Image (source here) is of a section of the Yarlung Zangbo river, which forms the deepest canyon on the planet.
The idea of doing any sort of general preamble for China is a little absurd given how ubiquitous they are in economics and politics, so I'm just going to hop right in to a recent news item of interest: China is working on the construction of an enormous new hydropower project in Tibet (@Metabola@hexbear.net had brought this up just before the last news mega ended).
This project (consisting of, I believe, five dams) will be overall three times larger than the Three Gorges Dam, will cost $167 billion, and will supply 70 GW (by itself more power than several significant countries generate). There are, of course, meaningful concerns regarding concerning environmental damage, but helping to avert catastrophic climate change seems worth it. The news coming out of the clean energy sector of China has getting only more encouraging over the last few years, even as the fully neoliberalized Europe and America descend into climate skepticism and refuse to adequately fund projects that could avert the worst of climate change.
Geopolitically, given recent India-China tensions (for example, sending Pakistan the equipment to shoot down Indian jets, as well as run-of-the-mill border tensions) one expects India to not receive the news very well, as the river upon which the dam is being constructed proceeds to flow into Arunachal Pradesh. But from what I understand of the Indian hydrological situation (which is, admittedly, not much), I don't think enough of the water in India comes from the river for China to hypothetically cause any kind of water shortages in India - the monsoons seem to supply plenty of freshwater all by themselves. Nonetheless, as with all Chinese news, wild fearmongering abounds.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
To be fair, there’s nothing the EU could do. Trump’s global tariffs inevitably forced China to dump their goods into the EU market, which appeared to be the final nail in the coffin for the EU to cave to the US demand.
If we really want to talk in historical terms, the sins of the EU really began the moment Europe robbed the post-Soviet states in the 1990s by monetizing their collapsing industrial assets into the finance capital that formed the EU and the eurozone. Pitching the euro as the challenger to the dollar’s dominance immediately painted themselves as a target to the US empire.
What Europe did to the USSR, the US is doing to them. This has been the case since the Balkan conflicts that erupted in the periphery in the late 1990s, the Nord Stream destruction was simply the most recent of such aggression from the empire itself.
And their continual mentality of treating Russia as nothing more than a gas station, taking advantage of Russia (literally how the Ukrainian civil war started back in 2014) instead of treating it as an equal partner, ultimately accelerated their own demise.
As I have said many times before, what could have been an alternative timeline would be China solving its own economic downturn by successfully transitioning into a domestic consumption economy and absorb the global surplus goods. That would have blunted the US financial aggression and Europe and many Global South countries would probably not have to cave to Trump today. Unfortunately, China is still very much trapped by the neoliberal thinking and I don’t see them shifting away anytime soon (in which sense, China’s overcapacity is weaponized to kill the other export economies the moment the US threatened to pull back its consumption with tariffs), so we’re still in the neoliberal timeline and likely with a new status quo after US and China have reached their own compromises with one another.
Europe though, is poised to be the biggest loser in this latest reconfiguration of global capitalism. Trump’s main thing is to reduce the trade deficit and it looks like Europe is going to give him that.
Honestly this just makes me depressed, if we can't hope on the largest socialist nation to ever exist to do what is necessary, what hope is there for everyone else in the world? Everyone who attempts to overthrow captialism will inevitably buckle under the pressure of Empire... 🥲 Our only hope is if the USA and it's vassals collapse without taking the whole world with it in nuclear fire.
I mean, you play with the cards you are dealt with. But ultimately, the so-called “socialists” in the Imperial Core seem too comfortable to want to commit to radical actions. They want to have a revolution but one that doesn’t involve enduring hardships or having to give up their treats. They want a revolution that falls on their lap.
Hence, they are more interested in peaceful protests, changes through the ballot boxes, and calling out other internet leftists for not supporting Palestine enough, because deep down that’s the extent of as far as they are comfortable with doing. Going further than that would mean a life of being hunted down by the feds and organizing underground, like actual communists had to do throughout history, and giving up the comforts they have so much enjoyed in the developed world.
The empire is weakening and collasping. That never meant that the us isnt able to snap back its vassals into their place nor does it mean they arent unable to do vast damage during its decline.
Their actions right now will make it harder for them in the future. It also dissolves Europe as an imperial rival, makes anti-west forces have more prominence inside europe, and makes it easier for them to later join as equals in a post-empire world.
