Interestingly, Russian media is corroborating the Reuters report that Putin has leaned into the "DPRK personnel in Russia" topic during a BRICS presser:

MOSCOW, 24 October — RIA Novosti. Russian President Vladimir Putin, responding to a question about "satellite images that suggest North Korean troops are in the Russian Federation," called them "a serious matter." "The images are indeed serious. If there are images, then they reflect something," the head of state said at a press conference following the XVI BRICS summit. https://ria.ru/20241024/putin-1979906877.html

I think this sort of "wink wink" non-denial from Putin really does suggest that DPRK military personnel are not just "in the Russian Federation" but somewhere substantive, perhaps specifically, in the Kursk region, most likely observing but also potentially providing auxiliary or technical assistance. The recent agreement that was just signed between Russia and the DPRK was a mutual assistance treaty and something of that sort would provision for the possibility of DPRK military support in the event of legitimate attack, which Ukraine indeed is conducting through its assault on actual Russian territory in Kursk.

This would hypothetically square the hemming and hawing from the West about the topic and is likely why most of the Western narrative on the "DPRK intervention" so far has had this tortured vocabulary of ambiguously accusing the DPRK of entering into the conflict without often explicitly stating that the DPRK personnel are in Ukraine itself. It explains how much of the coverage is more focused on that South Korean comprador president's threats of retaliation rather than taking a microscope to the alleged DPRK act itself.

It's therefore worth assessing this hypothetical scenario properly. The implications of this would be enormous, if true. For Russia, I'd say there's always been a sense from their side that they've been searching for a way to make Ukraine recognize some consequence for taking the fight into actual Russian territory (beyond the historical irony of attacking Kursk). The activation of a mutually defensive pact would be a way to do it, that can also be justified in terms of international law. The ability to reply to the Kursk incursion, which is costing Ukraine nothing but its least prized commodity - its people - by claiming the Ukrainian propaganda stunt triggered a Russian defensive pact clause would be the type of assertive rejoinder sufficient to deflect the passive image of being caught on the backfoot and stuck playing a reactive role, which is the Western narrative being pushed to create through the incursion.

As for the DPRK, if its relationship with Russia really has developed to such a public extent, I'd call this, without exaggeration, the most momentous paradigm shift in East Asian geopolitics since the DPRK's nuclear proliferation in the 2000s or even the collapse of the USSR. Especially if the South Korean lackey leadership is compelled, optics-wise, to respond to the DPRK's potential participation. This would begin a series of brinksmanship that binds the South Korean (and US) side in a Catch-22. Neither South Korean chaebol military boondoggles nor forcibly conscripting K-Pop stars into Ukraine would be ultimately relevant in shifting the fundamental NATO inability to alter the material conditions of the Russian attritional grind against Ukraine.

More importantly, given that the half-hearted character of the US role in Ukraine is being self-rationalized by the Pentagon as purely due to it "saving itself" for the great fantasized showdown against China, the diversion of any South Korean materiel and manpower away from the East Asian theater would be detrimental to the overall US military objectives of being still unable so far to fulfill that "Pivot to Asia." The idea that South Korea entering on the Ukraine side would bind irrevocably it to NATO and thus preventing such a scenario is "vital" can only come from a failure to appreciate that occupied Korea already hosts the largest US military presence on the planet apart from that within the former Axis Powers and therefore it was always going to be made to latch to the US side, willingly or not, when the moment finally comes. Furthermore, the fact that China is still officially "uninvolved" means that the Yoon government in Seoul would be restricted from using this opportunity to fully declare its subservient alignment towards NATO.

The more important factor is that the DPRK, through this hypothetical action, would put Yoon an impossible position. Responding to the brinksmanship would, for one, confirm their administration's tenure as likely the most deteriorated position since the Korean War itself and while the Korean Milei has been all too happy to sacrifice his country for US geostrategic aims whenever possible, something like this would likely be an outcome far beyond the administration's initial anticipations. Responding through parallel support for Ukraine would obviously also deteriorate South Korean relations with Russia and this is the most important thing. The DPRK's bilateral relations has always been, in truth, trilateral where Seoul rears its head akin that consent meme asking "Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" Seoul has been able so far to leverage this since the DPRK's nuclear proliferation to isolate Pyongyang from its two major partners, China and Russia.

Gradually, this has become a zero-sum game to the DPRK's detriment, as South Korea has been able to leverage its economic relationship with China and Russia to make them reluctant to sacrifice this established trade relations in order to support the DPRK. We can see this similarly play out with Cuba, where despite the desperate current conditions of the heroic Cuban Republic, both Chinese and Russian support is still being limited by compliance to the threat of American reprisal. Seoul sending military support to Ukraine would give Russia a legitimate pretext to justify tanking its economic ties with it and reorientate Russia more firmly with the DPRK, something which previous administrations in Seoul had painstakingly crafted to be impossible for the Russian cost-benefit economic calculus to consider in normal conditions. This would be something comprador Yoon would be made to throw away for the sake of retaliatory optics and adherence to US vassalage, thereby inadvertently rendering renewed DPRK-Russia ties feasible, potentially even to the height it once had been under the USSR. Restoring the DPRK's relationship with Russia from an implicitly trilateral to a definitively bilateral dynamic would end the era of isolation it has been held under since its nuclear proliferation and would thus have a dramatic effect on its material conditions.

