MelianPretext

The European peanut gallery probably won't be able to scupper a deal like this, though it might be a good thing for China if it actually did.

The last time an opportunity like this came up, I gather it was Chinese business/capital sectional interests that compelled China's trade negotiators to give nearly the whole farm away, so to speak in the CAI deal they were on the verge of signing back then, including asymmetrical market penetration in China for European capital. Then, EU atrocity propaganda sanctions stopped that deal in 2021 and the EU's negotiating power then plummeted with the Ukraine war, the subsequent de-industrialization and then the economic fallout from the crises in West Asia. With all these cascading consequences, China's negotiating position will likely continue to improve against the EU if the trade talks are continually postponed through attempts at sabotage like this.

I'd personally argue this is the biggest reversal, bar none other, in terms of the contrast between the first Cold War and this new cold war. The more ascetic leftists may be rather put off by this dynamic but it is a paradigm shift that places the West in the dilemma the 20th century socialist bloc was held under, which the (now late) Michael Parenti articulated in "Blackshirts and Reds."

The human capacity for discontent should not be underestimated. People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have. Leading professionals who had attained relatively good living standards wanted to dress better, travel abroad, and enjoy the more abundant life styles available to people of means in the capitalist world.

It was this desire for greater affluence rather than the quest for political freedom that motivated most of those who emigrated to the West. Material wants were mentioned far more often than the lack of democracy. [...]

[...] In 1989, I asked the GDR ambassador in Washington, D.C. why his country made such junky two-cylinder cars. He said the goal was to develop good public transportation and discourage the use of costly private vehicles. But when asked to choose between a rational, efficient, economically sound and ecologically sane mass transportation system or an automobile with its instant mobility, special status, privacy, and personal empowerment, the East Germans went for the latter, as do most people in the world. The ambassador added ruefully: "We thought building a good society would make good people. That's not always true." Whether or not it was a good society, at least he was belatedly recognizing the discrepancy between public ideology and private desire.

I think to further refine @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml's comment, one important skill as a leftist is to build on one's ability to think dialectically. One way to overcome liberal propaganda is to engage with it, process its arguments and still come out saying "No." The failure to do this is why you have all those "Why I left the Left" grifters where their origin story is that they were once the "model Marxist Leninist" but then were enlightened because some redditor one day spammed them with the NATOpedia article on Tiananmen.

If everyone could do that, there would be no need for AES to protect themselves from the modern West's propaganda system, the most comprehensive discourse hegemony in history.

This is why, if you read Marx and Lenin, they sound at times like they would be the most terminally online debate bros today because a bulk of their writings are just constantly dunking on Bakunin, Kautsky, The Economist or various other political talking heads. Yet in spite of their obsession in exposing themselves to slop, they maintained the integrity of their beliefs.

On the other hand, the alternate side of dialectics entails that this does not mean you need to spend your day reading just NYT or FT articles. Some "leftists" do this, where they have clearly never heard of Parenti/Losurdo/Amin or even the 20th century heavyweights like Fanon, Rodney, and Sakai. We need to support leftist information and content, especially because in the West, they are suppressed and leftist authors/platforms are suffocated of support like African Stream was. That's why it's also just as disappointing to see leftists who get all their information from liberal media and academic materials.

"What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself without anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals." - Peuchet, quoted by Marx

Most major US bases have a long history of atrocity complicity and imperialist utility, like the Kadena AFB and other bases in the occupied Ryukus or Guam or the joint UK/US Diego Garcia base in Chagos. You'll probably be able to better orient yourself with a more general overview, however.

David Vine is a notable author and subject matter expert on the topic. He's a soc dem rather than a leftist, but this just means you can reference his work to a general audience without them flinching in terror or cite it in an academic paper if you need to write one since they're published by university presses. I recommend his 2020 book "The United States of war: a global history of America's endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State," which you can find on various online repositories like Anna's Archive/Z-Library. His website has a great deal of US base world maps and he has an excel spreadsheet where he tries to track all publicly known US bases worldwide.

He also wrote a 2009 book "Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia" specifically on the occupation of Mauritius' Chagos (which incidentally was just recently compelled to sign an unequal treaty with the UK to convert the base into a Hong Kong-style colonial leasehold).

The dynamics of unorganized mass protests is that the movement will bend, in its internal contradictions, to the direction of the most well organized, motivationally driven and materially supported element.

Take the classic Tiananmen color revolution. It was originally an outcry against the runaway inflation of the 1988-9 period caused by the package reformers winning out against the gradualists. This led to an introduction of shock therapy by primarily Deng Xiaoping's (I would indeed argue that his role played a major part) and Zhao Ziyang's urgings, which led to historically high prices unseen in the history of the People's Republic. Price stability was then re-introduced in late 1988 to prevent economic catastrophe but this led to backlash both from parts of the population that were outraged at this poorly conceived obsession with a "big bang" reform having taking place at all in the first place and the incipient liberal comprador-aspirants who thought the price stability initiative meant the end of the liberalizing reforms and their profit-seeking opportunities.

Both elements were present in the initial protests. The former (the Western journalistic and academic trick at the time was to dub every socialist and leftist element in socialist state politics as "conservative" to deliberately obfuscate their identity) were the socialist contingents, including Maoists and Ultraleft elements, who wanted a return to the Mao era rather than some capitalist restoration. Obviously, the color revolution elements, backed up by the West's unfettered media penetration in China (which is how they captured those pictures they wave around nowadays), won out. They constructed that tacky Statue of Liberty clone "to Democracy" in Tiananmen Square, which appropriated and hijacked the imagery and messaging of the protests once the Western media started proliferating pictures of it, and the entire movement became a full blown color revolution aiming at capitalist restoration, even though large contingents of the participants wanted nothing of the sort.

