Western Media: XI IS LITERALLY STALIN!11!!1!
Xi: oh stop, you’re making me blush
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guiding-ideology/
I'm not a big fan of stalin but if he wasn't a socialist no one is. Do it Xi, do it
I'm almost certain that this is just a sinophobic fluff piece that keeps liberals on the edge by using a lot of scary words, written by someone who doesn't know shit about Stalin, communism or China other than they're bad.
It's such a terrible article. It pisses me off that journalists like this get paid well to write such pablum. I guess I just have to remind myself that journalists for the most part have no idea wtf they are talking about.
I can boil the entire piece to this: Stalin was a "totalitarian dictator" and that's what Xi wants to be. Oh and Stalin needed to always find enemies so that's Xi is doing too.
I can't decide if this author has less of understanding of Stalin, or of Xi.
For decades, many Americans dealing with and doing business in China have held to the idea that the Chinese Communist Party did not believe in anything other than power. There was no ideology in China other than money, the story went. “Pragmatic” became the buzzword used by reporters, academics and consultants for everything Chinese.
This blithe view of Chinese politics glossed over a struggle inside the party that began with the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 and ended — at least for the time being — with the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. The faction that continued to favor a totalitarian ideology won. Those, such as one of Xi’s predecessors, Zhao Ziyang, who advocated the ultimate convergence of China with Western liberal traditions, lost. Xi Jinping’s upcoming reelection as party boss constitutes a capstone of this struggle.
I don't know, man. Once you scrape off the "China Man Bad" outer layer, this seems fairly spot on. Westerners spent the last thirty years telling themselves China was a US ally and co-conspirator in the interest of colonial capital.
But it's increasingly obvious that Chinese labor value is not being exploited in the way western capitalists desire. Xi isn't building a Japanese-style western client state. He's building a self-sufficient core with its own global ambitions. (Whether those ambitions are good for anyone else is left as an exercise to the propagandist).
