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).
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.
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).