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The country has been isolationist forever and has made almost no effort to spread internationalism.

Not true though. China aided Korea and Vietnam and sacrificed heavily for that. Although you can claim it’s mostly self-preservation because of the proxy wars by the US, at least half a million of the People’s Volunteer Army died fighting against the Americans.

Ironically, it was after opening up under Deng that China had changed its internationalist position. China did invade Vietnam to appease the Americans though, but this is part of the process of being “integrated” into the global market and the neoliberal framework.

If the state's official line is zero solidarity with the international working class then the population holding zero solidarity with the international working class is to be expected.

Agree but I think it's the other way around, if the civil society don't care for proletarian internationalism, the state will reflect that, especially in China.

As I mentioned in the post, I think it has more to do with a lack of social welfare, jobs guarantee, free healthcare and housing that exacerbate the precariousness of the working class people. These are all basic guarantees that should exist in a socialist country, but the problem was not as palpable after the opening up because the country was experiencing rapid growth for decades.

Now that the growth has slowed down, the lack of such social safety nets is compounding the precariousness for your average worker.

Whether it’s the post-USSR, DDR as you mentioned, or “social democratic” Europe, it all coincides with the erosion of social welfare and workers rights being abandoned as even the left-wing parties in these countries adopted neoliberal policies since the 1990s (for some, it’s even earlier).

Lmao. The Maoist argumentation is wrong because it deliberately misses the forest for the trees in a facile "but what have the Romans done for me?" style of argumentation that Chinese online rhetoric often have this rather peculiarly unique characteristic of framing as if they're the first people in history to try such a sophistic stunt. China has objectively in all parameters gone through the greatest collective mass poverty alleviation campaign in human history. The Economist, RAND, The Atlantic all have articles where they admit this with gritted teeth yet you can't even say the same about Chinese Maoist/Ultra/Libs, which is interesting. I've lately come to understand this style of Socratic-aping Chinese rhetorical style much better after discovering Chinese Maoist forums like v2.redchinacn.org, which has incidentally gone off the deep end with Kirk apologia recently.

There's a decent article in Routledge's Journal of Contemporary China analyzing that episode though it has the typical "they have nationalists, we have patriots" sort of academic orientalism. The author notes the typical emotionally-overwrought sort of nakedly manipulative discourse that is profuse on the Chinese internet being used: "As a Han Chinese, I am crying softly,"; "I am here! 1.4 billion compatriots are here! As a Chinese, if it is necessary, there will be action on May 4!"

though it should be said that the Chinese online vocal minority commentariat often has this sort of self-orientalizing narcissism that assumes all other 1.4 billion people in their country are a hive mind that secretly share their personal political opinion, if only but for the dastardly Weibo censors preventing their posts' true updoot numbers from coming to light, as seen by the cited "I am here! 1.4 billion compatriots are here!" style of comments.

So basically "netizens gonna netizen?"

As I mentioned, I think the perceived threat of immigration is a culmination of many factors, but the most important I believe is just how precarious the employment for an average person is right now.

These weren’t problems when China was enjoying double digit growth from a rising export industries 10-15 years ago, or when the property market was booming before Covid. Back then, jobs were easy to find, and money could be easily earned as long as you are willing to work hard. But it is a problem now.

It is no coincidence that China has been experiencing deflation and poor domestic consumption, despite efforts to raise it.

Instead of giving more subsidies to encourage consumer spending, the government should focus on establishing social welfare, jobs guarantee, free healthcare and free housing (ironically, ended in 1998) so people have a safety net. These should all be basic guarantees for a socialist country and you cannot solve the fundamental economic issue without that.

While not the only reason, it’s the viral propagation of online social media content that often feature the most dramatic or uncharitable stereotype of certain countries. This is especially problematic when they reach people who have never interacted with outsiders/foreigners for much of their lives. It’s the same as boomer chuds living in suburban America thinking that big liberal cities are warzones when you can be robbed or killed just walking on the streets lol.

Just one example: when the airliner crashed in Washington DC not too long ago, clips like this spread like fire and people were making fun of how it’s dangerous to live in America. You get the idea - the most shocking content are often the ones that reach the audience and this is how their impression of a certain country is formed.

I mostly see this as the birth pangs of true multipolarity. The two existing poles, the US and China basically, have reasons to see the rise of India as a threat. As India becomes more powerful and consequently more of a threat, the Indophobia will skyrocket. It's like how Sinophobia exploded during the 20s. Sinophobia exploded at around the same moment when the West was finally clued in that China is going to surpass them.

The Indophobia will be spread partly from propaganda pushed out by the two respective governments and partly by insecure USian/Chinese nationals who don't want more competition. They will use their respective propaganda apparatus to push Indophobia onto their respective cultural spheres so it's not just going to be USian and Chinese nationals parroting Indophobic garbage.

