indigi posted:

what’s all this about then!? (seriously I haven’t been following)

Ardennes posted:

The US could intercept Chinese shipping without it being a nuclear war

Judakel posted:

hehehehehehe

Rutibex posted:

no i'm pretty sure if the US navy starts acting as privateers the chinese would consider that war

Spergin Morlock posted:

its going to be hilarious if blackrock ends up insolvent because of this poo poo

Cao Ni Ma posted:

A big chinese real estate company cant pay off its lenders (most of which are western companies in the first place) and will soon go into default.

China watchers think this will have disastrous consequences for the chinese market, but in reality its way more likely that western bag holders will get hit worse. I fully expect that Xi's just gonna let it happen because it sends two clear messages, dont commoditize housing and stop dealing with gweilo vulture capitalist.

Rutibex posted:

no i'm pretty sure if the US navy starts acting as privateers the chinese would consider that war

Spergin Morlock posted:

its going to be hilarious if blackrock ends up insolvent because of this poo poo

stephenthinkpad posted:

I can believe it. The Soviet share the same religious roof as the West. And while Marxism is not religion, it's still very ideological, OTOH the Chinese is not ideological. Things the Chinese do are more pragmatic. There is no clear ideological guideline on things Beijing does (to give a couple examples off my head, for example, future plans in SCS, or what's happening now to the Chinese domestic property market.) China is more foreign to the US/Australia elites than Soviet.

But If you ask me, why did Aussie went into super racist mode while New Zealand hasn't. I have no idea.

Spergin Morlock posted:

its going to be hilarious if blackrock ends up insolvent because of this poo poo

Some Guy TT posted:

Antonymous posted:

I think if you did a real analysis China is a bourgeois dictatorship, more of a deformed capitalist state than a deformed worker's state.

European 'social democracy' and the nordic models were the go-to way to 'save' capitalism until they became evident failures and on top of that the US waged an ideological global war against unions, protectionism and state power through the world bank, imf loans, and shock doctrine et al imposed on any country too weak to resist US meddling.

China is an alternative to nordic models dressed in a red banner. and individual capitalists are scared. But the system of capital isn't scared.

The soviets had a much more serious attempt at a post capitalist organization of resources and human relations to work

edit:
A lot of stuff China does, like keeping its billionaires' money locked inside the country, expropriating it when they gently caress up, is cool and good but also what like roman leadership did. It's just good statecraft when making money isn't the sole source of social power (like it is in the USA), doesn't matter about marxist ideology. The rich are the state's biggest threat in good times and often in bad times as well. I still think China is focused on growth driven by expropriating surplus from workers mass producing goods aka capitalism.

quote:

THIS JULY, THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY (CCP) celebrated its centenary. Next year will see the twentieth national Party congress, at which a successor to current leader Xi Jinping may or may not be designated. International attention has been focused on a new version of the Cold War between China and the United States. Meanwhile, domestically, the Party has launched a series of indoctrination campaigns, bombarding the masses with state-centered narratives of history, while tightening control over the public sphere, online and offline.

. . . long . . .

When Xi is praised for, or accused of, imitating Mao in the GPCR, the similarities between the two are limited to the post-1969 phase, when the Party reclaimed its systemic control over the country. By the early 1970s, the Chinese Communist Youth League resumed its organizational work. There were no longer “Red Guards” in middle schools or higher educational institutions; they lingered on in only elementary schools, where young pupils were organized into the “little Red Guards” (hong xiao bing) group. Today, many nationalist internet users, sometimes known as the “little pinks” (xiao fenhong) for not being truly Red, are mistakenly viewed as China’s new Red Guards. But they are more like new versions of the “little Red Foot Soldiers,” who recoil the moment an authority turns on them in displeasure.

What Xi Jinping admires most of the GPCR is not the utopian visions that Mao shared with the masses at the beginning. Xi’s fascination, what he is most willing to take as the GPCR’s legacy, is the Party’s absolute authority over every aspect of national life. Against this, Yang Jisheng is determined to speak out. I admire Yang for his courage.

Chaohua Wang, a freelance critic and translator, writes in English and Chinese on politics and intellectual life in the PRC and beyond.

https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/china/scholars/t15/wangchaohua.htm posted:

Tiananmen, 15 Years On: Where Are Some of the “Most Wanted” Participants Today?

