"[Russia and China] are basically natural enemies [...] China needs Russia land (sic) [...] but because of pure stupidity they were driven together," laments Trump in an interview about the "natural friction" that even a "minor student of history" would have recognized and exploited.

Given that this was on Trump's mind following the summit, I'd be pretty sure all that talk during the conference about "Arctic cooperation" was likely about US propositions of shutting out non-Arctic Sea states like China (and potentially others) from the region, since China potentially developing the Arctic corridor through the Siberian coast would completely bypass the whole Canada-Greenland-Panama annexations scheme to control global shipping lanes from the "roaming Chinese and Russian ships" that Trump had been publicly obsessed over back in January.

The immediate flareup seems to have been exacerbated by Hun Sen, who is one of those corrupt dynasty building decades-long leaders that pop up in post-socialist countries. Hun Sen was a Khmer Rouge cadre who fled to Vietnam and returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 and became Prime Minister of the SRV-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea and remaining in that position as Cambodia went through its capitalist restoration until 2023 when he passed the office to his West Point-educated son, Hun Manet.

A few months ago, there was a Thai soldier that was injured by a landmine while patrolling the border area which Thailand alleged was freshly planted by Cambodia. Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who was Thailand's PM's at the time, then called Hun Sen who was a family friend of her father, a former Thai PM himself. She downplayed the incident as the Thai Army trying to provoke trouble and tried to lean on her family history with Hun Sen during the call by calling him "uncle." This call blew up in her face because it turns out Hun Sen had recorded the entire conversation and shared it with others in his staff, when it was leaked.

Paetongtarn caught flack from the Thai Army, the Thai population who were outraged at her conflict of interest relationship with Cambodia and she was subsequently suspended from office and her father, the ex-PM Thaksin is under criminal investigation for "lese majeste." Now with the peacemaker out of the way, the Thai Army is making a show of force against Cambodia for the sake of its reputation as ASEAN's second most "Westernized" military (after Singapore), which could escalate until both sides find a way to de-escalate with grace.

As for geopolitics, both are economic partners of China and are pivotal for China's plan to diversify its trade away from the West into ASEAN through the international rail networks being constructed within both Cambodia and Thailand until they ultimately reach continental Malaysia and Singapore. Both countries have been subject to a fair amount of recent hem and haw from the Western national security think tank blobs. Thailand's institutional apparatus rejected one of those cookie-cutter NED mass produced Harvard-educated Western sycophants as PM because he campaigned to curb the power of the Munich-dwelling Thai monarch.

Cambodia has been building a naval port at Ream that is allegedly open to hosting by the PLAN, which has all those Western think tanks foaming in the mouth. Additionally, China is funding a canal called Funan Techno diverting the Mekong that would allow Cambodia to bypass Vietnam's Mekong Delta tolls and, for the West, it means that Yunnan Province in China would be theoretically connected to the SCS via the Mekong through a series of friendly countries in Laos and Cambodia. An ominous possibility (if you ignore the implausibly sheer elevation gradient from Yunnan down to the Mekong Delta).

Clearly there's more going on than just this. Hun Sen might perhaps be shoring up domestic credibility for his Pentagon-raised nepo-baby heir by inciting a military skirmish because sabotaging a Thai PM who seemed on the surface level to have been amenable to him through their family connections is an eyebrow raising choice to make. Though the force disparity between the Thai and Cambodian militaries is worth highlighting, other than the typical escalation response ladder tit-for-tat spiral, there shouldn't be any real incentive on either side for a full conflict.

I think many anti-imperialist leftists are increasingly coming to that conclusion. I recently finished reading Kyle Ferrana's "Why the World Needs China," and I can honestly say now that it's one of the most insightful leftist books published since Domenico Losurdo and Samir Amin. Before Ferrana goes on to answer nearly every major leftist question about China, its contradictions and the atrocity propaganda against it, the book first goes through an impressively cogent assessment on the material conditions of the contemporary world and where things stand. Ferrana's analysis concluded with the view that the "peace at all costs" principle of leftists and socialist states continuing up to today has been, in many ways, a consequential miscalculation. An excerpt:

Chapters One through Five showed that the United States is the strongest center of capitalist power in the world; Chapters Six through Ten showed that the PRC is the strongest center of proletarian power in the world. Though the super-empire’s mechanisms of exploitation and control have developed since the inter-imperialist rivalry era, financial capital still dominates the West, and its fundamental tendency that Lenin identified a century ago—to ever expand and ever increase its profits—is likewise unchanged. There is indeed a Thucydides Trap—not one determined merely by the military and economic power of states, but also by their class character. In order to grow, the Western bourgeoisie must eventually subdue China. If it cannot do so by subversion, sabotage, and trade manipulation, it will try to do so by force. The super-empire’s reaction can be delayed, if it can profit first by subjugating other victims (such as the Russian Federation and its other national-bourgeois enemies), but the world is finite, and as far as we know, the rate of extraction cannot increase much further; the most efficient paradigm of dispossessive accumulation yet discovered—neocolonialism—is already prevalent nearly everywhere.

