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And we promise ourselves the good China will triumph in the end. Any deals we have to make – any interaction with have to engage in – with their China is temporary. We love the people – those precious little laobaixing – and hate the government. And the frustration we feel at how it didn’t go our way seeps out in our obsession with its tragedies, our contempt for its every idea and policy, our shameful little joy at its every misstep. It fills our books and newspapers and overflows, getting in our eyes and ears, but we like it that way. This two China policy is the only way we have of understanding things. And we might despair sometimes, faintly aware that our superficial Anglosphere understanding of history has led us here, to this cul-de-sac, but then another Weibo hashtag that signifies the anger of the people will pop up and we’ll get excited all over again. Such is what’s left of professional China-watching in 2022. If we want to know the real China – not the one we prefer, or the one we want, but the one that exists – we need to accept, however begrudgingly, that it’s here to stay. And what might change it won’t, in fact, come from the same place as us. If we do that then we can face a much more interesting world of potential futures for China – and understand much better what’s happening to it today.

Again, my criticism of this is that it doesn’t do enough, that Xi is going to have to hurt the economy and its capitalists a lot more if he wants to even scratch the surface of these enormous problems, and China is so entrenched in capitalism and the Party so made up of number-chasers – Xi himself being one of them – that I don’t know if his government can or wants to. But I’m an internet communist, and my criticism is not the most common mooted in English. That would be the aforementioned ‘Cultural Revolution 2’ sort of language – -that this is a reversion to Maoism, the rubbishing of all of the sensible work Deng and his successors did. Man, I wish it was. What it is – and why we’re so hyperbolic about it – is the moving of focus from one China to another. Our China, my China, the China of all of the middle-class friends us foreigners make, was once supposed to be the future. Jiang Zemin’s ‘Three Represents’ allowed ‘patriotic entrepreneurs’ into the Party and experiments with open elections were happening at certain local levels of government, and the internet was making officials accountable and everyone was professing to us ‘foreign friends’ off the record that they didn’t believe in any of that red nonsense.

There was a belief that at all levels things would be moving more in that direction, that China was a ‘pragmatic’ authoritarian country, which to us meant it would move on from authoritarianism as soon as it needed to. Well it’s moved on, or is trying to – just not in the direction we assumed. Because to us the migrant workers and the farmers and the people so far away from our nice comfortable coastal cities, living in towns without electricity or roads or running water, were existent, sure, as a source of tragedy and pathos in op-eds about the real cost of breakneck development, as evidence yet again of the cruelty of communist dictatorship, eternal victims of Party rule – but they did not exist politically.

By politically I don’t mean that these losers of reform and opening up are somehow the masters of modern China, that they run things and this really is a true dictatorship of the proletariat. No – in the end the Party is the boss and no one else. But I mean that they, these people who make up the majority of the population, whose labour powers the vast gleaming first-tier cities where the middle class lives, are currently in the process of seeming to matter again rather than the ‘patriotic entrepreneurs’ and their offspring. It goes without saying that they were not who we thought might end up the target audience of socialism with Chinese characteristics. How could they? While we admired their hard work and found all the difficulties of being poor very touching, to us – children, from the UK to the US to everywhere else, of bourgeois revolution – the idea that these faceless tragic masses could exert any influence whether through actions or ideas on the ‘sensible’ ruling elite was unthinkable. Change came from those like us, not those unlike us.

The Party with its sham-socialism was supposed to be more scared of the educated foreign-trained middle classes than anything, and was supposed to pivot to appeasing them, seeing – surely, those pragmatists in Beijing would see it! – that marketisation, separation of Party and state, and ever-more freedom of speech could secure its legacy as another neat little developmental dictatorship that gave way to a happy bourgeois democracy. But this has not happened. The workers are not allowed to organise, to exist as a political force – there is only the Party – but the overlords hear them, and I’d wager are warier of them, of a potential Mao-fuelled leftist populism that outflanks the timid suits, the businessmen-cadres, in promising real justice for the left-behinds of reform, than of those who want to do “that democracy stuff” as Deng called it. So now this is where things are.