Wang Chaohua
“I jumped into the center of the movement. I thought I could make a decision for myself, for me as an individual. But this seemingly personal decision had repercussions for others, including ones I love dearly.”
—May 26, 2004

Wang was a thirty-seven-year-old graduate student in Chinese literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences when the protests began, older than most of the student leaders by more than a decade. She acknowledged that her age gave her a different perspective, in part because she had lived through the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). “Students in ’89 didn’t have the backing of the central government,” she said. As a result, there was a greater sense of uncertainty and a greater sense of risk. There was also a greater sense of self-liberation.”

Wang’s participation in the central student committee was a matter of chance. “When the movement broke out, I went to the Square to see the students. They were calling for volunteers from each school. I was with some of my friends. I said, if none of you want to go, I’ll go and report back.” That decision landed her on the “21 Most Wanted Beijing Student Leaders list” and six months in hiding before she could make her way to the U.S. As a doctoral student at UCLA, Wang researched and analyzed contemporary Chinese intellectualism. Today she is a California-based freelance writer

Antonymous posted:

I think if you did a real analysis China is a bourgeois dictatorship, more of a deformed capitalist state than a deformed worker's state.

European 'social democracy' and the nordic models were the go-to way to 'save' capitalism until they became evident failures and on top of that the US waged an ideological global war against unions, protectionism and state power through the world bank, imf loans, and shock doctrine et al imposed on any country too weak to resist US meddling.

China is an alternative to nordic models dressed in a red banner. and individual capitalists are scared. But the system of capital isn't scared.

The soviets had a much more serious attempt at a post capitalist organization of resources and human relations to work

edit:
A lot of stuff China does, like keeping its billionaires' money locked inside the country, expropriating it when they gently caress up, is cool and good but also what like roman leadership did. It's just good statecraft when making money isn't the sole source of social power (like it is in the USA), doesn't matter about marxist ideology. The rich are the state's biggest threat in good times and often in bad times as well. I still think China is focused on growth driven by expropriating surplus from workers mass producing goods aka capitalism.

Antonymous posted:

I think if you did a real analysis China is a bourgeois dictatorship, more of a deformed capitalist state than a deformed worker's state.

runaway pancake posted:

good news, people have done real analysis, you should try reading it sometime instead of making poo poo up

Antonymous posted:

I think if you did a real analysis China is a bourgeois dictatorship, more of a deformed capitalist state than a deformed worker's state.

European 'social democracy' and the nordic models were the go-to way to 'save' capitalism until they became evident failures and on top of that the US waged an ideological global war against unions, protectionism and state power through the world bank, imf loans, and shock doctrine et al imposed on any country too weak to resist US meddling.

China is an alternative to nordic models dressed in a red banner. and individual capitalists are scared. But the system of capital isn't scared.

The soviets had a much more serious attempt at a post capitalist organization of resources and human relations to work

edit:
A lot of stuff China does, like keeping its billionaires' money locked inside the country, expropriating it when they gently caress up, is cool and good but also what like roman leadership did. It's just good statecraft when making money isn't the sole source of social power (like it is in the USA), doesn't matter about marxist ideology. The rich are the state's biggest threat in good times and often in bad times as well. I still think China is focused on growth driven by expropriating surplus from workers mass producing goods aka capitalism.

hot witch divorcee posted:

ask lenin about it, as well as there needed to be incentive to work, grow, and make truly world-class poo poo in the first place hence allowing billionaires.

Antonymous posted:

US elite dont' care if you're ideologically western and christian there's just two or three levels,

level 1 - you're another former english colony (white majority), or england, and since America is your metropole you get to tag along with us internationally almost as if you have no government of your own

stephenthinkpad posted:

I wouldn't call the soviet economy world class. They had a "working" planned economy that's about it.

indigi posted:

I agree with your overall point but wasn’t the USSR putting out world class poo poo without producing billionaires? like, they won the space race, their city planning seemed to be top notch, military hardware forget about it. in terms of providing for its population it was unmatched until China. their economy was world class - never competing with the US 1:1 of course but they were in the top ten.