A conflict therefore is inevitably coming, a death-struggle between the American financial capitalist and the Chinese peasant/worker that will span the entire planet. If the PRC declines to defend itself, it will be destroyed; but if the financial oligarchy cannot destroy the PRC, it will lose its own control over class society. Were the PRC an empire, the new Cold War would not fundamentally threaten capitalist rule; victory would simply mean one gang of capitalists replacing another, just as new, ascendant empires have absorbed old, decaying ones throughout history. But the Chinese capitalists do not control finance in their own country, the workers do, and they are not required by their class interest to seek profit and exploitation at others’ expense. A Chinese victory thus has the potential to be another paradigm shift—a progression between stages of history. We have been here before. The bipolar world of the original Cold War, dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, displayed exactly this dynamic, and the Soviet Union was defeated utterly. It would seem wise to avoid the same situation that has historically led to disaster; but this can only happen if the two superpowers cooperate in avoiding kinetic, economic, or proxy conflict, and the United States almost certainly will not. An examination of the Soviet Union’s errors, the errors of contemporary anti-imperialists, and of any qualitative differences between the conditions it faced in the twentieth century and those presently faced by the PRC, is therefore essential to predicting its surest path to victory.

The PRC currently enjoys a relatively better position than the Soviet Union at its height. It has a considerably larger share of the global economy and total world population, as well as far greater international trade leverage. Even more importantly, unlike during the First Cold War, it has pursued close cooperation with the Russian Federation despite the differences in the ruling class of each country. The infamous Sino-Soviet Split, which set the two largest socialist countries at odds with one another, has not continued into the twenty-first century, and the super-empire’s open hostility toward both Russia and China make that chapter of history unlikely to repeat itself in the near future. Political strategy, however, may still ultimately be the most decisive factor in the Second Cold War.

In the first months after the October Revolution, Lenin wrote:

". . . until the world socialist revolution breaks out, until it embraces several countries and is strong enough to overcome international imperialism, it is the direct duty of the socialists who have conquered in one country (especially a backward one) not to accept battle against the giants of imperialism. Their duty is to try to avoid battle, to wait until the conflicts between the imperialists weaken them even more, and bring the revolution in other countries even nearer. . . one must be able to calculate the balance of forces and not help the imperialists by making the battle against socialism easier for them when socialism is still weak, and when the chances of the battle are manifestly against socialism."

The fledgling Russian Soviet Republic, which at first had controlled only the urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, could not fight the forces of every imperialist power at once; indeed, the key to its survival was not war against them, but extricating itself from the First World War as quickly as it could. For the next two decades, it followed Lenin’s strategy, seeking to make peace and détente with the imperialists while it was still weak and they were still strong. Great sacrifices were made to consolidate and defend the revolution within the Soviet Union, to appear harmless before the capitalist world, and to sow discord between the empires, which were not yet united. The Second World War seemed to vindicate this strategy; as the imperialist governments of France and the UK deliberately “appeased” Nazi Germany in the hopes that it would destroy socialism in Europe for them, the Soviet Union’s maneuvering succeeded in broadening the war, such that even while encircled by Germany and the Empire of Japan, it did not face their might alone. As a result of inter-imperialist conflict, the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence expanded, bringing revolution and proletarian rule to Eastern Europe, China, Mongolia, and Korea.

Yet the Second World War was also the last inter-imperialist war. The Soviet leadership became the victim of its own success, believing that the same strategy would work again under the next stage of imperialism, which at that point had not been identified. In 1952, Joseph Stalin confidently dismissed any objections to the contrary: "[...] the capitalist countries’ struggle for markets and the desire to crush their competitors turned out in actuality to be stronger than the contradictions between the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism. [...]"

Stalin did not live to correct this error, and his successors also failed to recognize it, even as the Cold War’s imperialist bloc increasingly became not less but more united against socialism. In 1956, the Soviet Union officially adopted the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist empires. Similarly, Deng advocated a foreign policy of “keeping a low profile”—which, after the collapse of the socialist bloc and the total encirclement of the remaining socialist countries, succeeded in keeping the Party in power at the cost of integration with the capitalist world—and ever since his passing, the PRC has officially forsworn seeking any form of hegemony and has scrupulously followed its self-imposed principles of non-interference in other countries’ internal political affairs. Yet it is now obvious from the remainder of twentieth century history that inter-imperialist war was not inevitable. [...]

