China has made monumental progress in poverty alleviation, infrastructural projects, agricultural sovereignty, overall making vast improvements in ordinary people's quality of life.

A few decades ago, you might have said that China appeared to be on an opposite trajectory of counterrevolutionary retreat, but today Chinese people enjoy luxuries that Westerners like myself can only dream of. Good governance, which is the scarcest resource in the world right now, a high trust society, beautiful cities, and a system capable of enacting rapid positive change.

So, it's unsurprising that given the unprecedented access that Westerners have into the everyday lives of Chinese people thanks to platforms like TikTok and Xiaohongshu, a lot of people are seeing the obvious appeal of whatever it is that Chinese people seem to have going on without realizing that its formula for success is a communist political party.

To seize on the opportunity that "Chinamaxxing" in this trend has given to us is to connect the appeal of China to Marxism-Leninism and socialist organization.

When people think of "Chinamaxxing", they probably think about iShowSpeed, Adidas China exclusives, and charming cigarette packaging. I've seen plenty of commentators observe that this trend is mostly comprised of shifts in consumption habits, aesthetic tastes, and superficial adoption of Chinese cultural practices, which are admittedly not great vehicles for consciousness raising and may even serve to depoliticize the fact of China's achievements through socialism by attributing its success to kind of abstracted essentialized "Chineseness" which is often viewed through a lens of orientalism.

Memes can sometimes be a useful shorthand for big ideas and humor can make space for political positions that are sidelined, demonized, or outright censored here in the core, but it's obviously not a substitute for deep study or real engagement with people who are actively applying Marxism-Leninism to their objective conditions (which is happening! – millions of people are undertaking that process in China).

Engaging with an idea that is as dangerous to capitalism as socialism through humor lowers the stakes of being pro-China in what is still a rabidly Sinophobic and anti-communist society.

So I do see the optimism and the opportunity that is inherent in the "Chinamaxxing" meme. I think capitalizing on it is going to be a challenge, which leads me to my next point and this is something that we've talked about within the Qiao Collective. Two of our members, I should point out, have already shared our analysis in a previous episode of the China Report in which one of my comrades made an excellent statement about the depoliticized nature of the meme:

He said that "Chinaxmaxing", quote, "can slide into a form of ahistorical escapism when the positive aspects of modern China are taken out of context and separated from the longer history of semi-colonial subjugation and violent revolutionary struggle that made its current prosperity possible. Without that memory culture, "Chinamaxxing" in the West risks squandering its potential for deeper anti-imperialist politicization in favor of quiescence and pure escapism without a robust memory culture."

At this level of vibes a lot of liberals are obviously disillusioned, disenchanted with a very bleak outlook that they've been confronted with and they don't feel very good about who they are and what their role in the global economic order has been revealed to be, the genocide in Palestine, or what their government does, and they're reaching for an alternative identity in a kind of directionless manner and they're feeling the gravitational pull of China the same way everyone else in the world is currently.

I don't know if this is really indicative of a measurable internal shift or acceptance of socialism. It might be – I hope it is – but liberals don't spontaneously become Marxist-Leninists and just because they realize America sucks. They don't spontaneously develop a coherent and humane framework when their old one is exposed as barbaric, but those are changes that need to occur in order for that consciousness raising to happen.

This point about nurturing the historical memory of struggle is very important. Back when we first opened up discussion about this meme, my instinct was to point back to the COVID-19 pandemic and public health emergency as an event that gave rise to the meme. It was a crisis that coincided with the death of what we could call "woke neoliberalism" – identity politics of that decade in the 2010s which paved the way for neo-fascism – and so I think it's apt to think through that moment again now that we're facing an imminent energy crisis that will make Americans' pockets hurt and trigger collapse that needs to be met with an organized response.

The pandemic was the last crisis that is really comparable to the looming energy crisis that we're about to face. And the task remains the same, but it will be occurring under much more difficult conditions because of the organizational paralysis, ideological disintegration, and timidity of the Western left since 2020.

So, "Chinamaxxing" is a deeply ambivalent meme for a deeply ambivalent population. And we need more than escapism and nihilism and compensatory humor to deal with the absence of socialism as an organizing force here. And what would excite me more than a shallow engagement with Chinese culture and this ambivalent embrace of Chinese dominance is a recommitment to anti-fascism, which can be achieved through the study of Chinese history and is a suppressed aspect of China's success, and the recognition that our – as imperial core workers – our dis-identification with empire and American national mythologies should lead us not necessarily to a vague "becoming Chinese" or "entering a Chinese time of our lives", but taking up the task of debilitating empire from within and forging links through internationalism with other communist movements and sovereign movements throughout the world.