Even if Seoul merely gnashes its teeth and refrains from substantive action, this episode has already resulted in the fait accompli of strengthened DPRK-Russia relations. Of course, all of this is merely hypothetical and contingent on the actual circumstances of the alleged "DPRK presence" in Russia, but given a mutual defensive treaty has already been signed, what has already occurred has been a badly needed step forward for the DPRK.

Update from Korean Central News Agency (English Translation by KCNA):

Vice Foreign Minister of DPRK Clarifies Stand on Rumor of Troop Dispatch to Russia

Pyongyang, October 25 (KCNA) -- Kim Jong Gyu, vice foreign minister of the DPRK in charge of Russian affairs, gave the following answer to a question raised by KCNA on Friday as regards a rumor that the troops of the Korean People's Army are dispatched to Russia which is recently drawing public attention in the world:

I heeded the rumor of the dispatch of KPA troops to Russia, which the world media is building up public opinion.

The DPRK Foreign Ministry does not directly engage in the things of the Ministry of National Defence, and does not feel the need to confirm it separately.

If there is such a thing that the world media is talking about, I think it will be an act conforming with the regulations of international law.

There will evidently exist forces which want to describe it as illegal one, I think. (End)

http://kcna.kp

There's the ideological reasons that all historically conscious leftists know about and while they were the pretexts for the split, I've come to the position over time that they don't represent the core issue that initiated it. As such, there's a fundamental relationship dynamic that should be clarified before anyone gets into studying the deeper weeds of the various grievances that propelled the split. This dynamic is also the principal lesson of value to AES and socialism today which to learn from in preventing such a catastrophic inter-fraternal relationship rupture from repeating itself under the same lines.

As a background, I would argue that the fundamental problem with the entire Comintern movement post-WWII was that it took the system of democratic centralism from the state level to the inter-state level. This was driven by the noble goal of finally breaking down the petty national divisions that bound human society for all of its existence through grasping the historic opportunity presented by the 20th century socialist revolutions and the historic atmosphere of internationalism.

The problem is that, in practice, inter-state democratic centralism led essentially de facto to the leadership of the socialist bloc by the first worker's state, the USSR. This would not be so intolerable if it weren't for the coincidence that nearly all socialist states that came into existence after WWII, with the sole exception of the DDR, were countries that had been the historic victims of colonialism and imperialist control where the indigenous populations had always yearned to finally take control of their own nations. This was true across the socialist world - of Poland, of Czechoslovakia, of Yugoslavia, of China and of the DPRK. The socialist revolutions were therefore also simultaneously struggles for national liberation. For these countries to win their independence and sovereignty - only to immediately be expected to subsume themselves under Comintern democratic centralism as led by the USSR - posed a serious tension that eventually snapped to catastrophic consequences. Comintern internationalism and inter-state democratic centralism were therefore arguably noble ideas, yet also ultimately idealistic, utopian and unfortunately ahead of their time. Implemented in the context of the mid-20th century, they could only end up clashing with the historical conditions of the USSR's new fraternal socialist partners.

No Soviet leader seems to have truly ever grasped this contradiction, including Stalin. The split with Yugoslavia, through his quite heavy-handed attempt to depose Tito within the CPY and then expelling Yugoslavia from the Comintern, was one of Stalin's actual and serious errors. Kate Hudson's work "Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia" argues that this was all precipitated by Tito's refusal to submit to Soviet supervision of its foreign policy under Comintern democratic centralism. MLs of the day largely sided with the USSR and denounced "Titoism" for its introduction of market forces as a horrifying betrayal. Tito's refusal to submit to democratic centralism (i.e. the CPSU) was then portrayed as akin to Trotsky's own actions. Obvious, given the conditions of AES today, principled MLs are more sympathetic to the aims of the CPY, but the Yugoslavs at the time were virtually ostracized. Yugoslavia was then isolated from the entire socialist bloc with all Soviet aid withdrawn and it is alleged by Hudson that the CPSU promoted several purges in the other Parties in Europe to remove "Titoist sympathizers."

This inevitably forced the SFRY to turn to the West and exacerbated its experiment with market socialism, which the USSR denounced, into an outright submission to Western capital in many aspects in order to receive desperately needed assistance for its post-war reconstruction, introducing various institutional contradictions that would later culminate in the IMF debt spiral that the SFRY found itself in the 1980s. The refusal by the CPSU to allow Yugoslavia to propose a Balkan federation with Bulgaria was also perceived by the CPY as Moscow's fear of an enlarged socialist state becoming a rival within the Comintern. The situation deteriorated to the extent that the West's scaremongering tactic of the week became that of the "imminent Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia."

