The Chinese government has introduced a slew of new measures designed to tighten its grip on lucrative natural resources used in everything from electric cars to wind turbines. In a list released by the country's State Council on Saturday, Beijing declared that rare earth metals are the property of the state and warned "no organization or person may encroach on or destroy rare-earth resources." From Oct. 1, when the rules come into force, the government will operate a rare earth traceability database to ensure it can control the extraction, use and export of the metals. China currently produces around 60 percent of the world's rare earth metals, and is the origin of around 90 percent of refined rare earths on the market. Advertisement
Beijing has already prohibited exports of rare earth refining and magnet manufacturing technologies. In January, it banned the export of gallium and germanium, both highly sought after by the computer-chip industry. Fears that China is looking to exert control over the industry, and could disrupt critical technology, automotive and renewable energy supply chains, have sparked a race to shore up supplies from alternative suppliers. Both the U.S. and the EU have launched efforts to procure rare earths at home and abroad, including in Vietnam, Brazil and Australia. A year ago, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced construction of the first large-scale rare earth refinery outside of Asia, located in Estonia. She said the move would "bolster European resilience and security of supply."
A 2022 analysis from the European Parliament warned that over-reliance on monopolistic suppliers was a major risk for Europe. "The EU imports 93 percent of its magnesium from China, 98 percent of its borate from Turkey, and 85 percent of its niobium from Brazil. Russia produces 40 percent of the world's palladium," it said. "The latter is a reminder of the strategic implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the need for the EU to prepare for an increasingly uncertain world."
The EU has launched a probe into anti-competitive trading allegations against the Chinese electric vehicle market, which benefits from heavy government subsidies and preferential access to essential rare earth metals. Earlier this month, the two sides agreed they would host consultations in order to try and resolve the standoff.
That last paragraph really is so damning. It is admitting the superiority of China’s central planning and how it is being used to actually improve society. ”But at what cost?”
Well, apparently the cost is that shares of China’s largest rare earth mineral mining firm have gone up 5% since the announcement. China proving socialists right every single day and absolutely crushing the capitalist development speedrun challenge. It’s genuinely hilarious that the development plan of China runs basically like what I’ll describe below, and capitalist nations are just completely incapable of stopping it from happening because the power of capital is greater than the power of their states.
“hmmm yes, today I will invest in the Chinese rare earth mineral market. Since China controls 90% of global production and all of the infrastructure is in place, all I have to do is bring my money, tech, and expertise with me and I’ll carve myself some serious profit! Easy money!”
“Ahh yes thank you for the help developing our mining industry/technology Mr. Foreign Capital. We appreciate your business and you had a great run, but unfortunately for you we have nationalized your mineral resources. The extractive capitalism will now stop. Feel free to reinvest elsewhere or compete with us on the global market tho :)”
”China is nationalizing its rare earth minerals, but at what cost? We need to ban China from–“
”Wait omg is that another investment opportunity in China where I can bring in my capital/technology/expertise to make some money? Hell yeah, where do I sign?”
Rinse and repeat
15 years ago I genuinely wouldn’t have believed it but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
All socialists thinkers ever who did any serious analysis came to the conclusion that capitalist development is largely unplanned beyond achieving profit, and operates nearly entirely unhindered by the state. China is just the first place to truly find a way to use this to its advantage. States where capital is the foremost power are utterly incapable of stepping in and stopping capital from doing the only thing it knows to do.
Kinda gets into Marx's idea of Capital as a "Real God." Capital has alien intentions of generating profit, and the market will move in that direction regardless of the wills of individuals because the system requires it.
Exactly. By carefully monitoring/pruning back capital and thus never allowing the power of capital to supercede the power of the state, you are put in a position where you can take advantage of capitalist development while never truly allowing it to gain a centralized chokehold over state power itself. You get to mitigate the most negative pieces of capitalist development while also getting to utilize all that it has already developed both domestically and in terms of the global market where, once integrated, there is no unified capitalist power which can (or would even want to) oppose your participation and continued development.