[...] The experiences of Japan are the clearest evidence that the inter-imperialist unity that outlived even the Soviet Union is in no danger. There would be no inter-imperialist war in the latter twentieth century, and one is not likely in the twenty-first. The greatest conflict between capitalist empires of the super-imperial era resembled nothing so much as the United States pointing a gun at an unarmed man. There is no reason to believe that the unprecedented unity among empires in the face of a socialist enemy that was a feature of First Cold War will not also be a feature of the Second, especially not now that the super-empire and neocolonialism are fully entrenched throughout the world. The PRC is therefore no more likely than was the Soviet Union to win simply through patience.

As described earlier in Chapter Eleven, the severing of the Nord Stream was in no country’s self-interest but the United States’ (and Norway’s); pipelines, railroads, bridges, ports, and other transport infrastructure of the kind that the PRC has been patiently and methodically building throughout the periphery are all vulnerable. What takes years to build can be destroyed in moments; without its own military and soft-power influence, the PRC’s long-term geopolitical strategy will soon be at a tremendous disadvantage, and it may lose what it has so painstakingly gained. In any war, hot or cold, the advantage usually lies with the side that takes the initiative. Though the PRC is still rising economically, militarily, and in every other respect, the United States has consistently acted first, through trade wars, diplomatic maneuvering, propaganda, and other provocations. It has retained its military outposts in Korea and is expanding them throughout the Pacific, [...] the Cold War blocs are re-forming, and the PRC is the de facto leader of the opposition whether the Party is ready or not. The outcome of the Second Cold War will depend heavily upon whether and in what fashion the PRC will take on this mantle of leadership.

[…] When the stage of super-imperialism began, national-bourgeois states at first sought not to resist the super-empire, but to join it—on their own terms, rather than as subservient compradors. Khomeini’s successors attempted not only to privatize state-owned enterprises and infrastructure but to attract investment from the West. In 1995, the Iranian government signed a contract with a French company to develop oil fields in the Persian Gulf. The Tehran Stock Exchange was revived. Under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran first applied to join the World Trade Organization. In 1999, President Mohammad Khatami went even further, proposing a “total restructuring” of the economy, and spoke of the importance of making Iran safe for foreign capital. […]

[…] Despite its desire for reconciliation and development, the Islamic Republic has continually experienced rejection and aggression. In 1996, the United States blocked its application to the WTO, and the one time (more recently) that it applied for a loan from the IMF, it was also denied due to U.S. influence. Even during Rafsanjani’s relatively reform-minded presidency, in which the Islamic Republic pursued integration into the global economy, new sanctions on Iran were imposed both by President Clinton’s executive orders and by the U.S. Congress. In 2002, President George W. Bush declared Iran to be part of an “Axis of Evil.” When the United States and the Islamic Republic finally agreed upon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 to ease sanctions in exchange for guarantees regarding the Iranian nuclear program, the U.S. reneged almost immediately. In 2020, on orders from President Trump, the U.S. military assassinated the Islamic Republic’s most celebrated military leader, General Qasem Soleimani. Just as it had with regard to Gaddafi’s Libya, the super-empire designated the Islamic Republic to be its enemy, and nothing less than its destruction could ever suffice.

The super-empire, continually driven to increase profits by the Western financial oligarchy, cannot permit the loss of a profitable neocolony. When a national bourgeoisie develops to the point of attaining sole control of state power, and moves to end foreign dispossessive accumulation within its own country, this means less super-profits for the imperialists; and if this national bourgeoisie were to join the group of exploiters, there would be more imperialists among which to divide even less loot. To sustain its rate of profit, the super-empire must therefore remain an exclusive club, and finds it preferable to annihilate, rather than embrace, any potential new partner […]

[…] The Islamic Republic had on a similar basis become the leading exporter of armed revolution against the super-empire’s hegemony. By the early 2000s, the super-empire had fully encircled Iran. To the east and west, the United States’ military had invaded and occupied Iran’s closest neighbors. To the north and south lay willing collaborators (Turkey and Saudi Arabia). The U.S. government had openly announced to the world that Iran was its enemy, and perhaps the next to be invaded. Lacking a nuclear deterrent, the Islamic Republic, out of self-defense, had to heavily invest in anti-imperialism, by arming and bankrolling national liberation movements throughout the Arab world.

