this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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i think that the global south is a dead end if the chinese can't figure out how to make it profitable fast enough.
governments like the americans have centuries worth of tribal knowledge and the experience it takes to make the global south bend to it's will and they will/are using that to grey rock chinese ambitions there and it's working.
the only counter that the chinese have, imo, is to expend their financial might in making it happen anyways despite the costs incurred like byd is doing in mexico; but doing so imperils themselves further because the biggest and strongest asset to the american war chest is it's de facto control over the world's finances. so if the chinese pursue this avenue, they should expect to be outmaneuvered wo strong allies.
It sounds like you’re analyzing China as if it were just another capitalist state, but it’s not one. It doesn’t need—or even want—to (neo)colonize the Global South. It wants equal exchange with them, not unequal exchange. The Global South is now largely wise to the imperial core’s neocolonial debt traps (think IMF & World Bank), and they’re happy to engage with China’s non-predatory alternatives.
i believe that this is why they have a real chance of outlasting everyone; people are sick of american hegemony and it's underhanded abusiveness.
whether or not china wants to be an imperial power itself is immaterial since the current hegemony of empires will & are doing everything in their power to assert control of china and cap its influence; they have enough leverage at their disposal to decimate china like they did in the past and their newest strategy includes the successful international ostracization levied against them to keep them away from the word economies that are both amenable to the goal of equal exchange and are able to help them achieve that goal. (eg mexico, brazil, vietnam, etc.)
I do not believe they have that leverage anymore. The Global North has largely deindustrialized itself, and it currently seems unable to escape the neoliberal hole it has dug for itself, and that will prevent re-industrialization. The US and Europe combined can’t even produce enough munitions for Ukraine’s needs right now. The US military is very large, but it is extraordinarily expensive, and it is very ineffective in proportion to cost. It produces very technologically sophisticated, expensive garbage, and their older, large platforms have been poorly maintained. The US has proven to itself in its own war games that it can’t reliably take on Iran, never mind China. Technology-wise, China has already surpassed the West in some areas, and that trajectory has a lot of momentum. China files more patents than the next nine countries combined. The Global North is also a minority of the world’s population by a long shot, and it holds a minority of the world’s natural resources. It is an empire in decline.
In the Global North’s attempts at “international” sanctions, it is ostracizing itself from the global majority. The Global South—Russia and China included—are ignoring those sanctions and doing its own thing. Even Global North countries are skirting their own sanctions and trading with Russia on the sly. A recent interview with Marxist economists Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff: A World Pushed to Resist: U.S. Policies and the Rise of Global Alliances
the american war chest no longer relies on an industrial base and it's military is a vestige of a time that hasn't yet completely passed but has already started to as you pointed out.
to be clear, industrialization is absolutely necessary for a long run, but they have more than enough financial surplus to outlast the entire world without it long enough to maintain their control until an industrial based can be created from scratch and they tackle one problem at a time. the first priority is always to nip social & economical movements that challenge their financial position in the bud and in every way that they can and at every opportunity.
the combined western military might alone is still capable of decimating china; but it would be a mistake to go with such an old fashion heavy hand (at least for now) when you can user newer and more surgical weaponry like american dominance in technology. china is still dependent on western technology despite their own impressive technological prowess and progress in mitigating it as a threat to them; but like the american military, it's MUCH bigger and deeper than anything china can realistically counter as evidenced by the russian contributor expulsions from the linux kernel maintainer's group and TSMC refusing to service chinese chip makers.
the second biggest and strongest weapon my in country's arsenal is social engineering and they've also successfully used it maintain narratives like china is being a bully in the international affairs and anyone speaks well of them in any light is automatically a "tankie".
like defederation & bannings in the lemmyverse; the ostracizing people are shooting themselves in the foot, but it's happening so slowly that it can only be seen from the lens of experience and that same experience also says that they will happily continue doing it against their boogeyman-of-the-month and no matter how detrimental it is to their own goals.
and also like in the lemmyverse; the ostracization leans into their leverage right now with key chess pieces like the linux kernel, tsmc, finances, and majority support (in lemmy's case).
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It goes both ways.
yes, the chinese have made a great deal of impressive progress at mitigating the military and economic leverage that works against them (technological too, but only to a degree so far); but they still have a long way to go at mitigating the other forms of leverage that the west has as its disposal, particularly in the arenas of technology, social engineering, and international tribalism.
our own inertia in the west is helping buy time to catch up and they can buy more time in the near future by aggressively reaching out the countries that the trump administration is going to abandon in the near future. however, unlike russia & cuba rn, a handout isn't going to fix anything in the long run, but it's a needful & beneficial place to start and they have to race against the clock to convert those countries from economic backwaters into players on the world's stage to mitigate the leverage from international tribalism (among others) and their lack of imperial experience is likely to bite them in the ass if they don't do it right.
You may not be aware that, as a Marxist, when you say imperialist, what I hear is monopoly capitalist, because that is what it definitionally means to us. I’m not sure what it means to you. From my perspective China isn’t trying to do imperialism, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. It’s not trying to follow the path of the UK in the 19th century or the US in the 20th. This is a different, uncharted path, which the US security state is only now beginning to realize, and I think it is finding itself caught with its pants down.
Chinese state thinkers have dialectical/historical materialism on their side, which leaves Western liberal, metaphysical, idealist thinkers ill-equipped. Until fairly recently, Western thinkers believed that China’s “reform and opening up” was going to lead to Western neocolonialization of China, as happened when the Soviet Union fell. They know now that they were wrong, and that China leveraged the Western capitalist states’ own capital and knowledge to develop its domestic productive forces, leapfrogging them in technology and industrial capacity.
this is the second time, and in as many days, that i learned my own personal shorthand monikers counter an already well establish phrase/term with meanings that describes something else; thank you for making me aware of that and prolewiki's existence.
i'm saw a lot of parallels between the chinese/western cold war and latin america's history with the united states and the latter is full of examples of peoples who wanted to "live and let live", like china says it does. all of them have either been destroyed or alienably altered to kowtow to american hegemony and it looked like china might go the same route since they appear willing to fall into the same traps from a ex reddit liberal perspective. i think your undeniable example proves that they're at least aware and their financing is already sufficient enough to help them succeed where the latin american examples failed.
i think i should start asking myself if my opinion comes from an "reddit liberal" perspective and read before showing my ignorance so blatantly and i wish i disciplined enough to follow through on it.
You’re making very quick work of deprogramming yourself: it took me about twenty years of peeling away the many layers of liberalism before coming around to communism.
ProleWiki and Lemmy are not unrelated projects.
thank you for the list of links.
also i don't think i'm deprogramming myself; i think that my experiences as a member to multiple multilayered minority groups that straddle the socio-economic divides in this country have been deprogramming me over the decades and lemmy is making me aware of where/how i got/get it wrong through my interactions with other leftists on this platform; like it did here.