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Lol, why even bother with Socialism then? It's all part of the same struggle. We're living through a massive disabling event and you want them to defer to Capital. That is liberalism.

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As if death is the only thing to save people from wrt covid.

Depression and anxiety are terrible but not on the same scale as becoming permanently disabled.

I don't think you really answered my question, you substituted it with another one. I wasn't asking you rhetorically, I was sincerely asking you what you think is an acceptable number of families destroyed?

It is though. The story is about workers who are rioting because a private company fucked them over and instead of cracking down on the company that clearly exploits its workers they beat the workers down.

A society isn't just its mode of production, but a dialectical relationship between its base and superstructure. A capitalist society needs a capitalist base and a capitalist superstructure. Even if we accept the premise that China has a capitalist base, it absolutely does not have a capitalist superstructure, so China is not a capitalist society.

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There's a material component that's answered in works like Divided World Divided Class, but there's also an ideological component as well. Capitalism having a single birthplace has profound consequence since the ideology used to justify capitalism (liberalism) has a single birthplace as well, in this case Western Europe. This was not true for feudalism, where it arose independently multiple times. But the multiple birthplaces of feudalism meant the feudal ideological justification for feudalism had multiple birthplaces as well. In Western Europe, this was Catholicism, in the Abbasid Caliphate, it was a particular school of Islam, and in Song dynasty China, it was neo-Confucianism. But even though all three ideologies uphold feudalism, they aren't interchangeable. Feudal French peasants won't accept their Catholic feudal lords suddenly becoming neo-Confucian bureaucratic-scholars even if neo-Confucianism is also a feudal ideology designed to reproduce feudalism because it's not just to reproduce feudalism but feudalism with Chinese characteristics.

There's no way to universalize these particular feudal ideologies. A de-Sinicized neo-Confucianism just wouldn't be Confucian (Confucian teachings rely on rituals particular to a Chinese cultural context), a de-Arabized Islam wouldn't be Muslim (if you didn't say the shahada in Arabic nor pray in Arabic, can you really call yourself a Muslim?), a de-Europeanized Catholicism wouldn't be Catholic (that would mean not recognizing papal primacy of the Roman pope). The only way towards universalization is through conquest and subjugation of the rest of the world, essentially killing your competitors and being "universal" because it's the only one in town.

Liberalism, as an capitalist ideology birthed from a Western European context, can also not be universalized. But an additional detail is that by the time liberalism was formally developed as an ideology during the Enlightenment, Western Europe had already begun colonizing the world. So, liberalism isn't just designed to reproduce capitalism with Western European characteristics but capitalism with Western European colonizing and imperializing characteristics.

And since capitalism was born in the West, capitalism had more time to crush, purge, and subsume every single illiberal (ie feudal) ideology within Western Europe so that the entire Western European populace had centuries of being marinated in liberal ideology compared with the rest of the world. At this point in time, there isn't anything illiberal left outside of fascism if you don't count fascism as an extension of liberalism. Even things like neo-paganism wind up being an incredibly individualistic (ie liberal) understanding and practice of religion. To be Western is to be liberal and to be liberal is to be Western.

Meanwhile, liberalism was imposed on the rest of the world by European colonizers, so a similar process of destroying native feudal ideologies occurred. The difference is because liberalism isn't designed to serve the interests of the colonized, the populace tacitly reject this in the same exact way feudal French peasants would reject neo-Confucianism. Part of this rejection is trying to hold on to those feudal ideologies and being more eager to find alternatives. This is why even today, the biggest proponents of liberalism in the non-Western world, be it China, India, Nigeria, Mexico, or Russia, are all Westernophiles. There's no such thing as liberalism with Indian characteristics. There's only Indian liberals believing in capitalist ideology with Western characteristics who worship the West too much. To be Western is to be liberal and to be liberal is to be Western.

Principled socialist and anti-imperialist orgs can use this inherent aversion of Westernization/liberalization, expressed in its most vulgar and chauvinistic form as "fuck whitey," towards anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist ends with the ultimate goal of building a socialist society where the people there are masters of their own collective destinies. Being anti-Western is by no means sufficient (there are plenty of anti-Western and anti-white dead ends like Black Israelites), so a principled org must be there to steer the people away from those dead ends.

A citizen of the Global South undergoing de-Westernization would, as pointed out by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, first attempt to replace liberalism with an ossified version of their native feudal ideology. With political development through class and anti-colonial struggle, the reactionary parts of that feudal ideology get dropped and the emancipatory parts of that feudal ideology get emphasized. Eventually, this progressive form gives birth to a new ideology that's anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist.

To finally loop back to your comment, the process of de-Westernization is far more challenging for Western Europeans. What would a de-Westernized French person or German even look like? Is it even possible? Combating liberalism is fine, but what do you replace it with? "Don't be a cringey liberal lmao" is not enough if there isn't anything to fill the ideological void. The Global South can temporary fill the void with their previous native feudal ideology with the understanding that it will eventually be superseded by a socialist ideology. What does the Global North have?

As capitalists, their basic argument is the same tired argument that capitalism is good, but needs a strong state to regulate its excesses. With regards to China, they use China's dynastic past and how the various dynasties had complete control over their economies (not actually true as some dynasties like Ming had a fairly laissez faire policy) to demonstrate that China as a polity always had a hands-on approach towards the economy, and the reason why capitalists control Western governments but not China is because Western polities lack the political tradition of having a strong centralized state. They also shoehorn Confucianism here by stating that part of the strong centralized state is Confucianism as a political philosophy (not really true either but it's just their way of trying to understand why all the "good" capitalist countries like Japan and the four Asian tigers have strong Confucian influences). Japan and the four Asian tigers being economic powerhouses and investing in China's economic development is supposed to be a harbinger for things to come.

Their arguments have flaws. For one, a lot of their arguments boils down to "Chinese capitalist smart Western capitalist dumb." Chinese capitalists are smart enough to enact zero-Covid so their workers do not suffer productivity from long Covid while Western capitalists are too stupid to realize the dangers of long Covid. Asking why Chinese capitalists have fractal brains while Western capitalists have frictionless spherical brains leads to uneasy answers. Many of their answers are essentially chauvinist. In other words, capitalism with Chinese characteristics is superior to capitalism with Western characteristics because Chinese culture and people are superior to Western culture and people. For obvious reasons, I see this reasoning often in Chinese capitalists even if it's implied. Their understanding of China's past is also not the greatest, perhaps purposefully misleading, and is somewhat Orientalist, although recasting many Orientalist tropes as a good thing so reverse Orientalism(?) I guess.

I still give them credit for at least trying to understand China's past and China's neighbors in order to understand present China. I can't say the same for these Western bozos though.