Deterrence, of course, only works if an aggressor believes in its target’s commitment to carrying out a threat; therefore the Iranian national bourgeoisie tied itself as closely as possible with the “Axis of Resistance,” both materially and ideologically. […] Under the conditions of super-imperialism, these national bourgeoisies are essentially stuck—perpetually unable to develop into imperialists, and frequently threatened with either annihilation or de-development. This is both a boon and a curse for the global proletariat. The workers and peasants in the neocolonies find national-bourgeois states to be their strongest allies in the struggle for liberation, yet within these countries, they are similarly stuck.

I think this is as good a time as any to share a fantastic Marxist analysis on the Islamic Republic of Iran, excerpted from Chapter 4 of "Why the World Needs China" by Kyle Ferrana, which is overall an incredibly brilliant book that has my full recommendation for everyone to check out.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bourgeois Anti-Imperialism

Chapter One identified the divisions in the global periphery between the comprador bourgeoisie who collaborate with an empire to extract resources from their own country, the national bourgeoisie who seek to retain these resources for their own exclusive benefit, and the lower bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie who aspire to join one of the other groups by attaining greater capital. Just as they did in Venezuela, the less prosperous bourgeois classes have a strong incentive to eliminate the restrictions on development that comprador rule enforces upon a neocolony. This chapter will explore their goals and limitations, their relationship with the other classes, and the nature of their conflict with the super-empire. […]

[…] The Iranian Revolution of 1978 is commonly oversimplified, often called the “Islamic” Revolution due to the theocratic system that eventually emerged. More fundamental to the Revolution’s development, however, was the ongoing class struggle. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign, the population of Iran had doubled, and the working class became the most numerous—particularly in Tehran and other urban areas, as many peasant sharecroppers, unable to purchase enough farmland to live off following the Shah’s land reform program in the early 1960s, migrated by necessity to the cities. Without their support, the popular movement would have been unable to overthrow the comprador Shah. Rather than ideology—religious or communist—the essential causes of the urban proletariat’s mass mobilizations were low wages, rising rents, severe income inequality, and the insufficiency of the Shah’s reforms. Workers began a massive strike wave in 1978, culminating in a general strike in October and November which paralyzed oil production; 35,000 oil workers had gone on strike demanding wage increases. The Resolution of the Ashura March of December 1978, which the New York Times reported was attended by “several million” protestors, demanded “the right of workers and peasants to the full benefit from the product of their labor.” The Shah fled the country the following month, never to return.

As a remnant of feudalism, the landholding clergy were quite naturally conservative, yet by 1979 it was a demographic inevitability that feudalism would never be restored as the prevailing mode of production in Iran. The millions of new city-dwellers could not return to the countryside even if they wanted to, and reversing land reform was politically impossible even for a figure of Ruhollah Khomeini’s considerable influence. However, decades of repression by the Shah’s secret police had severely diminished every potentially revolutionary organization (liberal and communist alike), leaving only the clerics relatively untouched (with the exception of Khomeini himself, who had been arrested and exiled). At the height of the Revolution, the clergy therefore found itself in command of a broad alliance of classes—everyone, really—that had mobilized against the Shah.

This alliance quickly destroyed the Iranian comprador class and redistributed much of its wealth. Many wealthy pro-Western business owners followed the Shah, or else fled after the Islamic Republic was officially declared by referendum in April 1979. That summer, the revolutionary government moved to expropriate their assets, as well as nationalize all private or foreign-owned banks, insurance companies, and large-scale industry, all without compensation. Between 1979 and 1980, the nominal minimum wage was tripled, and when the rural peasantry seized 800,000 hectares of farmland from large private landholdings, the government was either unwilling or unable to return the confiscated land to its former owners.

Nevertheless, once their common enemy had been eliminated, the alliance gave way to the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. While Khomeini’s government gave to workers with its left hand, it ruthlessly crushed their independent revolutionary leadership with its right. All Marxist parties were banned and their leaders arrested. Even the Tudeh Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization which had supported Khomeini, was eventually suppressed in 1983. Throughout the 1980s, the government executed several thousand political prisoners, including not just the Shah’s former secret policemen and loyal military officers, but members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (A militant organization that had attempted to overthrow the Islamic Republic, it joined the Iraqi side during the Iran-Iraq War, and has since become a willing tool of U.S. regime-change efforts), and many communists as well. Workers’ councils, which had seized factories and organized local proletarian resistance to the Shah, were gradually disbanded or replaced by Islamic Councils more loyal to the government. Meanwhile, Iran’s secular national legislature became dominated by the petit bourgeoisie. In A History of Modern Iran, Iranian-American historian Ervand Abrahamian writes: “the Majles, which had been a debating chamber for notables in the distant past and a club for the shah’s placemen in more recent years, was now filled with the propertied middle class. For example, more than 70 percent of the deputies in the First Islamic Majles [elected in 1980] came from that class. Their fathers included 63 clergymen, 69 farm owners, 39 shopkeepers, and 12 merchants.”