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Joining the WTO was not because China changed ideology. It was a strategic goal to establish a position in the Western capitalist economic system that could be exploited to their advantage. They needed to do it because China had been outmaneuvered by the West economically and development was threatened. The cost of gaining access to the WTO was neoliberal policies, true enough, but that cost was imposed because of a power imbalance, not because of a sudden shift from Marxist to neoliberal ideology. Xi is overseeing a much more powerful China, which means less need to compromise. Xi does not need to gain entry into the WTO by convincing the West China will change. Xi is limited, however, by the need to not get kicked out of the WTO before sufficient development has occurred.
What will count as "sufficient development?" This isn't me being anti-China, for clarity, I am just wondering what you think a likely timeframe is for China to get kicked out, if ever.
I think “sufficient development” to China means that it can’t get kicked out anymore for being too important. Too high tech, too much resource control, too much production, too wealthy, and most importantly TOO INTEGRATED.
China already has the WTO by the balls by tying the economy of THE global economic hegemon (USA) to Chinese industry. China could likely live on without the US, though certainly not without stress and careful planning. The US, on the other hand, could not simply find a new China. Frankly, it is evident in US foreign policy that the US knows this as well. There is no other critical game to the US outside of China. People will say Russia, or the Middle East, but they really are just peanuts comparatively. Whether it is combatting China, reigning in China, or trying to be technologically superior to China, almost all US foreign policy ties back into China somehow. I’d even argue that US policy towards Russia is simply an extension of US policy towards China at this point.
Pretty sure that's been the case for some time. The goal was to isolate China by pulling Russia away from China by either enticing it towards the West or via regime change, and we're seeing just how well that plan is working out so far with Project Ukraine being a complete disaster for them.
China getting kicked out of the WTO will be an attempt to harm China by the West. The West will kick them out when they decide it's the correct course of action to reduce China's power and influence globally. They have to do it before China has more leverage over them. It's possible that this has already happened and the West will never kick China out until they go full military intervention.
Probably until industrialisation in china is complete. People seem to forget this because the Chinese economy has been stacking so many Ws recently, but Chinese industrialisation is still not complete. Less than 70% of the chinese population is urbanised. Almost a quarter or the population works in agriculture and mining. Chinese wages and working hours are still not on par with the advanced economies.
Iirc, the aim of the CPC has been "common prosperity" by 2021 (already achieved), and to create a "great modern nation" by 2049. I personally think that china's development will become "suffiencient" to move to the next qualitative stage of socialism and fully break from world capitalism before then. The 2049 date is chosen not because that is a scientific estimate, but is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the prc.
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Deng is history's greatest chess player, scheming like an anime character
I swear he changed the game from chess to Weiqi
meanwhile the west still playing checkers
Xi moonlighting as the hit hip hop sensation, 50 yuan.
Politics really are in command! 🤔 😲
This is absolutely great and all but can we not memory hole the past like 2 years of the CPC literally in bed with the current genocidal US admin? China is a country of contradictions, they have many great Ws and this is one of them.
But I don't think its particularly smart of fair to say this stuff when Yellen and Blinken have a permanent vacation home in Beijing almost where they're always welcomed with open arms and "civility" despite all the genocide etc.
I want to see results, preferably without looking like hypocritical fucks too. I believe they can do it.
They can be praised for their Ws but we should not pretend they have been taking huge unnecessary Ls too.
I don't think you understand how the China Ws come about. They come about explicitly because they don't let moral considerations impinge on the strategic needs of defeating capitalism. That means no Iron Curtain, no bloc enforcement, no hard resistance based on ideology. It means letting American businesses come in, abuse their people, pollute their land and air and water. It means letting American politicians come and go and feel superior. The entire strategy is play to Western and capitalist hubris and let them take all the actions that will be their undoing.
If Blinken didn't have a vacation home in Beijing, he'd be that much more willing to bomb/nuke it. If American politicians didn't have business interests in China, they would be more willing to destroy it. The thing you're describing as bad is actually the mechanism by which the good things come about. Your comment feels like someone watching a grandmaster at chess and complaining anytime they lose a piece.
