Thanks for sharing your perspective. I wrote a comment a while ago with my own thoughts on this phenomenon.

In a sense, most of it is intentional and every leftist from formerly socialist Europe can attest to the reactionary overcompensation of regional cognition, where the only way to become “white” and “European” and “Western” is to prove one’s anti-communist bona fides with the zeal of a new convert. These are societies where an entire past half century has been completely repudiated and hollowed out in collective memory, leaving a vacuum that people searching for national pride and identity generally fill by looking back to the reactionary, often monarchical or fascist, regimes before socialism. These sentiments are of course encouraged by the political and educational regimes, where communism has been made an illegal thought-crime across most of formerly socialist Europe and it is openly seen as much more preferable for the population to swing towards fascism than socialism.

I think to further refine @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml’s comment, one important skill as a leftist is to build on one’s ability to think dialectically. One way to overcome liberal propaganda is to engage with it, process its arguments and still come out saying “No.” The failure to do this is why you have all those “Why I left the Left” grifters where their origin story is that they were once the “model Marxist Leninist” but then were enlightened because some redditor one day spammed them with the NATOpedia article on Tiananmen.

If everyone could do that, there would be no need for AES to protect themselves from the modern West’s propaganda system, the most comprehensive discourse hegemony in history.

This is why, if you read Marx and Lenin, they sound at times like they would be the most terminally online debate bros today because a bulk of their writings are just constantly dunking on Bakunin, Kautsky, The Economist or various other political talking heads. Yet in spite of their obsession in exposing themselves to slop, they maintained the integrity of their beliefs.

On the other hand, the alternate side of dialectics entails that this does not mean you need to spend your day reading just NYT or FT articles. Some “leftists” do this, where they have clearly never heard of Parenti/Losurdo/Amin or even the 20th century heavyweights like Fanon, Rodney, and Sakai. We need to support leftist information and content, especially because in the West, they are suppressed and leftist authors/platforms are suffocated of support like African Stream was. That’s why it’s also just as disappointing to see leftists who get all their information from liberal media and academic materials.

The renowned Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla’s 1962 book “Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico” compiles Aztec primary source documents where the trauma of what Spain inflicted really reaches across the centuries to agonizing parallels with modern day Palestinian accounts of suffering.

I remember, I will establish a little temple where we will place the new god that the men from Castile have given us. Truly this new god wants us to worship him. What will we do, my sons? Let us receive the water on our heads [be baptized], let us give ourselves to the men of Castile, perhaps in this way they will not kill us.

Let us remain here. Do not trespass [by] going on another’s land, perhaps in this way they will not kill us. Let us follow them; thus, perhaps we will awaken their compassion. It will be good if we surrender entirely to them. Oh, that the true god who resides in heaven will help us [coexist] close to the men of Castile.

And in order that they will not kill us, we will not claim all our lands. We will reduce in length the extension of our lands, and that which remains, our fathers will defend.

Now I declare that, in order for them not to kill us, . . . we accept to have water poured on our heads, that we worship the new god, as I declare he is the same as the one we had.

Now I reduce in length our lands. Thus it will be. Their limits will begin in the direction from which the sun rises and continue . . . [he mentions each of the limits].

I presume that for this small piece of land they will not kill us. It does not matter that it was much larger. This is my decision because I do not want my sons to be killed.

Therefore, we will work only this little piece of land, and thus our sons will do so. Let us hope in this manner they will not kill us.

Edit: Here’s an old comment of mine sharing more excerpts from this book, with accounts of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre committed by the Spanish and the suffering endured during the Spanish siege of the city.

There’s no such thing as “Bosnian sovereignty” given that, under the Dayton Accords, the country is a colony ruled by a viceroy dubbed the “High Representative.” The current viceroy is an ex-CSU Merkel-era cabinet minister from Germany, Christian Schmidt. As is the case with all these washed up political low-rungers across the history of colonialism getting newfound authority under a colonial role, they turn into power-tripping freaks that would make subreddit moderators swoon.