Today, there can be little doubt that the Iranian bourgeoisie has developed and holds state power with a grip that is stronger now than it has ever been. In 2006, the Islamic Republic’s constitution was amended to allow the privatization of 80% of shares of government businesses (excepting the National Iranian Oil Company and several other key state-owned entities). Though implemented at a slower pace than neoliberal shock therapy, privatization has nonetheless proceeded over the last two decades, even despite strikes and protests by the affected workers. Within a few privatizing the banking sector, including Bank Saderat Iran, one of the largest state-owned banks. According to the Tehran Times in 2014, hundreds of state-owned businesses had been privatized or were slated to be privatized; by 2017, the government had privatized over half the country’s power plants, and further planned to privatize at least 80% in total. By 2019, the government formally held only a minority share—which it pledged to sell entirely by 2021—in Iran Khodro and SAIPA, two of the largest domestic car manufacturers.

Poverty has declined considerably since the Revolution, recently aided in large part by substantial direct cash transfers from the government during the early 2010s; yet hard limits to this willingness to redistribute wealth have emerged. A combination of U.S. sanctions, declining oil prices, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic disaster in Iran during the latter part of the decade. GDP per capita plunged; in 2020, the World Bank downgraded Iran back to its “lower-middle income” classification, and despite the still-existing welfare state, inflation likely outpaced wage increases, according to analysis from Iran’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs. Yet Iran’s new rich went unharmed; while two decades of progress in reducing rural poverty were erased, the government’s priority during the crisis was to support the stock market with large infusions of cash from its sovereign wealth fund, in effect sustaining private fortunes with public money. […]

“Doomerism” matters in the sense that a proper dialectical materialist analysis ought to take pessimistic signals into account and shouldn't be blinded by pure delusional optimism. I've recently been on a reading binge of pre-1989 leftist books on the USSR. Their perspectives on things, untouched by the hindsight of the later Soviet collapse, was really quite fascinating (and depressing) and it was telling that, apart from those leftists like Harpal Brar (who passed a couple months ago) that were "Stalinist" and therefore rarely took post-20th Congress Soviet leadership at their word, most completely failed to see the problems with the Gorbachevite USSR which led to the capitalist restoration within half a decade.

One example that stuck with me was a Western Soviet-sympathetic cultural anthropology written in 1985 which focused on the non-Russian nationalities in the USSR and took Khrushchev's claim as settled fact that the USSR had "solved" the issue of the nationality question. Then, in just 6 years after its publication, for various reasons, the entirety of the multinational Soviet Union was torn apart and, three decades later, what's effectively a Soviet civil war between Russia and Ukraine began. That form of sheer optimism (akin to the non-Marxist anti-imperialists like Pepe Escobar who used to BRICS-post constantly about the imminent end of dollar hegemony) should be avoided and that's why I think it's good for "doomers" like XHS who (whenever they take a break from pitching MMT, that is) try to sift through both the typical China collapse slop and the constant “it’s so joever” stuff from places like Naked Capitalism to attempt to highlight some of the contradictions within China and the endurance of the existing hegemonic system.

That said, the extreme end of doomerism can be too much. Still, it’s often understandable. The important thing to always keep in mind is that the entire point of being a socialist is about believing that there is a possibility that "the future can be better than the past if we're willing to fight for it" (to borrow a line from Steban, the Student Communist). Even with all the ongoing atrocities and depravity in the contemporary world, I think it's honestly a miracle that we're even in a situation like this at all where, very visibly, the current Western hegemonic structure is being eroded.

If the West had an actually capable piece of shit like FDR who had the capacity of imagination (such as his relationship with Stalin and his Four Policemen and UN ideas), rather than fail-sons like Clinton and Bush, the West might not have squandered its unipolar moment. Real despair was what people in the now formerly socialist countries felt in the 90s, when everything they’d worked for and believed in was suddenly ripped apart. Leftists in those places often have older family members that spiralled into life-long substance abuse or tragically took their lives from the sheer despair, hardship, cruelty and alienation of capitalist restoration. That was a level of humanitarian suffering unmatched in the entirety of our post World War 2 epoch. Someone from the r/trueanon subreddit recently posted about the WW2 veteran and Soviet poet Yulia Drunina who committed suicide in 1991.

