Chinese leadership holds onto power by making sure to keep the boat from rocking on its population. Someone said it is a lot like Huxley's "Brave New World". It takes a lot of work keeping your population content. Their eyes are inward. The rest are customers not family. So they always need to create more techy diversions and gee whizz stuff to keep the population happy. The last thing needed is to have people fret about foreign intrigue.
And I don't think the population gives much of a thought to Palestinian suffering anyway. That's the same in the US. But if China is like the benevolent dictator, the US admin is like Orwell's Big Brother, controlling the population through fear of the other and sustaining it's economy through building ever more military junk to destroy. Fear, the weapons, then enemies created then fear then more weapons.
If you take the moral dimension out of it, the economies are not all that disimilar. They both rely on continued growth and extraction of resources and increasing consumption, and therefore need each other in a way, because neither has all they need within their borders to continue this extraction party going. Good cop, bad cop. But in the end they both will come to the realization through contemplation or catastrophy that there is only so much Earth to go around and the waste from their operations will keep piling up smothering land air and sea.
I don't know if I agree or disagree, because I didn't see a part in the essay where you laid out your proposed alternative strategy for China. It is certainly implied, but laying it out would be helpful to begin seeing how to navigate the various reactions within the complex system of international politics (e.g., you imply ending the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, but to replace it with what? And with Pandora's box opened to diplomatic pressure from all over the world to use trade as a weapon like the US, how to manage the maelstrom?). Keeping it only implied does an end run around all of this, but it is well worth addressing directly - if only because without doing so, people familiar with it will dismiss the argument entirely as unserious. You paint with an overbroad brush in parts, e.g., Chinese econ departments are not uniformly neoliberal or neoclassical (https://www.routledge.com/Competing-Economic-Paradigms-in-China-The-Co-Evolution-of-Economic-Events-Economic-Theory-and-Economics-Education-19762016/Cohn/p/book/9780367878023), but absolutely, the fact that any pseudoscientific apologetics for US-variety capitalism has even one proponent in China is an intellectual atrocity, I agree; and yes indeed there is a Right in China and if anything they are even worse than what you allude to here (e.g., https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670564.2020.1766911 - though one would hope that a decade of reality smacking them up the side of the head would suffice to change many minds on these points, but then again we are talking about rightists so...), but thankfully they are not in control of the country or else the tenor of Western media coverage would be substantially more positive. If Westerners can be of any help in internal political debates, I am more than happy to join in, but for that I would need someone fluent in those debates, and of course in Chinese, to enlighten me as to how. Otherwise what is most important is:
'If you are a Western leftist, feel free to judge the Chinese government as bad or good or anywhere in between - for not taking the action you think appropriate, or for doing exactly what you think is appropriate. Such judgments matter little, for the same reason that rightists’ arguments against protesting our own government and its dependencies are invalid (for instance, “why are you protesting for women’s rights in the U.S.!? Don’t you know that in EYE-RAN, women have no rights, why don’t you protest against them?” or “why are you protesting against the Israeli government!? Don’t you know that there is mass murder in Ethiopia or Sudan or Myanmar, why don’t you protest against them?”). Because citizens of the U.S. have some, if minor, influence over their own government’s policies, whereas we have zero influence over other governments. Your moral condemnation or approval of foreign governments (that aren’t dependencies of the U.S.) are as consequential as your judgment on whether or not Blackpink and Taylor Swift are laudable musicians.
Except in one respect.
This requires a bit of history to explain. During the Cold War, the CIA provided funding for a “compatible Left” – that is, a “Left” compatible with the US empire, and suitably anti-Soviet – from labor unions to leftwing political parties and intellectuals. To the U.S. Right, this was terribly immoral. Giving money to godless socialists, degenerate artists, and labor unions (the thugs who extort upright employers, denying them their god-given authority over the lower orders)? This was a moral stain on the CIA, defensible only insofar as this unquestionable immorality served a greater good. And that greater good was supporting the U.S. empire, by convincing as many leftists as possible that actually existing socialist governments were in fact bad, for whatever reason stuck. The reasoning didn’t matter – what did matter was getting leftists to judge the USSR as “bad”, to feel antipathy toward it, so they would be less likely to lend their support to any movement or organization associated with the USSR, and less likely to (or more tepidly) oppose U.S. anti-communist foreign policy. Which of course needed as much opposition as possible, considering that U.S. anti-communist foreign policy included so much torture, murder, and other barbarities around the world as to make the IDF in Gaza look like the Girl Scouts on a charity drive.
