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.
If losing four decades of progress while waiting for the PRC to reach parity with the US and establish multipolarity when the USSR was already at near parity, then china sacrificed the interests of humanity in service of its own, full stop
We passed 1.5C ffs
The USSR built a socialist world around and wholly dependent on itself, and then capitulated internally (due to the utter decay of the party as a revolutionary institution), destroying that order almost all at once. I don’t know what China could have done to prevent that. An unsplit China would have been significantly more dependent on the USSR and at best would most likely have been forced into a similar position to Vietnam after the collapse anyway.
One could argue letting the US have a unipolar moment induced a terminal delusion in the minds of it’s ruling class and untethered them a lot from reality,and now we’re beginning to see the payoff
The soviets,by doing those things,kept the western world on its toes and made it necessary to boot out any cranks or truly incompetent people
fuck off, china did what they thought it was best for them, and now they’re positioned as beacon for the global south while the USSR got dismantled by a freaking drunkard, that’s a clear sign that they were not even close to near parity with the west.
The ones responsible for the misery in the world are primarily the western working class, the privileged henchmen of the bourgeoisie, not china ffs.
So does NATO with things like colonialism. So did Germany, Britain, France, the US before the formation of NATO.
Doing what’s best for you, or what you think is best for you does not, in fact, make those actions good.
What does being a ‘beacon’ entail here? Other countries are not in a position to do what the PRC did (make itself the most attractive option for foreign investments at the exclusion of other countries (including the imperial core)), and the PRC does not seem to be supplying arms or anything like that to them to fight off NATO, nor is the PRC taking military action to help anti-colonial and socialist movements around the world.
The successes of the PRC, while very significant, do not seem to play much of a role outside of the PRC.
It’s primarily the western bourgeoisie, and the western treatlerite aristocracy comes after, but sure.
Not exactly an excuse to do stuff like literally supporting NATO (and, by extension, the western bourgeoisie), including by doing stuff like helping the Mujahideen against socialists in Afghanistan and fighting against Vietnam.
“supporting the Khmer Rouge was good, actually”
-literally you