The fracture between the CPSU and the CPY echo the later Sino-Soviet quite tellingly and this is likely by its nature indicative of a general defect in Soviet inter-socialist state policy. In 1989, Deng gave an extremely frank speech to Gorbachev during the latter's state visit on the history of Sino-Soviet relations from the Chinese perspective and he himself characterized it like this:

I should say that starting from the mid-1960s, our relations deteriorated to the point where they were practically broken off. I don’t mean it was because of the ideological disputes; we no longer think that everything we said at that time was right. The basic problem was that the Chinese were not treated as equals and felt humiliated. However, we have never forgotten that in the period of our First Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union helped us lay an industrial foundation.

If I have talked about these questions at length, it is in order to put the past behind us. We want the Soviet comrades to understand our view of the past and to know what was on our minds then. Now that we have reviewed the history, we should forget about it. That is one thing that has already been achieved by our meeting. Now that I have said what I had to say, that’s the end of it. The past is past.

More contacts are being made between our two countries. After bilateral relations are normalized, our exchanges will increase in depth and scope. I have an important suggestion to make in this regard: we should do more practical things and indulge in less empty talk.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1989/196.htm

The Soviet policy of Comintern and socialist bloc leadership through a form of inter-state democratic centralism by design prevented the treatment of fraternal states as equals. There was already the power, resource and economic asymmetries between the USSR and every other socialist state that prevented any claim to equality on material grounds and all of that combined with such a policy meant counterparts like Yugoslavia and later China found it difficult to see the relationship as one between equals. Given that the USSR's socialist partner states were nearly all countries with histories of national subjugation and thus had a particular desire to be treated as a sovereign and independent polity for once, the potential for relationship conflicts was, in a sense, inevitable and such a dynamic of "inequality" was what Deng himself identified as the actual root problem that defined the Sino-Soviet relationship.

To that end, it could be argued that the USSR carried through with such a mentality all the way to the very end with Gorbachev, who completely went over Honecker's head to discuss the terms of selling out the DDR to Kohl and the US directly, something that Honecker's memoirs written in jail (after being sold out by Yeltsin who allowed him to be extradited from Moscow to the former DDR in a perverse BRD orchestrated show trial on his "crimes") bitterly recount.

This makes sense on multiple levels, both from an ideological level and also from a pragmatic standpoint.

This end of detente visibly began with the demolition of that Unification Arch a while back and pausing the reconciliation initiatives like the "unified Korea" Olympic teams since the 2010s. This recent turn away from the goal of "unification" is a rather important ideological step for the DPRK because that aspiration, while noble, had always risked putting the cart before the horse, as the history of 20th century socialism showed.

In the DDR, the desperation for "unification" highlighted by the reception to BRD Ostpolitik prevented the development of an independent national identity. This meant that when capitalist restoration succeeded, the DDR was unilaterally annexed into the BRD by Kohl, who infamously managed to warp the "We are the People" protests into a "We are One People" color revolution. Any semblance of bargaining power for these "one people" of the DDR disappeared with the state. There was then the disgusting phenomenon of BRD landlords swarming into the former DDR to reclaim their "old" property and land, a kind of "Nakba" narrative except the fascists were the ones holding onto the keys. The DDR is a cautionary tale that unification cannot be done at any cost. In truth, it would be better for the Korean peninsula to be permanently fractured for the foreseeable future if the only alternative for the DPRK is a DDR-style "unification." As such, it wouldn't hurt to ideologically de-emphasize the concept of "unification" within Korean society, which ending this detente will contribute towards.

From a pragmatic level, there is actually little benefit for the DPRK to maintaining relations with the current regime in South Korea. Its present leadership has completely embraced South Korea's vassal status not just to the US but also doubly to Japan, surrendering unilaterally on longstanding issues like comfort women and just this week inviting Japanese troops to be stationed on Korean soil without requiring its legislature's permission. This disregard for South Korea's dignity is plainly to forcibly bind South Korean foreign policy to the US-Japanese military bloc in the New Cold War. Remarkably, this is happening under a Korean Milei who won the 2022 election by a mere 0.73% - who has eliminated any South Korean foreign policy autonomy through the stirring electoral mandate of a 247K vote margin of 32.5M.

Given this context, the DPRK faces minimal downsides in reducing relations. This opens the door for future engagement if a more reconciliation-focused leader, similar to Moon Jae-In, comes to power. In such a scenario, the DPRK could easily propose reconnecting severed ties, including these literal severed roads, which would generate positive headlines in South Korea for that counterpart's approval ratings without making significant concessions.

Given the scale of what took place and the response from the West not just to dismiss it but to justify and even celebrate it; given that this act of terrorism occurred exactly a week from 9/11, I think it's time to finally talk about 9/11 and though, yes, while inserting the two decade boilerplate about condemning terrorism and recognizing the innocent lives lost, to assess what it really meant.

Who “won” after 9/11?