I do think allowing billionaires was a useful and understandable tactic but I also don’t think it was absolutely necessary given the counterexample that shared a border

hot witch divorcee posted:

its been like 20+ years since the 90s, turns out deng wasn't loving joking and xi is DEFINITELY not joking, the millions of CPC members who have worked tirelessly for decades weren't joking, and the point of opening up and allowing and encouraging markets was actually, like deng said from the beginning, to develop productive forces to allow for material conditions necessary for a moderately prosperous society. the PMCs still knew how to run the factories, and were thus necessary, ask lenin about it, as well as there needed to be incentive to work, grow, and make truly world-class poo poo in the first place hence allowing billionaires. i would also personally argue that billionaires are a necessary misdirection under american hedgemony to make hostile liberal capitalist foreign powers believe you are going down a path to liberalization that you simply aren't; i don't like them either but they seem to have worked well in that regard. the fact that most if not all of them are in the CPC, there's more of them per capita, and they have a much lower multiplier of median/average net worth than in the us/west has demonstrated this and has been what brought me to be at peace with the idea.

the first major initiative xi put the CPC on as president was anti-corruption. you know that poo poo worked hilariously well because the foreign policy blob has been big mad about it since it started, as what it was doing in practice was removing thoroughly corrupt officials, punishing ones that did more minor oopsies, and fixing bureaucratic entanglements that kept people from seeking redress. this punted all the cia assets overnight. the methods were largely just creating multiple levels of oversight and taking accusations of corruption seriously and investigating suspicious activity and following up on tips and complaints.

the reason this was done first is, in order to make good on the promise that the development of productive forces would lead to a better, or "moderately prosperous" life for the entire country, and in order to be able to complete the next order of business, poverty alleviation, the thing that xi cares about the most and worked his entire career to be in a position to lead the cpc in allocating the resources and literal millions of party members that would need to be deputized to carry out the program. it simply couldn't be done if it was corrupt bureaucrats all the way down that kept pocketing money and resources meant to pull people out of poverty, either via direct welfare or infrastructure. extensive tracking and databases and oversight needed to be put in place to ensure every last person was out of absolute poverty, which was absolutely necessary because many of the problems that had to be overcome in the last mile was finding out who had their hands in the cookie jar that was keeping the people still in absolute poverty from their entitlements.

im going on but the point is here--does any of this sound like poo poo that a bourgeois dictatorship would do? head to bottom, the CPC, especially since the party has organized around and uplifted Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping Thought, simply does not take orders from billionaires. they actively root out corruption and kickback schemes. the second a river or lake somewhere gets hosed up they send out lawyers on ziplines and solve the problem and prosecute whomever is doing it instead of making it illegal for companies to NOT gently caress everything up until it becomes a superfund site at which point some token settlement is doled out like OTHER CERTAIN western countries.

china is not a country, and the cpc is not a ruling body, that puts money and capital before its citizens. it's not perfect, it has to make a lot of compromises to live in the historical materialist context it does under a us hegemony, and there are times where an eagerness for prosperity gets in the way of sound decision making a little too long. however if you actually look at their actions and how they have been developing, they aren't loving joking with the socialism by 2050; it's practically a new country every decade as they work to resolve the biggest contradictions they are able to at any given time.

in conclusion, i do not understand why so many western leftists insist on seeing china as this static place that seeks to be wealthy in capital for its own sake. while this is the MO of western powers, there is nothing in china's actions or history under CPC rule that indicate they are putting bourgeois concerns above proletariat.

Antonymous posted:

I think if you did a real analysis China is a bourgeois dictatorship, more of a deformed capitalist state than a deformed worker's state.

hot witch divorcee posted:

eh, there are two major things that i personally think tie into this and also why china is still chugging today while the ussr collapsed. first, i wouldn't say the ussr didn't have problems with this. my reading group just got to the chapter in blackshirts and reds that went over this in detail; there often wasn't really an incentive to work hard as you could just get another job elsewhere and there were no rewards contingent on performance, and the central planners had all kinds of perverse incentives to only do the bare minimum output with the lowest quality possible, with a similar version happening in farming because the quality of what you produced didn't matter, only the quantity. before the ussr was flailing around with this, deng and the cpc had already figured out that if they let farmers keep any surplus over what they were required to produce to sell or do what they will, they had much more productive farms with much higher quality output.

second, billionaires are a really drat good misdirection and i'm not convinced, nor do i think the cpc is convinced, they would have been able to pull off making the hegemony rely on them to do manufacturing for pretty much the whole world without making the west believe that they were on the path to liberalization. i would also argue that that's why there's a good number of western leftists who didn't (like parenti) and still haven't (like the guy that mouthed off itt) really caught on to the keyfabe and the rather open secret, i suppose assuming that rhetoric and policy outlines that are even officially translated into english are window dressing like they are in bourgeois liberal democracy and not, you know, 100% serious.

CaptainACAB posted:

It's because the CIA and other fieveyes thugs have infiltrated the western left and have been subverting it for decades now.