this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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The only thing that I've read anywhere that I respect is from Vijay Prashard. A super tldr is that it's mixed.
China really needs to be more proactive in its foreign policy. Losing three south Asian Ally’s to US proxies is not a good look.
this policy is probably the thing most singularly responsible for the coming collapse of global civilisation btw
Really though? By the time this policy emerged, Kruschev the revisionist had risen to power and was preparing the way for the USSR to liberalize. Mao was correct in preventing the integration of China into the USSR or it would have been subject to the same devastation as Russia once the Republic was dissolved. By maintaining a balance of powers, China was able to resist being absorbed into the USSR and avoid being couped and dominated by the West. The USSR destroyed itself.
The issue was more Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan and where ever else they undermined local socialist forces. But the USSR did create its own hangmen, when they reintroduced liberalism and did de-kolkhoziation
Chinese foreign policy back then is something a lot of people have trouble with. For what it's worth, I think there's a realpolitik answer to why China did it - they knew the USA would intervene on the side of the compradors in any and all conflicts in China's region if the conflict was socialists vs compradors, and that meant the USA could establish a foreard deployment of activated military. If China intervened on behalf of the revolutionaries, the USA would redouble it's involvement and China couldn't defeat the USA. So the solution was to take the board position that the USA would normally inhabit, preventing the USA from entering the theater. By intervening on behalf of the compradors, the USA had no pretext for intervention and China ended up with a forward deployed activated military presence AND significant influence over the governments.
This interpretation is congruent with their approach to capitalism as well, taking up the position that the USA would normally inhabit in exploiting workers by freely allowing Western capitalists to get rich off of exploited Chinese citizens. This resulted in China occupying the space the USA would normally be in and also giving China significant control over the means of production while also making it impossible to spin a narrative that China needs to be destroyed for its behavior.
This makes no sense, especially considering that the US did intervene in at least two of the mentioned cases.
It makes sense. It just doesn't mean it worked or worked in all cases or even that it would work long term. China abandoned this era of its foreign policy likely because it wasn't theoretically sound, but if you're going to say it makes no sense then you're going to have to provide some supporting argument.
What is the idea behind intervening in a region on the side that is anti-communist with the goal of making NATO stop intervening on the anti-communist side? Does one hope that NATO gets confused by a polity that has been trying to normalise relations with them joining on their side?
The idea is that NATO or the USA no longer has the pretext to enter the battle against communism because they would have to fight China and the revolutionaries against the minority incumbent. Because NATO cannot enter the battlefield, China gets to deploy its military and supply chains into the theater while the West does not. This expands China's force projection without triggering a reciprocal expansion of Western force projection .
Except that they still do have that pretext, as they are still opposing local communist movements and the USSR.
Also, even if that was true - that it wouldn't actually be fighting to suppress communist movements - logical consistency and factual-ness of justifications of such actions is not important for performing such actions. Hell, they could just not make these justifications and keep the relevant operations unadvertised.
But they obviously can, and did (via the Mujahideen in the case of Afghanistan).
What even is the argument for the presence of the PRC somehow making NATO removing its presence from a region?
You missed the tactical problem I raised, which is that if the USA entered the battlefield it would be either as an ally of China or it would need to fight both China and the revolutionary movement.
Regarding the development of the Mujahideen, that is demonstrably NOT entering the battlefield and needing to find another way to influence the game. The development and use of the Mujahideen is quite fundamentally different than USA's intervention in Korea and Vietnam. For China, losing a local revolutionary movement is a small loss compared with having a permanent USA military base on the Korean peninsula.
In essence, China moving in militarily creates a forward deployment that is still a material threat to the USA. If China did so on the side of the revolutionariew against the establishment, they would fighting the establishment military, which the USA could augment. Instead, China gets the full benefit of the establishment military and if the USA did intervene it would tactically be fighting in two fronts simultaneously. This creates forward deployments of Chinese assets with logistical support and an extension of Chinese military recon, all of which benefit China against Western intervention without creating political openings on the world stage and most importantly at the UN.
What's the tactical issue here, though? That NATO would have to act not according to the image it tries to project, i.e. that NATO would do as NATO always does?
I'm not buying that anybody would seriously base their policy of military and clandestine activities abroad on betting that NATO would care about theatrics when NATO states were formally and very publicly allied with the USSR during the late WW2.
In Afghanistan, the PRC aided the Mujahideen revolutionaries against the establishment, which only helped NATO.
I'm sorry, but this reads like your conjecture, and not something that you can provide a source on (I welcome you to prove me wrong on this matter), and I don't see how anybody can defend this sort of foreign policy on the grounds of it somehow helping communist movements in the world.
