President Masoud Pezeshkian has voiced Iran’s readiness for “serious and constructive” cooperation with China, particularly within the framework of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), ahead of his planned visit to China later this month.
China’s foreign policy is entirely centred around keeping China’s 1.4+ billion people safe. It is intensely conservative, yes, which is infinitely disappointing, but it is not up to China to stop the genocide and risk all out war with the world’s preeminent superpower. It feels like people on here have a confused view of China’s place in the world, hoping for it to be the second USSR in terms of foreign aid for revolutionary projects, and then turn totally the other way when they realise that this is not happening, acting like China has somehow betrayed it’s required revolutionary outlook and deserves extra condemnation.
1000%. Post-1991 China’s been laser focused on not repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union. Xi Jingping is particularly obsessed with this; excerpts from a speech he gave back in 2013 on this very topic:
The most striking part of Xi Jinping’s “new southern tour speech” is his revisiting the topic of the Soviet Union’s collapse. He said, “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken. In the end, ‘the ruler’s flag over the city tower’ changed overnight. It’s a profound lesson for us! To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organizations on all levels.”
“Why must we stand firm on the Party’s leadership over the military?” Xi continued, “because that’s the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union where the military was depoliticized, separated from the Party and nationalized, the party was disarmed. A few people tried to save the Soviet Union; they seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again, because they didn’t have the instruments to exert power. Yeltsin gave a speech standing on a tank, but the military made no response, keeping so-called ‘neutrality.’ Finally, Gorbachev announced the disbandment of the Soviet Communist Party in a blithe statement. A big Party was gone just like that. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”
“Nobody was man enough”! How vividly this captures Xi Jinping’s anxiety over the fall of the Soviet Communist Party and the collapse of the Soviet Union!
In his inauguration speech on September 19, 2004, when he succeeded Jiang Zemin to become the Chairman of the Central Military Committee, Hu Jintao also railed against Gorbachev as “the chief culprit of Eastern Europe’s transformation and a traitor of socialism.” “Because of the openness and pluralism he championed,” Hu said, “Gorbachev caused confusion among the Soviet Communist Party and the people of the Soviet Union. The Party and the Union fell apart under the impact of ‘westernization’ and ‘bourgeois liberalism’ that he implemented.”
China is not the USSR. The Chinese economy is fully integrated into the global economy - a very powerful position that the USSR did not have.
Just look at how China used the rare earth cards to get Trump back to the negotiation table. Do not underestimate China’s ability to assert its interests on the international stage. It can threaten the stop of goods flowing and the entire world will fold. It can stop the genocide if it chooses to.
And that’s why the US likes China to play the role it is right now, because in this calculation, China will not use its powerful position to disrupt US interests, so long as it doesn’t infringe the Chinese interests itself.
Yeah what. The US likes a very specific thing about China, that it doesn’t confront them in direct conflict. China, on the other hand, overtaking the US on every stage across the world, which the US fucking hates and is preparing for war to stop.
There is also just a form of geopolitical natural selection at work. There were surely political elements in the PRC that made it more stable against Western imperialism that helped it avoid a USSR-style dissolution, and they continued past the dissolution of the USSR. And they would be drawing from the material base of society as well, an engine that continued to today.
There is struggle in China, in the CPC, between the government and capitalists, between capitalists. Factions rise and fall. Despite this rotation it has only strengthened via its general charted course.
China’s foreign policy is entirely centred around keeping China’s 1.4+ billion people safe. It is intensely conservative, yes, which is infinitely disappointing, but it is not up to China to stop the genocide and risk all out war with the world’s preeminent superpower. It feels like people on here have a confused view of China’s place in the world, hoping for it to be the second USSR in terms of foreign aid for revolutionary projects, and then turn totally the other way when they realise that this is not happening, acting like China has somehow betrayed it’s required revolutionary outlook and deserves extra condemnation.
I wonder how much of that’s driven by the memory of the USSR’s interventionist policies and its collapse following e.g. its failure in Afghanistan.
1000%. Post-1991 China’s been laser focused on not repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union. Xi Jingping is particularly obsessed with this; excerpts from a speech he gave back in 2013 on this very topic:
Per https://chinachange.org/2013/01/26/beijing-observation-xi-jinping-the-man-by-gao-yu/
China is not the USSR. The Chinese economy is fully integrated into the global economy - a very powerful position that the USSR did not have.
Just look at how China used the rare earth cards to get Trump back to the negotiation table. Do not underestimate China’s ability to assert its interests on the international stage. It can threaten the stop of goods flowing and the entire world will fold. It can stop the genocide if it chooses to.
And that’s why the US likes China to play the role it is right now, because in this calculation, China will not use its powerful position to disrupt US interests, so long as it doesn’t infringe the Chinese interests itself.
lmao
Yeah what. The US likes a very specific thing about China, that it doesn’t confront them in direct conflict. China, on the other hand, overtaking the US on every stage across the world, which the US fucking hates and is preparing for war to stop.
There is also just a form of geopolitical natural selection at work. There were surely political elements in the PRC that made it more stable against Western imperialism that helped it avoid a USSR-style dissolution, and they continued past the dissolution of the USSR. And they would be drawing from the material base of society as well, an engine that continued to today.
There is struggle in China, in the CPC, between the government and capitalists, between capitalists. Factions rise and fall. Despite this rotation it has only strengthened via its general charted course.