news

China's foreign policy is entirely centred around keeping China's 1.4+ billion people safe. It is intensely conservative, yes, which is infinitely disappointing, but it is not up to China to stop the genocide and risk all out war with the world's preeminent superpower. It feels like people on here have a confused view of China's place in the world, hoping for it to be the second USSR in terms of foreign aid for revolutionary projects, and then turn totally the other way when they realise that this is not happening, acting like China has somehow betrayed it's required revolutionary outlook and deserves extra condemnation.

Why should China dive into helping Iran when the last time they were about to have really good relations the Iranian government threw it all away for the slightest concession from America? Iran is not run by principled socialists, they're a bunch of libs and theocrats who happen to be on the right side of history re: isntreal, China and Iran are right to improve relations now, but they're also right to be cautious and doing it in a measured way. Fool me twice, you can't get fooled again, as would say.

china won't do jack shit to improve anyone's lives in iran

Not necessarily true; if China decides to just sidestep the the sanctions stupidity placed on Iran then they can actively help make the lives of Iranians much better. Militarily? I'm not sure China is interested in helping from a military angle (although here's to hoping they sell Iran some serious power, but I know this hope is in vain), but at least if they can help Iran's economy then that would be really important.

they probably will improve peoples lives in iran the same way they are doing in africa and the such, cheap loans with gracious terms, supplying solar energy etc

China is not going to be the second USSR because its economic model is inherently neoliberal, and one that adheres to the market principles set by the IMF, despite what many Western leftists want to believe in otherwise.

This is what market socialism actually means, and what many Western commentators misunderstand about the Chinese model. In fact, the government has repeatedly stated that it vows to be the defender of the free trade order, and that it is the US that violates the international rules it sets itself.

You have narratives from both sides that attempt to paint China as “imperialist” or “anti-Western imperialist”, and neither of them is correct. China is the biggest beneficiary of the neoliberal free trade order, with the global industrial capacity being deliberately concentrated into China, at the expense of the rest of the world since it rendered the rest of the Global South vulnerable to the onslaught of Western finance capitalism.

The US is happy to de-industrialize itself, and China is happy to keep the system going and benefiting from it for as long as it can. As long as the IMF ideological indoctrination continues to hold, China’s actions will be constrained by the framework set by the US-dominated institutions.

The problem now is that the long term de-industrialization in the US has caused the rise of populism, and erupted in the form of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s movements in the mid-2010s, following the 2008 global financial crisis that truly ended what remains of class mobility in the country and fully disillusioned their own working class of the “American dream”. Everyone who is not establishment knows that the system is broken. This is itself the contradiction of the American neoliberal capitalist system.

Forced to respond to the rise of populism, American capital is now attempting to forge a new international order that would allow its own finance capital to remain hegemonic while at the same time pacifying the dissent of its own working class. A new form of fascism, if you will. It is a huge bet full of risks and contradictions in and on itself, but this is the only way for American capitalism to survive and perpetuate itself.

On the other hand, China wants the status quo to remain, and the continued de-industrialization in the US is good for China. Yet another contradiction at the global scale that will continue to build the geopolitical tension, until something breaks.

And the work had already begun with the first Trump term, with its initial foray into a trade war with China since 2018 (the same play dealing with Japan in the 1980s). Biden ramped up the trade war and completed the subjugation and disciplining of the European economy through Ukraine War and the Build Back Better policies (the long-term effort of neutralizing the euro as a major challenger to the dollar since the fall of the USSR, during which the plunder and monetization of post-Soviet industrial capital finally enabled Europe to form its own currency zone).

Trump II is now continuing the effort by playing up the global tariffs, with Europe out of the game and Japan is still too slow to recover its growth, most likely with the intention of setting off a mercantilistic fight throughout the world, allowing China to flood its cheap goods across the world while it hides itself behind the tariffs. This will weaken the domestic industries in many economies of the world, which will then set the stage for global supply chain to be reshaped, as they are plundered by IMF/bailouts by foreign capital.

Europe will likely be forced to purchase American goods and invest hundreds of billions in the US. Again, another layer of contradiction that relies on the Europeans playing ball - the last time Europe was being squeezed to pay its war debt beyond its ability to American creditors post-WWI, they ended up squeezing the defeated Germany which directly caused the rise of Hitler and Nazism. A very dangerous game to play here.

This is just a long winded way of saying that if you want China to act to the benefit of the Global South, the neoliberal ideology must first be purged in China.

The problem is that even after the Ukraine war started, despite many Global South countries wanting to jump on the de-dollarization train, China has been extremely reluctant to do so precisely because of what I described above - it benefits greatly through dollar hegemony, and this is the result of its economic framework being constrained by neoliberal theories. It does not have an alternative framework like the USSR did. This emboldens the US to continue to challenge China and the rest of the world, because its calculation is that China will still prefer to keep the status quo than to radically change the rules of the world.

Sadly, a lot of people try to engage in mind reading the leadership of the PRC and claim that they will definitely dismantle colonialism from inside, despite the fact that their current economic (i.e. 'material') interests lie in perpetuating it. For some reason, people forget about the base and the superstructure stuff when it comes to the PRC. And they also generally seem to forget about the consequences of the presence of the profit motive in an economy in this case for some reason.

The PRC being dominant instead of NATO would be an improvement over the current state of affairs, but people are way too blindly optimistic in this regard.

EDIT: Actually, going to use this opportunity and address one of the arguments for the privatisation of the PRC's economy (and the corresponding damage done to workers' rights in the PRC):

The PRC has been increasing living standards very quickly for more than a billion people. If you think that the PRC's economy is capitalist/not socialist, you must conclude that capitalism is the best economic system there is. Therefore, this criticism of the PRC is incorrect.

There are a few issues with that:

• Seeing that one system is achieving the results that look good on the surface, and concluding from that that that must mean it's the system that you liked beforehand is silly in a way that should be obvious. It's just some wishful thinking - making a conclusion based on what one wants to see, rather than on how things are. Also, the PRC, the USSR, etc. had more impressive improvements made under planned economies, and the current PRC can't replicate some of their achievements, so what the PRC has now is not even managing to be the 'best' system that we have seen.
• The fact that the current PRC has more people than the states that maintain/maintained planned economies isn't really relevant, unless one wants to argue that, when a state implements a policy, it picks some number of people for the policy to affect, and the policy then can't affect any more people, rather than for policies to affect groups of people regardless of how numerous those groups are.
• The way the PRC managed to get ahead after the privatisation, is by attracting some of the colonial spoils from the imperial core. It has become a semi-peripheral state, and is currently both a victim of colonialism, but also maintains relations of unequal exchange with other countries that are beneficial to the PRC. Colonial exploitation is, in the end, the only way for states that maintain economies with the profit motive to 'win' economically. Being the beneficiary of relations of unequal exchange are much better predictors of great economic power of a state than an economy being privatised.

pezeshkian is saying please help us

Is this before or after Pezeshkian saying please help us to the USians and Euros?