But if enough erstwhile or would-be leftists could be convinced that the USSR was bad – even if also bad, along with the U.S. – and kept away by the perceived stench of Soviet immorality from taking political actions in line with Soviet foreign policy aims or against U.S. aims, then that was a win for the CIA and the empire it serves. For instance, the last time the U.S. government perpetrated genocide: in Guatemala, the more would-be/erstwhile leftists who could be made to believe that the also-evil Soviets were behind the insurgency, the better. They’d reason: why make a big deal about the U.S. efforts to defend the Guatemalan or Salvadoran governments against the immoral Soviets? (This was made a lot easier by the lack of smartphones broadcasting U.S.-trained Guatemalan soldiers torturing and massacring entire villages, or U.S.-trained Salvadoran soldiers flaying babies to death with barbed wire in front of their mothers.) A pox on both their houses, I say, for a morally pure leftist individual like myself!
To create a “Left” compatible with the U.S. empire required only a negative moral judgement of actually existing socialist governments. A positive view of the U.S. empire would be the cherry on top, but entirely unnecessary. (And too hard to instill.) Instead, it sufficed to promote a universalist humanism which condemned the U.S. empire and the USSR alike; “neither Washington nor Moscow”, nor Beijing. Champagne bottles could pop in Langley so long as leftists could be made compatible with the U.S. empire in this limited way. As the Captain is told by his CIA handler in The Sympathizer: “as long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism, but with no actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless.”
Don’t be harmless. Judge the Chinese government however you like, but focus your political actions on civilizing your own government, ending the Dumb Cold War, and pushing for the existential necessity of an unprecedented degree of international cooperation to avert ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust. Be incompatible with empire. And if you have friends in China, talk to them about the ripe durians ready for picking, the soft power bonanza China could enjoy if it takes the lead against the genocide. Just avoid any laughable pretense of moral superiority: it is our governments actively perpetrating the genocide, and the onus is on us, primarily and overwhelmingly, to stop it. And, don’t act like your supposition about the eventual results of such a strategy is superior to any other supposition, particularly when you are not one of the 1.4 billion people with skin in the game, whose lives would be in jeopardy if your supposition turns out to be wrong.
Join a party or organization – for instance, in the U.S., DSA, in Europe, DiEM25 – and focus on improving it while you carry out collective tasks and attempt to educate normies into joining. It may be too late to stop the U.S./Israeli/European genocide in Gaza immediately, but there will be many more atrocities coming from the fanatics and crackpots comprising the U.S. foreign policy establishment – unless we are organized and numerous enough to stop them. Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (be as pessimistic as you like in your analysis, but act as if you were full of optimism) is good advice. A politically pessimistic intellect is operating on plenty of suppositions about future states of a complex system; you very well may be wrong about them. So act as if you had a world to save, and a good chance of doing so. Because the former is true with absolute certainty, and the latter will be true if we act like it is.'
Karim, I know that you're in Hong Cong, which I imagine is the most westernized part of China, but I have to confess, while your argument sounds urgent, I have no idea of the discussions and discourse that go on inside the Communist Party which runs the state. It's no secret that the Chinese admired and still admire western innovation, and the economy to fund it, but I never considered that the Chinese version of capitalism was ever a consideration for the CP to apply to their political / socioeconomic spheres.
The tell is the Chinese are free to work and save and buy, but they aren't polled on their political preferences, and they aren't encouraged to lobby for a liberal democracy. I think as long as China can feed its own and contribute to the happiness quotient in terms of work and individual needs, like healthcare, transportation and education, that individual rights aren't a platform that threatens the government.
There's ample evidence that capitalism cannot be a state's economic base, because it's unstable, unfair and doomed to periodic booms and busts. I'm confident that the CCP understands why it was colonized, and how it became a global power.