In 2023, Schmidt used the “Bonn powers” proscribed under Dayton to amend the Bosnian criminal code to literally criminalize, in the actual legal header of the new article, the “Failure to Implement Decisions of the High Representative,” which sets out a criminal charge for any “responsible person” that fails to:

implement, enforce or otherwise comply with a decision of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or who prevents or otherwise obstructs its application, implementation or enforcement, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term between six months and five years.

The present Republika Srpska issue arises because, in 2023, the autonomous region’s president, Milorad Dodik, (the “Bosnian Serb leader”) issued legislation blocking entry of the colonial viceroy’s decrees into the autonomous region’s gazette recording published acts and passed laws on defamation that had been previously annulled by Schmidt.

The colonial regime’s legal appendage then acted to use the newly amended Criminal Code against Dodik. In February of this year, he was stripped of his presidential office and sentenced to a year in prison and banned from political office for six years. The sentence was appealed to the “Constitutional Court,” a court of final appeal where three of the nine judges are foreigners appointed by the President of the “European Court of Human Rights,” which upheld the sentence for “non-compliance with the decisions of Christian Schmidt” early this month.

Bosnia is a good case example of the Western liberal “rules-based order’s” depravity, its utter moral bankruptcy and its innate talent for projection. On the one hand, you have them screaming bloody murder every time they see Chinese takeout food as “Chinese foreign interference” or “Beijing’s growing influence,” on the other hand, framing any resistance to literal modern day colonial projects as “Dodik’s defiance, echoed by Serbia, Hungary, and Russia, reveals an illiberal axis wielding sovereignty rhetoric to undercut EU authority”. Incidentally, on the exact same day as this judgment, the European Council for Foreign Relations published an article about “Reading China’s Playbook in the Western Balkans” where they congratulate themselves for rescuing “Montenegro from falling into debt bondage with China” and “raising fears that new member states could act as promoters of Chinese interests” in the region, which reads as satire when juxtaposed with what they’ve been doing with their actual colonial fiefdom in Bosnia.

If you remove the context, the legal argument Dodik used in his appeal, which was that “Schmidt had no authority to intervene in the criminal code, saying only the national parliament was empowered to do so,” could easily be mistaken for one of those Western international law journal editorials railing against the “erosion of democracy” by strongmen in designated adversary countries like Venezuela. In case anyone feels an excess of individual sympathy for Dodik, he’s one of those generic right-wing Eastern European Orban clones, down to his Israeli sycophancy, visiting the site of the October 7 “Nova Music Festival Massacre” to try to drum up support, so this is moreso one of those “worst person you know just made a great point” situations.

The case of Bosnia today really drives home that there’s no meaningful difference between the openly imperialist depravity of the West a century ago and the West today. The only real change since then is that, externally as a limiting factor, a few other nations nowadays have the military capabilities to deter Western expressions of our sociopathy from being directed them, because it really is just like Fanon said: “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Nothing really exceptional in these leaked transcripts in terms of tone. This is just how diplomats typically talk, it’s a sort of “casual formality,” equally candid and duplicitous, when they aren’t performing for their domestic audiences. It’s only the Reddit and Twitter NATO shitlibs who would be surprised by the tenor of these kind of conversations because they think diplomats talk to each other like they do screaming against designated tankies in r/worldnews threads.

If people here want to see some really interesting historical diplomatic transcripts, I’d recommend reading through the declassified portions of the top secret Kissinger transcripts with adversary diplomatic interlocutors like Zhou Enlai and Brezhnev along with Gerald Ford’s meetings with Mao himself. Him talking to Zhou Enlai about the CIA’s “innocence” in culpability for the Chilean 9/11 reactionary coup and Allende’s murder gives quite the Christian Bale talking to Willem Dafoe’s detective character from American Psycho vibes with the asymmetry of information at play in retrospect.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/publications/DOC_readers/kissinger/docs/index.html

Right on the 100th anniversary of Gitlow v New York. History rhymes right on time.

