Of course we can only guess, but let’s look at the trend and make some educated guesses.

Back in 2018 when Trump attempted his foray into a trade war with China, the Chinese Marxist/MMT economist Jia Genliang already warned of an impending shift in the US strategy (reissued article in February 2024, in Chinese):

笔者在2018年就指出，美国战略家将利用中国对美贸易顺差这种“核心关切”的错误认识，以不继续增加关税作为诱饵，诱使中国金融无底线开放。美国正在从通过贸易逆差输出美元为主的战略转变为通过贸易逆差和金融直接投资输出美元并重的战略，并有可能在未来转变为以后者为主，这是美国对华经济战略的重大变革，这就必然要求中国对美国实施金融开放。——2018年9月5日

I have pointed out back in 2018, that the American strategists will take the “core concerns” of Chinese trade surplus as an excuse, through the threat of increasing tariffs as baits, to entice China into opening up its financial sector in an unrestrained fashion. America is currently transitioning from its “exporting US dollar through trade deficit” strategy into a new strategy of “exporting US dollar through both trade deficit and financial direct investment with equal measures”, with the possibility of the latter becoming the dominant form of US dollar export in the future. This marks a fundamental shift in the US economic strategy against China, which demands that China implements financial opening up to the US. — September 5th, 2018.

美国谈判代表背后的战略家清楚他们的目的是“明修栈道暗度陈仓”，将关税作为幌子，通过跨国公司彻底控制中国经济，通过中国的对美金融开放，彻底摧毁中国的金融体系。——2019年12月18日

The strategists behind the American delegates clearly understood that their goal is to create a diversion (Chinese proverb: “repairing the plank road by day and secretly crossing the river at night”), using tariffs as “cover”, to allow multinational corporations to control the Chinese economy, to allow China to open up financially to the US, and to completely destroy the Chinese financial institutions. — December 18th, 2019

The whole article is well worth a read (I am told that machine translation works quite well but I never tried it myself), and while Trump wasn’t able to do much back then, the Biden administration had resumed and doubled down on imposing tariffs against China, which, when complemented by the high interest rates since 2022, led the Chinese libs to fall hook, line and sinker for their deception.

Looking back, these words appear prescient. The tariffs are just covers, the real meat is to enter the Chinese capital market. As much as I don’t want this to happen, recent events have me concerned.

Immediately following the interest rate cut in September, China announced its monetary easing policies to entice foreign investments. Chinese stock market even jumped for a short period then. This was then followed by various policy changes to make it easier for foreign direct investments to come into China by removing previous restrictions to ease the concerns of foreign investors.

More concerning is what the CSRC president, Wu Qing, announced on Monday (article from Global Times):

China's top securities regulator said on Monday that the authority is launching a new round of reform and opening-up of the capital market, as more measures will be rolled out to create a better environment for global investors to participate in the Chinese market.

…

China has realized notable achievements in boosting the high-quality opening-up of the capital market in recent years, represented by the establishment of more convenient investment channels, the continuous lowering of thresholds for foreign investors, and the growing scale of listed mainland firms overseas, said Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences.

Wang told the Global Times on Monday that the achievements have elevated the international competitiveness of the country's capital market while injecting vitality into China's economic development.

Chinese authorities have been ramping up efforts to attract foreign investment. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Commerce and five other departments released revised regulations for foreign investment in listed companies, making it much easier for overseas investors to invest in Chinese listed firms.

The trend is clear. China is now committed to its export sector and financial opening up, apparently believing that this will be their path towards saving the dampened domestic consumption amidst property market crisis and local government debt crisis (which can be traced back to the 2009 GFC and I’ve written this elsewhere so I won’t be elaborating for now). In this interpretation, the dollarization of the world economy will be good for China, a strong US economy is good for China. Other countries might get squeezed in the process, and de-dollarization won’t be on the table any time soon, but China will register growth in the short-medium term.

What remains to be seen is the long term consequence - was Jia’s prediction that the US finance capital will exploit the opportunity to infiltrate the Chinese financial market correct? What will China do in response to this? What will happen to the Global South exporter countries who will now become ever more dependent on a dollarized economy? What will happen to these countries when the US runs into a 2009 GFC style recession and consumption slumps? These are the key questions that need to be thought out further.

Are you kidding me? I have repeatedly said that China has far surpassed America industrially, technologically, while the state has succeeded in retaining much control of its national resources, industries and financial institutions. There is no way the American empire can compete with China on those terms. I have said these words many times before.