It has been said endlessly in the two decades since 9/11 that the attacks that day permanently ended the unipolar euphoria of the US Cold War victory: it derailed the consolidation of US unipolarity by diverting it into two decade-long West Asian entanglements. Especially nowadays with the US unipolar status in complete disarray, you frequently see US policy makers and the Washington think tank blob cry crocodile tears about what a "gift" 9/11 was to China. This is not necessarily untrue, Bush had been priming for a confrontation with China even as he allowed its entry into the WTO. Then 9/11 happened and it wasn't until Obama, exactly ten years later, that finally formalized the policy shift of the "Pivot to Asia,” which due the innumerable contradictions of US hegemony forcing it to react to Europe and (once again) West Asia, is still a “work in progress” in the present day.

The US fixation with its West Asian conflicts did allow China a breathing space for much of an additional decade until Trump finally took the US jumping with both feet into the New Cold War. Though there was always the Washington think tank cope as the US got bogged down that the puppet Afghanistan project was actually a 5D chess move that would allow a US presence right on the doorstep of Western China and meant the two decade occupation would allow the US to have its cake and eat it too, the total rout of the US with its 2021 Saigon moment nullified even that.

There used to be rather infamous op-eds from NYT and what-not, once the 9/11 self-censorship taboo faded a little, asking rhetorically if "Bin Laden won?" From the perspective of US unipolar hegemony, it does look like the attack did an incalculable damage not through the event itself but the US outsized reaction to it. However, is US hegemony really what matters most to the US political ruling class, "über alles?"


The specific attacks of 9/11 didn’t attack the elementary schools, they didn’t attack LGBT clubs, they didn’t attack parades; Americans would target those places themselves. They attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If the other plane didn’t crash land in Pennsylvania, the consensus based on its DC bound flight path after two decades is still that It would have likely been flown into the White House or the US Capitol building. As such the targets were principally the financial elite, the military elite and the political elite.

There was supposed to have been a precedent set with Pearl Harbor that the United States was never to be attacked, or in Roosevelt’s own words in his “Day of Infamy” speech: “will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The consequence for Pearl Harbor was the two nuclear bombs and the permanent semi-occupation and vassalage of the perpetrating Japan to the present day.

Pearl Harbor: the previous attack on “America”

As Daniel Immerwehr wrote in “How to Hide an Empire,” in the eyes of the US political elite like Roosevelt, an attack on Hawaii, nearly 5000 miles from Washington DC, was more of an opportunity than a threat to themselves. Not only that, in the just recently forcibly annexed settler-colonial holding of Hawaii (still not a state) far from the continental US, there was a chance that the average American also would fail to see it as a threat. As such, Roosevelt’s draft edits allude to an anxiety that the American people wouldn’t get it at all:

[…] when it came to Hawai‘i, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. Though the territory had a substantial white population, nearly three quarters of its inhabitants were Asians or Pacific Islanders. Roosevelt clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai‘i as foreign. So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost. An American island, where American lives were lost—that was the point he was trying to make.

Roosevelt insisted: “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.” Yet taken from the eyes of the American ruling class, Pearl Harbor, in comparison to 9/11, is respectively akin to someone setting your front lawn (which you just expanded in size by forcibly seizing from a neighbor) on fire compared to literally coming for your jugular with a knife. You can see someone setting your lawn on fire as the greatest possible threat to you only if you can never even conceive the possibility of someone being able to take a blade to your throat. The greatest threat to the ruling class was supposed to be just to their way of life, not to their very lives themselves.

The Unthinkable becomes Thinkable and the Impossible is actually Done

9/11 not only negated the historical meme that Americans propagandized themselves with that “they were geographically gifted” on their stolen continent and “untouchable,” buried under lines of defence from enemies with territorial meat-shields like Hawaii, Guam, Japan, Britain, Western Europe and West Berlin that would-be adversaries would be forced to chew through first like layers on an onion; it also struck at not principally the working class masses but the literal elite themselves. Generations of American imperialism was supposed to have created an utterly vast breathing space and this “lebenstraum” was meant to make the continental US on which the US ruling class inhabit untouchable.

Even in the scenario of "World War 3," so long as it remains conventional, in the geo-strategic calculus of the US ruling class, those immense territorial meat shields that it set up (for China: the first island chain, then the second, then the third; for Russia: the former USSR territories like Ukraine, then the former Warsaw Pact NATO, then Western Europe) mean that it would take a "World War 4" for a conflict to conceivably reach the continental US, let alone threaten the elite themselves who could scurry into their bunkers in Cheyenne mountain if things get too hot.

9/11 cut past all of this calculus like a hot knife through butter and brought the truly utterly unthinkable to realization, not only was the US squatter state on occupied Turtle Island subject to attack but the ruling class themselves were the ones specifically targeted. It’s like the hierarchy of needs where you never realized, through your privileged material conditions, there was an even lower base on the pyramid of your needs that you had been always standing on and which could be pulled out from under you.

This is the reason for the overwhelming and psychopathic US military response and the two decade commitment to devastate West Asia. The lesson needed to be taught that that what was make thinkable and possible must be made unthinkable and impossible again. Of course, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, but though the emperor was revealed to have no clothes, the world needed to be made to pretend he was still fully clothed - at gunpoint.

