A relatively short article with some key assertions. The first paragraph is definitely going to irritate some people here. But the main thrust of the article is presented later, which is -
China’s late Cold War role as the great anti-communist power in the East, and its subsequent role in financing the American empire as it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
The article lays out a lot of history as it relates to the Sino-Soviet relations and shows how as a result -
The CCP picked the side of capital in the Cold War, doomed the international communist movement in the process
Most important is this paragraph w.r.t the Cold War -
The first sign of betrayal was China’s active role in supporting Pakistan during the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh By 1972, Mao’s meeting with Richard Nixon signaled that the full anti-communist pivot was complete. With this pivot, China became a close American ally and the bulwark of anti-communism in East Asia and beyond. By the middle of the decade, the CCP was giving out loans to Pinochet, supporting UNITA in Angola alongside South Africa and the US against Cuba and the Soviet Union and had opened diplomatic relations with reactionary capitalist powers, from the Marcos regime in the Philippines to Japan. Deng Xiaoping sealed this alliance by invading Vietnam in 1979 in defense of the US-backed Khmer Rouge which the Vietnamese government had been attempting to overthrow. The CCP claims to have killed 100,000 Vietnamese communists in that war, which broke the back of the communist movement in East Asia and essentially ended it as a Cold War front , thus allowing the US to fully pivot to its massacres in Latin America and Africa in addition to the defense of Europe against the USSR and domestic communist movements.
And in the post-Soviet world -
Unlike other major American bond purchasers (Japan, South Korea, Germany) who are American military protectorates and can thus even be coerced into increasing the value of their currency, China subsidizes the American war machine ... CCP funds America’s wars in order to maintain the high value of the dollar relative to the yuan, which gives China a massive competitive edge in manufacturing and is a critical source of China’s massive economic growth.
In coalition with the East Asian American military protectorates, China filled the massive budget shortfalls that resulted from the combination of the Iraq War, Bush era tax cuts, and the early 2000s recession, propping up the flailing US economy as the war commenced. Chinese bond purchases intensified with US spending in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the CCP became an eager participant in the new War on Terror by allying closely with Israel, adopting American counterinsurgency techniques and technologies from the rapidly burgeoning trade, and eventually hiring American mercenary Erik Prince for themselves for deployment in “Xinjiang.”
Good questions to which I don't have an answer. China definitely did a lot of yikesey shit.
I tend to play devil's advocate for China a lot online in recent months but that's just because most of the attacks on them are just lazy or just plain lies.
What you mentioned here is something I hold against all ML states, the "ends justify the means" attitude tends to lead to quite a bit of excesses that are all nominally explained as necessary but how can they really be so sure of themselves?
Yeah exactly. Everyone I know irl just swallows up Zenz and Epoch Times and BBC. I always defend China from their propaganda, just like I defend any other country from that draws the ire of US/Western imperialism. I've had success defending Bolivia and Venezuela and Vietnam and Cuba. But when it comes to China, people's brain just freeze and they start viewing me as idk a Chinese agent or something. And I see a lot of what you see online too.
That's the shit. I want to believe but...see above.
These extremist actions always backfire. Ethnic cleansing of the Chechens comes to mind. It opened the region and people to more extremist ideas and many fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Yeah so this is something I grapple with a lot as someone who's still learning. My formerly liberal anti-US imperialist & anti-Bush stances are one of those things that has remained fairly unchanged as I've moved toward Marxism - this idea that the US invading the middle east to kill terrorists is at least in part what leads to the terrorism. Though idk, this on its own is a bit shaky and kind of buys into anti-terrorism propaganda when the wars were more about oil. But in any case, I have this idea that invading a region to stop terrorism is both morally bad and also leads to more violence, which in your Chechnyan example holds true in that they eventually fought against the soviets. It's a big part of what makes it difficult for me to call myself ML, and why I can't entirely dismiss anarcho-communist arguments even if I lean toward the former (but like Brace says, don't be a dork, just call yourself a communist) :ypg-brace:
That said, historical context matters, Chechens had sour tensions with the USSR and it was a difficult position all around. It just makes me do a double-take when Chinese media does their "fight against terrorism" rhetoric in e.g Xinjiang because it triggers my anti-Bush 'anti-anti-terrorism' sentiments and I struggle to know when to apply these feelings.
Btw for those of you itching to debunk my concerns about Xinjiang, know that I've heard your points and am still working through a recent pro-China essay-comment I got and my puny brain needs time to process it pls forgive me