Gitlow, who had been arrested in the raids, would be charged under New York’s post–McKinley assassination legislation, the criminal anarchy law.

Gitlow’s crime, such as it was, was distributing something called the “Left Wing Manifesto,” a document that emerged out of contention within the then-dominant Socialist Party.

According to that manifesto, “The old order is in decay. Civilization is in collapse. The proletarian revolution and the Communist reconstruction of society—the struggle for these—is now indispensable. This is the message of the Communist International to the workers of the world.” For the New York criminal justice system, such writing was a clear example of flagrant violation of their legislation.

At his trial in January 1920, Gitlow was convicted and sentenced to five to ten years in prison. After appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, the conviction was upheld. The opinion delivered in 1925 by Justice Edward Sanford was ominous: “A State may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means. These imperil its own existence as a constitutional State. Freedom of speech and press . . . does not protect disturbances to the public peace or the attempt to subvert the government.”

Leonard, Aaron J. 2025. Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism.

This rag, where the editors all hide behind anonymous bylines (and when they do reveal themselves, they predictably turn out to be ghouls like the failson of a MI6 director), has been consistently on the wrong side of history since its inception. Its founder got his wealth from the opium trade and the Economist defended and advocated for both Opium Wars along with vocally supporting the Confederacy. And those are just merely listing the things that Marx himself denounced them for. Proving their talent of writing cowardly anonymized depraved trash transcend both time and genre, their book review section includes shamelessly scolding scholars for writing books about the history of slavery where, for some reason, “almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.”

“What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself without anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals.” - Peuchet, quoted by Marx

Most major US bases have a long history of atrocity complicity and imperialist utility, like the Kadena AFB and other bases in the occupied Ryukus or Guam or the joint UK/US Diego Garcia base in Chagos. You’ll probably be able to better orient yourself with a more general overview, however.

David Vine is a notable author and subject matter expert on the topic. He’s a soc dem rather than a leftist, but this just means you can reference his work to a general audience without them flinching in terror or cite it in an academic paper if you need to write one since they’re published by university presses. I recommend his 2020 book “The United States of war: a global history of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State,” which you can find on various online repositories like Anna’s Archive/Z-Library. His website has a great deal of US base world maps and he has an excel spreadsheet where he tries to track all publicly known US bases worldwide.

He also wrote a 2009 book “Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia” specifically on the occupation of Mauritius’ Chagos (which incidentally was just recently compelled to sign an unequal treaty with the UK to convert the base into a Hong Kong-style colonial leasehold).

Is it really? I don’t think so.

This seems like “what if ‘Birth of a Nation’ could be narratively reclaimed somehow as a film celebrating black liberation and condemning white supremacy” territory of discourse. I’m not interested in it because it’s plainly not how the majority of people would reasonably see it and that’s the only thing that matters in a consequentialist media analysis. The author’s intention, whether they somehow actually intended this to be a 500 IQ veiled critique against the bourgeoisie, are irrelevant. Most people see the “demons” in the same uncritical and unambiguous light as they see every DnD “ontologically evil,” which DnD itself lifted from Tolkien.

This confusion seems to appear because people hardly ever actually take a look at the rhetorical structure of that kind of racial and intercultural discourse. There’s two levels. There’s the level at ontology, which is that “this external group is weak and inferior and deserves to be taken advantage of by us.” Then there’s the level at epistemology, which that “this external group is a bunch of bloodthirsty savages because they only know violence and are the actual aggressors.” This is actually the definition of fascism as laid out by Umberto Eco, which is that “the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” In real terms, they are weak (which justifies attacking them on a material basis), but in cognitive terms, they are strong (which justifies attacking them on a ideological basis, as it would be an act of bravery and heroism).

Take a look at the American Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t say “the ‘Indians’ are weak and therefore their inferiority justifies our conquest of their lands,” it frames the case against them in the exact precise terms you’ve laid out, where all the characteristics and qualities of the aggressor are projected upon their victim: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Never get between online leftists and their treats. Scratch a lib and a fascist bleeds; scratch a online leftist’s favorite media and a lib bleeds.

