MelianPretext

The comical thing about this rag is that it is so consistent in its cheerleading agenda for Western imperialism and chauvinism since its creation in the early 19th century that both Marx and Lenin dunked on it.

"Having stood forward as one of the staunchest apologists of the late invasion of China" is how Karl Marx himself described "that eminent organ of British Free Trade, the London Economist" back in October 1858 regarding its support for the First Opium War. In October 1859, following the Anglo-French naval bombing of the city of Guangzhou during the 1857 Battle of Canton in the Second Opium War, Marx wrote "The Economist, which had distinguished itself by its fervent apology for the Canton bombardment" Over a hundred and sixty years since then, this rag has been just as anti-China today as it was back in Marx's time. Back then, it was the apologist of British "free trade," the pretext for both the Opium Wars it supported (along with supporting the Confederacy), now that the tables have turned, the "free trade" magazine's cover illustrations now depict Chinese EV exports as akin to bombarding the Earth like a meteor shower.

This closure is referring to the Economist's "Chaguan" column, penned by a single author in Beijing yellowface-cosplaying under that Chinese column name. It was analyzed in a January 2024 King's College London report as having not a single "clearly positive" story on China despite that this journalist "travels extensively in China to produce his reports, and on-the-ground anecdotes are a strong feature":

Another source of influential reporting on China is The Economist’s Chaguan column, launched in September 2018. It takes up one page of the print version of the newspaper (in the region of 1,000 words per article), and appears most weeks (The Economist is a weekly publication). Chaguan is written solely by one journalist, David Rennie, who is based in Beijing. [...] given that this period covered the COVID-19 pandemic in China, there were numerous reports on public health (12 in total) – particularly in 2020 (the first year of COVID) and again in 2022, when China’s COVID policy faced several challenges; when China was doing better than other countries in managing COVID, it was treated less by Chaguan and the media generally. Our framing analysis identified negative coverage in 84 per cent of Chaguan’s columns, with only four reports (1.5 per cent) being coded neutral-to-positive (and none clearly positive).

[...] Chaguan echoes the practice of other media in consistently repeating and emphasising particular terms or images of China, many of which are negative. For example, when discussing the economy, China’s economic behaviour towards foreign firms or governments is often described as ‘bullying’ or ‘threatening’. The use of negative terms is most common in reports on politics. Frequent keywords used in reports on Chinese domestic politics include ‘authoritarian’/‘authority’/‘autocracy’, ‘censorship’/ ‘controlling’/‘surveillance’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘violate’/‘limit human rights’. Keywords regarding China’s foreign relations include authoritarian/autocratic, bully/cheat/harass, aggressive/reckless and blame/accuse foreign countries. These words directly define the nature of China or its behaviour as negative, and their frequent appearance in political coverage creates their links to Chinese politics, subliminally transforming the framework constructed by the media into the reader’s own perception. This constitutes a normalisation of a strongly negative picture of China’s politics.

The way that Hong Kong or Xinjiang are referred to across all of these media outlets reinforces this pattern. These two places, and the central government’s policies towards them, have become media bywords for repression and authoritarianism. They are frequently mentioned in passing in reports on topics that are not related to either place, in a way that frames China negatively: a template to plug into any story that needs evidence for Chinese ‘repression’, even if that story does not relate either to Hong Kong or Xinjiang.

Summers, Tim. 2024. "Shaping the policy debate: How the British media presents China." King's College London.

The truth is that, when it comes down to it, the debates about the numbers, the optics and the moralizing that the Western narrative revolves around, and which MLs since have poured ink doing "damage control" for, are fundamentally irrelevant. The only question at all for ML discourse between MLs is that, when it comes down to it, does the Party and the People have the duty and the resolve to defend the revolution by all means from genuine counter-revolution. A principled position was already given just a few months after the defeat of the counter-revolution and it remains the most well articulated to this day.

[...] The facts are that in Beijing not all the guns were fired by the soldiers. In Tienanmen Square the army negotiated with the students and a majority of the latter decided to leave of their own accord. But the criminal counter-revolutionary elements, who were in charge and bent upon over-throwing the socialist system, were by no means agreeable to such an outcome. They tried forcibly to prevent ordinary students from leaving. They instigated and indulged in wanton violence against the soldiery.