If the neoliberals and neocons didn't kick the cold warriors like Kennan and Kissinger, who were screaming in alarm, to the curb, they might have found a way past their greed, paranoia and aversion to even remote degrees of power-sharing to bring post-Soviet oligarchic Russia into the fold. It's frankly astounding that they managed to alienate the likes Yeltsin and Putin, Russian history's most unabashed Western sycophants since the time of Peter I. With Putin on board, they could have applied coordinated pressure on China and completed the maritime and territorial encirclement to block off projects like BRI, by blockading Chinese access to inland Eurasia through Western-aligned Russian sabotage. By the time the 2010s came around, China might have been coerced into accepting a subordinate position to the US, which was the nature of the so-called “G2” deal that Obama purportedly offered and China rejected. That would truly have been the darkest timeline.

The fact that the USSR's catastrophic collapse didn't end in some thousand year American reich, even though the West had held nearly all the cards in the 90s, and that China could rise to become a new successor counterweight to that Western hegemony, though its inaction or contradictions may at times leave leftists and anti-imperialists wanting, is frankly miraculous in of itself. Of course, the infamously misguided euphoria leftists had about the "weakened" US following its defeat in Vietnam should be kept in mind. History never ends and the potential for some form of US and Western hegemonic comeback is always within the realm of possibility.

We’re still living in a world shaped by 500 years of continuous Western hegemony, both direct and indirect, and to be able to see that come apart at the seams, especially after the setbacks of 1989-91, however much of a "long dureé" process this unravelling sometimes seems, is honestly something, by the very fact that it’s happening at all, enough to make sustained nihilism or defeatism hard to justify.

It's pretty wild that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is quoting Mao to hit back at the US tariffs. It really underscores what a huge mistake it was when Khrushchev, that "poison dwarf skinhead fuck" tore down Stalin's legacy. You can almost hear all the Western "Sinologist" academics losing their minds right now, shouting, "No, you can’t quote Mao! You’re supposed to be just as ashamed of him as we made the Soviets feel about Stalin! Mao’s supposed to be an ideological weapon we use against you, not something you wield against us! Are all my Ivy League/Oxbridge-published University Press anti-Mao books for nothing?"

I think with the so-called "90 day pause" (not really a "pause" from what's so far discernible in the fine print) and the China-US tit-for-tat escalation, those those two developments should be stable enough to make it possible to finally analyze the situation of the past week for a bit without being being at the risk of rendered immediately outdated within the next hour.

With the 90-day "pause," this has in effect turned from a US trade world war into more of the same Sino-American trade war that has been ongoing since Trump I. What does this mean? It means that the pressure on China has risen far more now that the US has just stated it will fully concentrate against it, though it could be argued that the whole tariff gimmick was all about China in the end anyways.

The damage done to the markets will likely recover for a while due to political reasons since the "pause" was conceded precisely because of the one-two punch of the American world tariffs assault and China's unexpectedly resilient response, which made it unbearable for Trump's Republican oligarch backers to support, as Musk's panic illustrated. Trump and his lackeys like Navarro and Miran may have a chef's kiss plan all sketched out of restoring American manufacturing, but their great sorrow is that they and their perfect plan exist in the mud and dirt of reality, Hegelian idealism faceplanting into the material conditions of the real world. American leadership simply does not have the capacity to tell its oligarchic and financial backers to "shut up" and "bear the pain for the greater good" in the same way that China did during the first term trade war. This "pause" shores up the market from a state of total doom and gloom, which relaxes some of the political pressure on Trump.

I don't really have an opinion on whether the "pause" was a pump-and-dump market manipulation (it totally was) because regardless of the intentionality, it has wider consequences. In that way, it wouldn't be wrong to say that the Chinese response put Trump into a Catch-22. Retaining tariffs on the rest of the world to follow through with their grand plan would be politically untenable through the mounting financial damage to their financial backers, which is the ultimate limiting factor curtailing any US executive action. The US made itself into a capitalist oligarchy and it is forced to lie in the same bed it made through McCarthyist repression. Reducing and pausing tariffs on the rest of the world, as he has now chosen, would provide an avenue to retaliate and take revenge against China, but undermines his original strategic goal.

The point, as Trump's team revealed after people mocked them for tariffing random Pacific islands, was to exact a cost on manufacturers so long as they stay out of the US, no matter where else they set up. This was done to incentivize the profit-seeking calculus of manufacturing companies to determine that it was worth it to come to the US rather than anywhere else. Additionally, and more importantly, this was meant to combat China's manufacturing outsourcing strategy of "Made Abroad with Chinese Characteristics" where Chinese manufacturers went overseas to set up intermediaries in locations like Vietnam (which is why that country received among the highest tariffs), which effectively negated the entire point of the US trade war on China, which was to weaken the Chinese manufacturing sector.

I believe that Trump genuinely sought to "make a deal" with China, particularly in line with the Phase One trade agreement that he briefly secured before the onset of COVID-19 and his electoral defeat in 2020 derailed any lasting progress. Historically, the West's successes against China have often involved signing unequal treaties, which leveraged the centralizing strength of the Chinese state to enforce Western terms on China and its people. Whether Trump anticipated China's response or was genuinely surprised by it, the "pause" he was ultimately forced to concede—at the detriment to his re-shoring strategy—demonstrates the impact of China's reaction.