If you think its just about morality than you're being entirely superficial about it.
China is hypocritical because they hope the same fascists they deal with will honor their business deals. It only works until it doesn't but as far as I can see if China is not willing to help the global south by taking the bare minimal critical stances towards their enemies then China will lose their claim as their ally.
Palestinians call for China to step up pressure on Israel as they seek an end to ‘collective punishment’ on Gazans
Not everyone is willing to drink this Chinese koolaid. China has failed on Israel. Its as simple as that, and its not even bringing up their historical deals(e.g BRICS investment in Israel IT).
If it helps you to sleep at night and have this insiduous double standards on the CPC can do no wrong, please do it with the understanding you're not speaking for everyone. China will create enemies if they don't sort out their hypocrisy should be a room temperature take.
You're saying China doesn't have to fight a battle it can't win but that it has to adopt a moral stance that is equivalent to it. It's a liberal moral mindset. China is incredibly strategic and cautious in its foreign policy because it knows just how bad the fascists can make things. China can't do anything about Palestine except as part of a broad coalition and China can't lead that coalition because as much as you think "words don't have power, but you still have to say them", building international voices against USA's military interests is high risk low reward.
China can't fix the world's problems, so why should we expect it to do anything about Palestine? Because it can or because it's the right thing to do? Let go of the moral positioning.
China is instead building literal material capabilities and infrastructure all over the world and this is far far above the bare minimum. The fact that China isn't "speaking out" while literally doing the most any country has ever done for building power in Africa and South America is something that isn't going to make a lot of enemies except of ultras and libs
I refuse this premise from the start. Why are you assuming that
1- The bare minimal political and economic sanctions against Israel leads them to "a battle they can't win". What is this Israel is a shithole with not even an army for themselves. How long would they survive without the nukes and America support?
2- The US doesn't need excuses to fight China, they're already doing that. Whatever China does towards Israel is not going to move the needle on US-China relations at all.
You should be aware this is literaly the exact argument people use to suppress leftist organizations. "Oh if we push for X policy then the fascists will start hunting us down and fighting us in the open" even though they're always doing that and capitalists don't need excuses to fight the left.
Nonsense. I'm not laying it on them to solve the crisis. I'm laying it on them to do the bare minimum from their side.
BTW I'll quote you from the article you clearly didn't read where Vijay Pashrad literaly counters this exact argument. Please I beg you, forget this whole comment chain and just go and read that, please I'd rather have that than pointless arguing. We are literaly talking about bare minimal gestures. Anything, literaly anything beyond just speeches at the UN. China has done nothing and if you think that is a compelling argument by communists towards the oppressed people global south then you're out of touch, sorry.
"Ah yes the literal soon to be global superpower, surpassing the US in every metric, obviously clearly can't lift a finger to defend global south interests." This is not a reasonable position.
Again read the Prashad quotes, he was asking for the bare minimum, not some amphibious assault war against Israel.
Pointless arguments are when commentators and pundits claim to understand the entirety of the geopolitical situation better than the countries who have been prosecuting that situation for centuries. You do realize that a no-fly zone literally means shooting down military aircraft, right? A no-fly zone is a escalatory move against a US proxy. That's not the bare minimum, that's literally violence in a conflict that China cannot win.
You're also speaking for the entirety of the global south when you say you think everyone sees China as both capable of doing anything about the conflict and also that if they don't then all of the other investment they make in the global south can be ignored as just meaningless. Forgive me if I don't think you speak for everyone.
As for China beating the USA on every metric, it's just not true. China is trending towards beating the USA on every metric and will overtake the USA on most metrics eventually. But the USA still has significant material advantages over China, some that China will never surpass. The most important ones to this conversation are:
Among others. No, China is not an impervious super power. It absolutely has a lot to lose right now that would throw it off the course it has been on to cultivate a socialist experiment that will last longer than the Russian one as we all try to figure out the right path towards communism. You seem to think you have it all figured out. You seem to imagine you can pass judgment on China when you have none of their military intelligence, none of their diplomatic relationships, none of their risks, and none of their strategic analysis.