What you are citing and lamenting feels like a western fascination with the new and different, with no intellectual tools to understand what it means. As a westerner, I am influenced to believe that an idea can change a nation, but I know that's more BS than actual. In China it's not even BS, because the state doesn't churn out narratives to seduce. So do those young Chinese soaking in western marketing dreams believe that personal ownership is a right of birth?
We are seeing right now, that the system that promised prosperity and opportunity has morphed into a goon squad that will crush anyone who tries to change it. I have difficulty imagining that the Chinese youth have grand illusions about the west, even if they crave more toys or money.
As for China's public posture, I don't think viewing it with a western lens is helpful. It doesn't threaten, or seek to intimidate, but it makes decisions that work. The current American profound military losses in Ukraine and Iran are in no small part the consequence of Chinese barring the west from getting their hands on the materials to generate bigger and better weapons. And every sanction that the West imposes on China is met with sanctions the other way, that have serious implications for whichever side is heeded. This gets no attention in the West's lapdog media, and China has no motivation to make its decisions anybody's business.
I think having expectations of China taking moral positions in public can only disappoint. It's not who they are.
By that logic, I should never question anything China does. As my lens can always be accused of being “Western”. Sorry, not gonna happen. I think China’s behaviour deserves to be questioned and I won’t ever stop doing that with any country.
China has never had imperial pretensions. And yet the oppressive, colonialist mindset of empire is much needed when dealing with empires all of which will swallow you if they can.
Unless China starts to build an empire - by, obviously invading and seizing Taiwan - it will remain vulnerable to the exploitative machinations of the Judeo Masonic mafia that runs America and Israel.
Sometimes even the ‘good guys’ have to ‘play the bastard’ or their full potential will remain unfulfilled. And whilst I wouldn’t wish this outcome on Taiwan - or anywhere for that matter - I feel that China needs to be ‘bled’ before it is able to take the empire on and win.
From Sony Thǎng on twitter just now, please excuse the chatbot cadence (and sorry to him if he mastered that style of writing and then chatbots destroyed it by overuse!)
‘ The most misunderstood thing about Chinese foreign policy is what it is optimizing for.
It is not optimizing for ideological satisfaction.
It is not optimizing for the approval of the Western left or the Western right or the Global South intellectual class or anyone else whose primary mode of political engagement is evaluation and commentary.
It is optimizing for the construction of a world in which China, and, as a structural byproduct, other countries that plug into the same alternative architecture, cannot be strangled by the control systems that American power has spent eighty years building into the plumbing of the global economy.
That goal requires:
Not triggering the military response that would set the project back by a generation.
Not giving the United States a clean pretext to organize its alliance system into active containment.
Not moving so fast on any single front that the empire has to choose between accepting the change or going to war to reverse it.
It requires patience that reads, to people who want confrontation, like cowardice.
It requires restraint that reads, to people who want declarations, like complicity.
It requires accepting the accusation of insufficient radicalism from people who have never had to think about what happens the morning after the dramatic confrontation they're demanding.
The people building the alternative world are not building it for the approval of people who assess foreign policy the way sports fans assess a game.
They are building it for the countries that will still be here in fifty years and need the architecture to be different.
I'm with you, but beyond kinda! 😆 It is most annoying when one's counterarguments go ignored, and the same original arguments keep hobbling around after being critiqued, like the knight with chopped off arms and a leg insisting it’s just a flesh wound and he is still capable of battle. For instance:
1)'Secondly, what would Chinese economic sanctions accomplish? $14 billion sounds like a lot; but if cut off from Chinese consumer goods, would the U.S. not step into the breach to replace anything its Israeli dependency needs? Sourcing alternatives would require a lot of work, and incur some expense over the “China price” - but does anyone believe that the U.S. government would not pay the cost?’ Also, should go without saying that as the #1 trading partner for the vast majority of countries in the world, China’s headline trade figure for all countries seems high. By exclaiming about that topline figure (which roughly doubled from 24 to 25 for the reason below), you elide the fact that China-Israel trade is relatively low, less than China-Iraq trade for instance, and much less than the regional heavyweights.