I wonder how much of this reconfiguration/new status quo we're seeing is a conscious gearing up for hot war in 10-20 years. I also wonder if, this being the case, China's decisions will look sound in hindsight
I doubt it will take 20 years for the us-china war. Many say 2027-early 2030s
I’m surprised by how entrenched neoliberal thinking is still in China today. You wouldn’t thought that the Ukraine war would have taught them the lesson.
Xi’s proposal for the Dual Circulation economy in 2020 to balance out export with domestic consumption is now a confirmed failure - nearly five years on, China is now still the world’s number 1 trade surplus country, in fact with a record $1 trillion annual surplus while neutered domestic consumption is causing deflation which is a very big problem in itself. I cannot even run cover for them anymore.
Honestly both Russia and China have both been a disappointment in the last few years. Both showed so much promises in the beginning of the Ukraine war. But it’s also a lesson for the left here, which is how difficult it is to get rid of liberals once they are entrenched in the system. Perhaps now you would have seen Stalin’s brutal purge in a more different light.
Is there something you think China could have done differently in the past few years to avoid the status quo, or was the die cast by market liberalization decades ago?
Yes, as I have said many times in the past.
The US hegemony was at its weakest in the months immediately after Putin invaded Ukraine. The backlash of sanctions and the spike in energy prices prompted Biden to raised interest rates (to 5% within a year). Many Global South countries back then were seriously looking to de-dollarize.
In August 2022, Russia cancelled $23 billion of African countries’ debt. China also showed some progress by waiving the interest-free loans for 17 African countries.
However, they did not keep going. For one, China could use $800 billion of its vast dollar reserves ($3.3 trillion) to pay off Africa’s foreign debt, then immediately flood the region with newly created yuan, Marshall Plan-style, to give the African countries the money to purchase Chinese goods.
This will raise the wages of Chinese workers (thereby eliminating the low consumption and deflation problems altogether), but most importantly, this will increase the purchasing power of the Chinese working class (which I remind you, is only half of the South Korean working class and did not even approach the purchasing power of Japanese working class in 1990) that will enable them to purchase the goods from those Global South countries, driving growth in those regions and raising the income of the working class there too (replacing the consumer role that has played by the US for decades).
By transitioning into a domestic consumption economy, China not only solves its own deflation and overcapacity problems, it also reduces its own dependency and the reliance of many Global South countries on the US, therefore the power of the dollar will no longer be as effective or coercive as it has been.
The downside is that China will have to give up its export-oriented industry and those labor and resources will have to be re-allocated to internal development, like provision of healthcare and welfare to their own people, instead of making cheap goods for Westerners to consume just to collect the dollars that they couldn’t use anyway (hence the trade surplus).
This is also very different from Chinese investments in those countries, like the Belt and Road Initiative, because those investments do not necessarily come with the consumption demand for the expanded productive capacity in those countries. As a result, those countries still have to sell their goods to the US or other wealthy Western countries as China does not have the desire to give up its export industries and also, its working people does not have the purchasing power, to buy from them.
That endeavour was stillborn and existed solely in the abstracts and maybes. Since 1945 the us had loyal puppets on the continent. The Suez crisis did reveal the last sovereign empires of europe to be a sham. The inclusion of the UK into the EC later was another nail in the coffin, because they always acted in the americans interest and made sure the continent could never truly challenge the us. Even worse is that the EC itself was basically an futile attempt of France to bind Germany and Italy to itself and use them to remain relevant as they were considered the “least” victorious of the allied powers. Which was flawed as Germany and Italy in their post 1945 form are compromised entities build on the whims of the primarily america.
The game could be played back even further. Both the UK and France became dependent on us financial power during the world wars, the modern us empire was created when the UK essentially loaned out its empire, South Africa during the 1920s tried open up the British economic sphere to the dollar. Churchill born of a transatlantic union himself was an major advocate for closer ties. So the reduction of europe into vassalage was in utero as far back as the 1913, when Germany and the USA passed the UK as the largest economies in the world. Combined with the Berlin-Bagdad railway, this was a hidden cause for WW1, because it would have destroyed the monopoly of the suez canal.
Ironically now another Anglophone Empire is fearing being passed by another surpassing economic power which has infrastructure projects that will destroy the former empires stranglehold over trading routes. History does repeat indeed.
Oh yes it goes way back, but we’re being generous here since the neoliberal designs of the EU itself - which was only made possible as a consequence of the fall of the USSR - directly contributed to its own demise today.