However, the US-China conflict is not going to take place along these fronts - it will be a currency war - a full fledged financial warfare that the American empire excels at. This is where the US will hit China the hardest. Let us not forget how the USSR - one of the greatest industrialized nation - was wrecked by neoliberal policies that promised to open up the world market to them, because the ruble was calculated on industrial terms, while the dollar was calculated on real estate and financial terms. This made the disparity between the strengths of the currencies so large that Western capitalists came in and stripped every industrial asset down to their bones in the former Soviet states. This is the power of finance capitalism.

China already has all the fundamentals to take on the US empire on financial terms, yet it is still ideologically restrained by the neoliberal ideology indoctrinated to them by Western economics schools, and as such continues to “gift” the goods and servicesof its hard labor to America in exchange of worthless junk papers, which it proceeds to lend/issue bonds denominated in USD to Global South countries. The latest series of policies from China have all but confirmed its commitment to propping up the US dollar and leveraging them to fuel its export oriented economy.

What I am criticizing here is that China has effectively chosen to sacrifice the Global South countries (by opening them up to dollarization) to be harvested by US imperialism to save their own economy. This is the naive liberal interpretation of how US imperialism works, when they should be doing the opposite by strengthening the yuan (transitioning into a domestic consumption economy) to support the growth of the Global South and shield them from US monetary imperialism.

China is going to benefit greatly from a highly dollarized world, but so will the parasitic declining US empire. Both US and China are going to do fine with this arrangement, and that unfortunately places the entire Global South in great jeopardy. Be careful what you wish for.

I really don’t know if I should laugh or cry whenever I read stuff like this. Anyone can really write anything and there will be credulous people who want to believe it to be true. No wonder even multipolar bloggers can become gold and crypto grifters.

First of all, this is all predicated on the fact that China has a huge trade surplus from America, because that is the only way China can obtain a huge amount of dollars. On the other hand, America can simply print those money out of thin air. While Global South countries have to endure an entire day’s of hard work for the plantation owner to earn a bottle of drinking water, America (the plantation owner) controls the tap and can pump out as much as it wants at no cost.

Do you know what that means? It means that the hard work of Chinese labor creating goods and services sold to American consumers is being exchanged for a bunch of junk papers, that they don’t know how to spend. This is why the Belt and Road initiative came about - because China didn’t want to keep buying US treasuries and earning a deflating interest on those bonds, and didn’t know what to do with accumulating a whole bunch of junk papers. So they lent them out to other developing countries to help them build their economies - with the caveat that those infrastructure loans are denominated in US dollars.

You can issue USD-denominated bonds to other countries, you can lend it out as Belt and Road infrastructure loans, whatever, it doesn’t change the fact that the US gets free shit simply by printing a bunch of junk papers that you can’t use (Stephanie Kelton was even more incisive about this point: China isn’t even earning junk papers, it’s earning an accounting unit, numbers that only exist in the spreadsheet somewhere on the Federal Reserve. This is how the parasitic capitalism of the US empire freeload upon the rest of the world).

Second of all, it’s even worse now that China is re-dollarizing the world. Monetary sovereignty is key to the preservation of national sovereignty, as evident by how neoliberal capitalism and the liberal free market order over the past 50 years have destroyed the economies of numerous Global South countries (Argentina came to mind immediately with its extremely high external debt).

This is worse than China just building the infrastructure and supply chain in the Global South, it is setting up those Global South exporter countries to be bought up by Wall Street finance capitalists with so much dollar denominated loans and assets. What do you think is going to happen if the US is to go through another 2009 GFC-style recession? American consumption will plunge, and all these export economies will have difficulties selling their goods and services. Because China refuses to give up and even doubled down on its super net exporter status, its consumer base will remain weak and cannot absorb the demand that is needed to save these Global South economies. There is only one outcome from this: IMF comes in and takes a “big bite” on the Global South assets.

Third, all US dollars (with the exception of physical banknotes, coins and the special case of Eurodollar) exists in the US banking system. Did people forget that the US literally just seized $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserve at a moment’s notice? It doesn’t matter how much US dollars you own, if you don’t control the tap, there is very little you can do about it.

The monetary policy (interest rate) is a valve - all the Federal Reserve has to do is to tune the valve to control the global flow of US dollar. For example, by simply hiking the interest rate to 5%, the Biden administration easily funneled all the international capital back to the US, causing a liquidity crisis in the Global South and brought dozens and dozens of countries to the brink of financial default, famine and energy shortage. That’s because the US controls the dollar tap. China controls the yuan tap, not the dollar tap.