2)‘CIA Officer 2: He will never ask why the trade doubled [from the time I wrote point 1]—because our own sanctions failed, you know. Israel sold seventeen billion dollars in semiconductors to China last year. Helped them evade our AI blockade. Our good pals in the Holy Land decided to help themselves again, much like they did in the nineties.
CIA Officer: 1 That was our defeat.
CIA Officer 2: (Laughing) And he turned it into China's moral failure. We lost a battle in the chip war, and he fights our propaganda war for us. It is the most exquisite irony.’
3)‘is China bad, due to its Iran policy?
To avoid being more Catholic than the Pope, we should start with the Iranian government’s view. In this case, the Iranian government evidently/publicly has nothing but appreciation for the Chinese government, from the Qur’anic verse chosen for China at Khamenei’s funeral, to recent diplomatic statements. (And statements going far further back.)
Why might the Iranian government be more sanguine on China than Anglosphere leftists who want the Chinese government to enter the war more directly?6 Among other reasons – none of which would be trumpeted to the world, out of self-preservation – because China is the only market for Iran’s primary export.
Without which, it’s hard to imagine U.S. primary and secondary sanctions not destroying the country.
And how is China alone able to buck the Empire? By building its national power, that is, playing the (despicable) game imposed by the hegemon and playing it well. I don’t like that game, and you probably don’t either, but China playing it well is why the U.S. government isn’t running Iran right now.
But should the Chinese government have, in addition to not withdrawing oil from its strategic petroleum reserve (but actually adding to it during the war), prohibited its companies from withdrawing oil from their commercial reserves, to help drive up the price of oil, at the cost of bankrupting some of them?
First, those with disposable income who haven’t bought oil futures during the war can hardly criticize the Chinese government for not bidding up oil prices. But for those of us who have, I still wouldn’t – the oil price mechanism is a highly indirect way to help Iran, by putting political pressure on Trump to end the aggression, and of course it harms the global poor. Futures-market manipulation is likely a far bigger factor in keeping benchmark prices low. Plus, the Chinese government’s permitting private firms to tap their commercial reserves allowed it to use refined-product exports as a political tool in their region – that is, playing the Empire-imposed game well, to build power. (Which has spillover benefits, like keeping Iran from collapse, etc.)
Second, the Chinese government doesn’t buy Iranian oil, it gives protection from U.S. sanctions to small “teapot” refiners in China so they can buy it. Recently, Gulf producers undercut Iran’s state vendor by several dollars per barrel. Hence the recent drop in purchases in the Chinese market. It was not the Chinese government stabbing the Iranian government in the back (with the latter somehow not noticing).
So, if we are not to be more Catholic than the Pope, we’d take a similar perspective to that of the Iranian government.’
4)What is ‘your proposed alternative strategy for China. It is certainly implied, but laying it out would be helpful to begin seeing how to navigate the various reactions within the complex system of international politics (e.g., you imply ending the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, but to replace it with what? And with Pandora's box opened to diplomatic pressure from all over the world to use trade as a weapon like the US, how to manage the maelstrom?). Keeping it only implied does an end run around all of this, but it is well worth addressing directly - if only because without doing so, people familiar with it will dismiss the argument entirely as unserious.’
5)But I am also guilty of leaving some arguments merely implicit. Here’s one explicit-ized: knowing what we know about how the CIA has historically dealt with western leftists, imagine a parallel universe exactly like ours except in this one you are a CIA asset (knowing, paid) tasked with reprising the same strategy as in the first Cold War. How would we distinguish the parallel universe from the one we currently live in? Remember, compatible leftists back then could be as vituperative and passionate as they wanted to be against the U.S. empire, all that was required of them (and the vast majority were unwitting and unpaid) is to also be against the USSR.
I just restarted my subscription. This is an important subject and I appreciate this work.
Jeffrey Sachs has reported that the COVID project was, from the beginning, a joint China/USA project.
Bill Gates and the CPC are the two heaviest funders of the WHO.
The Adelson family which owns the money laundering casinos in Vegas also control 50% of the gambling trade in Macau a Chinese SAR.