In any case, the US's focus is once again squarely on China, but this just represents a continuation of the Trump I trade war, a more familiar ground compared to the scenario of the global trade conflict, now put on hold. While China will suffer from this renewed US assault, its experience from the first trade war suggests it is better equipped to weather such pressures. The previous trade war allowed China to consolidate domestic capital around its self-sufficiency goals, making it more resilient. In contrast, the rest of the world, as seen during Biden's term, lacks defenses against US economic and political aggression. Trump can boast about other countries coming up to "kiss his ass," but those nations like Vietnam do so out of a lack of options.

During Biden, China largely took a passive stance, as the US lashed out indiscriminately at multiple targets. To be frank, I'd say that it would have been politically untenable, for the Chinese leadership to have voluntarily stepped forward to faceslap Genocide Joe and draw his attention towards them at that time. Now, however, the Chinese government has a compelling rationale for positioning itself as a shield to redirect American hostility away from the rest of the world and focusing it squarely on China - simply because it's been made a fait accompli through Trump's actions. Since this is what happened during Trump I, at least all the way until the one month prelude in 2020 before the beginning of the pandemic when the US assassinated Soleimani, an intensification against China can be expected to allow the rest of the world, the Global South in particular, some breathing room. This would be a disaster if China is weakened as a result, but the experience accrued from a near-decade of trade war means that China is better positioned than in any time ever and the speed of the Chinese response this time around suggests that the Chinese government knows it.

I do find the mental contortions needed for the "leak" propaganda narrative to be fairly interesting. China is so weak that the US can defeat it on its own doorstep if it tries to reunite its renegade island and yet so much a threat that a pathogen that brought down the entire planet to its knees was merely "leaked" from its research labs. You have US congressmen and think tanks fantasizing about how they'll use "tactical" nukes on Shanghai and "blow up" the Three Gorges Dam if the Chinese do a Pearl Harbor on Guam or Kadena AFB in occupied Ryukyus and harm one single precious American soldier - and yet over a million Americans, the largest single mass casualty event in American history, greater than even the Civil War, is supposedly from a Chinese leaked pathogen - and nothing happened in terms of Burger Reich "reprisal."

It's such a gimmick and you can tell the only point of all this is just to ensure that whatever pop COVID-19 history books plopped down on Barnes & Nobles shelves decades down the line will be required to mention this "China bad" angle.

This thread has had enough West Asia doomers lately, but it is true that the outlook for the Palestinian cause is going to revolve around the US policies. Trump was much more clever than Biden with respect to Palestine. His gambit in Term 1 was the slow suffocation of the Palestinian cause by bribing countries to sign onto the Abraham Accords for Israeli normalization. The Saudis under MBS were giving strong signs of being imminently about to sign on when October 7th happened. This would have been the grand prize: if the "center of Islam" recognized Israel, then all the other Gulf monarchies could opportunistically ride in on its coat-tails and the notion of normalizing relations would have been itself definitively normalized. This was Trump's asphyxiation strategy against the Palestinian cause.

Then the Al-Aqsa Flood took place and the Israeli rampage under Biden turned the Arab world completely against any arguments for normalization, to the point of potential violence against their governments if they pursued that course. Whatever military boondoggles that the US promised the Saudis became secondary to the risk of their own royal standing being threatened by alienating their populace and the fear of their prestige as the "Custodian of the Two Mosques" being diminished if they pursued normalization post-October 7th and so they put it on pause.

Trump will definitely try to restart the normalization campaign but public mood might still prevent countries like Saudi Arabia from signing on, even though MBS clearly would like to. This is the real achievement of October 7th, which is reigniting the Palestinian cause in the consciousness of the populace of the potential Abraham Accord countries. However, the overall West Asia situation is decidedly much less favorable than it was prior to October 7th. Hamas and Hezbollah are badly diminished and Iran is still evidently wracked by trauma at Soleimani's assassination by Trump and so their new "Reformist" leader is openly throwing everyone else under the bus to try to appease the US (including restarting the whole nuclear talks circus) so that it would turn its attention to another global theater. Syria has been completely flipped into simultaneously a comprador and a salafist entity and how this regime will appropriate Syria's resources, leftover military materiel and populace to serve US and Turkish interests once they've consolidated their grip on power is still unknown. The Russians are now completely out of the picture in West Asia after being evicted from their Syrian military bases. All in all, the only upside is the strengthening of Palestinian solidarity potentially stymying normalization efforts as the only thing the regional Arab governments care about more than taking bribes from the US is having popular discontent threaten their own positions.

