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.
You don’t let things slide for the sake of peace or friendship, you let them slide because they do not matter and interfere with your actual political activism.
Unless you are engaged in international politics it doesn’t really matter what you think, you can’t influence china. The thoughts only matter so far as they matter for the work they are willing to do and the systemic critiques they can engage in. If they’re still socialists or the like, they still hate their government and cops, they still go out and fight and organise, they can still peer thru capitalist propaganda, then it really doesn’t matter what they think of a country on the other side of the earth. Engaging in that discussion only causes needless strife, where the best case scenario is that they end up agreeing with, which also changes nothing in your day to day action
Here here!
Well, one of the differences is that it’s good to have positive examples to point to as socialists, Cuba can only carry so much weight and the DPRK is a bit of a hurdle. Just as we can all agree it would broadly be misbegotten to point to Denmark as a case of “socialism works”, there is the question of if it would likewise be an error to point to China this way.