With Hong Kong and Macau powerful Chinese have full access to the “offshore” dark money system.
Chinese leadership holds onto power by making sure to keep the boat from rocking on its population. Someone said it is a lot like Huxley's "Brave New World". It takes a lot of work keeping your population content. Their eyes are inward. The rest are customers not family. So they always need to create more techy diversions and gee whizz stuff to keep the population happy. The last thing needed is to have people fret about foreign intrigue.
And I don't think the population gives much of a thought to Palestinian suffering anyway. That's the same in the US. But if China is like the benevolent dictator, the US admin is like Orwell's Big Brother, controlling the population through fear of the other and sustaining it's economy through building ever more military junk to destroy. Fear, the weapons, then enemies created then fear then more weapons.
If you take the moral dimension out of it, the economies are not all that disimilar. They both rely on continued growth and extraction of resources and increasing consumption, and therefore need each other in a way, because neither has all they need within their borders to continue this extraction party going. Good cop, bad cop. But in the end they both will come to the realization through contemplation or catastrophy that there is only so much Earth to go around and the waste from their operations will keep piling up smothering land air and sea.
I don't know if I agree or disagree, because I didn't see a part in the essay where you laid out your proposed alternative strategy for China. It is certainly implied, but laying it out would be helpful to begin seeing how to navigate the various reactions within the complex system of international politics (e.g., you imply ending the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, but to replace it with what? And with Pandora's box opened to diplomatic pressure from all over the world to use trade as a weapon like the US, how to manage the maelstrom?). Keeping it only implied does an end run around all of this, but it is well worth addressing directly - if only because without doing so, people familiar with it will dismiss the argument entirely as unserious. You paint with an overbroad brush in parts, e.g., Chinese econ departments are not uniformly neoliberal or neoclassical (https://www.routledge.com/Competing-Economic-Paradigms-in-China-The-Co-Evolution-of-Economic-Events-Economic-Theory-and-Economics-Education-19762016/Cohn/p/book/9780367878023), but absolutely, the fact that any pseudoscientific apologetics for US-variety capitalism has even one proponent in China is an intellectual atrocity, I agree; and yes indeed there is a Right in China and if anything they are even worse than what you allude to here (e.g., https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10670564.2020.1766911 - though one would hope that a decade of reality smacking them up the side of the head would suffice to change many minds on these points, but then again we are talking about rightists so...), but thankfully they are not in control of the country or else the tenor of Western media coverage would be substantially more positive. If Westerners can be of any help in internal political debates, I am more than happy to join in, but for that I would need someone fluent in those debates, and of course in Chinese, to enlighten me as to how. Otherwise what is most important is:
'If you are a Western leftist, feel free to judge the Chinese government as bad or good or anywhere in between - for not taking the action you think appropriate, or for doing exactly what you think is appropriate. Such judgments matter little, for the same reason that rightists’ arguments against protesting our own government and its dependencies are invalid (for instance, “why are you protesting for women’s rights in the U.S.!? Don’t you know that in EYE-RAN, women have no rights, why don’t you protest against them?” or “why are you protesting against the Israeli government!? Don’t you know that there is mass murder in Ethiopia or Sudan or Myanmar, why don’t you protest against them?”). Because citizens of the U.S. have some, if minor, influence over their own government’s policies, whereas we have zero influence over other governments. Your moral condemnation or approval of foreign governments (that aren’t dependencies of the U.S.) are as consequential as your judgment on whether or not Blackpink and Taylor Swift are laudable musicians.
Except in one respect.
This requires a bit of history to explain. During the Cold War, the CIA provided funding for a “compatible Left” – that is, a “Left” compatible with the US empire, and suitably anti-Soviet – from labor unions to leftwing political parties and intellectuals. To the U.S. Right, this was terribly immoral. Giving money to godless socialists, degenerate artists, and labor unions (the thugs who extort upright employers, denying them their god-given authority over the lower orders)? This was a moral stain on the CIA, defensible only insofar as this unquestionable immorality served a greater good. And that greater good was supporting the U.S. empire, by convincing as many leftists as possible that actually existing socialist governments were in fact bad, for whatever reason stuck. The reasoning didn’t matter – what did matter was getting leftists to judge the USSR as “bad”, to feel antipathy toward it, so they would be less likely to lend their support to any movement or organization associated with the USSR, and less likely to (or more tepidly) oppose U.S. anti-communist foreign policy. Which of course needed as much opposition as possible, considering that U.S. anti-communist foreign policy included so much torture, murder, and other barbarities around the world as to make the IDF in Gaza look like the Girl Scouts on a charity drive.