But really, all you need to say was that you think a no-fly zone enforced by fucking Egypt at the behest of China is a bare minimum stance and we could have ended this conversation before it started, because clearly you don't live in the real world. I love Vijay, but he's not talking about undermining the Chinese communist project, he's inhabiting a very important role in leftist critique to push the dialogue in the right direction. You sound like an ultra, he sounds like a theorist and a pundit. There's a big difference.
You refuse to understand Prashad's point. BTW nice slander calling a fellow Marxist a "pundit". Good job punching left just because they disagree.
The bare minimum is literaly any anti-Israeli resolution at the UN.
If we both admit it wouldn't be enforced than what is the cost here? Literaly what is the cost of proposing this? The fear that this is some watershed moment that now justifies US starting WW3 against China? This is delusional and should be dismissed.
You realized China missed key moments like the student protests. Israel is a pariah state. The ICJ ruled against them. The nazi literaly got the same arrest warrant as Putin. You are ignoring these points to excuse Chinese inaction. Do you actualy believe the world would support any aggressive retaliatory move against China given Bibi is a literal war criminal according to the same liberal western institutions?
Stop making excuses by creating hilariously unrealistic results.
Almost every point listed here doesn't matter in relation with a war against China unless you think Guantanamo is relevant in WW3 against China.
The US has more nukes but you damn well know you don't need 1000 nukes to destroy any country let alone the entire human race. Literaly 10 nukes from each side is the end of the world. The only relevant point is both countries have large and capable nuclear arsenals therefore MAD is key.
For someone that started argueing about morality in the end you're the one resorting to a moral argument are you not?
China has a lot to lose? Tell that to the global south being genocided right now. This is not Olympic competition on who is suffering more. Unless it is then it is about morality after all, do you think China importing minerals from Africa is also not a moral issue? Draw a line and stick with it. If the suffering of Chinese matters than so does of every other global south worker.
The only clear point is China refuses to act as an ally when it matters and where it matters. This is all. Keep your own moral judgements to yourself, or don't and embrace you were wrong. You're defending China based on a moral argument in favor of Chinese exceptionalism and I'm arguing against China on the basis they have acted at times as complacent allies of the enemies of the global south.
The most we can agree on is its obviously not their fault. But the bare minimum is
-Some useless UN resolution everyone knows wont pass anyway
-Some BS sanction that wont actualy affect Israel's economy nor military capability
-Some explicit support for Yemen's anti-shipping, instead we get Wang Yi doing a historical major blunder completely misunderstanding the ideological reasoning behind the Houthi's motivation.
(careful don't look at Chinese actions in the SCS against Philippines and others, do as we say not as we do).Instead we get
Yellen and Blinken getting state dinners and high level meetings with the CPC
Xi traveling to SF and Paris, both centers of US genocide and imperialism.
-Literaly not a single actual finger lifted against Israel or explicit support for Yemen.
This is a ridiculous conversation. Who the fuck are you to define what the bare minimum action is and how the fuck does that not rest SOLELY on moral reasoning? Honestly, what the fuck is your logic other than "it's the right thing to do"? You have provided zero fucking material analysis of what the causal chain would be for those "bare minimum" actions to result in anything OTHER THAN moral positioning.
What the fuck do state dinners have to do with genocide other than moral positioning? What the fuck does Blinken's home have to do with genocide other than moral positioning? You think seizing Blinken's home in Beijing has a causal linkage to impacting the genocide? Or are you just expressing MORAL OUTRAGE?
Regarding Vijay, I literally said there's a big difference between what you're doing and what he's doing. Vijay is taking up an important space in the discourse and creating pressure at the international level. You are arguing on the Internet that China's other efforts in anti-imperialism and the development of socialism are to be questioned because they don't meet a standard you have declared isn't morally based but have not actually justified materially. And you think I'm punching left?