This fictional concept of a “ontological evil” species is obviously not supported by any real-world “ontological” basis. The application of “evil” as an exonym to appellate against external cultures or races has had monstrous historical and present-day consequences. The unfalsifiable idea that a certain race or culture is merely pretending to be civilized and sentient “while in reality, as we all know wink wink they are actually evil and un-persons” has such an abundance of parallels to historical racial discourse, genocide and prejudice that it’s comical and unsettling in equal measure that people would use it as apologia for their fictional media.

I said this years ago in a discussion about Tolkien (a racist POS) and his characterization of the orcs:

It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkien in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization (that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples, as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples), simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkien admitted).

Please tell me what are these external pressures

Imperialism. It’s a real doozy of a thing.

I think anti-“dengists” prefer to say “le mao.”

You’ve become so irony-pilled that I’ve no idea what to make of you talking in the third-person means. If I knew about Zero Covid in 2018, I’d stock up on some face masks for my IRL mutual aid group to use in 2 years time rather than commenting some esoteric “dengist parody” on the bear site.

I do think it’s a monstrous thing that Gaza is subjected to all it has while the rest of the world pretends to go about its day and China’s non-interventionism has a share of the blame. It’s incredible that some people give China the same level of animosity as they should reserve for the US or Israel in this regard, but that’s still understandable.

If you’re claiming that the majority of a country of 1.4 billion people are xenophobes without evidence, I’d stop you right there, however.

You write a lot of convoluted words, but continues to miss the point.

A kettle meets a pot.

The issue is that I hold imperialism as the primary contradiction, not “neoliberalism.” We’ve seen socialist states with comprehensive socialist welfare be destroyed by counter revolution. China itself undid most Mao era socialist welfare in the Opening Up period. There’s a reason why all that happened and it primarily entails with the external conditions imposed onto the given socialist state.

This sort of Last Tuesdayism argumentation strains your premise. Yes, taking aside the prior economic growth, the still reasonable economic growth (China is still pulling away from the US on a PPP not nominal measure), poverty alleviation, the existing social welfare systems, “China does not provide a basic guarantee of welfare.”

If the point is actually “provide a sufficient guarantee”, then I’d agree. Then the issue is “why is it not so” and our disagreement is that I’d imagine you predominantly would prefer to shift the onus inwards onto the CPC (which is not to say the presence of individuals like Li Qiang in the CC does not give me unease) while I’d say that the external pressures are overriding.

It’s more that we’ve been here before. Surmising that is the whole point of historical materialism, which isn’t just the name of some Western Marxist slop journal but an actually useful mode of analysis.

Never mind the examples of other 20th century socialist states, Mao’s China had much of the safety nets in question. The question to ask is what happened to them?

The answer you might form to that question will inevitably color your perception of the material conditions in present day China.

That sounds like a very classically Hobbesian sort of argument that the mere deprivation of socialist guarantees and the subsidence of the fastest GDP rate in human history would turn a collective society into a bunched up ball of xenophobia. I think it’s important not to attribute undue weight onto minority positions, unless they can be substantively demonstrated as being a majority view.

The issue in the DDR was specifically that, following capitalist restoration, with the left politically censored and historiographically maligned, it was inevitable that people would move rightwards as the only visible alternative, which is precisely what is happening slow boiling frog-style across Europe and the West. The issue in the post-USSR states is that with the capitalist regimes in the former SSRs’ legitimacy contingent on being a “superior” choice to its socialist predecessor, similarly, the only alternative was rightwards. This was compounded in the non-RSFSR SSRs, where national historiography was rewritten so that the entire experience of being in the USSR was warped into a “victimhood” narrative of “occupation” under the “Soviet empire.” The resistors of that Soviet regime were naturally the fascist puppet freaks in WW2 and this is the primary reason why Ukraine was hijacked (against the consent of the majority) by Neo-Nazism.

