• eldavi@lemmy.ml
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    18 days ago

    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.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      18 days ago

      their lack of imperial experience is likely to bite them in the ass

      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.

      • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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        18 days ago

        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.