The eclipse of our China is baffling to us. We remain locked into a way of thinking that sort of worked to understand China ten years ago, of the vibrant, capitalist first-tier cities pulling along the corrupt, hopeless rest of it in their wake, all to be resolved at a later date when those first-tier cities revolt and introduce democracy, and we remain convinced that Xi has cheated us by attempting to shake this world up. All our hopes are for the moderates within the system to overthrow him, wherever they are, or for the middle class to finally, finally have enough and spark a kind of fuzzy rebellion. We do not factor in the Chinese poor, except to condescendingly refer to them as the (always using the Mandarin word) laobaixing, sort of noble savages whose salt of the earth charm and wit make for cute Kuaishou clips and whose continual suffering at Party hands is also our evidence for its evil.

If the educated people could organise things, start to oppose the Party from within or without, then the masses would surely join in. But as is these proles are brainwashed, only expressing opinions given to them by the propaganda chiefs; the real China, the middle class one we glimpsed before Xi, is the only one that knows the truth, the only one we really trust with the power to shape the country’s political future. The ordinary people, after all, might choose something else. We remember having to help Yeltsin rig the 1994 Russian elections to ensure those pesky people didn’t vote the Communist Party back into power again. What a hassle! So here we are waiting for the good guys instead.

It is this that makes Shanghai, currently still under inept and surreal lockdown, such a lightning rod, as Hong Kong was in 2019. Because we see ourselves there; we see the ultimate middle class city, emblem of our China, being starkly reminded that in the end it’s just as subject to the Party’s logic of numbers as everywhere else. The Shanghai lockdown is not really a paradigm shift – it’s just saying out loud what we should have always known, that there was no way it was going to turn out how we wanted it to. And so we fixate on the middle classes, the locked down foreigners and white collars, the bureaucratic absurdity and the mismanagement, and the delivery drivers and migrant workers who are actually much worse off are acknowledged only in brief glimpses, in weepy stories of individual suffering that surface for a moment before being subsumed over our outrage that this is happening in Shanghai, not in some poor other city. The misery of the laobaixing, after all, won’t change anything. Or at least not in the way we wanted.

The same can be said for our dependence on Weibo, on the ‘netizens’, to gauge public opinion and the way the political winds are blowing. Pre-Xi Weibo was a kind of civil society of sorts, a place for the online class to talk, and today every time a subversive hashtag trends or a new game of cat-and-mouse between censors and users takes off we sit up, alert. Is this it? Has the revolution begun? That this is like reading American politics through Twitter never seems to occur to us. Shanghai has seen many moments of Weibo insurgency, as did Wuhan before it – and yet after each, after the censors have laboriously scrubbed it all away, nothing ever happens. We mistake the censors’ work as evidence of the supreme danger of what they’re censoring, and eagerly await the next big shock, the next internet earthquake. This ghost of our China hovers there and we are always happy to see it, because it helps us forget that the other China, the much larger China, has dwarfed it utterly and was always going to. The political circumstances of China, its system, its history and its people in all their varied forms of struggle for and against modernity, ensured this. It was never as clear-cut as we thought.

So we wait. For what? In 1949 at the end of the civil war we lost China, the good China, to these godless communists. Now another civil war is playing out and again our China is losing, the good-hearted, well-intentioned, by-no-means wrong-headed ‘civil society’ of the 2000s having been disarmed before the battle began and knocked over quite easily. After 1949 we waited for our China until it was clearly no more. Now we wait for our China again. We wait for failure; for Xi to fumble, for the economy to collapse, for the Party to rot and all of its cadres to discover democracy or be pushed aside like it’s the Eastern Bloc in 1989, by mobs of people storming government offices led, of course, by educated students and intellectuals. We wait for the whole thing to fall inward as we always knew it would if it didn’t do as we told it to.

What else then is behind the shift? A growing nationalism and a growing pride in the country’s achievements as it develops, sure- but this is mingled with an awareness of just how much went wrong in those last few decades; and since those last few decades were the decades of catching up with the west, aping the west, and learning from the west, this does not only create discontent with the prevailing socio-economic order, with its massive alienation, work burnout and cruel stratification, but against the place associated most with how these things, hitherto unknown in the pre-market era, came to China’s shores – and of course, that would be the west.

It was assumed by us that these things would all be blamed on the party-state and that to deal with them the party-state would have to begin abolishing itself, just as we didn’t really understand what was happening when Russian capitalism was birthed in the traumatic nineties and that the Russian people might blame us for their plight and not only the oligarchs. A world of hope glimpsed in the aspirational middle class of China, so similar to our own, was mirrored by a world of despair that bubbled along beneath it that it seemed the Party was incapable of recognizing or responding to. And now it is trying to do so. But not how we wanted. Angry nationalism and anger at socioeconomic injustice mingle and the party-state attempts to respond. Normally clumsy and blundering it is surprisingly nimble when it has to be, and it does its best to stoke these feelings where it needs to, and suppress them when it doesn’t, and aims to in the end come out balanced precariously still on top of the world despite everything.