History and context matters, which I suppose is why they dubbed the analysis historical materialism. The principal issue with Maoism (which is to say, not MZT) is that it is idealism in service of socialism. A fine idea, but it’s just that. I take issue with the “woe is me, living in modern China is suffering” narrative because no man is an island, including China. It’s evident that the West is unable to copy-paste the same ideological propaganda of material disparity it used against the USSR in the New Cold War and spamming “communism no blue jeans” due to China’s position as the world factory, so it gets by with gaslighting about China’s economic growth (the orientalist assumption is that a single half year of negative growth, a mere “technical recession” in the West, would immediately cause the CPC to lose its legitimacy, always framed as the “mandate of heaven” by some China “expert” talking head, and be “finally” spontaneously overthrown so that the West is finally rid of this meddlesome priest).

History shows that socialist welfare is less than relevant so long as the state is capable of being subverted and all that work is capable of being undone. Most 20th century socialist states met all those qualities that give Maoists the starry-eyed glimmer, yet those states don’t exist anymore. To assume that China can achieve that “socialism in one country” label and become “Fortress Communism” is frankly chauvinistic conceit that ignores the lessons provided by 20th century AES.

It’s equally non-dialectical to pull one’s hair at China’s socioeconomic condition without considering that China doesn’t need to outdo itself, just others in relativistic terms. When the rest of the world is in the shitter, it’s unrealistic to expect China to wholly avoid getting some mud splashed on it. Europe and North America’s economic conditions are far more dire than anything looming on China’s horizon, which bears reminding.

The lesson from the hubristic notion of the “end of history” is that history never ends. China’s goal should be to ensure that it can create the domestic and global conditions for a sustainable and long-lasting socialist socio-economy. That involves the primary contradiction of imperialism. So long as progress is made towards that goal, however slow it is, I see no reason why the “things are so bad in China, it’s literally Taiping 2.0 right now” narrative should be given oxygen or credence.

But - is that making your life easier?

Lmao. The Maoist argumentation is wrong because it deliberately misses the forest for the trees in a facile “but what have the Romans done for me?” style of argumentation that Chinese online rhetoric often have this rather peculiarly unique characteristic of framing as if they’re the first people in history to try such a sophistic stunt. China has objectively in all parameters gone through the greatest collective mass poverty alleviation campaign in human history. The Economist, RAND, The Atlantic all have articles where they admit this with gritted teeth yet you can’t even say the same about Chinese Maoist/Ultra/Libs, which is interesting. I’ve lately come to understand this style of Socratic-aping Chinese rhetorical style much better after discovering Chinese Maoist forums like v2.redchinacn.org, which has incidentally gone off the deep end with Kirk apologia recently.

In any case, the anti-immigration sentiment is simply a continuation of the same movement from 2020, where online backlash quashed the Chinese permanent residency reform project. Similarly, this K visa initiative is essentially a second attempt that follows in the footsteps of that 2020 draft proposal which aimed at: “China would formally expand the pool of immigrants that could qualify for P.R. to a still select but larger group of high-income or highly educated long-term migrants.” K visa would be the 0.5 version, where the goal is merely to get visa holders rather than broach the subject of permanent residency.

There’s a decent article in Routledge’s Journal of Contemporary China analyzing that episode though it has the typical “they have nationalists, we have patriots” sort of academic orientalism. The author notes the typical emotionally-overwrought sort of nakedly manipulative discourse that is profuse on the Chinese internet being used: “As a Han Chinese, I am crying softly,”; “I am here! 1.4 billion compatriots are here! As a Chinese, if it is necessary, there will be action on May 4!”

Beyond that kind of nonsense, the actual substantive objections that the author summarizes are the same ones being reused five years later against this K visa initiative.

The draft regulations to many seemed to fit in a tradition of the state privileging foreign nationals, at a time when domestic employment and residential conditions for many Chinese citizens are considered far from adequate. Attracting larger numbers of immigrants to aid China’s development, also sounds inappropriate to some, given China’s recent history of government-enforced family planning. Some suggest revising the regulations to eliminate any loopholes for so-called ‘low-quality’ migrants and to include guarantees that P.R. holders would not be privileged over local Chinese.

