If this community actualy thought that China's only chance of saving themselves from western domination is becoming an active party in the Iran-Israel-US war (spoiler alert, Iran didnt even ask them to or ever did anything to create that contigency) then maybe we shouldnt get our money up, we dont deserve any Ws associated with us and should instead focus on groupwatches of China clickbait youtube videos and group reads of non communist geopolitical expert subtracks with readership of 500 people. Because apparently thats the level of understanding of China, the world economy and relevant trajectories we are capable of

@MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net apparently China just (not just , like 3 days ago) deployed 2x 815A electronic surveillance ships to the Persian Gulf which are some of their most modern platforms. They claimed its for antipiracy patrols but come on lol. So ,any thoughts on implications. Would it be just to pick up and collect data from f-35s and B2 deployments ? What intelligence/data sharing they could provide to iran, in real time or not, that can make a differenece defensively and offensively given whatever the capabilities iran still has. help with shot downs, ship targeting , early warning idk. Any change in movements and deployments they may force the US to do just by being there and the threat of the above?

A cope sci-fi scenario would be that China could position some j20 in bvr range or some AD battery hidden and actualy shot down a f35 or more so likely the bomber especially since the latter would have a predictable path to the nuclear site. Would the US missions even have awacs support themselves or would they be going in blind like Israel since Iran is a non threat for these platforms? Retrieving some wreckage would be very valuable for China tbh. Like if they shot smth down over iran how could the US even prove it? Iran would claim shotdown and the US would look like moron losers if they claimed china helped. Wont happen but its fun to imagine

So with China apparently experiencing the greatest surge in household consumption the world has ever seen over the last 1-2 decades and being the biggest consumer market in the world for most goods, already outperforming in per capita sales of goods any other remotely comperable in income level country, how much faster should consumption be growing for China to solve all those oh so terminal weak consumption problems? Should consumption have been growning at double the rate of gdp somehow? Should they, on a per capita basis, already be consuming near level of the average american somehow instead of idk 60% as much? Should they be eating more , buying more cars and smartphones? They are already the largest market by far of just about any product (cars, phones, appliances, furniture, luxury etc) so should they be that by multipliers of 2-3 or 5 already?

Or should they aspire to spend similar amount of money on rent and healthcare on average to catch up ?After all Chinese household consumption numbers usualy come in at levels similar to retail sales, while household consumption in the US is ~2-3x retail sales. Thats because not only ar services (largely rent, healthcare and education) a much larger burden for the american and western consumer but they are also (mis)calculated completely differenty in the chinese national accounting system which is still of leninist origin leading to these numbers above been undercounts funnily enough for china, as are ultimetaly the usualy circulated very low numbers of consumption as a % of GDP. For that and other factors uniqe to China, apples-to-apples, China’s household consumption share is probably 50-55% of GDP, only a bit lower than world average.

Even so ,Is the CPC neoliberaly holding down Chinese household consumption by having it grow only 2+ times as fast as any other country over the years instead of uhhh 4 times ? Where should and would those numbers in those graphs be if not for the missmanagement of Chinas consumer economy by the CPC? At 300% ? At what level should and chinese HH consumption be for it to become a "consumer country" or whatever ?

Greek here. First of all dont take any information from non Greek non leftist twitter accounts cause it will cause disastrous confusion.

They are a purely opportunistic, leader centered party with no platform, no program and no organization. Laughable to even call them left. Led by a former Syriza politician. They were just promoted and pushed massively by the media as the non antisystemic opposition to the ruling party on the heels of the massive anti government sentiment and rage coming from the Tempi train disaster and the entire saga of corruption and criminality that included, successful piggybacking that public discontent. At the same time there was a big collapse of syriza through the last year. So them just yelling the loudest, taking whatever populist position is possible at every issue and being given pr constantly by the media and having large amounts of voters from left populist spaces available along with apolitic people that eat the narrative the media feeds them and pick "whoever tells it like it is" led to that increase.

A total unserious opportunistic mess of a party that is doomed to not exist in 5-10 years time and will be sure to lose against the ruling government , given life by how desperate and given up people are and through the machinations of maybe the most corrupt media and political environment in the EU

Im early on on my Mandarin journey but holy fuck is Mao accent thick as shit to the point of being almost unintelligible. Do modern Chinese understand everything he says without subs ?

Idk what to think but there are some utterly apocalyptic ideas floating from and around the administration and the surrounding hack economist and advisor sphere and they even get credible coverage and op-eds in mainstream financial publications and media in the last weeks. Especialy if things detariorate debt parameter wise , there is a Fed-administration crisis and/or the less insane Miran/Bessent plans A/B dont work or even have time to work. Stuff like the administration trying to unilateraly turn all US government bonds into 100 year bonds or taxing capital flows/capital controls. Can they be that suicidal towards the dollar hegemony?

