You also don’t get this problem with China lol. China has always been suspicious about the West due to their semi-colonial history and everything is transactional with the West, nothing more, nothing less.

This is true to a fault. Almost all their economists are western trained or trained on western capitalist theories. Although “marxism degrees” have been rising in Chinese universities lately, I don’t think it’s Marxian economics. Xi is said to be a devout marxist leninist, but he hasn’t taken too many steps to actually promote the core of the movement - the economic systems that are supposed to replace capitalism.

Socialism with chinese characteristics describes how to accumulate productive forces in a capitalist world (within a county controlled by socialists), and you know what? It may very well be their plan to focus on one thing at a time, and it will evolve to be more communistic once they get closer to their goal and study the new conditions. It’s just difficult to have that much faith into the future when so many of the advisors are aligned with western thinking even if they don’t trust the westerners. Would these economists be nationalistic / communist enough to shift gears towards socialism when the time is right, or will they be too entrenched in capitalist thought and resist?