So all these flooding the US with excess dollars to drive up inflation is complete nonsense and simply perpetuating the typical neoliberal myth. Inflation in the US over the past few years was caused by energy price hike due to the war in Ukraine, the supply chain issue caused by Covid and exacerbated during the sanctions against Russia, and monopolists hiking prices taking advantage of the rising energy cost.

So why is China doing this? While we don’t know the real answer, the logical and far more reasonable explanation is that they believe that their export oriented economy cannot be abandoned, and is the way towards saving the economy from low consumption amidst plunging property prices and the local government debt crisis. As such, propping up the dollar becomes imperative to sustain the Chinese export economy (US-China trade is transacted in dollar), and attracting FDI (foreign direct investment) has become a short-medium term goal accompanied by the new monetary easing policies.

Only two countries benefit from the current global economic arrangement: the US (by being a super importer) and China (by being a super exporter). No wonder China isn’t ready to give up its exporter status and embrace a Bancor-like system that a number of BRICS+ member states have been keen on getting to. For the Chinese libs, they prefer to flirt with the US imperialists than to forge a radical and transformative path forward.

In other words, the liberal faction has won out. This is going to “save” China’s economy in the short-medium term, but it also gives the parasitic finance capitalism of the US empire a breathing room to reinvigorate itself. This can prove to be fatal in the long run.

So what should China do then?

First, China should prioritize on de-dollarization, not the opposite that it is doing now. To do so, it needs to transition from its export-oriented economy into a domestic consumption model. This will allow the yuan to be internationalized (giving up its net exporter status) and be used to build the productive capacity of the Global South through a Marshall Plan style “yuanization” of the Global South countries.

This means instead of investing in export manufacturing industries, China will invest in high tech manufacturing, R&D, universal healthcare, quality education and many others that improve the living standards of its citizens. Currently, China largely finances its domestic sectors through export revenues (monetary base determined by how much foreign currencies it earn). This allows them to keep their GDP deficit spending to 3% and below (a neoliberal dogma that must be obeyed at all times! - meanwhile the US ignores its own rules and deficit spends 7-8% GDP, and all the people who predicted this would crash the US economy over the past two years turned out to be dead wrong)

Instead, China should drive up its government deficit (central/state bank spending) to directly invest in these sectors. This will also allow the huge Chinese consumer base to absorb the goods and services produced in the Global South when the US and Western economies go into recession, since the plunge in consumption in the West has to be made up by someone else - and China would play an important role in sustaining the global economy.

Importantly, China can also use its huge US dollar reserve ($800 billion) to pay back the Global South debt (e.g. Africa’s $800 billion dollar-denominated debt). Unlike what has been speculated in this article (China flooding Global South with liquid dollars to help them pay their debt, which is bad), China using its foreign reserve to pay back Global South debt will also destroy a huge amount of dollars in circulation in the world (which is good). This can create a temporary vacuum in the dollar hegemony that then enables China to flood the world with yuan (not dollars!) and help them build their economies.

This is how you can fight US monetary imperialism (or at least one of the ways that seem quite realistic, as long as it doesn’t escalate into a global thermonuclear war). As Michael Hudson has mentioned recently, only Marxism/MMT can help us see through the designs of the parasitic finance capitalism of the US empire. Following the Western neoclassical theories will only end up doing the bidding for US imperialism without being aware of it.

In other words, China is going to help the US build the supply chain in the Global South, expands the usage of dollar into Global South countries, and when the US next goes into recession and all these exporter economies are fucked, the Wall Street finance capitalists can easily come in and buy out all these supply chain assets built by China for cheap.

This actually solves the de-industrialization problem for the US, and they should really thank China for that.

I finally understand why Michael Hudson kept saying that China’s problems come from the fact that Vol. 3 is not taught in China. China has everything it can to solve all these fundamental problems by themselves, and yet they keep getting taken advantage by the US. This is the end result of having your knowledge of finance coming from Western economics theory, not from Marxism/MMT.

We need de-dollarization, not dollarization. That’s the only way the Global Majority can survive as the US empire continues to decline.

Russian mayonnaise has quite the reputation. You can store them at room temperature, apparently. The destruction of its factory is not to be taken lightly.

From a materialist perspective, what matters is whether Capital can flow wherever it wants. Or more precisely, through what means can the contradictions of Capital be resolved. Lenin laid out that imperialist war is imminent due to the inevitable expansion of finance (monopoly) capitalism.