But if enough erstwhile or would-be leftists could be convinced that the USSR was bad – even if also bad, along with the U.S. – and kept away by the perceived stench of Soviet immorality from taking political actions in line with Soviet foreign policy aims or against U.S. aims, then that was a win for the CIA and the empire it serves. For instance, the last time the U.S. government perpetrated genocide: in Guatemala, the more would-be/erstwhile leftists who could be made to believe that the also-evil Soviets were behind the insurgency, the better. They’d reason: why make a big deal about the U.S. efforts to defend the Guatemalan or Salvadoran governments against the immoral Soviets? (This was made a lot easier by the lack of smartphones broadcasting U.S.-trained Guatemalan soldiers torturing and massacring entire villages, or U.S.-trained Salvadoran soldiers flaying babies to death with barbed wire in front of their mothers.) A pox on both their houses, I say, for a morally pure leftist individual like myself!
To create a “Left” compatible with the U.S. empire required only a negative moral judgement of actually existing socialist governments. A positive view of the U.S. empire would be the cherry on top, but entirely unnecessary. (And too hard to instill.) Instead, it sufficed to promote a universalist humanism which condemned the U.S. empire and the USSR alike; “neither Washington nor Moscow”, nor Beijing. Champagne bottles could pop in Langley so long as leftists could be made compatible with the U.S. empire in this limited way. As the Captain is told by his CIA handler in The Sympathizer: “as long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism, but with no actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless.”
Don’t be harmless. Judge the Chinese government however you like, but focus your political actions on civilizing your own government, ending the Dumb Cold War, and pushing for the existential necessity of an unprecedented degree of international cooperation to avert ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust. Be incompatible with empire. And if you have friends in China, talk to them about the ripe durians ready for picking, the soft power bonanza China could enjoy if it takes the lead against the genocide. Just avoid any laughable pretense of moral superiority: it is our governments actively perpetrating the genocide, and the onus is on us, primarily and overwhelmingly, to stop it. And, don’t act like your supposition about the eventual results of such a strategy is superior to any other supposition, particularly when you are not one of the 1.4 billion people with skin in the game, whose lives would be in jeopardy if your supposition turns out to be wrong.
Join a party or organization – for instance, in the U.S., DSA, in Europe, DiEM25 – and focus on improving it while you carry out collective tasks and attempt to educate normies into joining. It may be too late to stop the U.S./Israeli/European genocide in Gaza immediately, but there will be many more atrocities coming from the fanatics and crackpots comprising the U.S. foreign policy establishment – unless we are organized and numerous enough to stop them. Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (be as pessimistic as you like in your analysis, but act as if you were full of optimism) is good advice. A politically pessimistic intellect is operating on plenty of suppositions about future states of a complex system; you very well may be wrong about them. So act as if you had a world to save, and a good chance of doing so. Because the former is true with absolute certainty, and the latter will be true if we act like it is.'
https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/magical-negros-mandarins-and-how
Karim, I know that you're in Hong Cong, which I imagine is the most westernized part of China, but I have to confess, while your argument sounds urgent, I have no idea of the discussions and discourse that go on inside the Communist Party which runs the state. It's no secret that the Chinese admired and still admire western innovation, and the economy to fund it, but I never considered that the Chinese version of capitalism was ever a consideration for the CP to apply to their political / socioeconomic spheres.
The tell is the Chinese are free to work and save and buy, but they aren't polled on their political preferences, and they aren't encouraged to lobby for a liberal democracy. I think as long as China can feed its own and contribute to the happiness quotient in terms of work and individual needs, like healthcare, transportation and education, that individual rights aren't a platform that threatens the government.
