What is China's position in the world at the moment, summarized in like... I dunno, a couple paragraphs, I guess?
Vidiwell [any] @ Vidiwell @hexbear.net Posts 0Comments 10Joined 5 yr. ago
Vidiwell [any] @ Vidiwell @hexbear.net
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It seems to me that modern china is ready to work with about anybody. a quick stroll through the BRICS countries would say so, India(one bad day away from a billion person religious war) a semi feudal and mildly fascist(although with a robust labor movement) country being a standout. But yes as you say the matter that seems hard to square is the USA's uncompromising belligerence. although its possible that is a strange but powerful cold war cultural artifact that just possesses the various higher ups in the military with a fanatic bloodlust. Obviously exceptions among the elite like Elon who clearly would like to benefit from chinas industrial capacity remain despite his incoherent libertarian ideals, Milei in Argentia talked a big talk and then when the chips were down decided he did like china, global capitalism was allowed to eat another day. somehow the USA persists in barreling towards war though. Although this probably should get squared into a proper analysis, Matt christman had a byline through his vlogs about capitalism "leaving behind" the need for the USA as its tool securing globalized markets, and now that it has locked itself into a role as the reserve currency while also producing a population with expectations about consumption/immigration/lots of other things that result in highly present and irreconcilable contradictions. But I am sure there is an even cleaner explanation, or one that better captures geopolitical complexities inside Lenin's break with the second internationale on how imperialism will always lead to war.
Of course, if we believe that China is "capitalist" or at least obeys the law of value(which many metrics of its economy implicitly do, even the SOE's) then it also will run into many similar problems as the USA. I cant imagine the CPC is not aware of this, but it is in a genuinely delicate balancing act in the coming decades. And while its quality governance and prudent state investment has mellowed out the shocks and bumps, the future is worrisome. Someone else in the thread mentioned "jack ma is not the most powerful person in china" but that belies the reality that there are immensely powerful capitalist interests in china that also rapaciously desire profit, and will put up quite the struggle if xi did "press the communism button". how they will actually move away from commodity production, if it all, to avoid capitalism's contradictions remains illusive. Especially as they seem to be putting some aspect of their stability into the fortification of a robust middle class, not exactly a socialist ideal.
I mean this is the same Parenti who defended Gorbachev on cspan with the claim "he was making modern socialism" while Gorbachev was dismantling the USSR. As mentioned below Parenti had real connections to the USSR so this opinion makes sense, although it should be evident to people here that if Parenti's views were commonplace then that the modern incarnation of people defending china with little investigation is aberrant and regrettable in how limiting the AES horizon of thought is. We are on an explicitly leftist website, dispense with the arguments you make to your lib friends to justify china to them.
"Market socialism" as practiced by modern china is basically a couple arguments masquerading as justification for capitalist restoration. Either you have to let foreign capital into your nation in order to bamboozle them and acquire their leverage/tech/forex etc, and this is merely a tactic in crisis(and also completely breaks with lenin's work on how foreign trade should be conducted by socialist states, see "Red Globalization" and read up on the NEP more and how its practices used to justify the opening up while actually being completely flipped on their head). Commodity production but under state control, e.g. parts of cuba. At least this is honest about the capitalist production. If this is not the case then maybe capitalist markets are a stage in the development towards communism, especially in "underdeveloped" countries. E.g. Deng when he sometimes said that he didnt care if china was capitalist as long as the line went up. Yugoslavia tried this, and we saw how that went, although perhaps china's stalled attempts due to political gridlock has something to do with that.
Or perhaps the "market" is more efficient as a director of investment. profit allocates resources better than any state level bureaucrat. This is the most trite, especially looking into china's agricultural sector which saw almost no increases in efficiency when they were exposed to free market prices, they just started growing cash crops.
And all of this cant be removed from how advanced various aspects of the relations of production are in 2025. Amazon in and of itself removes any ability to say the "market" is a better planner of investment than a massively centralized system of management.
China's existing system is a series of contradictions defined by various powerful blocs within china that all fundamentally disagree on how it will continue. At least Xi and the various plenums reports are completely honest that the "market" will continue its dominance. It is now, more than ever, impossible to imagine the end of capitalism. www.news.cn/politics/20240721/cec09ea2bde840dfb99331c48ab5523a/c.html From a comrade doing some translating:
"Focus on building a high-level socialist market economic system, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources, give better play to the role of the government, adhere to and improve the basic socialist economic system, promote high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance, promote high-level opening-up, build a modern economic system, accelerate the construction of a new development pattern, and promote high-quality development"
They might damn well privatize what little remains of the SOE's within our lifetimes.
And to anyone who continues to defend the opening up period as some magical moment when state controlled capitalism was able to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, there is plenty of modern scholarship that challenges that conclusion. https://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/DSullivan-JHickel-CapitalismExtremePoverty.pdf
the casual dunking from people with no idea of its historical background was more the point here. an interesting idea with a history in socialist science and instead reduced to the lowest common denominator for a cheap dunk is reddit culture for better or worse. Hence investigate...then dunk.
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/to-dispense-with-abiotic-oil
recommend a bit of "investigation" prior to right to speak. It has an interesting history. Mao and Stalin were abiotic oil guys for a time!
The point that the USSR would have invaded China due to the cultural revolution(or perhaps you are referencing something else I am completely unaware of) is absurd. It only intervened when bourgeois counter-rev was impending within the warsaw pact when it was invited.
The real nature of the question here is not persay the thought process behind how someone could mistake the USSR as an imperialist power equal to the USA, but how the theoretical underpinnings there intertwined with the great proletarian revolutions struggles within military politicization. Once we have that we do not have to throw the idea away wholesale, and it certainly ties into social imperialism in a real sense, and SPD's being critiqued by Lenin as an origin of that phrase. I do not have persay finalized thoughts there.