And after all this the bond market is still doing its thing. 10 year yields up again and over 4.3%. Really started to set in on what trade war with China actualy means and the countries/investors remain shaky on if us dept is worth it. Maybe Trump did actualy break something

Since Russia's new icbm tests seem to be a bit hit and miss lately and with China's test recently its important to note that while the general public in the west seem to be under the impression that Russia’s ICBMs are the faulty and unreliable ones, it is the US that actualy fields almost exclusively positively ancient barely working missiles .

The Minuteman III is by far the world's oldest ICBM still in active use as part of a nation's nuclear triad. It was originally deployed in 1970 and only had a planned service life of 10 years. It's only still operational over 50 years later because of life extension programmes but at some point, a thing is so old that there's no life left to extend. The electronic components of that era basically don't exist anymore. So you'd not just be re-engineering the missile's design, you'd be re-enginering and remaking components from the very birth of the chip industry. It's an impossible task. Which basically means as these things break down there's no fixing them.

The former STRATCOM Chief had this to say about the situation:

“Let me be very clear: You cannot life-extend the Minuteman III [any longer],” he said of the 400 ICBMs that sit in underground silos across five states in the upper Midwest. “We can’t do it at all. ... That thing is so old that, in some cases, the drawings don’t exist anymore [to guide upgrades],” Richard said in a Zoom conference sponsored by the Defense Writers Group. Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”

People joke about questionable operational readiness of Russian ICBMs but in reality, Russia has significantly more modern ICBMs in service than the US and im not even gonna mention China's buildup in quantity and quality. It's the US that should be worried about the operational readiness of its ICBMs. This is especially prominent after the highly publicising failure of 2 of the US' Minuteman III tests last November. Sure, two missile tests worked in June (one barely) but given the recency of the previous failure, another failure would have spelled absolute disaster for the US' nuclear credibility so I'm sure extra care and attention to detail was taken in ensuring that failure was not even a possibility. Problem is its douptfull that the US even has the domestic capability to replace the land portion of its nuclear triad completely without it costing like 2 trillion dollars and taking 20 years. Sure the subs will always be there and they work quite well but its interesting to see what the US will done with its land based nukes. I highly doubt either the Democrats nor the Republicans will want to be seen as the party that says "our nukes dont work and we need 1 quintillion dollars to replace them " or just completely drop one leg of the US' nuclear triad, however unnecessary that leg may be.

One thing’s for certain and its quite funny, and that is if the US does not find significantly more money for its military, it will have to cut back on many aspects of its military it has up until this point taken for granted. Already, we are seeing budget constraints affecting every branch of the military in very significant ways. With the USAF being forced to rethink what it wants with quite literally one of its most important next-generation projects due to budget constraints. The state of the USAF tanker fleet is also less than optimal with them significantly cutting back on the number of tankers they planned on ordering this decade by half. Instead, the USAF wants to pursue a gold-plated stealth tanker solution called NGAS to enter service in the 2030s at the same time as all of their other commitments. God knows where they’re going to get the money for this.

The USN is also being forced to cut back on its own next-generation projects that are not limited to just F/A-XX as DDG(X) has also been running into issues. This is all in addition to F-35C procurement that is far less expedited than it should be. There is no money to expand shipyards and increase production in any significant way and submarine production is progressing at a glacial pace, with the US being unable to produce SSNs and SSBNs at the rate it needs to let alone produce surplus SSNs for Australia.

The US Army has also been forced to consistently delay replacements for aging platforms like the Bradley, Abrams, Apache, Chinook and so on. But, given that I highly doubt the US is going to be seeing any large land war with a major power any time in the near future, the US Army can get away with it much more than the other branches can.

"dont let history repeat itself"

Bruh you are 500 miles off of China and they havent colonized you once in 3000 years. Meanwhile you got got multiple times by western colonial empires from the otherside of the globe. The only history repeating itself is yall being colonized by the US, this time willingly

President Xi says we can have a little Maoism, as a treat

Xi meets with representatives of grassroots units applying 'Fengqiao model'

What is the Fengqiao model? Generaly speaking, a mass line based model developed and advocated in Mao’s era that directed the masses themselves at the local level to carry out the on-site “rectification” of “reactionary elements” in society promoting greater degrees of local self-governance and "decentralizing" class struggle. The “Fengqiao experience” ,named after Fengqiao Township, was the process of mobilizing the masses in order to “strengthen the dictatorship over class enemies.” Here is how the top Party leader of Fengqiao District at the time (early 60s) reflected back on it:

During the National People’s Congress in 1963, the minister of public security, Xie Fuzhi (谢富治), gave a speech called, “Relying on the Strength of the Masses, Strengthening the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, Transforming the Majority of ‘Reactionary Elements’ into New People” (依靠群众力量，加强人民民主专政，把绝大多数“四类分子”改造成新人). Xie’s speech made specific mention of the example provided by Fengqiao.