Through this, it didn’t really matter whether Iraq and Afghanistan could be built into stable client regimes to service US hegemonic interests, but that as much devastation as possible should be done so that every time someone glances at the misery of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, they would link it to the US and think that “this all happened because 9/11 attacked the US.” By such aims, the bigger the bloodbath, the better. Through this, the US ruling class really did achieve their goals, despite the ultimate failure of both invasions and occupations.

The Contradiction of Life and Way of Life

Does all this mean that the much bemoaned “wasted decade” for the US is actually a rare species of camouflaged victory if you look further into it? No, that would stretch the provided thesis too far. What the US reaction to 9/11 shows that there is a contradiction between the interests of US hegemony, which benefits all Americans through the dividends of its financial imperialism and the interests of the US ruling class, which benefit only itself and its preservation, which 9/11 was experienced as a startling reminder to them.

That there exists a distinction between the two, though in normal times both are aligned and in near perfect sync, is what 9/11 exploited and the US response has shown to exist more clearly than in any other moment in American history. The outsized retaliation by the ruling class to reassert their “untouchability” through the “counterterrorism decade” was actually a net negative for both normal Americans and for the system of US hegemony, but the ruling class did not care because 9/11 was what shown them that - when forced to choose - their individual life were more important than their way of life.

To put it in analogy, this is akin to a business owner unhesitatingly sacrificing the profitability of their own business, making it far less competitive to rivals, by a fire sale of assets and diverting earnings to pay for their own emergency surgical procedure. At that point, to that individual, there are bigger things at stake when made to realize they are forced to choose, even though what normally matters is their business and it suffers through this opportunity cost. Becoming cognizant of this contradiction is the most revealing lesson of the US response to 9/11.

Here's a translation of the actual statute, which I would rather sift through than read the Western coverage take on this:

Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on the Implementation of a Gradual Delay in the Statutory Retirement Age

(Adopted on September 13, 2024, at the 11th Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the National People's Congress)

In order to thoroughly implement the Central Committee's decision on the gradual delay of the statutory retirement age, adapt to the new demographic situation in China, and make full use of human resources, the 11th Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the National People's Congress decides as follows:

Gradual Adjustment of Retirement Age:

Men and Women: The statutory retirement age for male employees will be gradually extended from the current 60 years to 63 years over a period of 15 years. For female employees, the retirement age will be extended from the current 50 and 55 years to 55 and 58 years, respectively, over the same period.

Principles for Implementation: The gradual delay in the statutory retirement age will adhere to principles of incremental adjustment, flexible implementation, differentiated progress, and overall coordination.

Government Responsibilities: Local governments at all levels should actively respond to aging demographics, encourage and support employment and entrepreneurship, safeguard workers' rights, and coordinate efforts related to pension and childcare services.

Approval of Detailed Measures:

The "Measures for the Gradual Delay of the Statutory Retirement Age" issued by the State Council are hereby approved. The State Council may supplement and refine these measures as needed.

Effective Date and Previous Regulations:

This decision will come into effect on January 1, 2025. The provisions regarding retirement age in the "Interim Measures on the Placement of Elderly, Disabled, and Sick Cadres" and the "Interim Measures on the Retirement and Resignation of Workers" approved by the 5th National People's Congress Standing Committee at its 2nd meeting will no longer apply.

Measures for the Gradual Delay of the Statutory Retirement Age

Guided by Xi Jinping's Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and in deep implementation of the spirit of the 20th National Congress and the 2nd and 3rd Plenaries of the 20th Central Committee, and considering factors such as life expectancy, health levels, population structure, educational attainment, and labor supply, the following measures are enacted for the gradual delay of the statutory retirement age:

Article 1: Starting January 1, 2025:

For male employees and female employees whose statutory retirement age is 55 years, the retirement age will be gradually extended by one month every four months until it reaches 63 years and 58 years, respectively.

For female employees whose statutory retirement age is 50 years, the retirement age will be gradually extended by one month every two months until it reaches 55 years. National regulations will take precedence where applicable.

Article 2:

Starting January 1, 2030, the minimum contribution period for receiving basic pensions will be gradually increased from 15 years to 20 years, with an annual increment of six months. Employees reaching the statutory retirement age but not meeting the minimum contribution period may extend their contributions or make a lump-sum payment to meet the minimum requirement and receive monthly pensions.

Article 3:

Employees meeting the minimum contribution period may voluntarily choose flexible early retirement, up to three years before the statutory retirement age, provided that the retirement age is not lower than the original statutory age of 50 or 55 for women and 60 for men. Employees reaching the statutory retirement age may also choose flexible delayed retirement, up to three years, with mutual agreement from their employer. The implementation must respect employees' wishes and cannot involve compulsory or disguised compulsory retirement.

Article 4:

The country will improve the pension insurance incentive mechanism, encouraging longer, higher, and later contributions for higher benefits. The calculation of basic pensions will be linked to individual contribution years and actual contributions, and personal account pensions will be determined based on retirement age and account balance.

Article 5:

The country will implement a priority employment strategy, promoting high-quality and full employment. The employment public service system will be improved, and lifelong vocational training will be enhanced. Support for youth employment and entrepreneurship will be provided, and job development for older workers and assistance for disadvantaged individuals will be strengthened. Measures against age discrimination in employment will be enhanced, and incentives for employers to hire older workers will be introduced.

