this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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China will have to eventually abandon its "non-interference" policy. As shown, US/NATO don't just fight direct or proxy wars, they will do color revolutions and unleash their terrorists, Xinjiang and Pakistan will be hot spots if/when China moves on Taiwan. The CIA already has their terrorists in Pakistan killing Chinese engineers working in Pakistan.
i am wary of this rheotoric, i have heard on podcasts the ussr was extremely hesistant and critical of the soviet afghan governments killing of people, and despite stating so multiple times upon deploying soviet troops into afghanistan were unable to solve the issue and continued the mindless deaths of the people of afghanistan.
war is a crude form of politics, and another form of competition.
the contradictions from war waged by a socialist state will be many. i have heard it said socialism cannot sustain it self with weapons of war - that the steel of rifles barrels could have built bridges and incubators.
not to mention the foreign actors who wish to see the PRC collapse, we all know very well that the capitalist have the power to make mountains of ant hills
This is nominally the correct answer. The key fault that lied with the Communists of the former socialist Afghanistan they fell into ultra-left deviation of moving too far ahead of the Afghan people and attempted to force their people to move faster than they were willing from afar, leading to their masses becoming fertile grounds for reactionary religious fundamentalist sentiments to sprout and causing an unbroken vicious cycle of violent reprisals that would lead to the fall of Socialist Afghanistan and the weakening of the Soviet Union.
Material improvements are indeed one of the primary means of countering festering reactionary seeds, but the methods of application of ideology is another one as well. And currently I'm of the belief that China's currently pursuing, as far as we can generally see thus far, the correct course in relation to their own self-governance. Nevertheless I do hope they're paying close attention and have been working thoroughly to ensure the defenses of their western regions.
good comment
Blanket statements about war being a crude form of politics tends toward dogma and not material analysis.
Reminds me of Mao’s “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” speech. “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”
Modern China is quite different from Mao’s China, but I think it is still true that there are conditions under which war is a necessary activity for a socialist state. One of those conditions would be acts of war imposed on that state by other bourgeois states. If Mao had not insisted on the necessity of war in revolutionary China, I don’t think we would have a socialist China today. The threat on China today is only increasing, and military force will inevitably have to be used to counter Western aggression.
I am not advocating hawkishly for war. It is not automatically the correct strategy. Nor is it automatically incorrect. War is a reality imposed on socialist states that has to be dealt with on its own terms.
i am acknowledging this comments, will come back when my thoughts are fully processed
China will be fine. If they can survive in the 70s when they're completely surrounded by hostile countries they have border skirmishes with on top of being a bit of a pariah state, they'll be fine now.
They should have years ago but they wont. In the end even in the worst case and these terrorists do make it to China they'll treat it as their own internal affair, do whatever needs to be done and then have Xi meet with whatever dipshit is replacing Blinken and Yellen every few months.
China has been consistent. The best description I've seen is BRICS is not anti-west but rather non-west. They want to claim independence from western(US) influence and intervention yet they want to be treated as equals and be friendly. Sadly this naive idea is exactly what dominates right now and it is bound to fail no matter what.
Very deep questions need to be asked but they wont. China will do everything to keep the economic miracle going while crying US bad and doing nothing about it. Taiwan is a dead end issue given China's own technological development.
what needs to happen is that the br4mins that rule India need to allow BRI
the chinese need to stop claiming Arunachal in return
after that, coolzone
China maintains their current foreign policy because they learned from the mistakes of the USSR.
The USSR did the opposite of non-interference and actively tried to ferment revolutions or arm socialist orgs around the world. While this isn't a bad thing, it resulted in the Soviets overextending themselves and getting bogged down in proxy wars and a frankly unnecessary arms race with the US. When the Soviets went into Afghanistan to fight the US-backed Islamists, they lost far more than they gained, and the Afghan people ended up turning against them.
The collapse of the USSR and loss of the Cold War gave China much to reflect on, and ultimately, they fine-tuned their Marxist ideology to suit the post-Cold War Unipolar world. And it has worked for them thus far.
Whether they will need to fine-tune it again as we head into a multi-polar world still dominated by Neoliberal Capitalism remains to be seen.
It’s not so clear as that, I think. The USSR and the PRC both exported revolution / aided decolonial revolutions to some extent, but the USSR also attempted a policy of peaceful coexistence and in many cases was probably not as proactive as they could or should have been, often only reacting to the most egregious of aggressions from the U.S.
The USSR's "peaceful coexistence" during the Cold War was simply them trying to avoid WW3 with the US, especially after how much WW2 devastated Soviet society and how far it set them back in their economic goals. It wasn't an incorrect position to take given the US still had an immense amount of production capital before the neoliberal turn and, if the USSR were to hypothetically enter a hot war with America, they would likely lose it solely because the US would be able to outproduce them.