On November 20, 1963, Mao Zedong added his written instructions to the Xie Fuzhi speech, in which he said: “The example of Zhuji raised here is a good one — various regions should follow this example, expanding the work through pilot programs.” Before the Cultural Revolution, the ministry of public security released materials about Fengqiao, but the People’s Daily never reported on these. On December 21, 1977, the People’s Daily published the piece from the top Party leader of Fengqiao District quoted above. That piece was called, “Raising High the Red Flag of Fengqiao Erected by Mao Zedong, Relying on the Masses to Strengthen Dictatorship"

In the struggle against the enemy, arrest is necessary and proper only for a small number of class enemies; as for those you can choose to arrest or not, none should be arrested; you must mobilize the masses to carry out a struggle of reason, to deal with the enemies, carrying out on-site monitoring and rehabilitation, without the need to submit issues to higher authorities. This experience was affirmed and praised by the greater leader and teacher Mao Zedong.

Until recently, no top Chinese leader since Mao Zedong had ever been quoted publicly in the People’s Daily or other state media making remarks on the “Fengqiao experience.” But in 2013, marking the 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s written instructions, Xi Jinping broke this pattern by issuing “important instructions on the development of the ‘Fengqiao experience’." But the focus and promotion of the model has increased considerably in the last few years.

In the report of the 20th National Congress it was clearly directed that that the "Fengqiao Experience" in the new era must be upheld and developed at the grassroots level of society and based on it the mechanism for correctly handling contradictions among the people under the new situation should be improved. To facilitate and regulate the expression of public demands, coordinate interests and safeguard rights.

In March 2023, Xi again emphasized the need to uphold and develop the "Fengqiao Experience" in the new era, improve the mechanism for correctly handling conflicts among the people under the new situation, and promptly resolve conflicts and disputes at the grassroots level and in the bud by involving the masses in the identification of elements ,practices or people that must be reformed. During the Hangzhou Asian Games, Xi made a special trip to inspect the Fengqiao Museum and affirmed the great historical and practical significance of the "Fengqiao Experience".

The other day, along with the meetup i originaly linked Xi met with like 4 heads of state (including the Australian dumbass) ,yet his meeting with cadre representatives of the "fengqiao model" was the frontpage news on the People's Daily and other state media over them

To end with some interesting (optimistic and with a bunch of assumptions) food for thought. The "common prosperity" project, lauded as the next stage in socialism with chinese chracteristics and specificaly its "pilot" in Zhejiang, aimed to be completed by the mid 30s, calls , among other things, for "adjusting income distribution" and "adjusting excessive income". No specifics have been given on how that wealth redistribution will be achieved but it is notable that county-level social conflict and dispute mediation and resolution centers have been also a behind the scenes focus of the "common prosperity" pilot in Zhenjiang and its also the province with the most developed and widespread grassroots "fengqiao model" system

Anyone here got any good analysis on the situation in Myanmar. Junta seems to be on the back foot and a couple of (pro china) resistance groups with strong maoist roots that have been participating and co-leading some noticable gains lately. But also large part of the conflict is between them and cartel like militias controling ereas of Myanmar? Are they prominent enough ?

Some continued and sustained strengthening of KKE (Communist Party of Greece) in the last 1-2 years happening. After getting good results in the last parliamentary elections earlier this year (~7.5%) they now poll at ~10% in the first time since who knows when . And that level of support has been pretty much confirmed in the local elections (for regional and mayoral authorities) where communist candidates recieved ~10.5% of the votes country wide if you aggregate and elected mayors in some pretty big cities/populous Athens municapilities..

Yeah they are still at best mid-bad on LGBT issues (tho improving at a very slow pace). Yeah their foreign policy positions are still only ~70% there with some ultra left analysis on China and a couple of other issues. Yeah they have other issues. But they are still a hardboiled Marxist Lenninist party with little to no compromise on their positions and historical analysis or messaging. Very well and stricktly demcent organized ,with deep roots and activities on the union sphere and increasing membership and young support. Pretty much immune to spooks , gladio like infiltration or demsoc turns.

Looking at the state of communist parties and movements in most of the west , at eurocommunism and in general the post war trajectory of most , youdont have that kind of party with that kind of support and organizational strength almost anywhere else. So despite its flaws i cant really complain too much and its a bright spot for sure.

Another positive is that with KKE at this level of strength any EU promoted anti-communist or even anti-protest legislative stuff (that we see start popping up more and more around Europe) is basicaly dead on arival and impossible to implement and will only strengthen it while if KKE was weakened and at like 4% they would have attacked already