When it became absolutely clear that this criminal coteries would accept no other resolution of the problem than the complete overthrow of the socialist system and its replacement by capitalism, that to achieve this nefarious end the conspirators were prepared to kill, burn and loot, to practise thuggery and intimidation, the Chinese Government and the army decided to take resolute action. It would have been a criminal dereliction of duty in such grave circumstance for the Government and the army not to have resorted to the use of force. In fact, should we not accuse the Chinese Government and the army of not having acted resolutely early enough? Should we not accuse them of showing patience for far too long? Should we not accuse the Chinese authorities of tolerating the presence in Beijing and elsewhere of hundreds of bourgeois journalists, who acted as cheerleaders for the criminal conspirators in Beijing in flagrant disregard of Chinese law?

The Chinese people achieved the liberation from imperialism in 1949 after a long and arduous struggle. During the course of this struggle millions of Chinese people perished and many more suffered extreme hardship. After liberation they completed the democratic task of the revolution and under the leadership of the CPC, the vanguard of the Chinese working class, they went on to begin the construction of socialism. They have made untold sacrifices and suffered much in order to reach the present stage of affairs when no Chinese dies of hunger, there is no illiteracy, there is basic health care available to everyone, and last but not least, China is no longer a pushover for imperialism. It is no longer possible for the imperialist powers to wage opium wars against China or to sack Nanking or Beijing.

Having reached this state of affairs, the Chinese people, with their long revolutionary traditions, the history of their struggle and sacrifice, are not lightly going to let a few thousand criminal elements, albeit with strong connections with international imperialism, overthrow the socialist system. The People's Liberation Army is a guarantee of that: it is the cutting edge of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China and if this causes outrage among imperialist circles, their hired hacks and their ideologues, the Chinese people can afford to treat it with the contempt such outrage deserves. If the resolute actions of the Chinese Government and the PLA sent petty-bourgeois 'socialists' - the Trotskyists and the Euros and even some would-be Marxist Leninists - into a stat of paroxysm, this only goes to show that at every critical juncture in the development of the revolutionary movement the world over, during every major crisis, our petty bourgeois socialists are as unfailingly bound to support the imperialist bourgeoisie as they are to stab the working-class and the national liberation movements in the back. [...]

[...] It is for this reason, and being guided solely by the interests of the proletariat, that we unhesitatingly support the suppression by the PLA of the counterrevolutionary rebellion in Tienanmen Square. It is for this reason that we denounce and oppose the sanctions and pressure being sought to be put on the Chinese government by US Imperialism and its junior partners.

• Harpal Brar, Chinese Counter-Revolution Crushed. August/September 1989.

The real takeaway lesson, both for modern AES and all MLs in general, is whether they take the words of Engels' On Authority seriously, as the CPC did in 1989:

"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. It is the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons — by the most authoritarian means possible; and the victors, if they do not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule by means of the terror which their arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if the communards had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach them for not having used it enough?"

There's too many fellow travellers here for them to see the point you're trying to make, some people in the West resist the New Cold War not out of any moral or principled anti-imperialist reasons but principally a selfish self-preservational fear from a potential MAD scenario they have floating in their heads.

We've been through all this before. Back in the 1980s, you had some Western "leftists" too busy celebrating over the supposed European nuclear disarmament through the "Zero Option" scam that Reagan pitched to Gorbachev to see the capitulation to imperialist hegemony that Gorbachev represented. There was a rather disgusting, though largely unserious at first, struggle session over on Hexbear a while back where they debated whether China should "bother" launching its second strike if the US suddenly launches a first strike against it. "Yes, 1.4 billion people will be murdered, 1/5th of the human race exterminated, but since things are already too late, China should prevent the loss of 'more lives' and let bygones be bygones." I'm sure they thought writing a few articles in Monthly Review afterwards condemning this nuclear holocaust would be a balanced recompense for this fantasy genocide scenario. You don't need enemies with "comrades" like these.

All these nonsense stories about Ukrainian "dirty nukes" or NATO escalatory gimmicks, that tries to make it seem like the Western leadership is more like the fictional General Ripper rather than the chicken-hawk it really is, obfuscates the fact that Russian nuclear superiority, particularly its still-active Perimeter program will always ensure that there is always a bottom line the West will avoid stepping on. China has completely bypassed the nuclear unilateralism nonsense that gripped the USSR, having rejected so far all Western attempts to shackle it to "trilateral arms agreements" (where the West combines its stockpile with Russia's against their own) when it still has not reached nuclear parity. The material conditions of a contemporary arms race are different from the first Cold War in that China's industrial capacity can afford it to outcompete the West in a nuclear buildup when this had once been an active US strategy to drain the Soviet budget.