Article 6:

Employers hiring workers beyond the statutory retirement age must ensure that workers receive fair wages, rest, labor safety and hygiene, and work injury protection. The rights of flexible employment and new employment form workers will be protected, and paid annual leave systems will be improved.

Article 7:

For individuals receiving unemployment benefits with less than one year until statutory retirement age, the duration of benefits will be extended to the statutory retirement age. During the period of gradual delay, the unemployment insurance fund will pay pension insurance contributions for these individuals as required.

Article 8:

The country will standardize and improve policies on early retirement for special occupations. Workers engaged in underground, high-altitude, high-temperature, or especially strenuous physical labor, as well as those working in high-altitude areas, may apply for early retirement if they meet the conditions.

Article 9:

The country will establish a coordinated pension service system combining home, community, and institutional care, and develop an inclusive childcare service system.

Obviously, the 60-55 retirement age has been one of the policies the goons at places like The Economist have long crocodile teared China on and that tantrum had been greatly memed on by leftists. Most 20th century socialist states maintained a retirement age around 55-60. This is a fairly sizeable clawback of a major worker's concession, there's no really denying it. The age increases to numbers like 63 and 58 for men and women respectively seem to be anticipating a further second increase to 65 and 60, whereupon the statutory age for white and blue collar working women might be even equalized at that stage (i.e. 55 to 60 for the latter). That is the game played in the West, where they seem to be gradually working their way to establishing the full pension retirement age at 70 with current "stretch-goal" numbers like 67 (US, Germany), 68 (UK).

The immediate one-two punch is the basic pension contribution period increase from 15 to 20 years (5 years) when retirement age increased only 3 years. Beyond the policy measures themselves, I would say that the promulgation of this statute indicates that the CPC believes that the demographic issue, and specifically, the decline in the overall working age population are real and rather serious if they would adjust the retirement age like this, a policy that affects the entire population and thus will have inevitable knock-on effects.

Of course, it's arguable that this would merely be a bandage solution to artificially boost the working population numbers rather than addressing the root of the problem. If the CPC weren't currently undergoing through the planned demolition of the real estate sector bubble, I would be seriously concerned at a lack of willingness in addressing, or even identifying, the base causes of the contemporary Chinese demographic issue.

Now this is character development.

If this doesn't end up as a typical memorandum nothing burger, this could potentially lead to levels of basedness in gaming unseen since Disco Elysium. There's already collaboration between the two industries, Atomic Heart apparently only secured funding through principally an investment from Tencent according to its devs.

China's biggest cultural export issue is the (understandable) restrictions against political and ideological products, especially in gaming where most historical settings then are only wuxia or classical literature-derived like ROTK games or Black Myth Wukong. This is understandable given the absolutely justifable concerns of loose restrictions causing historical nihilism and under the current conditions of siege socialism, treats like video game are frankly irrelevant in that context of the preservation of AES. Additionally, any "red" cultural product released for an international audience would be immediately cast as "communist propaganda" by the West, who are still desperately trying to plagiarize their old Cold War playbook and find a way to convince Global South capitalist ruling classes that China is "out to get them" just like the USSR "was." Incidentally, I saw a transcript of a Chinese MOFA press conference from a couple days ago where Reuters tried to entrap the spokesperson into saying that the recent wildly financially successful Wukong game was "supported by the government" so that likely they could immediately put out a press release framing the game as a "government-sponsored cultural invasion" like they've done with the Confucious Institutes. Instead, the spokesperson deftly deflected with "haven't heard of it but sounds neat."

Russia's biggest cultural export issue is that they have plenty of developers with leftist leanings, like the Atomic Heart team, but the current neoliberal governance in Russia is nervous of overly promoting Soviet and Communist nostalgia and the current Western cancellation frenzy on Russian works means that there is no significant infrastructure and financial support to promote and protect those leftist devs. Atomic Heart developer Mundfish had to relocate to Cyprus and if you read their interviews, they don't mention "Russia" even once. Isolated devs in the worst case end up as ZA/UM did.

I might be now completely on hopium, but if this can amount to genuine collaboration, both sides could have their cake and eat it too: we could finally get a proper game about Stalingrad without the "Enemy at the Gates" million man rush propaganda and a grand strategy game where the devs don't nerf Communism because it's too efficient (Victoria 3). Chinese devs could excuse the presence of socialist political themes on the Russian side and the Russians could vice versa blame shift to prevent Western media from effectively pinning it as "Chinese red propaganda" or "funding the Russian invasion."

Or this could be just a pretext to pumping out endless remakes of Tetris.

The issue with studying the collapse of the USSR is that everyone has an opinion on it and very few are principled Marxist-Leninist assessments, as K&K describe in the first chapter.

I'd recommend Carlos Martinez's Why Doesn’t the Soviet Union Exist Anymore? for a brief but updated synthesis of K&K's work once you're finished, it helps in hammering in the main points.