So. Yes, it's conjecture. However, I am not defending this sort of foreign policy on the grounds of it helping communist movements in the world. It explicitly does not help. What it does is advance China's national strategic goals on the grand chessboard. It is little comfort that China either did nothing or supported a smaller nation's communist movement if that movement (a long with Chinese material) is destroyed by USA intervention and results in a permanent USA base aimed at China.
It's an explicitly anti-imperialist instead of pro-communist approach. If the analysis is such that the USA would intervene and establish bases if a communist revolution occured in a small nation around China, the biggest threat to China is not the end of that revolution but the subsequent military occupation of their neighbor by the USA. So, if China instead occupied their neighbor, it takes up the space on the board. Sure, the USA could choose to fight China directly in that theater, but they didn't. They only ever did so indirectly, likely because fighting them directly was untenable - either tactically or politically or both.
It is even less comfort in case the PRC actively helps NATO crush a communist movement and establish a permanent NATO base aimed at itself.
If you calculate that the ally will surely be defeated, then it's better to not waste your resources on helping defeat them.
Furthermore, Vietnam was hardly in immediate danger of being crushed by NATO at the point when the PRC decided to act against it.
If you actively help the worst empire in the world, the approach is not anti-imperialist.
The revolution already occurred in both Afghanistan and Vietnam, and the PRC sided with giving the control of Afghanistan to NATO's Mujahideen, so both of these cases contradict your guess.
Did the PRC move to occupy Afghanistan or any other such neighbour where they helped defeat a local communist movement? Did they occupy Cambodia, at least after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam?
I'm sorry, but this foreign policy was bad, and I can't say that you are doing a good job providing a solid explanation for why it wouldn't be so. This is one of the few issues I have with the PRC.
yeah very fair points and it's not materialist of me to engage in historical counter-factualising, just really upsetting how subjectively "good" things looked for international socialism in the mid 20th century and how badly we've fallen.
I think the problem is that in the mid 1900s, things actually weren't good for international socialism, it's just that it wasn't widely understood. The USSR was struggling to propagate it's own internal revolution. Remember, Lenin didn't want Stalin to take over but there was literally no one better for the job. Stalin, for all the good he did, went on a purging spree and STILL failed to secure the revolution against the counter revolutionaries. That means that by the mid 1900s the vanguard of the first successful revolution was already falling apart, and China not only saw it but called it out.
The USSR vanguard also made a ton of mistakes that hadn't been fully understood by the 1950s including religious persecution and economic bloc isolation. China's revolution was an incredible advance in not just Leninist vanguardism but in elucidating dialectical materialism itself. And China made huge mistakes that needed to be analyzed and corrected. And by that time we're talking the end of the mid 1900s.
Meanwhile the USA was for the first time seeing an ascendant Black Power movement and American Indian Movement, which they promptly crushed and co-opted.
Meanwhile Europe was busy doing Social Democracy to pull the wind from the sails of workers movements and the die hard communists were still confused about materialism, dialectics, and the like. European communist movements, including the Cuban revolution (as it was led by European colonists, albeit true revolutionaries and traitors to their European heritage), were arguing that all forms of queerness were liberal bourgeois perversions.
And in Africa, while the decolonization movement was energized, it was clearly wrong in its strategy and tactics because by the beginning of the end of the 1900s Europe had reasserted its neocolonial hold over the continent.
I guess what I'm saying is that maybe their was revolutionary zeal in mid 20th century but things were not actually good. And we're now in a situation where the revolutionary zeal is way more subdued, but the periphery is once again reasserting itself. This time, however, it seems like the European war machine is floundering in ways never before thought possible and its racking up loss after loss without much to show for it. And that, to me, feels more hopeful than anything else. Instead of the Soviet perspective of building a better system to compete with the imperialists, China has shown us that it's possible to participate exploit the contradictions in imperialism to create conditions that imperialism simply cannot resolve and, thus, cause it to self-destruct.
this is really well argued im too drunk to give a proper response but i appreciate it
Truly
While this remains an open question, the theory is relatively strong. Wars destroy productive forces. That's not just what they do, it's a major component of their purpose. The USA military destroys productive forces. However, China's productive forces were built using USian and European capital, and the outputs of China's productive forces are the foundation of the West's economy. Destroying China's productive forces destroys the West's capital and destroys the West's commodity sources.
This is relatively new in history. It remains to be seen if these conditions will stop a war. If a war starts, it remains to be seen if these conditions will change the revolutionary conditions in the West sufficiently to bring about revolutionary defeatism at a large scale.
TLDR: China is more naive when it comes to the US empire and its desires than the USSR
Very interesting and concise , thank you
Don't you mean 'the first (US and the developed countries of the Global North) and the second (the USSR and the rest of the Warsaw Pact) worlds'?
The Chinese government knows that a offensive political strategy will have american carriers arriving at their shores in two days max, so they try to "uphold international law" to give the americans less leeway to attack and possible have more cards to deal with the taiwan issue.