I’m finishing the last episode of S5 now, and I’ll be fully caught up on this series. Between Afghanistan and Cambodia, China’s willingness to play ball with the US and its agenda is frustrating to learn.

It leaves me wanting to learn more about the Sino/Soviet split. The way this division manifested really aligned China with some dark forces, it would seem.

I also imagine the process of “normalization” with the US plays a huge role in the way this history unfolds as well.

It makes me wonder what they knew about The Khmer Rouge’s operations. I was left with the impression, based on how the history was laid out, that China was aware of just how aggressive and bloody the Khmer Rouge’s policies were.

Something about that stretch of time between 79 and 89 seems to have resulted in a bunch of weird geopolitical stuff.

Need to finish this episode, I guess.

  • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    22 hours ago

    It’s hard to say, since China was far weaker than the USSR at the time, and did not want to be an unequal partner to the USSR, especially with revisionists at the helm. Who’s to say China would have managed to lose its pariah state status and become a superpower if it was subordinate to the Soviets? This of course is no excuse for the atrocious foreign policy decisions following the split, a gross overreaction brought about by a combination of Mao’s senility and some realpolitik with Nixon, but there’s no guarantee that had the split not happened that things would have played out better; you’d still have a revisionist USSR in ideological decay to contend with, and now China would be poorer, still cut off from most of the world, and more vulnerable to the predations of imperialist states.