The absolute funniest thing is that whenever something like this happens, including the literal day after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in Feb 2022, there's the current crop of "realist" Kissinger/Brzezinski wannabes like that Meerswhatever freak screaming in ghoulish rags like Foreign Affairs "not to forget about China!" and waving around RAND Corp PDFs trying to remind the Washington blob that "China is still the real long term adversary!"

They've been getting completely sidelined for the past two years in every subsequent geopolitical moment since Ukraine because they don't understand that the irrational greed inherent of US hegemony can't stand getting challenged on a single inch of its imperial sway anywhere on the planet.

That's just the pre-New Cold War early-mid 2010s reddit r/worldnews top comment copypasta that would appear every time in a DPRK-related thread. "Oh, the only reason South Korea isn't reincorporating the DPRK East Germany-style is because China fears the North Korean hordes ("Norks") flooding in and uncontrollably eating all the grain in China with giant spoons after having been famined by "rocketman" Kim."

Sino-Korean relations are actually a very fascinating study that go beyond Western propaganda's vibes based assertions of "dependence" and "vassalage."

It's important to establish a macroscopic view of the Sino-Korean relationship to understand the material conditions which underpin it today. The basis of the relationship dynamics between China and the DPRK go back to the late Qing Dynasty which, to be plain, completely abandoned Korea to the predations of Japanese imperialism. The Korean Joseon government had refused to establish relations with Japan explicitly due to their loyalty to China and (misplaced) faith in its capacity to come to Korea's rescue as the Ming once did against Japan's invasion in the late 16th century. The Qing, having just lost their own war against Japan, were in no position to do so. The Japanese pretext for initiating its imperialist assault on Korea actually began with the pretext of "opening it up" as a direct result of this Korean diplomatic refusal. This soon forced Korea to sign its first unequal treaty with Japan and began the catastrophically traumatic Japanese invasion of Korea. The sense of Qing China having failed to live up to its obligations, and with such calamitous consequences for Korea, is the historical essence which permeates both Chinese and Korean perceptions.

This sense of past failure in historical obligations alongside socialist solidarity, a further indebtedness to Korean aid against Japan in Northeast China and, yes, pragmatic realpolitik calculus towards counter-containing the expansion of the American containment doctrine from reaching the Yalu River, were the reasons why China intervened in the Korean War. Following this, the China-DPRK relationship was actually the inverse of the big nation-small nation power dynamic for most of the 20th century, precisely because both sides were deeply historically cognizant of not making the relationship seem like such, particularly since China, following the Sino-Soviet split, had a vested interest in not making itself also appear to be the overbearing big brother when it was simultaneously accusing the USSR of being a "big nation chauvinist" within the socialist world.

To this end, the power asymmetry of the relationship under Mao actually came to skew towards the DPRK, with Mao personally offering Kim Il Sung de facto military and administrative control of Northeast China as the DPRK's "great hinterland" and the border around Mount Paektu/Changbaishan was amended so that the DPRK would possess half of the mountain alongside its highest peak. At a time where the Sino-Soviet rupture had isolated China from fraternal nations that sided with the USSR, such as Mongolia and Vietnam, it became imperative for China to maintain its friendship with the DPRK. The DPRK under Kim Il Sung therefore not only benefitted from such asymmetry, but also could always fall back on the triangular relationship with the USSR to further cushion its position.

The Chinese perception of the Mao era relationship here is very telling, because Deng Xiaoping actually articulated it when the DPRK tried to block China's normalization process with South Korea: "We should draw lessons from our dealings with North Korea. We should not give the North Koreans the wrong impression that whatever they ask for we will give them."

Deng saw China's relationship with the DPRK as not only asymmetric, but also the teleological next domino to fall over after the ruptures in similar relationships where China once gave great sacrifices to maintain: “Of course, the North Koreans are unhappy. Let it be. We should prevent them from dragging us into trouble. We have made huge efforts to aid Vietnam, Albania, and North Korea. Now Vietnam and Albania have fallen out with us. We should be prepared for the third one [North Korea] to fall out with us, though we should try our best to prevent that from happening.”

This perception, became coupled with revisionist views of the Korean War brought about through Western narratives that "if only China didn't intervene (and humiliate America and the 'United Nations' coalition by fighting them to a stalemate), America might have even let China have Taiwan back," which resonated particularly in the midst of the 3rd Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1990s.

When China's FM informed Kim Il Sung that it was going to normalize relations with South Korea, Kim allegedly responded "The DPRK will adhere to socialism and will overcome any difficulties on its own.” This mindset, along with the collapse of the USSR, is what led the DPRK to pursue an independent nuclear program outside of China's nuclear umbrella. The disappearence of the USSR, its abandonment by Yeltsin's Russia and the semi-estrangement with China following the latter's normalization with the South at the end of the 20th century would have held undeniable parallels to the Qing failure to rescue Joseon Korea at the end of the 19th century. This justified, from the DPRK's perspective, the idea that only with its own nuclear capabilities, could it be truly safe.

