icecrystal posted:

forgive the necroposting, but i mean c'mon...

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

there's nothing that shows the bankruptcy of the free tibet movement more than the childish and selfish practice of burning oneself to death, talking about emotional blackmail.

"my culture qq"

so what? isis and al qaeda blow themselves up for their religion. tibetan dissidents didn't start burning themselves until one guy did it in 1998, during one of the tibetan youth congress's unto death hunger strikes, almost 50 years after the annexation. the dalai lama has said nothing against these suicides even though the majority of them are young people in their early 20s and even teenagers as young as 15.

and for what it's worth, the chinese have accused the tibetan youth congress of all sorts of shady shit.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-05/04/content_8104388.htm

Wow You took him down a peg I eagerly await IWC's rebuttal.

dipshit420 posted:

This was such a great thread title, good job Donald.

Thank you.

Also yeah the land tenure system is undergoing major revisions and it is possible that some rights will be formalized. This is a complex thing though. The problem is that it affects different people in different ways. Like if you are a farmer whose family has farmed in a region for a long period of time, and they say oh you don't have a right to this land since it's public property, and they kick you off and build a cement factory there or something, you'd probably be happy that the government wants to give you a 99-year title or something. But obviously a more formal market in land does not necessarily do that for everyone and carries with it risks as well (such as farmers being able to sell off tracts of good farmland which then is lost to development which might be caused by irrational speculation).

getfiscal posted:

Many people on this forum support Hugo Chavez because he leads a government that calls itself Socialist. At the same time, most of us are very critical of Chinese capitalism. Maybe we're being a little tough on the Middle Kingdom, though?

Consider these facts about China:

- Almost all of the financial sector is state-owned and is integrated into loose national plans for investment.
- The state still has a controlling interest, through state-owned enterprises, in industries like resources and transportation.
- Marxism is an obligatory course in university programs.
- Most workers in China are members of a union.
- The Communist Party has 80 million members from all leading sections of society.
- China's life expectancy is 10 years longer than India's due to strong health care programs.
- China has invested large amounts in public transit.
- All land in China is owned by the people rather than landlords.
- China is considered less corrupt than India according to Transparency International.
- Chinese media is largely public and controlled by the socialist movement.
- China tries to curtail dumb political comments and pornography on the Internet.
- Chinese foreign investment tends to focus on mutually beneficial resource agreements.
- Chinese foreign policy tends to be critical of 'humanitarian intervention'.

Maybe it's time to cut Zhongguo a little slack?

ok so I'm a serial effortposter and I think the question of China warrants some serious effortposting on everyone's behalf, like especially serious Marxists and revolutionaries outside this forum. I'm an aspiring political economist and I think Samir Amin has the best angle on modern political economy. However, his positions are also ambiguous in many key areas but I think this is a good thing when discussing China due to the shifting nature of China' s internal MoP and the shifting of the international balance of forces to be more favorable to China (and because I don't want to offend anyone who might have a strong opinion on China).

It's true westerners can be hard on China in that western rulers are critical of anything moderately resembling the DotP while also having a proverbial hard on for China's economic success in terms of capitalist metrics. So I think that the "Chinese threat" is greatly exaggerated as a propaganda tool. Mythologies about China's supposed colonization of Africa deflect criticisms of the very real re-colonization of Africa by the west through the establishment of the Hippo trench, the proxy war with Libya, the corporate warlordism in the Congo, etc. If you think about it, China's ascendance in the modern era is really just returning to its international position pre-imperialism (which many considered China's "natural" position in the silk road world-system) and in this sense China's economic development, whether state socialism or state capitalism (the line is really quite blurry) is a huge achievement as a third world bourgeois-national project. Granted, this has also provided an ideological base for the renewed capitalist class to pursue a "restorationist" direction similar to modern Russian nationalism and this clique, along with the revisionists, holds a strong sway over the economy and state apparatus.

I appreciate the above achievements of modern China and I think the comparison to Chavismo is accurate, especially with the return of populism in Xi Jinping's administration. However, part of this comparison is that capitalism continues to exist in Venezuela, and post-Cultural Revolution in China it certainly made some kind of return. This is not to deny that the Chinese state does a lot to act as a counter-power to both internal capital and international imperialist hegemony and that working-class Chinese people and other developing nations have benefited from modern China's policies.

Ultimately, I think that the worldwide transition to communism will require resolving China's internal contradictions through some sort of second cultural revolution involving a line struggle in the CPC and possibly even some sort of insurrection. However, I think these contradictions are less sharp than what ultra-left maoists, trots, and anarchists in the west might believe.

I think other third world nations and revolutionary movements have a lot to learn from the Chinese experience, and there's certainly evidence that diverse interpretations of the Chinese project, from ALBA's developmentalist socialism to Maoist anti-revisionism, have had to center these lessons and engage modern China. I think Venezuela's and the potential Philippines under a joint Duterte-NDF government represent imperfect good approaches to Chinese economic activity- friendly but at arm's length.

Just sharing my thoughts, I might include the above comments in some sort of separate effortpost.