Part of the contradiction is that these foreign workers are predominantly drawn to major urban locations like Shanghai known both for their Chinese liberal population and their deluded “I am a global citizen” type of multinational suit wearing capitalists. Both groups ideologically would favor foreign workers of select demographics and this creates the sort of imagery of privilege that provokes this sort of backlash, though it should be said that the Chinese online vocal minority commentariat often has this sort of self-orientalizing narcissism that assumes all other 1.4 billion people in their country are a hive mind that secretly share their personal political opinion, if only but for the dastardly Weibo censors preventing their posts’ true updoot numbers from coming to light, as seen by the cited “I am here! 1.4 billion compatriots are here!” style of comments.

Another one of the issues is the typical catch-22 associated with most socialist governments, which is that they are overly sensitive of their Western-propaganda maligned depiction as “repressive authoritarian regimes” which makes them excessively petrified by accusations of “authoritarianism” through alleged governmental overreach, rendering them particularly indecisive and obsequious in instances when they ought to be standing their ground and demonstrating some faith in their governing mandate and legitimacy. This makes socialist governments exceptionally vulnerable to groups that are aware of this contradiction and then deliberately take advantage of it. This is how the 2020 PR draft was shut down. This is how the “white paper” Shanghai lib protesters are credited with “ending” Zero Covid, as if they weren’t always a minority and the vast majority of people by all accounts silently still tolerated the policy.

In 20th century socialist states, this was how the DDR failed to react to the Berlin Wall breach debacle, totally capitulating to the BRD in spite of most East German citizens preferring a negotiated union rather than the total annexation by the West as it happened in reality. It was also how the CPSU (or what was left of it) tolerated the illegal secession of the Baltics and why the August putschists spinelessly dithered in 1991. Incidentally, the 1989 Tiananmen failed counter-revolution was the only major time a socialist government stood their ground against this sort of issue and that decision is why the People’s Republic still exists today.

Overall, it’s actually good for the xenophobia to make itself plain, because that’s the only way it can be ever addressed in the first place. While socialist states have promoted societal internationalist values of tolerance, we saw how easily they were subverted following the fall of those states. Superficial tolerance led to Khrushchev blathering about how the USSR “solved the nationality issue.” In the DDR, this gave way to Neo-Nazis and the AfD; in the USSR, this gave way to ethnic pogroms in the 90s and the current disastrous state of the former Soviet world. China has the privilege of those types outing themselves while the socialist state still holds power so it will be interesting to see if they concede once again to the vocal minority on this matter or push ahead forward.

It really depends on whether “TikTok” refers to TikTok Global, which is the entire worldwide platform beyond China, or some potential TikTok US entity geo-locked for Americans akin to Douyin.

If it’s the former, then China lost big time - no other way to put it. If it’s the latter, then it’s the next best case scenario other than taking the ball home entirely and eating the US ban threat. There would then be three TikToks: TikTok Global, TikTok US and Douyin.

To put it simply, China loses in every scenario because it’s important to remember that the US made up this TikTok threat out of nowhere. There’s no way something like this would have been tolerated in a UNO reverse card scenario and, in fact, it wasn’t with US social media forays in China. Facebook and Google chose to leave the Chinese market entirely rather than address basic Chinese concerns like “stop algorithmically boosting color revolution slop against us to your top results,” let alone concede to demands to access their core backend infrastructure. But this is the nature of being in a world subjected to US hegemony and the cost of doing business in a global system where the US market is held up as indispensable. Just like the tariffs, it’s a matter of fighting to concede and lose the least.