And so, in an environment of AI-driven mass surveillance and manipulation, a lack of credible institutions, widespread hostility and distrust, it is natural that people do see China as a source of of optimism and hope for the future, and that people will naturally connect with what is sincere and beautiful and validated by real experience and the concrete reality that we see in China in the in the success of socialism. I would encourage people to take that seriously if if they feel ambivalent about China.

The antidote to the nihilism that we face in the core is mass communist politics articulated as an organized party that brings together a lot of our disparate efforts.

And there's no shortcut to building the party. But China's socialist revolution and political economic model is an enormous resource to us, as an economic, spiritual, ideological, developmental, and diplomatic resource to the third world as well. And to the internal colonies in particular within the US.

But China can't do our work for us. It can't be a substitute for the work that we have to do to create fractures within the ruling party for the ruling class or a debilitating empire from within.

We can all agree that it's a foregone conclusion that we are in the Chinese century, and even though there remains a lot of denial about the US's ability to project power and militarily enforce the value drainage mechanisms of imperialism, we can all agree that we are living in a different world because of China, and that world is a better one because China is socialist.

There's no easy way out from the situation that we find ourselves in, kind of like an American Samsara, and we keep refusing to accept that communism is how we exit that cycle of suffering.

And if "Chinamaxxing" is a means of smuggling in some socialist propaganda and education, so be it. But we deserve sharper tools. And anything that gives us hope for the advancement of socialism at a time of profound nihilism, despair, and organizational paralysis should be preserved and celebrated.

Palestinian journalists from Gaza Ahmed Alnaouq and Hala Hanina are joined by Palestinian author, academic and physician Dr Ghada Karmi and investigative journalist Matt Kennard.

They discuss the latest news from Palestine and the wider region, including the now viral of image from L’Espresso magazine showing an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank terrorising a Palestinian woman, the ongoing genocide in Gaza despite six months of so-called “ceasefire” and the significance of Palestinian Prisoner’s Day on 17th April.

01:20 L’Espresso Magazine photo of Israeli settler

16:00 six months into the so-called ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza

25:00 Why won’t Israel STILL allow journalists to enter Gaza?

37:00 Flotilla sets sail from Barcelona to break the siege of Gaza

45:00 Palantir, Israel and the NHS

57:00 Green Party motion declaring Zionism is racism

1:04:00 Palestinian Prisoner’s Day

1:17:00 Is the British government involved in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon?

Why should we in Southeast Asia care about a frivolous Western social media trend like "Chinamaxxing"?

Because, let's be honest, it hasn't really gained traction in the Global South in the same way [as in the US]. The tropes of "Chinamaxxing", drinking hot water, eating rice porridge, wearing indoor slippers aren't particularly novel in Southeast Asia. We have a long history of Chinese migration, deep cultural overlap, and large Chinese diasporas.

So yes, the memes are fun, funny even, and they're welcome in a general kind of counter to anti-China sentiment. But if we're talking about "Chinamaxxing" just as a Western viral phenomenon, it falls short. It doesn't land the same way it does in in the West.

So the question that I would have first, instinctually, would be: by amplifying its importance, are we still seeking Western validation? Are we just welcoming cultural appropriation? What is the point of this?

And certainly, if we are just thinking of it as a Western apolitical social media meme, the answer to those questions would be yes. However, this is not about just social media. The phenomenon of "Chinamaxxing" is that it signals a new stage for humanity, and that is why it holds a much deeper significance.

For decades in Southeast Asia, we have lived with a Cold War era dichotomy:

On one side is US imperialism with their propaganda machine built on disinformation, smears, and the erasure of the atrocities committed in this region during its anti-China, anti-communist campaigns.

When I interviewed the Indonesian journalist Febriana Firdaus, who faced consequences as recently as 2016 for reporting on Indonesia's 1965 US-backed genocide, where anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million people were reported to have disappeared due to suspected socialist affiliations, she recounted her own personal experience of finding out years after the fact that her grandfather had been taken by government officials on this pretext. No one ever heard from him again, and no one ever talked about why he disappeared.