To your second point it feels a bit callous to list off a couple points and not grapple with the fundamental failure of decolonizing the world along socialist lines. Certainly China, the USSR, and Mongolia were able to draw reasonable borders all together, but the sino-vietnam-cambodia war is just one example that is clearly formed by colonialism and chinese revisionism and persists to this day. And that underlying issue, not making up a tally of W's and L's, is what I am interested in. But certainly point taken that successes are possible, although quite a few of them likely have to due with quelling nationalistic urges in border regions more so than socialist-oblige.
Where to even begin? Yugoslavian regional desires? Vietnamese Doi Moi and how it emerges from Le Duan and how that stems from the differences in the north and the south's unequal development despite a common struggle? Che's writings on USSR/Cuba/Free Trade/Sugar? Defining what differs between Khrushchev or Deng(its nothing)? How soviet "social imperialism" is in retrospect clearly subordinated to American imperialism and now China repeats the same mistakes today. The eurocommunism-maoist split and how that really does derive from various European communist parties and just about every single USA communist parties revisionism, which plays out now in various rightist deviations towards what "actually exists" and from that "what is actually possible".
And of course all of this precedes the answer to why post colonial bourgeois nationalism flared up in border struggles with Vietnam and China, and now regrettably we have a china that continues many of these trends. Laos and Vietnam still at least exist as a good model of interstate relations, or much of the Soviet unions internal borders at least before capitalist restoration and the return of genocidal ambitions we see today.
not to be trite with you, this question is massive, and arguably as fundamental to communism as any other question nowadays, given its real applicability on how revisionism re-asserts itself time and time again, although its particular contours are obviously not at all limited to "who gets to own a couple islands along the amur river". No easy book to start with, but Albania-China relations is probably as good a starting point as any.
The podcasts failure to really materially interrogate the origins behind Chinese revisionism instead just hand waving away "its all realpolitik now" is fairly disappointing, although of course this same issue comes up with soviet revisionism in the Cuban and Afghanistan seasons as well. Its very very well put together(although the Korean season I think better exemplified its desire to be a high production value drama) and obviously the soundtrack does a great deal of adding emotional weight, but overall its superficial discussion of the class structure, land reform efforts, and revolutionary wartime activity I think places it in an almost unhelpful place since it can give the impression to someone who listened to it that they now "understand" the topic at hand. In a way that is obviously very common to the high speed flow of ideas we all exist in. But not helpful to make any downstream conclusions such as "why did land reform in much of southeast asia succeed and or fail", why is vietnam now also "market socialist" and how does this play into their modern revisionism. But perhaps I ask too much of a 10 hour podcast.
Highly recommend imperialism and the development myth as a necessary book based in Lenin's theory of imperialism, value added manufacture, and more, to dispel any myths about the opening up and reform within china having a "good" end.
and for those still defending that china will be pressing the big red socialism button any time soon, or even promoting more SOE's as compared to further marketization, there recent plenary has plenty of details that should pour some water on that. http://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202407/21/content_WS669d0255c6d0868f4e8e94f8.html “While promoting independent operation of natural monopoly businesses in sectors such as energy, railway, telecommunications, water conservancy, and public utilities, we will advance market-oriented reforms in the competitive areas of these sectors and improve regulatory institutions and mechanisms.”
if one cant accurately delineate between khrushchev or deng, between what the NEP was and what "opening up" was, how losing control the states monopoly on trade will affect your countries relationship to the law of value, how modern monopoly works there's little sense in trying to speculate further. all of these are questions I am still attempting to unravel, but my travels so far have lead me to be more neutral on china's long term prospects.
of course, all of us are here to defend china from imperialist aggression, but you can take your pick of other more optimistic analysts, michael hudson has clout around here, but his "finance" thesis I have always found to be a bit more vibes based than I like.
China is interested in Raison d'État. same as any other modern state. They are capitalist because their economy obeys the law of value, even the SOE's are subject to this if anyone here took the time to read about it. This website's darling Michael Hudson, despite having some interesting contributions in american fiscal policy, has a remarkably weak defense of china, boiling down to "they dont have a federal reserve". Comrades here trying to run defense and tie themselves into knots for its foreign policy decisions are being very silly to be frank. The sharp contrast between pre and post maoist china's foreign policy can be explained simply, the capitalist roaders won the struggle, they have no interest at this point in time of fighting for global revolution. Their material support for cuba is a pittance, and possibly a strange artifact of cold war antagonisms. The extended loans with interest, they have privatized healthcare, and their economy runs on the extraction of raw materials from Africa and South America. None of this is to paint them as "imperialist" obviously we can defend them against western depredations, but trying to call them some bastion of socialism is bananas. And to paint them as some sort of special economy who succeeded because of the magic of "market socialism"is also a mistake. Their success is in fact highly similar with other "tiger" economies of Asia. Highly Prudent governance and massive state investment to ward off the falling rate of profit non-withstanding.
The red sails article linked below is the classic example of lazy dengist analysis that honestly falls apart with a little thinking. there is almost no political economic explanation of why billionaires must exist and the same, borderline gnostic, claim of a "master plan" by the CPC. Taking trite quotes from deng and saying "historical materialism" does not absolve people of actually having to defend their economic explanations. I have deconstructed myths about chinas "need" for market socialism, capitalist penetration, etc before and will do so again if asked, but this stuff is straight out of lenin and was functionally settled almost 100 years ago at this point.
Their decision to open up their economy and subject hundreds of millions was the force that saved capitalism. Those people labor now so the rich of the world can live lives in abject splendor. There is no such force waiting in the wings for next time. Who knows how that contradiction will resolve. Who knows how the seeming impending showdown with the USA will go.