Now, this bullshit that China must act as an ally and that any claims to the contrary are espousing Chinese exceptionalism sounds like some real fed propaganda testing bullshit. China is literally fighting against the world's preeminent espionage ring on multiple fronts simultaneously. You and I have no fucking idea how involved they are with resistance movements in the region. What they aren't doing is making statements and working on non-binding resolutions. We all saw how effective USSR rhetoric was. Why would China change its geopolitical strategy at this stage when it's been working so well? Again, they have no causal power to change what's going on in Yemen or in Palestine. These things are many many many years in the making. The conditions that gave rise to these events are outside of China's influence and China getting more involved now is a matter of strategic analysis - analysis which they have no doubt done in spades with dozens of people far more informed than you or I and for much longer than you or I have been even considering it. That's how statecraft works.
You seem to think that if China doesn't meet your foreign policy standards then that means clearly they are not up to your standards but you fail to identify those things as moral standards. For whatever reason, you can't see that you are projecting that morality on to me when my position is very clear realpolitik - people are gonna die and there's nothing China can do, materially, to fix it without risking their entire project. You think there's no risks. Good for you. You have zero skin in the game, you have zero access to Chinese intelligence, you have zero access to their strategic analysis. If there was no risk, China would likely take more action than it is taking now. But it's very clearly a dangerous and complex situation that's related to all of the West's terrorism, espionage, and irregular activity in West Asia which means there's activity happening under the surface in Western cells through the region, which I shouldn't have to remind includes Xinjiang. I mean FFS even Taiwan is wrapped up in the Israel situation. It's way more complex than 'this is bad, the CPC must do something or they will be judged'.
Your only attempt at a materialist position is to say that Global South nations will distrust China because of their inaction, and yet we see Global South countries continuing to work with China, enhance their relationship, and make public positions about it. You're projecting your morality onto Global South countries as though they all have the same naive understanding that you do.
You bother me.
Some dude having a random vacation house that the PRC can effortless expropriate back to the state is the exact same as nationalizing critical natural resources.
Some dude being literaly the guy in charge of the worlds largest genocidal empire's Foreigh Policy.
Uh huh. And China trades with the US. Are you going to start crying about China trading with "the worlds largest genocidal empire?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6HYzs3YHAPI
china manufactures key parts of us military hardware, this seems contradictory, until you realise this makes it impossible for america to ever go to war with china. China has succeeded because it is too important to try fell. China has succeeded because it is not the ussr
Still malding that China didn't shoot down the plane Pelosi was on?
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Did you enjoy Wang Yi telling the Yemeni to eat shit? Or do you prefer when the CPC refuses to sanction Israel after 8 months?
So much winning
That Yemeni dude was part of some forum China had organized with various Arab states. Like I said when that news dropped in the news megathread, he's part of the nominal government of Yemen that holds no real power, which means nothing Wang says to him mean anything. There's a reason why Ansarallah and Resistance media like Al Mayadeen didn't bother covering this, let along condemn China and why the news was covered by Qatari mouthpiece Al-Jazeera.
Even though china did not officially sanction israel, Israeli businesses complained about "shadow sanctions", in which they suddenly started seeing delays in shipments. Didn't go far enough, but again, the Chinese strategy is to do foreign policy as cautiously as possible
Winning is the only true moral.
Lenin even said it "Morality is subordinate to the class struggle."
Winning is the most important thing, would you have had China fight to stop the East Timor genocide, only to be destroyed? Or the Iraq War? We all want these things, China even makes the statements it can to signal these things, but it does not know if it can win. The USSR could fight, and it won some battles, but it died before it could challenge and destroy the bourgeoisie.
If we talk about Gaza, then saying Palestine is winning is straight up copium. They may eventualy win, some decades from now because Israel loses America support, but you go ask the survivors of this genocide if they give a shit about that and would rather not win today if they could, for example, count with a more broad support from the relevant supposedly enemies of America. Its like going back to 1975 and telling Palestinians back then "don't worry, we're not lifting a finger against Israel today but 50 years from now Israel will be destroyed". Now look its 2025 and we're still saying exactly that.