Wow, xiaohongshu (the user) is right:. Shanghai's Party leadership really is just some liberals LARPing with hammer and sickle lapel pins if this is what they cook up. This is an idea reaching Yakolev levels of turbolibbery.

According to Mao Xiangdong, Vice President of Shanghai Institute of Technology and a member of the Municipal People's Congress [...] Learning from developed countries and embracing new technologies, restoring access to the international internet is just around the corner.

It could also boost the "AI + Entrepreneurship" boom, leading to a rise in companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Tesla, Google, Facebook, and X.

[...] helping Shanghai align with international norms. This would also give residents the freedom to use popular social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter

Tools like ChatGPT, O3, and other AI resources would be more accessible, fostering a more dynamic and innovative educational environment.

The comical thing about this rag is that it is so consistent in its cheerleading agenda for Western imperialism and chauvinism since its creation in the early 19th century that both Marx and Lenin dunked on it.

"Having stood forward as one of the staunchest apologists of the late invasion of China" is how Karl Marx himself described "that eminent organ of British Free Trade, the London Economist" back in October 1858 regarding its support for the First Opium War. In October 1859, following the Anglo-French naval bombing of the city of Guangzhou during the 1857 Battle of Canton in the Second Opium War, Marx wrote "The Economist, which had distinguished itself by its fervent apology for the Canton bombardment" Over a hundred and sixty years since then, this rag has been just as anti-China today as it was back in Marx's time. Back then, it was the apologist of British "free trade," the pretext for both the Opium Wars it supported (along with supporting the Confederacy), now that the tables have turned, the "free trade" magazine's cover illustrations now depict Chinese EV exports as akin to bombarding the Earth like a meteor shower.

This closure is referring to the Economist's "Chaguan" column, penned by a single author in Beijing yellowface-cosplaying under that Chinese column name. It was analyzed in a January 2024 King's College London report as having not a single "clearly positive" story on China despite that this journalist "travels extensively in China to produce his reports, and on-the-ground anecdotes are a strong feature":

Another source of influential reporting on China is The Economist’s Chaguan column, launched in September 2018. It takes up one page of the print version of the newspaper (in the region of 1,000 words per article), and appears most weeks (The Economist is a weekly publication). Chaguan is written solely by one journalist, David Rennie, who is based in Beijing. [...] given that this period covered the COVID-19 pandemic in China, there were numerous reports on public health (12 in total) – particularly in 2020 (the first year of COVID) and again in 2022, when China’s COVID policy faced several challenges; when China was doing better than other countries in managing COVID, it was treated less by Chaguan and the media generally. Our framing analysis identified negative coverage in 84 per cent of Chaguan’s columns, with only four reports (1.5 per cent) being coded neutral-to-positive (and none clearly positive).

[...] Chaguan echoes the practice of other media in consistently repeating and emphasising particular terms or images of China, many of which are negative. For example, when discussing the economy, China’s economic behaviour towards foreign firms or governments is often described as ‘bullying’ or ‘threatening’. The use of negative terms is most common in reports on politics. Frequent keywords used in reports on Chinese domestic politics include ‘authoritarian’/‘authority’/‘autocracy’, ‘censorship’/ ‘controlling’/‘surveillance’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘violate’/‘limit human rights’. Keywords regarding China’s foreign relations include authoritarian/autocratic, bully/cheat/harass, aggressive/reckless and blame/accuse foreign countries. These words directly define the nature of China or its behaviour as negative, and their frequent appearance in political coverage creates their links to Chinese politics, subliminally transforming the framework constructed by the media into the reader’s own perception. This constitutes a normalisation of a strongly negative picture of China’s politics.

The way that Hong Kong or Xinjiang are referred to across all of these media outlets reinforces this pattern. These two places, and the central government’s policies towards them, have become media bywords for repression and authoritarianism. They are frequently mentioned in passing in reports on topics that are not related to either place, in a way that frames China negatively: a template to plug into any story that needs evidence for Chinese ‘repression’, even if that story does not relate either to Hong Kong or Xinjiang.

Summers, Tim. 2024. "Shaping the policy debate: How the British media presents China." King's College London.

Edit: Also just found out that this particular journalist is the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie. His brother was caught in the Hong Kong heroin trade which caused their father to resign from MI6. The fact that the Economist chose a literal MI6 failson as their "Beijing bureau chief" and that the son of Britain's top spy was permitted and trusted to "travel extensively" in the country at all and LARP as a "journalist" for six years is an excessive tolerance by the Chinese government and sinks whatever sob story they spun about being finally being shown the door.