And even before WW2, the USSR was already doing peaceful coexistence with capital from their policy of 'Socialism in one country', because they realized after the failure of socialist uprisings in other European countries in the 1920's, they were alone in the world and surrounded by the enemy. Trying to be more 'proactive', which is what the Trotskyists wanted, would have been tantamount to self-destruction.
The PRC and the rest of the Marxist-Leninist states today continue the same doctrine, because it works for them today as it did for the Soviets back then.
It should also be noted that some of the interventions that the USSR did undertake ended up eliciting resentment from the local populations towards Soviet Communism. The Soviet-Afghan War is a prime example, but it can also be seen in their suppression of protests and politicians that didn't toe Moscow's line closely enough in Eastern European SSRs (which, while understandable, did create a big impression from the people that the USSR was an occupier getting in the way of self-determination).
Mao's criticism of the USSR conducting 'social imperialism' during the Cold War was an apt one when, in the cases I noted beforehand, it was very much the Soviets trying to impose their will and ideological line on foreign peoples, instead of allowing left-wing movements to grow and develop organically. I personally believe the Belt and Road Initiative is China's way of allowing the latter idea to occur, but it's not without its faults, and it remains to be seen if it will succeed.
Let's not forget the PRC themselves made several mistakes in their attempts to export Socialism abroad too; backing the genocidal Khmer Rouge, sending the PLA into Vietnam to "teach them a lesson" for removing the Khmer Rouge, and the Sino-Soviet Split itself causing a massive rift in the International left that greatly stunted the ability to organize against global capital.
Again, I'm not trying to argue that it's wrong to try and instigate revolution abroad and back anti-colonial movements (DPRK indirectly supplying weapons to Palestinians is based), but that there is a lot more historical nuance behind the modern geopolitical strategies of AES.
If I may ask, what do you believe the USSR should have been more proactive in in regard to their interventions abroad?
I’m not really well informed enough but my understanding is that after Afghan communists took power, the Soviets had very little at all to do with supporting that government until they sent troops like a full 6 months after the CIA began arming, organizing and funding reactionary forces in the country, something which a US official famously admitted, boasting about provoking the “invasion”. Maybe a more proactive approach by the Soviets could have been more effective than going in only after the government was already beset by well armed forces of reaction. I don’t know though, it’s just a thought. I wasn’t trying to say you’re wrong, I just think it isn’t so black and white as to say they did the opposite of non-interference.
My general reading of the Cold War is that the USSR as opposed to how they were painted by western propaganda as this scheming force trying to install communism everywhere is that they were actually highly conciliatory and as you said trying to avoid WW3, whereas the U.S. was the truly aggressive and belligerent actor across the globe. The USSR mostly restrained itself to supporting causes that solicited their help and only then when they had already taken state power or were close to doing so. As you said they were like this even before WW2, telling the Chinese communists to continue working the KMT is another example.
Post WW2 they were highly conciliatory giving half of Berlin to the capitalists, allowing the U.S. to occupy half of Korea and only begrudgingly aiding the DPRK military campaign after Kim took action to end that occupation. The U.S. was far more aggressive in places like Greece, and later places like Indonesia where the U.S. was actively bombing parts of the country and provided support to the anti-communist military forces allowing them to kill a million people and destroy what was a large well organized communist party in one of the world’s most populous countries. I can imagine an alternate history where the communists in Indonesia armed themselves with the aid of the PRC or USSR and that huge win for the forces of reaction never happens (actually, Mao warned the Indonesian communists to arm up and they chose not to so it’s not a criticism of China or USSR, more so just illustrative of how sometimes choosing to not act or bide your time can be disastrous in general).
But I mostly agree with you, and I think China has been served well by following a strict non-interference policy during this particular historic moment. I was only quibbling with the characterization of the USSR’s policy as the opposite of that, their actions were somewhere in between. There may have been times they got involved unnecessarily but I think there were also times where they could have been served well by doing a bit more.
The longer they wait the weaker the west will be when it happens. The west us powered by capitlaism and well, there is this tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time.
It pretty much always works against the US and that is kinda wild.
The time for Xinjiang separatists to make their play was in 2016 when media coverage and support for them was an all time high. The CPC have already integrated Xinjiang successfully with the rest of China with stability through development and crackdowns and can flex a huge tourism industry on top of that. The terrorists are just going to arrive in Xinjiang and realize they have little to no connection to the people there after camping in Syria and cozying up to western groups.
Going from Syria to Xinjiang is a pipe dream and I think the imperialists believe this as well so they're only going to be used for manufacturing consent for anti-Chinese policies in already captured nations and at home rather than any attempt at color revolution.