Opium War, naval bombarding the city of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and supporting the Confederacy, so it would expose their “geopolitics understander” rag as having always been consistently on the wrong side of history.

The immediate flareup seems to have been exacerbated by Hun Sen, who is one of those corrupt dynasty building decades-long leaders that pop up in post-socialist countries. Hun Sen was a Khmer Rouge cadre who fled to Vietnam and returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 and became Prime Minister of the SRV-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea and remaining in that position as Cambodia went through its capitalist restoration until 2023 when he passed the office to his West Point-educated son, Hun Manet.

A few months ago, there was a Thai soldier that was injured by a landmine while patrolling the border area which Thailand alleged was freshly planted by Cambodia. Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who was Thailand’s PM’s at the time, then called Hun Sen who was a family friend of her father, a former Thai PM himself. She downplayed the incident as the Thai Army trying to provoke trouble and tried to lean on her family history with Hun Sen during the call by calling him “uncle.” This call blew up in her face because it turns out Hun Sen had recorded the entire conversation and shared it with others in his staff, when it was leaked.

Paetongtarn caught flack from the Thai Army, the Thai population who were outraged at her conflict of interest relationship with Cambodia and she was subsequently suspended from office and her father, the ex-PM Thaksin is under criminal investigation for “lese majeste.” Now with the peacemaker out of the way, the Thai Army is making a show of force against Cambodia for the sake of its reputation as ASEAN’s second most “Westernized” military (after Singapore), which could escalate until both sides find a way to de-escalate with grace.

As for geopolitics, both are economic partners of China and are pivotal for China’s plan to diversify its trade away from the West into ASEAN through the international rail networks being constructed within both Cambodia and Thailand until they ultimately reach continental Malaysia and Singapore. Both countries have been subject to a fair amount of recent hem and haw from the Western national security think tank blobs. Thailand’s institutional apparatus rejected one of those cookie-cutter NED mass produced Harvard-educated Western sycophants as PM because he campaigned to curb the power of the Munich-dwelling Thai monarch.

Cambodia has been building a naval port at Ream that is allegedly open to hosting by the PLAN, which has all those Western think tanks foaming in the mouth. Additionally, China is funding a canal called Funan Techno diverting the Mekong that would allow Cambodia to bypass Vietnam’s Mekong Delta tolls and, for the West, it means that Yunnan Province in China would be theoretically connected to the SCS via the Mekong through a series of friendly countries in Laos and Cambodia. An ominous possibility (if you ignore the implausibly sheer elevation gradient from Yunnan down to the Mekong Delta).

Clearly there’s more going on than just this. Hun Sen might perhaps be shoring up domestic credibility for his Pentagon-raised nepo-baby heir by inciting a military skirmish because sabotaging a Thai PM who seemed on the surface level to have been amenable to him through their family connections is an eyebrow raising choice to make. Though the force disparity between the Thai and Cambodian militaries is worth highlighting, other than the typical escalation response ladder tit-for-tat spiral, there shouldn’t be any real incentive on either side for a full conflict.

I think many anti-imperialist leftists are increasingly coming to that conclusion. I recently finished reading Kyle Ferrana’s “Why the World Needs China,” and I can honestly say now that it’s one of the most insightful leftist books published since Domenico Losurdo and Samir Amin. Before Ferrana goes on to answer nearly every major leftist question about China, its contradictions and the atrocity propaganda against it, the book first goes through an impressively cogent assessment on the material conditions of the contemporary world and where things stand. Ferrana’s analysis concluded with the view that the “peace at all costs” principle of leftists and socialist states continuing up to today has been, in many ways, a consequential miscalculation. An excerpt:

Chapters One through Five showed that the United States is the strongest center of capitalist power in the world; Chapters Six through Ten showed that the PRC is the strongest center of proletarian power in the world. Though the super-empire’s mechanisms of exploitation and control have developed since the inter-imperialist rivalry era, financial capital still dominates the West, and its fundamental tendency that Lenin identified a century ago—to ever expand and ever increase its profits—is likewise unchanged. There is indeed a Thucydides Trap—not one determined merely by the military and economic power of states, but also by their class character. In order to grow, the Western bourgeoisie must eventually subdue China. If it cannot do so by subversion, sabotage, and trade manipulation, it will try to do so by force. The super-empire’s reaction can be delayed, if it can profit first by subjugating other victims (such as the Russian Federation and its other national-bourgeois enemies), but the world is finite, and as far as we know, the rate of extraction cannot increase much further; the most efficient paradigm of dispossessive accumulation yet discovered—neocolonialism—is already prevalent nearly everywhere.

