Ask Lemmygrad

China did not abandon class analysis. That claim misreads the post-split line. The errors in China's foreign policy after the Sino-Soviet split were real, but they did not emerge from a rejection of proletarian internationalism. They emerged from a concrete contradiction: Moscow's attempt to subordinate the Chinese revolution to its own state interests. Pressure on the Taiwan Strait, blocking independent nuclear development, demanding strategic compliance. These were great-power maneuvers that forced a rupture. China's response contained serious mistakes, yet those mistakes were made while still operating within a framework of class struggle, not outside it.

You cite the Khmer Rouge, the FNLA in Angola, and pressure on North Vietnam as proof China prioritized national interests over revolution. These were errors. Supporting forces with reactionary domestic programs carried political costs and often misjudged the balance of class forces on the ground. But these choices were not made in a vacuum of nationalist deviation. They were made under the pressure of a global split in the socialist camp. When Moscow backed one faction in a liberation struggle, China often backed another, not because it abandoned class analysis, but because it saw Moscow's alignment as serving Soviet state interests rather than revolutionary ones. The method was materialist even when the conclusions were wrong.

The charge that China collaborated with the US against the USSR needs precision. Tactical engagement with an imperialist power tin the hopes of countering a more immediate threat is not class collaborationism when the aim is to preserve the base area of world revolution. This is the same logic that guided Lenin at Brest-Litovsk. China's opening to the US was not an alliance with imperialism but a strategic effort to fragment the offensive capacity of a hegemon that was actively constraining revolutionary movements. The Three Worlds analysis had real problems. Elevating state-to-state relations risked blurring the line between proletarian internationalism and diplomatic maneuvering. But it was not bourgeois nationalism. Bourgeois nationalism dissolves class struggle into abstract national unity. The Chinese line, even at its worst, never abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat at home or the stated goal of world revolution.

Class struggle remains the engine. Overthrowing the bourgeoisie and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat worldwide is the goal. But that struggle unfolds in a world of real contradictions. When Moscow prioritized its foreign policy over revolutionary solidarity, it created a rupture that rippled through the entire camp. China's push for independent revolutionary practice, its support for forces resisting Soviet dominance, was an attempt to prevent the anti-imperialist front from being absorbed into a new hierarchy. The errors of that period should be criticized sharply. But they should be criticized as errors of strategy made under siege, not as proof of nationalist betrayal. To judge that period by the standard of pure principle is to ignore the dialectic that makes revolutionary strategy possible: you act on the principal contradiction as it exists, not as you wish it to be.

The crux of your criticism seems to be claiming that China has prioritized its own interests at the cost of the international working class, but your closing statement contradicts this outright. If the most important goal is the proletarian revolution, then it stands to reason that the most important action on China's part is developing and reinforcing the revolution that they do have (rather than a hypothetical one in another country that they don't have), and that if anything, the USSR fell because it tried to do too much in other countries and prioritized its internal state too little.

There are other points we could go over, but that seems to be the most pressing.

Other points:

It abandoned class analysis

Pure nonsense that does not hold up to scrutiny.

Examples include the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the FNLA in Angola, and trying to get North Vietnam to capitulate to a ceasefire leaving a divided country like Korea during the Vietnam War.

The USSR also made geopolitical blunders and misjudgements in post-WWII. A mistake is not the same thing as being revisionist.

China began collaborating with the US. Against the USSR in many cases.

rather than unite against imperialism and capitalist exploitation, they facilitated it in many ways.

Citations desperately needed. Again, this is little different than saying allied with. It is also in contradiction with implying that China prioritized its own interests, as allying with imperialism would not further its interests.

Were China an ally of imperialism, it would be praised by the empire, not vilified constantly. It is precisely because China is a threat to the empire that it gets vilified from both left and right, in ongoing attempts to reduce it to nothing more than a caricature of "power gone wrong", whether from the perspective of "evil commies" or "used to be commie and got lost to revisionism". This reductionist perspective is two sides of the same shitty coin.

It is tiresome, this song and dance about how China (or any socialist project) should bend over backward to support any and all revolutionary efforts in other countries, but at the same time, imply that those efforts are justified in throwing it under the bus as being revisionist if it doesn't support them in particular, especially in the precise way that they want. China is not a superhero. It is a complex entity made up of over a billion people. It's not a savior or villain. It's neither revisionist nor is it without fault. When it comes to difficult decisions on the global stage, there is plenty of blame to go around and in recent history (recent as in last hundreds of years or so), most of that blame lands squarely on the shoulders of colonialism and its development into imperialism. Something China has staunchly avoided engaging in, no matter the accusations that get levied its way (for example, the claims pushed by the empire itself that China is bad for helping other countries develop infrastructure, as if that's inherently the same as making them a dependent) and China was even a victim of colonialism when dealing with Japan's aggression. The least people can do is give them credit for not being another arm of genociding humankind.