Is it currently succeeding? Yes and no. The Xi-era Party faces a crucial contradiction of not really being able to push back against the most important parts of western influence – capitalism, markets, inequality – as much as the loudest of those who wholeheartedly support it want it to. It wants the stock markets, the nice buildings, the impressive-looking numbers, the tasty foreign investment and (in certain grimy quarters) the money it got by being intertwined with big business. “The market must play the decisive role in resource allocation”, Xi says. “Reform and opening up will never end.” is another of his lines, and it’s one that I sometimes read as a bit of a concession to his liberal number two Li Keqiang and other pro-market forces within the Party but also as an indication of the limit of his ambition.

Despite handwringing from western observers today’s Chinese government is not returning to the command economy; rather it wants to follow the market for the most part and retain the power (long forsaken by western governments) to discipline it when it’s bad, to be socialist in the streets and capitalist in the sheets. This is the same thing it has wanted ever since Deng’s successors pushed down hard on the reform button and launched themselves into the stratosphere, holding on for dear life: to reassert control. But let’s be fair to it; for all the areas it falls short in the government seems to be attempting to strive for this rebalancing of society properly rather than just honouring it in the breach. Rural revitalisation and environmental restoration, neither ideas to set the stock market on fire, are the key tentpoles of the new era, not madcap growth – the megacities are less the focus than the left-behinds who built the megacities, whose impoverished, polluted and corrupt hometowns create the push to leave that has created the floating migrant class and hollowed out much of the countryside.

The household registration system that exacerbates this is easing up, and the ruinous real estate bubble is being gingerly prodded and local fiefdoms of corrupt officials are being purged and rectified. Infrastructure is built up where before no budding cadre would bother to do so and public housing is made available for those who can’t afford it. Grassroots politics and the spirit of volunteerism, long neglected, are in the process of attempts at revival. Poverty, the government proclaimed last year, has been eliminated, and although this is a nebulous thing to declare eliminated there can be no doubt that, whatever we say about its addiction to capitalism, the party-state is currently acting to try to cut down a little bit on its annual intake. Because Xi Jinping doesn’t like it, because of this or that – and also because the organisation as a whole is part of a society that is increasingly seeing the damage the capitalist decades have done, even if the Wall Street Journal isn’t.

And this meets with the nationalism of both middle and working classes. The 1996 essay collection “China Can Say No” was the bestseller of the nineties that argued for a new Chinese nationalism, and neocon non-communist Chinese patriotism has been a thing since after 1989, but for a while these were bourgeois pursuits only. Nowadays though this new nationalism, whether the youthful “little pink” online warriors who report their politically-incorrect teachers and troll people on Weibo, or the vibe of that old guy who stopped me in the park to point to his Mao Zedong badge and tell me “China Number One!” or the kids who play communists vs Japanese soldiers with their friends, or the guy I knew who had “Add Oil, Huawei!” stuck to his car during that whole thing, to two girls I saw who started crying during Battle At Lake Changjin – it has spread all the way down to the street. It might sometimes be absurd, it might sometimes be cloying, it might in some cases (as nationalism does) override common sense – but it is not only a product of Party indoctrination, and rests on that long vein of Chinese patriotism that powered the 1949 revolution in the first place, that has its roots all the way back in the ‘century of humiliation’ prior.

That this energy was to some extent exhausted during the early decades of reform by the tendency towards overcorrection – from the grandiose, arrogant autarky and isolation of the Cultural Revolution and its trauma to China as weakling, needing foreign help to ‘civilize’ itself – didn’t mean it went away. Its return has been bolstered by, to speak frankly, the alienation and loss of social cohesion that reform itself created. People are lonely – the motherland is always there, the perfect motherland of the heart, where none of the things that make you miserable – office jobs, busy subway stations, difficult social relationships between alienated capitalist subjects, having to talk to girls – exist. And as well as that is the very real sense of foreign threat born from trade wars, international condemnation over Hong Kong, Xinjiang and so on, and the US moving to ‘contain’ China when from a layman’s perspective China hasn’t really done anything wrong, or at least anything the US didn’t already do first. Does the Party use these things, exploit them, fan them when convenient? Duh. Does that mean they exist just as the result of machinations in Beijing, because of what Xi wants? Not at all.