A conflict therefore is inevitably coming, a death-struggle between the American financial capitalist and the Chinese peasant/worker that will span the entire planet. If the PRC declines to defend itself, it will be destroyed; but if the financial oligarchy cannot destroy the PRC, it will lose its own control over class society. Were the PRC an empire, the new Cold War would not fundamentally threaten capitalist rule; victory would simply mean one gang of capitalists replacing another, just as new, ascendant empires have absorbed old, decaying ones throughout history. But the Chinese capitalists do not control finance in their own country, the workers do, and they are not required by their class interest to seek profit and exploitation at others’ expense. A Chinese victory thus has the potential to be another paradigm shift—a progression between stages of history. We have been here before. The bipolar world of the original Cold War, dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, displayed exactly this dynamic, and the Soviet Union was defeated utterly. It would seem wise to avoid the same situation that has historically led to disaster; but this can only happen if the two superpowers cooperate in avoiding kinetic, economic, or proxy conflict, and the United States almost certainly will not. An examination of the Soviet Union’s errors, the errors of contemporary anti-imperialists, and of any qualitative differences between the conditions it faced in the twentieth century and those presently faced by the PRC, is therefore essential to predicting its surest path to victory.

The PRC currently enjoys a relatively better position than the Soviet Union at its height. It has a considerably larger share of the global economy and total world population, as well as far greater international trade leverage. Even more importantly, unlike during the First Cold War, it has pursued close cooperation with the Russian Federation despite the differences in the ruling class of each country. The infamous Sino-Soviet Split, which set the two largest socialist countries at odds with one another, has not continued into the twenty-first century, and the super-empire’s open hostility toward both Russia and China make that chapter of history unlikely to repeat itself in the near future. Political strategy, however, may still ultimately be the most decisive factor in the Second Cold War.

In the first months after the October Revolution, Lenin wrote:

“. . . until the world socialist revolution breaks out, until it embraces several countries and is strong enough to overcome international imperialism, it is the direct duty of the socialists who have conquered in one country (especially a backward one) not to accept battle against the giants of imperialism. Their duty is to try to avoid battle, to wait until the conflicts between the imperialists weaken them even more, and bring the revolution in other countries even nearer. . . one must be able to calculate the balance of forces and not help the imperialists by making the battle against socialism easier for them when socialism is still weak, and when the chances of the battle are manifestly against socialism.”

The fledgling Russian Soviet Republic, which at first had controlled only the urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, could not fight the forces of every imperialist power at once; indeed, the key to its survival was not war against them, but extricating itself from the First World War as quickly as it could. For the next two decades, it followed Lenin’s strategy, seeking to make peace and détente with the imperialists while it was still weak and they were still strong. Great sacrifices were made to consolidate and defend the revolution within the Soviet Union, to appear harmless before the capitalist world, and to sow discord between the empires, which were not yet united. The Second World War seemed to vindicate this strategy; as the imperialist governments of France and the UK deliberately “appeased” Nazi Germany in the hopes that it would destroy socialism in Europe for them, the Soviet Union’s maneuvering succeeded in broadening the war, such that even while encircled by Germany and the Empire of Japan, it did not face their might alone. As a result of inter-imperialist conflict, the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence expanded, bringing revolution and proletarian rule to Eastern Europe, China, Mongolia, and Korea.

Yet the Second World War was also the last inter-imperialist war. The Soviet leadership became the victim of its own success, believing that the same strategy would work again under the next stage of imperialism, which at that point had not been identified. In 1952, Joseph Stalin confidently dismissed any objections to the contrary: “[…] the capitalist countries’ struggle for markets and the desire to crush their competitors turned out in actuality to be stronger than the contradictions between the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism. […]”

Stalin did not live to correct this error, and his successors also failed to recognize it, even as the Cold War’s imperialist bloc increasingly became not less but more united against socialism. In 1956, the Soviet Union officially adopted the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist empires. Similarly, Deng advocated a foreign policy of “keeping a low profile”—which, after the collapse of the socialist bloc and the total encirclement of the remaining socialist countries, succeeded in keeping the Party in power at the cost of integration with the capitalist world—and ever since his passing, the PRC has officially forsworn seeking any form of hegemony and has scrupulously followed its self-imposed principles of non-interference in other countries’ internal political affairs. Yet it is now obvious from the remainder of twentieth century history that inter-imperialist war was not inevitable. […]

[…] The experiences of Japan are the clearest evidence that the inter-imperialist unity that outlived even the Soviet Union is in no danger. There would be no inter-imperialist war in the latter twentieth century, and one is not likely in the twenty-first. The greatest conflict between capitalist empires of the super-imperial era resembled nothing so much as the United States pointing a gun at an unarmed man. There is no reason to believe that the unprecedented unity among empires in the face of a socialist enemy that was a feature of First Cold War will not also be a feature of the Second, especially not now that the super-empire and neocolonialism are fully entrenched throughout the world. The PRC is therefore no more likely than was the Soviet Union to win simply through patience.

