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.