The difference in the treatment of Libya and the DPRK, the first having drawn back from its nuclear program and the latter having heroically ensured its sovereignty through a mere modest nuclear capacity is plain to see for anyone in the Global South.

A perspective that I've personally come to adopt is to dialectically consider the Ukraine conflict through the lens of a "Soviet or post-Soviet civil war." This assessment acknowledges, for one, that the ongoing conflict is embedded within the broader paradigm of the Cold War, which has persisted since 1945, experiencing periods of (what can now be seen as) mere "detente" in the 1990s and 2000s. Much like the extended decade long pauses seen in the historical "Hundred Year's War" did not prevent that from being classified as "one" war, I believe future historical assessments may categorize the contemporary period as a continuation of a singular Cold War narrative, rather than distinct "old" and "new" Cold Wars as commonly discussed today.

The significance of this perspective is that it once again reinforces the sheer catastrophe that is the collapse of the USSR, a perpetually relevant historical lesson for all surviving AES states and MLs today. I distinctly remember that, back when the conflict escalated in 2022, there was a post on r/genzedong (which I can no longer find) that showcased street interviews of people in Moscow during (likely) the failed August 1991 intervention where one interviewee in the video presciently predicted there would be conflict between the newly separated nation states of Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.

In such a sense, the fact that there is now a Russo-Ukrainian conflict at all and to have it develop into a proxy war by NATO is the, in full frankness, undeniable victory of US hegemony within the macroscopic historical perspective. This is near entirely forgotten these days, but during the 20th century phase of the Cold War, it seemed inevitable that a NATO-Russia conflict would break out. This was not meant to be in Ukraine, of course, but Germany and specifically over Berlin. NATO has moved this war that was supposedly bound to occur in the middle of Europe all the way into the heartland of the USSR, furthermore subverting the former Warsaw Pact countries into its most fervent belligerents.

This US achievement must be recognized as it highlights that this is Russia's defeat in the sense that its leaders since Khrushchev have failed to appreciate the unchangingly permanent material conditions underlying US-NATO antagonism towards the pole of regional power which the USSR and Russia represents. Their utter idealism led to fantasies that such antagonism could be massaged or overcome through "peaceful coexistence" and then outright capitulation. Through this, the clash between the two was ultimately merely moved a thousand miles eastward and the immense scale of the Soviet surrender just buying two decades of detente as NATO swallowed up the former socialist states between West Germany and Moscow.

However, this does not mean that the escalation of the Ukraine conflict itself by Russia in 2022 is some geopolitical victory for US hegemony, however, rather than a colossal blunder by the geopolitically mediocre benchwarmer Biden presidency. To put it metaphorically, this is akin to having scammed someone of their own house and property and just as you were about to scam them of the very last clothes off their back, they finally wise up and sock you in the jaw. Yes, you still managed to take their house from them, but they ideally weren't supposed to wise up at all nor give you a distracting broken jaw right before you were planning to move on and pick that next fight across the city in the Asian neighborhood.

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called "virgin soil" populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent - a sad, but both inevitable and "unintended consequence" of human migration and progress. This is a modern version of what Alexander Saxton recently has described as the "soft side of anti-Indian racism" that emerged in America in the nineteenth century and that incorporated "expressions of regret over the fate of Indians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically," Saxton adds, "the effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had decreed." In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere's native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.

From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically - whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink - and often over the brink - of total extermination.

Stannard, D.E. 1992. "American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World." Oxford University Press.

Pretty momentous occasion as far as UNSC affairs go. This is the infamous March resolution that has been renewing the sanctions supervisory regime that was first implemented in 2014 and renewed every spring since. This year's would have been the 10 year anniversary of it and having it squashed by Russia and abstained by China is a positive step towards drawing back from a long cooperation with the West on this matter and a necessary preliminary move to re-legitimize any re-establishment of economic relations with the DPRK.

Her biggest accomplishment is paying homage to Mao with a kowtow when she fell down the stairs of the Great Hall of the People. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Evr9IJCUUAEbGzR.jpg

Xi’s seeming belief in supernatural forces.

And of course, we all know the most supernatural force of all is the eternal science of Marxism-Leninism 😎