This is an objective process. If the Dark God of Free Market - Capital - calls for one billion human beings to be sacrificed, then it will have to be obeyed by the Priests and Priestesses of Neoliberalism who comprise the dominant sect of the Free Market of our age.

Our goal as Marxists is to use our human agency to reshape the material conditions such that the contradictions of Capital do not come to the point where nuclear war is imminent. However, since there is no Marxist movement left, war is imminent. What we don’t know and can’t know is whether it will turn nuclear and destroy the human civilization altogether.

Well let’s see who will eventually win this bet: Biden or you.

Hate to say it but I genuinely suspect Biden might turn out to be right.

There has been a proliferation of murder mystery live action role playing games (剧本杀) in China over the past few years, but apparently the whole industry is trending down and many have since gone out of business.

The last time Scholz spoke with Putin was on September 14, 2022, 12 days later Nord Stream pipelines were bombed.

Scholz spoke again with Putin on November 15, 2024. 4 days later the undersea cable was cut.

This is a message and a warning to Germany and the whole of Europe: don’t try anything funny.

You’re going to get the worst cabinet of all time, because it’s going to make the New Republican Party (formerly Democratic Party) much more palatable in a few years’ time.

Putin just told me that if you go ahead and create and finish your bucket list, he won’t start a nuclear war. That’s his promise to you.

They’re calling Russia’s bluff. That’s what they’re thinking. They’re betting Russia wouldn’t dare to escalate into a nuclear war, and they’d be right (most of the time), because no sane country would want that.

The S-400s can be dismantled and deployed within 5-10 minutes. Mobility is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot use them when they’re being transported elsewhere.

When there is an incoming strike, it has to turn on its radar in order to detect and track the enemy missiles. And when you turn on your radar, you are vulnerable to anti-radiation weaponry. The very act of defense in itself places the SAM battery at risk.

So, you have to choose to protect your SAM batteries, or your high value assets.

Also, the S-400s are object-based defense systems, which means that they are deployed to specifically defend a certain asset or location (object), for example, an airfield, so their locations are mostly fixed because airfields can’t move. There are other lighter systems like the S-300V4s that are deployed together with troop movements and these systems are much more mobile in operational terms.

(Note that the Russian integrated air defense systems (IADS) can also receive inputs from other ground-based and air-based radars, so while there is a primary radar, it doesn’t have to rely on only one sensor. Western/NATO air force has also achieved this capability in recent years with data links.)

The technology you’re describing does not exist in our world. In fact, I cannot even name a single country with an air defense system other than Russia that can handily intercept 5 out of 6 highly advanced supersonic ballistic rockets. The Patriots don’t even come close to this when intercepting Iraqi Scuds designed in the 1960s.

These aren’t homemade rockets that the Israeli Iron Domes were used to shoot down with, and likely happened under heavy electronic jamming environment that strongly curbed the operational capability of the Russian integrated air defense systems (IADS), which comprise not just the long range S-400s but an integrated network of intermediate and short range defense weapons like Pantsirs and Buks as well. With an extremely long border, there is very little chance of saturating any single location with limited amount of air defense systems except for the highest value assets.

Maybe the S-500s can do that (specially designed to take down hypersonic ballistic missiles) but I think there are only a couple units that are operational and they’re all deployed around Moscow.

Bonus trivia: did you know that Moscow’s urban layout with its distinctive concentric ring-like layers was designed specifically to accommodate the world’s first surface-to-air missile defense system, the S-25 Berkut, that were first deployed around Moscow in the 1950s to defend the capital city of the USSR from potential NATO air attacks?

They can now afford to do this because Biden has succeeded in deindustrializing Europe. Expect huge wave of white European immigrants over the next 20-30 years as EU sinks into fascism, endless wars and refugee crisis from the Middle East.

In fact, if you pay attention, Ukrainian migrants and refugees (many of whom are quite highly educated) already begin to take up low paying working class jobs in America typically represented by the black and Hispanic population. Their proportion is still small but they can only be expected to grow as more and more people migrate to America.

Trump is dead wrong about making America for Americans only. Biden’s Fourth Reich plan is far more likely to succeed than Trump’s MAGA.

Let’s frame it another way: it’s the deep state giving Trump the excuse he needs to not have to fulfill the promise of ending the war in Ukraine.

The fact that Rubio that Trump belittled back in the 2016 primary is now a significant part of his new cabinet sends the message that Trump has fully capitulated to the neocons, and his cabinet might as well be arranged and picked by the pro-war Republicans who supported Harris during the election.