My father in Malaysia also recounted a similar experience of a classmate disappearing for having anti-colonial socialist leanings, and the teacher's reprimand was silence when questioned. It is a measure of how effective US anti-China, anti-communist propaganda was that all 30 of his classmates believed that this boy that was taken and detained deserved it because he was a communist.

Ultimately, these tactics worked. In the words of my father, nobody would even dare to whisper the word socialism, and the generation after my father's, my generation, knows nothing about our country's socialist histories. US imperialism disappeared a whole generation of socialist thought leaders and revolutionaries, and consequently, in the war of ideas, completely obliterated socialism in the region outside of the two countries, Vietnam and Laos, that achieved their people's revolution.

There is a trauma embedded in this erasure, and it has lasting psychological consequences. Instead of understanding underdevelopment as the direct outcome of imperialism in the forms of extraction, military aggression, and coercive economic structures, people were encouraged to internalize it as individual or cultural failure, and that extended to our view of China. China was poor because they were inferior.

We internalized an inferiority complex and a set of very potent self-limiting beliefs that corruption is innate in our populations, that incompetence is cultural, that the West is morally superior, that Western intervention is benevolent, and most importantly, that resistance is futile because there is no alternative. These beliefs were cultivated in the vacuum of historical memory and political education.

China's socialist achievements directly challenge this. They show in concrete, measurable terms that an alternative exists, and this is the other side of the Cold War that US imperialist narratives worked so hard to bury: A socialist system rooted in people's power and collective prosperity, and operating with a completely different strategy for winning the war of ideas.

China's approach is encapsulated by Deng Xiaoping's well-known quote, "Socialism is not poverty. Development is the hard truth." In other words, while the US requires us to deny reality and accept fabrication in order to uphold its imperial system, China, by contrast, argues that the most persuasive case for socialism is not messaging tactics at all, but material improvement, the ability to deliver concrete gains in people's lives.

And as China has delivered these concrete gains, we can see that it is a strategy that is currently bearing fruit.

In the West, we have "Chinamaxxing" born out of people seeing video evidence on Red Note or on social media, and celebrating that in their own way through a fun meme. In Southeast Asia, because of proximity, people are more likely to actually travel to China themselves to witness this in person.

I witnessed this myself going to China for the first time when I was nine, and then in the 2000s, and again last year. And it did aid and galvanize my own political education, which is still ongoing. It drives my curiosity, and it is a huge part of the reason for my belief that we can do better in the West, and that we have to do better.

And as my father tells me too, the very classmates who held on to their anti-China, anti-communist beliefs for decades have now themselves traveled to China and are reversing their opinions. Their first-hand experiences have led them to question the narrative that they accepted without question decades ago, and to seek answers for what happened to their classmate. (Unfortunately, he was detained, obviously without trial. No one really knows how long he was detained for, and he was quietly released.)

But this is just a testament that if we can witness with our own eyes China's achievements, the 850 million people lifted out of poverty, life expectancy gains, clear measurements of life improvement improvements, massive infrastructure systems, the deep indoctrination of Western imperialism can be broken through.

The evidence is all across Southeast Asia in the regional frameworks that provide a clear alternative to Western coercive institutions: China's prosperity for all extends outward. The countries in Southeast Asia who seize on the opportunities that China is offering are reaping the rewards.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, is currently China's biggest bilateral trade partner, and the Belt and Road Initiative has already delivered Southeast Asia's first high-speed railway in Indonesia, the China-Laos railway, Cambodia's first expressway and a new airport, Malaysia's East Coast Rail Link, and dozens of hydropower plants and special economic zones across the region.

In total, China has built or is building over 1,800 km of new rail, thousands of megawatts of energy capacity, and billions of dollars in ports and industrial zones.

On the flip side, to illustrate what happens when you embed yourself more further into US imperial systems, we have the example of the Philippines, which after decades of US-aligned neoliberal policy has been the first country to declare a national energy emergency due to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

So in conclusion, China is significant because it marks a new stage in humanity. It is still useful because it it invites curiosity in a pretty low-stakes way, safely, playfully, openly, and we don't have to manufacture anything to meet that curiosity. The reality of what people can see, measure, and experience is more persuasive than any propaganda we are fed. And I, personally, I'm hoping that this opening will allow the next generation in Southeast Asia to heal the wounds of imperialism and to rebuild the political socialist movements we need because, as "Chinamaxxing" definitively illustrates, US imperialism has failed, and the path forward for human progress is socialist.

