Monthly Review | China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?
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Whether China has become an imperialist country is a question of crucial importance for the global class struggle. Although China has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa…

I’d originally written a bunch of my own thoughts, but the article is long enough as it is and I don’t want to embarrass myself.

Edit: Huh, look at that, there’s another discussion about this article from three years ago. Half the comments have been deleted, but hey, neat.

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Still reading the article, since its definitely not a puff piece, I’m only about 1/4 of the way through.

    But the general gist so far… critics of China are going to look an international activity and tend towards “imperalism” mostly due to “big country has more economic power than small country”. But a more nuanced way of looking at China’s activities with other countries can show that the “big country bad” hot takes are unlikely to come from a place of thorough analysis.

    It seems really easy to identify a capitalist country, as they’ll tell you up front what they are. It’ll probably be pretty easy to figure out if that country has gotten to the point of pursuing an imperial project.

    But it gets really difficult to identify a socialist/communist country. There hasn’t been a enough of a history of long lived socialist/communist countries of various sizes that can be used as test cases for comparrison so China gets compared to the USA as a “large country, lots of capital wealth, lots of natural resources to take advantage of, engages in international trade and investments in ways that can seem like they are getting the better end of the deal, etc”. What socialist/communist countries China can be comapred to are either “past tense” or much smaller than China in every way.