As described earlier in Chapter Eleven, the severing of the Nord Stream was in no country’s self-interest but the United States’ (and Norway’s); pipelines, railroads, bridges, ports, and other transport infrastructure of the kind that the PRC has been patiently and methodically building throughout the periphery are all vulnerable. What takes years to build can be destroyed in moments; without its own military and soft-power influence, the PRC’s long-term geopolitical strategy will soon be at a tremendous disadvantage, and it may lose what it has so painstakingly gained. In any war, hot or cold, the advantage usually lies with the side that takes the initiative. Though the PRC is still rising economically, militarily, and in every other respect, the United States has consistently acted first, through trade wars, diplomatic maneuvering, propaganda, and other provocations. It has retained its military outposts in Korea and is expanding them throughout the Pacific, […] the Cold War blocs are re-forming, and the PRC is the de facto leader of the opposition whether the Party is ready or not. The outcome of the Second Cold War will depend heavily upon whether and in what fashion the PRC will take on this mantle of leadership.

[…] When the stage of super-imperialism began, national-bourgeois states at first sought not to resist the super-empire, but to join it—on their own terms, rather than as subservient compradors. Khomeini’s successors attempted not only to privatize state-owned enterprises and infrastructure but to attract investment from the West. In 1995, the Iranian government signed a contract with a French company to develop oil fields in the Persian Gulf. The Tehran Stock Exchange was revived. Under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran first applied to join the World Trade Organization. In 1999, President Mohammad Khatami went even further, proposing a “total restructuring” of the economy, and spoke of the importance of making Iran safe for foreign capital. […]

[…] Despite its desire for reconciliation and development, the Islamic Republic has continually experienced rejection and aggression. In 1996, the United States blocked its application to the WTO, and the one time (more recently) that it applied for a loan from the IMF, it was also denied due to U.S. influence. Even during Rafsanjani’s relatively reform-minded presidency, in which the Islamic Republic pursued integration into the global economy, new sanctions on Iran were imposed both by President Clinton’s executive orders and by the U.S. Congress. In 2002, President George W. Bush declared Iran to be part of an “Axis of Evil.” When the United States and the Islamic Republic finally agreed upon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 to ease sanctions in exchange for guarantees regarding the Iranian nuclear program, the U.S. reneged almost immediately. In 2020, on orders from President Trump, the U.S. military assassinated the Islamic Republic’s most celebrated military leader, General Qasem Soleimani. Just as it had with regard to Gaddafi’s Libya, the super-empire designated the Islamic Republic to be its enemy, and nothing less than its destruction could ever suffice.

The super-empire, continually driven to increase profits by the Western financial oligarchy, cannot permit the loss of a profitable neocolony. When a national bourgeoisie develops to the point of attaining sole control of state power, and moves to end foreign dispossessive accumulation within its own country, this means less super-profits for the imperialists; and if this national bourgeoisie were to join the group of exploiters, there would be more imperialists among which to divide even less loot. To sustain its rate of profit, the super-empire must therefore remain an exclusive club, and finds it preferable to annihilate, rather than embrace, any potential new partner […]

[…] The Islamic Republic had on a similar basis become the leading exporter of armed revolution against the super-empire’s hegemony. By the early 2000s, the super-empire had fully encircled Iran. To the east and west, the United States’ military had invaded and occupied Iran’s closest neighbors. To the north and south lay willing collaborators (Turkey and Saudi Arabia). The U.S. government had openly announced to the world that Iran was its enemy, and perhaps the next to be invaded. Lacking a nuclear deterrent, the Islamic Republic, out of self-defense, had to heavily invest in anti-imperialism, by arming and bankrolling national liberation movements throughout the Arab world.

Deterrence, of course, only works if an aggressor believes in its target’s commitment to carrying out a threat; therefore the Iranian national bourgeoisie tied itself as closely as possible with the “Axis of Resistance,” both materially and ideologically. […] Under the conditions of super-imperialism, these national bourgeoisies are essentially stuck—perpetually unable to develop into imperialists, and frequently threatened with either annihilation or de-development. This is both a boon and a curse for the global proletariat. The workers and peasants in the neocolonies find national-bourgeois states to be their strongest allies in the struggle for liberation, yet within these countries, they are similarly stuck.