So I’ve been putting off writing this for a long time and it’ll probably need to be a series, but I’ve had a difficult time answering challenges from my friends who assert that China is either a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie or of the Bureaucracy (i.e. state capitalists), and that it’s a competing imperialist power along with America (and they also say Russia but I can answer that one being stupid on my own).
The problem with China Discourse is that there is a serious paucity of sources dealing with nuanced critiques rather than just “debt trap!” bullshit or whatever, since the objections of liberals and the objections of smarter ultras are very different. At the very least, the sources dealing with this Discourse are less accessible to me.
But now I’m extremely bored and also recently saw Comrade Queermmunist’s excellent rebuttal against the claim of China doing imperialism in the DRC, which gave me some hope that Hexbear would be able to answer some of these claims with something at least plausible.
The main objects of concern are the for-profit national businesses causing bureacratic class antagonism, foreign policy in the form of UN peacekeeping contributions, and straightforward imperialism at the base of its supply chain, along with miscellany like this:
https://newworker.us/international/chinas-stock-market-a-lesson-on-what-socialism-is-not/
I don’t know, it’s all a mess and putting off ideological work causes problems. If nothing else, let this be a practical lesson to you:
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
It catches up with you and makes things worse in the end.
I’d absolutely be critical of the CPC if I were a Chinese citizen, but as a present citizen of a NATO member there’s no way I could take myself or my arguments seriously enough to actually attempt any sort of debate.
Every time I interrogate a specific feature of present-day China that irks me, there’s only a history of antagonism and covert actions by capitalists which puts it in context.
Could you elaborate?
I’m not OP, but Xinjiang is like that to me. Doing a lot of full society policing and re-education is not good. It’s not a genocide or slave labour, and it’s also not as bad as any of the western responses to large scale separatism/terrorism such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, but it is still a shit load of police action. However, I criticize the US more for fucking up Afghanistan and sponsoring terrorism across the region than I criticize China for how they handled that situation.
When you’re asked to criticize any ugly thing that done by one of NATO’s official enemies trying to survive in a hostile environment created by NATO, you always have to ask if there was even a plausible alternative.
Was China not supposed to address religious reactionary terrorism in Xinjiang? Is letting reactionaries destabilize the country so it can be pillaged by the richest Westerners and their collaborators really an acceptable option?