You know, for someone who is supposed to be knowledgeable on Chinese socialism, it’s a pity the author didn’t reference the story of Ah Q. Ah Q’s mentality, or rather Dutch comfort is one of the pillars Western Marxist ineptitude draws from.
for reference https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/
My wake-up call was the COVID pandemic.
When the rest of the world sent “essential workers” like me off to die while China stayed locked down, I had to reevaluate everything I thought I knew. If China had completely abandoned the revolution, I thought, why would they put the lives of workers ahead of profits and growth? Surely if they were just some kind of authoritarian capitalist state they’d have marched their workers off to die the same as my country did!
And they didn’t. And they kept not doing it, long after the rest of the world was screaming for them to open up the economy.
Any Westerner that still believes China has completely betrayed the revolution needs to explain why and how this happened.
It’s honestly pure fucking racism. China is clearly just acting in an underhanded way and manipulating people by LOOKING like they are doing the right thing by bringing people out of poverty but really they are just waiting for their moment to assume imperial power. Those sneaky orientals-- I mean revisionists!
China is obviously a complicated entity. There are a lot of important questions to be asked about how they operate and how that fits into ideas of socialism and communism. But 1. this is their socialist project and not ours and 2. you definitely don’t have the right to project centuries old racist tropes on them.