While the US is busy fighting illegal wars of aggression around the globe, Taiwan is quietly mending ties with China to avoid being "Ukrainized" by the lunatic warmongers in Washington. The recent meeting between Taiwan's opposition party leader, the KMT Chair Woman, Cheng Li-wun, and Xi Jinping.

To put this into proper perspective, I speak with Dr. Joanna Lei, a Taiwanese businesswoman, media executive, and former KMT lawmaker.

This video explores a village located on a 1,500 meter cliff in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China. Villagers must climb 2,556 steel steps, a drop of 800 meters, to get home. Many of them have moved down the mountain to new homes [provided for free by the government], but some have chosen to return. This video shares the lives of people in one of China's poorest regions and explores the new challenges they face.

"We are told that security in the Middle East requires defeating Iran, security in East Asia requires defeating China, and security in Europe requires defeating Russia. We never discuss security in terms of how to learn to live together by harmonising interests and managing competition. This is by design. This is hegemonic peace, in which security depends on defeating rivals rather than managing a balance of power.

Subsequently, security relies solely on deterrence rather than reassurance; diplomacy is dismissed as appeasement; peace agreements are temporary and deceptive; and war is peace. Our rivals do not have legitimate security concerns, as their policies are allegedly always motivated by aggressive, irrational, or expansionist behaviour.

We have convinced ourselves that our liberal hegemony is a force for good, and that our opponents oppose our dominance because they reject our benign values of freedom. Discussing the security concerns of adversaries is believed to “legitimise” their policies, which is treasonous. The world is divided into good guys (liberal democracies) and bad guys (autocracies). We should not ask how defeating Russia, as the world's largest nuclear power, is a rational security strategy, or why our governments refuse to even speak with Moscow to discuss the European security architecture and end the war. Our governments have relabelled nuclear deterrence as nuclear blackmail to signal that there can be no more constraints.

All empires can become irrational during decline. Leaders take greater risks to avoid decline, legitimacy crises at home must be distracted with enemies abroad, outdated strategies from a bygone era of strength are still embraced, and there is a tendency to double down on narratives of being indispensable, representing universal values, and dismissing all opposition as illegitimate and dangerous. Are we the fanatics?"

Downtown Kashgar, Xinjiang is beautiful, but it is also very touristy. Are we having an authentic experience when we visit? Or are we in "Uighur Disneyland"? How does China balance development and preservation, and what is the future for an ancient Silk Road town?

European countries that produce weapons for Kiev risk a direct conflict with Moscow, the Defense Ministry has warned

Kiev’s Western backers want to ramp up production of long-range drones to prop up Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry has said, warning the move is bound to drag the European nations conserned into a direct conflict with Moscow.

The ministry said a network of facilities producing drones and their components is operating in a number of European countries, including the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Poland. Additional sites were identified outside the continent, including in Türkiye and Israel. At least four facilities are located in Italy alone.

According to the ministry, Kiev’s Western backers are seeking to ramp up production of long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, a move Moscow described as a “deliberate step leading to a sharp escalation of the military-political situation throughout Europe.” It added that such efforts risk turning host countries into “Ukraine’s strategic rear area.”

“The implementation of terrorist attack scenarios against Russia… using supposedly ‘Ukrainian’ UAVs manufactured in Europe is leading to unpredictable consequences,” the ministry said, referring to repeated statements by Ukrainian officials about expanding long-range strikes.

Instead of strengthening the security of European states, the actions of European rulers are rapidly drawing these countries into a war with Russia.

The ministry named multiple drone manufacturing facilities located in the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

At least four sites producing drone components were identified in Italy, with several plants involved in such activities located in Türkiye, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Israel.

Ukraine has been regularly launching one-way drones deep into Russian territory, targeting assorted civilian infrastructure, industrial sites, and residential buildings. The attacks have seemingly intensified in recent weeks, with Kiev sending in hundreds of fixed-wing UAVs daily.

Russian officials have described the strikes as indiscriminate “terrorist” attacks aimed at compensating for frontline setbacks the Ukrainian military has been suffering. Moscow has retaliated with a long-range strike campaign of its own against dual-use infrastructure and military installations, maintaining it never targets purely civilian sites.