How is saying that China should raise its wages so that the Chinese working class has the purchasing power to import from other Global South countries, a “chauvinist” position?

This is going to cause the Chinese manufacturing industries to be redistributed to the Global South. At the same time, living standards in China and the countries they import from will improve because of increased wages. How is that a bad thing?

Alternatively, a Chinese-style Marshall Plan that floods the Global South with yuan, which gives people from the other Global South countries the purchasing power to purchase Chinese goods, and this will in turn raise the wages of the Chinese working class, raising their own purchasing power, and this back and forth will lead to a more balanced and equitable development between countries.

This is way better than China investing in some poor countries to extract their minerals and resources to fuel their own manufacturing sector at home, and in effect, just another form of colonization. What I am proposing is actually going help develop and industrialize the other poor countries, like what the US did to post-war Germany through Marshall Plan.

Currently, China wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to be the global export superpower (which squeezes the wages of the other Global South countries because they simply do not have the production of scale to match China’s) and at the same time they don’t want other countries to save in yuan, because they want other countries to import Chinese goods, not to save in its currency. This is leading to the exporting countries competing with one another, and why they all still depend on the US to become the “buyer of the last resort”, because there is nowhere else for the surplus goods to go. How is that “chauvinist”?

The reason I brought up the EU is because the euro is still a far more acceptable currency for most countries to save in (see the figure in my previous comment) than yuan (how many Global South countries do you think would prefer to hold euro than Chinese yuan? The vast majority of them!), and quite frankly, the real concern for the US imperialists if the dollar is ever going to be challenged. I seriously think that the US has calculated that China is never going to weaponize its yuan, and so far they have been proven right.

Just remember to take everything I say with a huge grain of salt lol.

This is going to come across as a bit of incoherent rambling, but let me try:

Honestly, I think the take that “China already has a strong economic base and financial system to challenge US hegemony” is far more optimistic than what I’ve commonly heard in Western leftist spaces like “nooo China still needs MORE primitive accumulation of capital to become socialist!” and “China is playing the long game and this liberal policy is actually a WIN for BRICS”.

Like, my friend, China already has a global manufacturing share of 31% (compared to 18% in the US, and 5% each for Germany and Japan). If this is still not enough, then our entire socialist project is doomed. How else are other countries ever going to achieve socialism?

I’m also not going to sugar coat it: China’s economy is the only one that can directly challenge and realistically replace the US, at least in short-intermediate term. It is a policy choice. The key challenge is how to get the world to accept the yuan, and to get the local bourgeoisie who have accumulated trillions of dollars over the past decades to give up their huge privilege.

And just to dispel the idea that my analysis is frequently “China centric”, I’ll remind everyone that this source of optimism that we have for the past few years was only because of Russia’s valiant defiance against the entire Western-dominated economic and financial system. People often under-appreciate what Putin had done that, while the Ukraine war was provoked and caused mass casualties, its defiance to unprecedented global sanctions forced the US to take a high risk gambling approach to protect the hegemony of the dollar.

You’ll often see me praising Putin for canceling $23 billion of Africa’s debt, because that’s absolutely the right thing to do, if only China had followed up with its trillions of dollar reserves - it can achieve a lot for the Global South just by making the big numbers of its bank statement to go down. And Russia indeed had rallied many Global South countries to its call for de-dollarization (anyone remembers the summer of 2022? It was nice, albeit a bit naive in retrospect) Unfortunately Russia’s economy was simply too weak to take on the global hegemon, and China’s eventual doubling down for preserving the dollar hegemony sealed the fate of this unprecedented opening never seen in decades.

I will also give it that Putin’s willingness to let the world sanctioning its oligarchs is far more of a baller move than China has ever done in recent years. Too bad, when your economy is weak, and doesn’t help with the liberal economists continuing to sabotage from within, there is only so much energy you can exert on a global scale - exactly what I have said about most countries simply being too weak to take on the global hegemon.

On the flip side, I often wonder how much longer can China keep going with the charade? No, this is not the right wing’s “China’s going to collapse because of COMMUNISM” lol. While the US economy itself seems teetering on an impending crisis, my pessimism is more a reflection of what many people around me have felt in recent months: the initial surge (often fueled by nationalistic propaganda) of “China is defeating Western countries in handling Covid!” in 2020 had gradually turned into “the economy’s gonna recover after Zero Covid, we just need to give it some time” in 2023 to the more pessimistic “welp, the recovery that was promised isn’t happening, I’m gonna be careful with how I spend with so much uncertainty in the world” last year. With the uncertainty of getting laid off at any point, people chose to save instead, because a lack of welfare means that people fear their current level of income, once lost, cannot be easily replenished.

The plunging property market (it’s cooked) and the deflationary spiral despite multiple rounds of subsidies have fueled a lot of disappointment, if not resentment. For many people, it’s almost as if the government will do anything just to avoid raising the wages of the people. Lots of big charts showing the economic recovery, but people continue to feel their wallets getting lighter (reminds me of the Bidenomics propaganda in the US not too long ago).

Meanwhile, the two key economists who pushed for the whole property market investment scheme for the past decade, Justin Lin Yifu and Meng Xiaosong, continued to be revered by the leadership, doubling down on rhetoric like “we need to double down on more investments to raise the wages of the people so they can consume”, when one should be asking: “how is producing even more goods going to raise wages when nobody has the money to buy them?”

It doesn’t help that for those paying attention to left politics, Xi’s ten years of reining in private capital and cracking down neoliberalism have ended in complete reversal over the span of the past few months, with Xi now doubling down on affirming the “sanctity” of private capital (that the COMMUNIST Party of China will DEFEND lol) and disgraced capitalists like Jack Ma have now returned to the altar.

There has been a lot of nationalistic propaganda about how China’s consumption has recovered “look at the record turnout to watch Ne Zha 2” lol and “wow look so many people traveling on May Day holiday, who says China has a consumption problem?” as if people aren’t frontloading their vacations to take advantage of promoted subsidies. But, how long can these “feel good” propaganda last?

There is now a lot of technocratic push to promote a technological revolution like EVs (the price wars are decimating hundreds of companies and suppliers), solar panels (the industry registered one of the worst losses last year) and AI and robotics, hoping that a technological revolutiom is going to bring forth an economic transformation, magically propeling the country to a high income country. Too much emphasis on STEM (too much worshipping Elon Musk) and too few attention paid to social policies and reforms. Anything to avoid giving people money and welfare.

So, how long before people are going to endure before they have had enough? How long can the liberals continue to sell their snake oil economics before the central leadership (which unfortunately is full of them right now) decides that they can no longer be trusted? Furthermore, how long before the central government rein in on the outsized authorities of the local governments (a sequelae of decentralization since the post-Mao reform), that have continued to cause troubles at the national level?

No, I’m not saying that China’s economy is going to collapse lol, that’s never going to happen. But if you had asked me if China is treading the path of Japan, even just two years ago, I would have thought ridiculous. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.

Sorry for the long rant. I hope it gives you some perspective from my end.