TikTok could just take the example of its US counterparts and simply leave the US market. There would likely be a bandwagon effect where the app is blocked from much of the West, but would largely remain for the Global South. For an ephemeral moment, this would be an undeniable moral victory in demonstrating Western censorship and hypocrisy - until the NYT inevitably cooks up a damage-control narrative about TikTok requiring daily Aztec-style human sacrifices of [insert the West’s repressed Chinese minority of the week] to run and this allows global libs the excuse to own and celebrate the censorship, “morality” really seems to be that simple nowadays. Though it’s possible that TikTok de-burgerfied would become some unique Global South social media haven, I think it’s more likely that the loss of the US user base would cause a slow overall decline in TikTok because (as we saw with us Euro sheep flocking to XHS in January simply because the Americans went there) some sections of the worldwide user base would flock to alternate apps to remain with their dominant US-based influencers, causing decreased engagement on the platform, causing more of a user drain in a cyclical feedback loop.

For whatever reason, China has decided against that. It’s interesting that the government has explicitly stepped in to negotiate for TikTok since it’s been speculated that Xi had skipped the Brazil summit this year when Lula’s wife broke diplomatic protocol by requesting that he intervene against TikTok’s lack of moderation, basically insinuating that the Chinese government had control over a private company, which (may be true, but also) would have been great ammunition for the West.

In a sense, I’d say the Chinese government intervened because it came to see TikTok as a test case for how Chinese companies can be begrudgingly accepted with gritted teeth by the West in the geopolitical climate of the New Cold War. With the contemporary hostility, there’s been only two choices for such companies: complete surrender to the US or accept a total ban from Western markets. If China handles this well, it could set a working precedent for a third path, allowing the US to take its victory lap and claim a face-saving win, while still relying on a system built by China. On the surface, the company might get an American flag sticker slapped on it, under “licensing,” but the actual substance remains firmly in Chinese ownership. This modus vivendi is just how the game has to be played until the moment comes when such hegemonic expressions of asymmetry no longer can hold such sway.

The dynamics of unorganized mass protests is that the movement will bend, in its internal contradictions, to the direction of the most well organized, motivationally driven and materially supported element.

Take the classic Tiananmen color revolution. It was originally an outcry against the runaway inflation of the 1988-9 period caused by the package reformers winning out against the gradualists. This led to an introduction of shock therapy by primarily Deng Xiaoping’s (I would indeed argue that his role played a major part) and Zhao Ziyang’s urgings, which led to historically high prices unseen in the history of the People’s Republic. Price stability was then re-introduced in late 1988 to prevent economic catastrophe but this led to backlash both from parts of the population that were outraged at this poorly conceived obsession with a “big bang” reform having taking place at all in the first place and the incipient liberal comprador-aspirants who thought the price stability initiative meant the end of the liberalizing reforms and their profit-seeking opportunities.

Both elements were present in the initial protests. The former (the Western journalistic and academic trick at the time was to dub every socialist and leftist element in socialist state politics as “conservative” to deliberately obfuscate their identity) were the socialist contingents, including Maoists and Ultraleft elements, who wanted a return to the Mao era rather than some capitalist restoration. Obviously, the color revolution elements, backed up by the West’s unfettered media penetration in China (which is how they captured those pictures they wave around nowadays), won out. They constructed that tacky Statue of Liberty clone “to Democracy” in Tiananmen Square, which appropriated and hijacked the imagery and messaging of the protests once the Western media started proliferating pictures of it, and the entire movement became a full blown color revolution aiming at capitalist restoration, even though large contingents of the participants wanted nothing of the sort.

This is how it works. Victor Bevins (a soc-dem), wrote a book called “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” that essentially dissects the systematic co-option of every single unorganized mass protest movement in the 2010s. The most infamous being the Hong Kong color revolution attempt, where public frustration over the affordability housing and the dynamics of the frozen economic and political system of Hong Kong due to China’s concession to Britain with the 50 year “1C2S” policy preventing any substantive mainland intervention or introduction of socialist governance to Hong Kong, which boiled over through an extradition case of a murderer. This was then easily was hijacked by the Trump I admin and the Western NGOs operating in Hong Kong, and co-opted as a “democracy” and “independence” protest.

As for Nepal, I incidentally made a comment three months ago back in May:

… the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

It’s not to say that things will necessarily progress in that direction, but that the external interests have been clearly demonstrated and many of the requisite pieces have likely been set in place.