Oh my god why is this always the assumption? You are talking about the 3rd largest nuclear arsenal. The largest military, they can sink half the US navy with a dozen hypersonic missiles, they have thousands and thousands of modern 4th and 5th fighters, drones, bombers, a completely modern military far more efficient and capable than the current world imperialist powers. The largest commercial and military shipbuilding capacity in the world etc etc.
But also smol bean China can't even lift a finger against Israel because otherwise uncle sam comes to the SCS blockades them and 1 billion people die within a week. This is not realistic, this is a convenient excuse.
Nobody is asking for China to do an amphibious assault on Gaza to stop Israel. Why is it that nobody acknowledges this? People are asking for the bare minimum anti-Israeli real world action like economic sanctions. China can do that, and no 1.4 billion people will not die because they stopped sending treats to Israel. This is insane.
China will not be defeated because they stopped sending treats to Israel. This is embarassing to read. If a Democrat said America must support Israel otherwise America's enemies will destroy it within a year you'd laugh at them and call them genocidal maniacs. Yet the reverse logic is used to say China can not only excuse themselves from geopolitics but keep supporting our global enemies and believe that unironically.
In any case, while you can make that argument in favor of US-China relations, no you can't make that argument over why China wont do anything against Israel, not even the bare minimal sanctions. You can rightfuly say but those minimal gestures wont stop Israel either and that would be fine. So what? People in the global south want and need real support, not excuses and rethoric.
This assumption that Dengism is winning because of token gestures and saying the right shit even though they repeatedly make contradictory decisions that cause real world harm is just dogmatic. China goes and says the thing we want to hear and then goes and does the exact opposite. China's got more billionaires now than ever, the US is closer to war for Taiwan now than ever, the global leftist movement is weaker now than 5 or 10 years ago. BRICS embarassed themselves with Argentina etc.
Its not to say China hasn't done good things, I conceded that already. But I will push back against this blind narrative that China is winning overall and they shouldn't be criticized for obvious mistakes that even calls into question their theoretical stance as Communists.
I'll give you one example. People on HB are traumatized by COVID still. How do you think most of the people here reacted when the CPC gave in and ended Zero COVID due to the protests? I imagine the same people that criticized China then would be facing backlash because clearly the CPC can do almost no wrong.
I realy don't understand why people suddenly refuse to hold the Communist party responsible for checks notes acting completely opposite to supposedly communist beliefs and ideology. People confuse support for Chinese Communism for support of Chinese Nationalism.
I don't like the turn to neoliberalism of China one bit either but it seems to be working out now that the imperialists have fallen for it and lost all their means of production through capitalist means to China. If it weren't for Dengism maybe China today would be just like Russia, a sad ruin of something that used to be great, but it's not. It seems to be reaching a turning point and slowly giving capitalists the boot.
I guess something similar would be the bourgeois revolutions that ended feudalism and the French Commune which got crushed because material conditions for socialism were far from ready. Capitalism is shit but it was necessary to get us to the point that proletarian revolutions were possible and led to the not so short lived success of the USSR.
We can't ignore the reasons that USSR was defeated though, it was because of strategic failures and the backtrack by giving in to capitalist measures but also because of being surrounded by hungry wolves in the West.
Dengism seems to postpone the revolution until imperialist's capital is stolen to the point that they are much less of a power to be reckoned with when revolution happens. If strict ML socialism is implemented at a point like this, it will probably be extremely more likely to defend itself and support global socialism until the US itself is also socialist.
This is still progressing and only time will really tell if Deng was a genius revolutionary or a traitor. I'm really hoping it's the first, it would mean that wherever you are, socialism might be coming soon enough to see it in our lifetimes.
Morally it sucks but this is what material dialectisism teaches in part, morals aren't the driving factor of history, only material conditions and relations of production are.
This is a perfectly fine point and its not what I'm arguing about. You can say Dengism does crucial important things while still recognizing the current mistakes and hypocrisy. They're not mutually exclusive.
Sadly people seem to very much want to have blind hope the same hypocritical dengism approach wont lead to even more crucial mistakes in the future. Its fine to hope for that, but not admitting their currently obvious flaws is just wrong imo.