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.”

  • LibsEatPoop2 [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Okay, that's useful to know re:Israel. So is the information regarding Jiang. Idk if I'd call Erik Prince just "any foreign capitalist", though. Blackwater is a unique kind of evil and I don't see how associating with them has any benefits.

    And on international communism - imo it's weaker today than it has been at nearly any point in the 20th century. The reasons are numerous and there are multiple parties to blame, capitalists obviously but also the communists.

    • skeletorsass [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      The dealings are not with Blackwater, but with a supposedly civilian security company he set up in Hong Kong. I do not trust him, but this was probably not a decision made centrally, but by a state foreign investment bureaucrat who was most likely filling a less clear demand from above to invest in foreign security-related companies for the BRI. The logic seems to be that enterprises using BRI would not want to contract security directly from the Chinese government and that the government would not want to administer them. I think it is a bad idea, and I expect he is still doing military things and is no better than before, and I hope that the company is kept on a tight leash or divested from. I would not use these dealings the way the piece has however.

      I think that the Sino-Soviet split is the largest disaster of the 20th century. It did not happen for no reason, but blame falls to both parties, and it is part responsible for the position of accommodation we are all under. I think that the weakest moments were in the 1990s however. The reform and opening up here was very active, and all socialist countries depending on the USSR were either collapsed, in NEP-like reforms and placating the west, or experiencing famine. All communist movements are made up of flawed humans and I hope that we can learn from the past.

      Thank you for the discussion! It is time for me to go to bed now (-_-) zzZ