Most disappointing I've seen are various Yemeni Twitter accounts also stooping into Indophobia. But it shouldn't be too surprising. Modi is an Islamophobic fascist who uses an Islamophobic pogrom as the foundation of his political career, India doesn't even bother showing token support to the Palestinians, and Pakistan offers (token) support to the Palestinians. Their Indophobia is not through Western influence, but through Chinese/Pakistani influence instead.

I suspect there is a fair amount of astroturfing on xiaohongshu considering how many pro-MAGA weirdos are on there, even from Chinese locales.

Feels like once it was established that westerners would be using it, some US entities scrambled to get their bots on there, not taking care to adapt them for XHS and Chinese culture, so they default to US flavored culture war brainworms.

Hate to repeat myself, but the problem is that the Chinese government has been the best student of the IMF, keeping its government deficit under 3% for almost every year except 2020, 2023 and this year is projected to be ~4%:

In order to spend and invest domestically while keeping your deficit low, you need to have add corresponding asset (usually earning foreign currencies) to offset your spending. This led many countries to adopt the export-led growth model to keep their deficit low.

You can also borrow from financial institutions, which is where the bulk of money supply in China came from - deposits created during commercial bank lending:

As a result, China’s M2 money supply is far higher than the US even though its monetary base is much smaller than the US, which “prints” the money freely whenever the US federal government wants to spend e.g. during Covid.

Pay attention to the year it began to rise for China: after the GFC in 2008, the slump from Western consumption caused China to turn to infrastructure building (4 trillion yuan stimulus) to stimulate domestic growth.

Because the local governments receive a much smaller proportion of their tax base after the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, many local governments began to seek for non-tax revenues in the 2000s. Land premium thus became an attractive source of income for local governments when the real economy took a downturn, and so many local governments speculated on land price by driving infrastructure and housing development in order to raise the land value and then selling/leasing the land at a premium.

In turn, the local governments borrowed heavily through shadow banks (LGFVs) that lend out money from various and often dubious sources. This is known as the “hidden debt” and the true scale of the debt can no longer be known. We know it’s at least 12 trillion yuan, because that’s the amount the central government attempted to help alleviate from the November policy last year. After 2015, the local governments were given the authority to issue their own debt/municipal bonds, and the scale of the debt went further out of control.

Additionally, property development also raises GDP numbers, a main KPI for local official promotion. So essentially it’s a “cheat code” to drive up your GDP by keep building more and more houses while not having to invest in the real economy. Good when consumed in small doses, but when it becomes your obsession, it’s gross misallocation of capital that could have been utilized to directly raise the living standard of the people.

In any case, the question is how are you going to settle the local government debt issue. Since the borrowing occurred domestically, in principle, the central government can write off the debt (though that raises the whole other question of whether it is rewarding the most reckless risk takers). However, this does not appear to be on the table at all, and so everyone has to work harder to pay off the debt. The wealth is being funneled into the financial institutions to help the local governments pay off the infrastructure debt borrowed from a decade ago.

Furthermore, there is also this whole green tech inter-regional competition where, following the new priorities set for green technology since the 14th Five Year Plan, many local governments attempted to jump on the bandwagon. Without much coordination between the regions from the central government, the result is that you have overcapacity. It raised the GDP numbers, sure, but many local governments had also already invested (usually with borrowed money) heavily, giving billions and billions of subsidies to the local industries, so the sunk-cost have given them very little off-ramp to step back from such investments. As a result, more investment is being thrown in and hoping that you kill off the competitors while your own invested company survives the onslaught. And that means the wealth is effectively being funneled into propping up companies that would otherwise have failed.

The central government is recently attempting to consolidate the overcapacity in EVs and solar panels, where the industries have driven themselves into making severe losses since last year. That means some regions will have to be the losers, with billions and billions of subsidies now becoming sunk cost that they can no longer recover.

So there you have it (as a concise version of a much more complex topic) - why Chinese people have to work harder and longer hours despite the country is becoming a superpower. It is mostly ideologically imposed due to adopting the neoliberal framework.

The solution would require the Chinese leadership to abandon their neoliberal policies and simply run up the deficit to spend domestically, without having to accumulate foreign assets or borrow from financial institutions. Besides, deficit spending would allow for jobs guarantee program to sustain full employment, while also resolving the domestic consumption problem.

Surely, there is an obvious solution to this, what is preventing it from being implemented?

The profit motive.
The companies/company leaderships are interested in employing as few people as possible and making each of them work as much and for as little as they can get away with, with workers mandatorily being compensated with less than what the companies get from their labour. That's the whole point of investing in private property that is operated by other people's labour.

The solution would be to re-abolish private property, which would also have the benefits of introducing guaranteed housing and universal healthcare.

Export-led growth. Wages must be kept low to keep prices low.

The only solution to this is boosting the internal market, so the increase in wages is captured by the businesses themselves.