The explicit statement that the DPRK could not depend on China's nuclear umbrella would have undoubtedly stung, which is one reason why China's response against the nuclear missile tests in the 2000s was explicit condemnation, but I'd argue the more important reason, and the reason why Russia also joined China in supporting the American annual renewal of sanctions in the UNSC is the, in their view, disastrous precedent in terms of non-proliferation. If the DPRK could argue that the Chinese and Russian nuclear umbrellas were no longer sufficient, US-aligned lackeys like Japan and South Korea could also use it as a pretext to develop their own nuclear weapons. The nuclear proliferation of the DPRK has been the defining impediment hamstringing the last two decades which contributes to the undercurrents of tension in the Sino-Korean relationship. To be clear, the two countries are still allies and China's treaty with the DPRK is the only explicit alliance it has in effect today, though Western propaganda and Chinese liberals have both tried to downplay its durability (the latter out of the typical Chinese liberal behavior of wanting to Gorbachev China's interests to throw to the West in return for a pat on the back).

The New Cold War has changed the dynamics of East Asian geopolitics considerably as both Japan and South Korea (under its latest President who shifted his country's entire foreign policy position to outright fealty to the US and Japan through his stirring democratic mandate of a 0.73% margin victory) have now openly sided with the US. This outright alignment with the US lessens China's fear of condoning DPRK proliferation in affecting its bilateral decision making. This fear, that condonement would lead to the proliferation of the US vassals, is now less significant as there's now a non-trivial chance they'll do it regardless of what China's position is or if the DPRK has nukes, since their principal target has now shifted explicitly to China itself.

Last week, actually, the biggest diplomatic shift for the DPRK occurred in that this year, when the annual March DPRK sanction supervision UNSC resolution came up for renewal, it was vetoed by Russia and abstained by China. This is a promising sign that the necessity to comply with the punitive sanctions by China (and Russia, for that matter), which has hamstrung the enhancement of Sino-Korean relations since, may now begin to be alleviated.

For further readings, I'd reccommend Shen, Z. and Xia, Y. 2018. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976. Columbia University Press. As can be guessed by the "Western University Press" publishing association, this is a fairly lib take by Chinese liberals who I surmise, through the overarching narrative in this work, wanted to make a case to sell out the DPRK to the Trump era US in hopes of this somehow improving China-US relations, so their modus operandi is to downplay the resilience of the Sino-Korean relationship and to highlight Chinese grievances. However, the fact that they're university professors tenured in China prevents them from making any outright chud takes and so the work is useful and informative so long as this is kept in mind.

UNSC resolutions are prima facie binding unless stated otherwise. It's a opt-out circumstance. Article 25 of the UN Charter simply states: "The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter." See this post for the legal explanation: https://verfassungsblog.de/why-todays-un-security-council-resolution-demanding-an-immediate-ceasefire-is-legally-binding/

The US claim that the resolution is "non-binding" is simply the expression of a cynical disdain for the real international legal order under the UN Charter prevailing for once over the interests of its "rules-based order."

The US position is simply trying to eat its cake and have it too: they want to escape the international notoriety of imposing yet another veto, thereby forcing them to abstain, and yet "narratively veto" the resolution by claiming it's actually "non-binding" and thus as worthless in promulgation as it would have been if it was actually vetoed by the US.

It's not going to happen.

Nor would its proposed forced sale be "level headed" or a good "long term strategy." The rightful focus from leftists on the social health impact of short form apps has apparently also consequently given tunnel vision from seeing what's really at stake in the eyes of the American state apparatus.

Yes, Bytedance's CEO is a complete wannabe comprador who constantly stated how much he worships the West before his company got into the crosshairs, but we've been seeing the "Tiktok Forced Sale" skit happening for 4 years now. Trump first tried to do it before in the summer of 2020 as a last feather in his cap before the election. His attempt failed as well.

At that time, in reaction to the attack on Tiktok actually, China released a technology export law restricting the sale or transfer of sensitive algorithms. That's what this is really about on the business side, the US wanting to steal a free lunch from China and setting a long lasting precedent through Tiktok's forced sale so that future Chinese tech can be expropriated. This happened to France when Alstom was forcibly sold to GE back in 2015. That export law is what's going to ultimately block this forced sale attempt. It would be better in China's interests for Tiktok to be banned than allowed to be stolen by the US.

Additionally, what should be said is that Tiktok really is a "threat" to the US state apparatus. All the whitewashing, misdirection and partisanship over the Twitter Files evidently has successfully misdirected people from the real bombshell confirmations they showed. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have active communication channels with US state officials, where they algorithmically boost accounts and content created by the US and suppress the visibility of contrary content via email contact directives.

Tiktok USA/Global, while basically controlled by US personnel, including ex-NSA officials, at this point, is still ultimately connected to its parent company. This makes Tiktok a "perpetual outsider" and the establishment of similar censorship channels much more vulnerable to exposure, at least psychologically. The existence of Tiktok is, with no exaggeration, a massive challenge to the US state's complete hegemonic monopoly on social media platforms in the English speaking world.

This is why the attempts to ban Tiktok are currently the predominant "China" concern and have been for the past 4 years.