Real western chauvinism hours

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      China’s success story is a capitalist success story, or rather, a success story of authoritarian capitalism.

      Compare China under balkinized colonial rule in the 19th century and China under a unified People's Republic in the 20th century.

      I see substantial differences in everything from local autonomy to economic prioritization to legal standing of native peoples that would suggest a very explicit change in policy.

      Maybe I've got my eyes too focused on the colonialist neoliberal ball, and I'm missing all the same sins playing out domestically. But I would argue the major distinction between Chinese domestic policy and western economic policy is that the Chinese government leadership is focused on satisfying the expectations of Chinese locals in order to maintain political security and autonomy. Westerners are attempting to upset Chinese locals, manufacture discontent and division in the Chinese state, and use the chaos to plunder the Chinese economic interior.

      I might go so far as to compare the Chinese state as a massive multi-industry union and western capitalists as bosses attempting to fracture and exploit that union. Whether you believe the Chinese union leaders are clean or corrupt is incidental to the core class struggle - the solidarity they're trying to cultivate versus the disunity western agencies are attempting to inspire.

      The point is, China’s economy is operating within the global capitalist framework

      China's economy is operating alongside the western capitalist framework. There's an interface. But the systems remain distinct. The policies and goals of western society are not driving China's domestic agenda. Wall Street and the IMF are not writing up China's next five year plan. The CIA/MI5 is not setting China's production or infrastructure development goals. Beijing is not a puppet state.

      They might still be adhering to capitalist growth strategies, but the benefits for western investors are incidental rather than engineered. The real strategy is to build a strong, unified Chinese state that can operate independently of western business.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          What? Capitalism does not belong to the “West”.

          Institutions of economic control - large brokerages and banks, military bases and technology labs, research universities, international embassies, HQs of major media and energy and manufacturing centers - have been controlled by western agencies.

          Capitalism as an ideology might not belong to westerners, but - at the end of the 20th century - high value capital itself was under the dominion of Western institutions.

          China's independence is rooted in its development of parallel competitive institutions. It isn't beholden to western centers of capital. And, as a consequence, westerners cannot extract rents from Chinese laborers either directly or through a captured Chinese bureaucracy.

          What does not being a puppet state has to do with not being able to confront the realities of capitalism?

          It goes to the very basis of Capitalism as an economic institution - the ability for one individual to garnish the labor of another. Chinese residents are not held hostage by western capitalist institutions in the same way Mexicans or Africans or Japanese residents have increasingly become.

          This is seriously getting into crazy conspiracy theory territory where you seem to think that “global capitalism” is run by some cabal of Western “elites” secretly pulling the strings from behind.

          If you're writing off the Petro-Dollar, the US network of military bases and clandestine agencies ( Five Eyes international spy network), western control of major arteries of trade like the Suez and Panama canals, and a century's worth of corporate conglomeration as "a conspiracy", I honestly don't know what to tell you.