There's ample evidence that capitalism cannot be a state's economic base, because it's unstable, unfair and doomed to periodic booms and busts. I'm confident that the CCP understands why it was colonized, and how it became a global power.
What you are citing and lamenting feels like a western fascination with the new and different, with no intellectual tools to understand what it means. As a westerner, I am influenced to believe that an idea can change a nation, but I know that's more BS than actual. In China it's not even BS, because the state doesn't churn out narratives to seduce. So do those young Chinese soaking in western marketing dreams believe that personal ownership is a right of birth?
We are seeing right now, that the system that promised prosperity and opportunity has morphed into a goon squad that will crush anyone who tries to change it. I have difficulty imagining that the Chinese youth have grand illusions about the west, even if they crave more toys or money.
As for China's public posture, I don't think viewing it with a western lens is helpful. It doesn't threaten, or seek to intimidate, but it makes decisions that work. The current American profound military losses in Ukraine and Iran are in no small part the consequence of Chinese barring the west from getting their hands on the materials to generate bigger and better weapons. And every sanction that the West imposes on China is met with sanctions the other way, that have serious implications for whichever side is heeded. This gets no attention in the West's lapdog media, and China has no motivation to make its decisions anybody's business.
I think having expectations of China taking moral positions in public can only disappoint. It's not who they are.
By that logic, I should never question anything China does. As my lens can always be accused of being “Western”. Sorry, not gonna happen. I think China’s behaviour deserves to be questioned and I won’t ever stop doing that with any country.
China has never had imperial pretensions. And yet the oppressive, colonialist mindset of empire is much needed when dealing with empires all of which will swallow you if they can.
Unless China starts to build an empire - by, obviously invading and seizing Taiwan - it will remain vulnerable to the exploitative machinations of the Judeo Masonic mafia that runs America and Israel.
Sometimes even the ‘good guys’ have to ‘play the bastard’ or their full potential will remain unfulfilled. And whilst I wouldn’t wish this outcome on Taiwan - or anywhere for that matter - I feel that China needs to be ‘bled’ before it is able to take the empire on and win.
From Sony Thǎng on twitter just now, please excuse the chatbot cadence (and sorry to him if he mastered that style of writing and then chatbots destroyed it by overuse!)
‘ The most misunderstood thing about Chinese foreign policy is what it is optimizing for.
It is not optimizing for ideological satisfaction.
It is not optimizing for the approval of the Western left or the Western right or the Global South intellectual class or anyone else whose primary mode of political engagement is evaluation and commentary.
It is optimizing for the construction of a world in which China, and, as a structural byproduct, other countries that plug into the same alternative architecture, cannot be strangled by the control systems that American power has spent eighty years building into the plumbing of the global economy.
That goal requires:
Not triggering the military response that would set the project back by a generation.
Not giving the United States a clean pretext to organize its alliance system into active containment.
Not moving so fast on any single front that the empire has to choose between accepting the change or going to war to reverse it.
It requires patience that reads, to people who want confrontation, like cowardice.
It requires restraint that reads, to people who want declarations, like complicity.
It requires accepting the accusation of insufficient radicalism from people who have never had to think about what happens the morning after the dramatic confrontation they're demanding.
The people building the alternative world are not building it for the approval of people who assess foreign policy the way sports fans assess a game.
They are building it for the countries that will still be here in fifty years and need the architecture to be different.
The critics will move on to the next outrage.
The architecture will remain.’
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2089352908412510526?s=46
Im kinda sick of all these explanations ignoring trade with Israel and letting a genocide happen while they signed the genocide convention.
All they do is bash the Western left from a place of arrogance while engaging in triumphalism that completely ignores Palestine
I'm with you, but beyond kinda! 😆 It is most annoying when one's counterarguments go ignored, and the same original arguments keep hobbling around after being critiqued, like the knight with chopped off arms and a leg insisting it’s just a flesh wound and he is still capable of battle. For instance:
1)'Secondly, what would Chinese economic sanctions accomplish? $14 billion sounds like a lot; but if cut off from Chinese consumer goods, would the U.S. not step into the breach to replace anything its Israeli dependency needs? Sourcing alternatives would require a lot of work, and incur some expense over the “China price” - but does anyone believe that the U.S. government would not pay the cost?’ Also, should go without saying that as the #1 trading partner for the vast majority of countries in the world, China’s headline trade figure for all countries seems high. By exclaiming about that topline figure (which roughly doubled from 24 to 25 for the reason below), you elide the fact that China-Israel trade is relatively low, less than China-Iraq trade for instance, and much less than the regional heavyweights.
