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.
Long article, dense article, good article.
Are there any points you particularly agree or disagree with, or found particularly enlightening or thought-provoking?
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.
Thus, if China were to become a core country in the capitalist world system, the existing core countries would have to give up most of the surplus value they are currently extracting from the periphery. It is inconceivable that the core countries would remain economically and politically stable under such a development. Alternatively, the capitalist world system would have to develop new schemes of exploitation that manage to extract 140 million worker-years of additional surplus value from the remaining part of the periphery. It is difficult to see how the exploitation imposed on the periphery can be increased by such a massive extent without causing either rebellion or collapse.
Huh… never came across anything trying to explain in a plain enough way to easily digest, that China trying to actively pursue an imperial project among the current imperalist powers, might be physically impossible.