All the noise about how Trump is actually playing 4D chess is simply cope from his supporters. Trump can only disappoint, MAGA can only fail. The new Republican Party is being built as the Democrats rebrand themselves as the true moderate conservative faction contra the worst cabinet you’ll ever see under Trump.

Irony of Fate (1976) - rom com

Perhaps a bit of an old fashioned dating culture and even cringey by today’s standards, but offered a glimpse into the Soviet urban lifestyle of the 1970s. Premised on the stereotype that centrally planned Soviet cities all looked the same, comedy (and romance) ensued. One of the most well known Soviet films of all time, due to the fact that they always air the movie on television every New Year’s Eve when families gather, a tradition that continues to present day’s Russia. For maximum cultural immersion, watch the movie on New Year’s Eve.

Solaris (1972) - sci fi

The Soviet response to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey! Even though Tarkovsky was unaware of the Kubrick film, Solaris became an unintentional counterpart to 2001 that neatly contrasted the ideological difference between the capitalist West and the Soviet Union. While Kubrick depicted a futuristic vision set to technical perfection that propels mankind forward, Tarkovsky asked the question of whether scientific advances are even capable of solving the perplexing nature of humanity. Prepare yourself emotionally for one of the greatest science fiction films ever made.

Dollar’s Enduring Appeal on Show in China’s Sovereign Bond Sale

China’s Dollar Dedication

Just weeks after China’s President Xi Jinping signed off on a BRICS communique that included a call for reducing use of the dollar, his finance ministry was marketing sovereign bonds denominated in — wait for it — US dollars.

Actions speak louder than words, as the old saying goes. For all the de-dollarization fervor, Beijing is demonstrating that it remains dedicated, or at least resigned, to continuing to use greenbacks in international finance.

China’s government has no real dollar-funding need itself, so one of the main motivations is to offer benchmarks for Chinese banks and corporations to price their own bonds off of. Dollar-denominated securities are appealing to Chinese borrowers because they can access a broader pool of investors than at home. Some Chinese investors also like dollar investments to park their funds offshore.

High rates and a run of defaults cast a shadow over the Chinese dollar debt market for a time, and the government held off on sovereign issuance in 2022 and 2023. In September, when Beijing for the first time in three years sold its first new sovereign bonds in euros — popular lately with Asian corporate issuers — the question was whether dollars would also resume.

This year’s dollar sale came with a twist: the securities were sold in Saudi Arabia, not Hong Kong as was done in the past. Which also tells a story. First, it demonstrates China’s increasing connections with the Middle Eastern oil giant, which is building its own international financial hub in capital city Riyadh.

Fans of de-dollarization have for years awaited a move by oil exporters to shift their pricing of crude to Chinese yuan, at least when it’s shipped to China. But dreams of a petro-yuan always ran into a key challenge: what would Saudi Arabia and others do with the Chinese currency? China itself maintains capital controls, which makes it awkward for any investor interested in liquidity.

This week’s China dollar bond sale suggests a solution: keep on pricing the oil in dollars, and build out an offshore dollar bond market in Riyadh, with China’s help.

Whatever the longer-term intentions, investors loved the deal: bids were some 20 times the $2 billion of bonds on offer and they were sold for a razor thin margin over similar-maturity Treasuries.

Unfortunately saw this coming for a while now. Nothing’s good gonna happen when Saudi Arabia is involved. I have said before that Saudi Arabia (not in BRICS yet) is going to play the role of dollarizing BRICS, not dedollarizing it.

China’s economy is going to do fine, but de-dollarization and challenging US imperialism are going to take a back seat for now.

The same reason TSMC cannot just hand over the blueprint of its semiconductor fabrication to the US and expects them to be replicated. This kind of technology requires many decades of expertise and very skilled personnel for production.

There is a reason why Russia continued to export its military equipments even after the fall of the USSR - if they had stopped at any point over the course of the past 30 years, those expertise would have been lost forever. The dilapidated military industry was kept afloat by the occasional buyers of Russian military hardware.

In other words, Russia needs buyers to stimulate their defense industry. China is welcome to invest in the Russian military industrial complex by placing large orders on their equipments. In fact, Su-57 is currently flying in Zhuhai hoping to entice the Chinese into purchasing them.

Please define liberalism and neoliberalism in economic terms, otherwise I don’t know what you’re trying to say. I don’t think even you know what you’re trying to say. I’d suggest learning about Russian politics as a first step before talking about things you don’t understand.