2)‘CIA Officer 2: He will never ask why the trade doubled [from the time I wrote point 1]—because our own sanctions failed, you know. Israel sold seventeen billion dollars in semiconductors to China last year. Helped them evade our AI blockade. Our good pals in the Holy Land decided to help themselves again, much like they did in the nineties.
CIA Officer: 1 That was our defeat.
CIA Officer 2: (Laughing) And he turned it into China's moral failure. We lost a battle in the chip war, and he fights our propaganda war for us. It is the most exquisite irony.’
3)‘is China bad, due to its Iran policy?
To avoid being more Catholic than the Pope, we should start with the Iranian government’s view. In this case, the Iranian government evidently/publicly has nothing but appreciation for the Chinese government, from the Qur’anic verse chosen for China at Khamenei’s funeral, to recent diplomatic statements. (And statements going far further back.)
Why might the Iranian government be more sanguine on China than Anglosphere leftists who want the Chinese government to enter the war more directly?6 Among other reasons – none of which would be trumpeted to the world, out of self-preservation – because China is the only market for Iran’s primary export.
Without which, it’s hard to imagine U.S. primary and secondary sanctions not destroying the country.
And how is China alone able to buck the Empire? By building its national power, that is, playing the (despicable) game imposed by the hegemon and playing it well. I don’t like that game, and you probably don’t either, but China playing it well is why the U.S. government isn’t running Iran right now.
But should the Chinese government have, in addition to not withdrawing oil from its strategic petroleum reserve (but actually adding to it during the war), prohibited its companies from withdrawing oil from their commercial reserves, to help drive up the price of oil, at the cost of bankrupting some of them?
First, those with disposable income who haven’t bought oil futures during the war can hardly criticize the Chinese government for not bidding up oil prices. But for those of us who have, I still wouldn’t – the oil price mechanism is a highly indirect way to help Iran, by putting political pressure on Trump to end the aggression, and of course it harms the global poor. Futures-market manipulation is likely a far bigger factor in keeping benchmark prices low. Plus, the Chinese government’s permitting private firms to tap their commercial reserves allowed it to use refined-product exports as a political tool in their region – that is, playing the Empire-imposed game well, to build power. (Which has spillover benefits, like keeping Iran from collapse, etc.)
Second, the Chinese government doesn’t buy Iranian oil, it gives protection from U.S. sanctions to small “teapot” refiners in China so they can buy it. Recently, Gulf producers undercut Iran’s state vendor by several dollars per barrel. Hence the recent drop in purchases in the Chinese market. It was not the Chinese government stabbing the Iranian government in the back (with the latter somehow not noticing).
So, if we are not to be more Catholic than the Pope, we’d take a similar perspective to that of the Iranian government.’
4)What is ‘your proposed alternative strategy for China. It is certainly implied, but laying it out would be helpful to begin seeing how to navigate the various reactions within the complex system of international politics (e.g., you imply ending the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, but to replace it with what? And with Pandora's box opened to diplomatic pressure from all over the world to use trade as a weapon like the US, how to manage the maelstrom?). Keeping it only implied does an end run around all of this, but it is well worth addressing directly - if only because without doing so, people familiar with it will dismiss the argument entirely as unserious.’
5)But I am also guilty of leaving some arguments merely implicit. Here’s one explicit-ized: knowing what we know about how the CIA has historically dealt with western leftists, imagine a parallel universe exactly like ours except in this one you are a CIA asset (knowing, paid) tasked with reprising the same strategy as in the first Cold War. How would we distinguish the parallel universe from the one we currently live in? Remember, compatible leftists back then could be as vituperative and passionate as they wanted to be against the U.S. empire, all that was required of them (and the vast majority were unwitting and unpaid) is to also be against the USSR.