Simply put, it was expected by us that the contradictions of the reform era would lead to an identification of its failings solely with the party-state, and of the successes with the market and the freedom of people – of its weaknesses with backwards nationalism, and its strengths with the friendship with the US and other countries. In fact it hasn’t been this simple. While we can of course say that Chinese attitudes towards their government and leaders aren’t black and white, and that there are many – probably the majority – who are indifferent or resigned about their government more than anything (capitalism does that), I’d say that today people are more politicised than before, and that this is partially because the government’s attention is now on not the winners of the democracy-seeking middle classes in China but those outside of that winners’ bracket, the working class both migrant workers and otherwise, the remains of the peasantry, and those of the middle class who have fallen beneath involution’s grindstone. It is these people, the discontented, who are becoming the Party’s primary concern, and whether or not it has the ability to truly help them or not it seems set on trying. The wealthy and outward-facing classes of China can sit tight for a few years or decades, goes the message. “Let some people get rich first” was Deng’s big phrase, and now some people have gotten rich first. Now ostensibly it’s time for the rest. It’s time for common prosperity. “China is turning inward”, some pundits say; well, might be the rebuttal, given what kind of crazy shit has gone on ‘inward’ maybe that’s probably something it needs to do.

Can I do that? I can cross-post it but I don't think that moves this post to that comm. But I'll keep that in mind for the future

Hmm, I'm not sure how reasonable he is. I'm biased because I sort of feel indebted to him for writing this essay , which finally convinced me to become a communist. If you already told him all your counter-arguments I don't really think it's useful to try to spend more time trying to persuade him, it's not like he's a very influential commentator or anything. Also, I think it would be useful if you reposted your email to him here if you feel like Gowans didn't summarize it correctly.

No, I'm not Gowans. Though I did have a hunch that you were the one he was responding to considering you posted his email in the previous post

So you agree with this quote and still think China is socialist? How do you reconcile that?

The post that spawned a thousand copypastas

No, it's because Haz's community uses apes and suns as a symbol of their community

Ever since GZD got quarantined, it seems ECS has to scrape the bottom of the barrel, huh?

I thought the point was you can't control the lathe, and that the wishes you make always have unintended consequences?

however I feel like this dude is proposing the broken “works in theory” version of socialism that must be frictionless, perfectly round, and equally balanced for it to be successful.

Not really, he says that the USSR and Mao's China were both socialist

While there are leftists that are entirely and irresponsibly uncritical of Russia’s narratives,

That's the type of leftist that this essay is criticizing

Had no idea John Mearsheimer and Vladimir Pozner were “Anachronist radical socialists”,

?? Mearsheimer and Pozner never supported socialism in the first place.

Also I highly doubt Gowans cares about appealing to liberals, considering his work is extremely critical of liberal positions.

The point of the essay is to critique the socialists that act as if we're still living in the cold war and that Russia and China are still socialist. Things have changed and analysis and strategy have to change as well

This is literally the opposite of the author's point lmao

To help midwife the birth of the emerging multipolar world, the anachronistic radical socialist turns skepticism of US pretexts for imperialist assaults into a need to believe the very same pretexts Moscow recycles for its own imperialist assault on Ukraine. NATO’s humanitarian interventions in the former Yugoslavia and Libya to prevent claimed genocides are scoffed at, for good reason.

He said it was correct for the anachronistic radial socialist to doubt that NATO had humanitarian interventions in Yugoslavia and Libya

The author explains why in the last paragraph

Radical socialists used to say that they practiced a scientific socialism. It was scientific because it tried to adapt to reality, not obfuscate it or fit it to a Procrustean bed. But what many radical socialists practice today cannot be called scientific, or indeed, even coherent socialism. Their practice instead is based on a detachment from reality and a construction of a pleasing fantasy of a world that once was but is no longer; in other words, on mental illness.

dont force people to do emotional labor for you? then who does? no one.

the way I see it, this statement implies that streamers have an obligation, or at least an expectation to do emotional labor

The article doesn't use the term 'trauma dumping' in a derogatory way, nor does it encourage villainizing people who are suffering.

the fact that decent mental health resources are inaccessible to a section of the population is awful and is a systemic problem. The streamer is just an individual. I'm just repeating the parent comment now because they said it so well, but taking responsibility for people's emotional wellbeing should not be a precondition for streaming

then who does?

maybe loved ones, preferably therapists

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