This is how it works. Victor Bevins (a soc-dem), wrote a book called "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" that essentially dissects the systematic co-option of every single unorganized mass protest movement in the 2010s. The most infamous being the Hong Kong color revolution attempt, where public frustration over the affordability housing and the dynamics of the frozen economic and political system of Hong Kong due to China's concession to Britain with the 50 year "1C2S" policy preventing any substantive mainland intervention or introduction of socialist governance to Hong Kong, which boiled over through an extradition case of a murderer. This was then easily was hijacked by the Trump I admin and the Western NGOs operating in Hong Kong, and co-opted as a "democracy" and "independence" protest.

As for Nepal, I incidentally made a comment three months ago back in May:

... the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

It's not to say that things will necessarily progress in that direction, but that the external interests have been clearly demonstrated and many of the requisite pieces have likely been set in place.

The full comprehensive answer you're looking for is Shiyuan Hao's books "How the Communist Party of China Manages the Issue of Nationality" and "China's Solution to its Ethno-National Issues."

In short, the original structural intent of the CPC for China was precisely that of a federal state based on the models of the USSR and the United States which had also influenced Sun Yat-sen's "Republic of the Five Nationalites." The contradiction was that China was a country that had always invited fantasies of partition. Churchill in 1901 during the Boxer Rebellion infamously said his "Aryan triumph" quote in the context of his own imagining of China's partition: "I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe in the ultimate partition of China. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph." That view for a federal system therefore evolved in the process of the historical and material conditions of the CPC's experience within the disunited China of the Warlord, WW2 and Civil War eras, which saw the British attempts to legitimate the feudal Lamaist theocracy's secession in Tibet, the Japanese attempts to carve away the Northeast as Manchukuo, the breakaway of Outer Mongolia and the incitement of the two Turkestan secessionist attempts propped by the Soviets in Xinjiang and the various warlord clique territories.

As such, one of the defining qualities of the Chinese polity as recognized by the CPC was its historical tradition of unity. This had largely preserved the territorial integrity, which is the sina qua non of all states, of the various Chinese governments throughout the torturous first half of the 20th century. In the materialist view that socialist governance must reflect the history and national conditions of the given state, this historical context was therefore instrumental in influencing the CPC's decision against a federal system, as Hao explains in this excerpt and cites Zhou Enlai's views on the matter in 1949:

Both the Chinese Soviet Republic founded by the Communist Party of China in 1931 and the Red Army’s political declaration of establishing a federal republic in China en route to the Long March can be identified as the Chinese Communists’ early attempts to inaugurate a federal republic in China. However, these symbolic advocacies and practices were unable to be realized due to their incompatibility with the national conditions of China.

Historical facts have testified that neither the American-style “one out of many” federalism nor the Soviet-style “union of constituent socialist republics” applies to China due to its unique ancient historical process and modern historical experience. Therefore, maintaining state unity and respect for diversity have been upheld as a national commitment by the people of all ethnic groups due to China’s time-honored history as a unified multi-ethnic state. Toward the modern era of China, which was heralded by the First Opium War in 1840, the state unity, political unification, ethnic solidarity, and territorial integrity of the country were seriously threatened and undermined by the foreign powers’ aggression. Neither the social conditions for Bourgeois Revolution nor the backbone forces for launching Proletarian Revolution were existent in Mongolia, Tibet or Xinjiang at that time. If these regions were factitiously facilitated for “national self-determination” and founding independent states, they would inevitably be reduced as imperialist powers’ colonies or spheres of influence. In addition, the Versailles Peace Conference in the wake of the First World War permitted no space for China’s national self-determination. Therefore, federalism is only a fantasy for China; it would only lead to national and state disintegration.

The federalism form of government tallies with the reality of the Russian Revolution at that time; however, it does not mean that the Soviet-style union of constituent republics is the only form of government for all the socialist states. Some federated states of Eastern Europe founded after the Second World War, for example, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, successively collapsed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, fundamentally speaking, the inevitable result of divorcing from their corresponding national conditions.

In addressing the first session of the CPPCC, Premier Zhou Enlai stated: “China is a multi-ethnic country in which the ethnic minorities make up less than 10% of the total population. Of course, all the ethnic groups, regardless of their population sizes and levels of economic development are on an equal footing. The Han people should respect the religious beliefs, languages, folkways, and customs of ethnic minorities. We advocate regional ethnic autonomy under the pre-condition of maintaining the territorial integrity of the country. Any ethnic group is undoubtedly entitled to the endowed right of self-determination. But today, the imperialists intend to divide China by fomenting the independence of Tibet, Taiwan or even Xinjiang. Against this backdrop, we hope people of all ethnic groups will not be incited by the provocations of the ill-conceived imperialist forces. For this very reason, the name of our new administration is called the People’s Republic of China, rather than the federal republic. We shall implement regional autonomy in the concentrated communities of ethnic minorities to ensure their right of autonomy”. Zhou Enlai added: “the policy of regional ethnic autonomy, by means of ethnic cooperation and assistance, aims to achieve a common development and prosperity of all ethnic groups. It will, in turn, contribute to a prosperous, culturally advanced and unified China”.

By comparing the historical conditions and developmental path of China with those of the Soviet Union, Zhou Enlai expounded the reasons why the Chinese government established the system of regional ethnic autonomy as a basic political system: “Historical conditions and the revolutionary movement development have provided a sound basis for ethnic cooperation in China; therefore, regional ethnic autonomy conforms to the national conditions of China”. Zhou Enlai added: “in addition to their obvious different appellations, the regional autonomy of China and the federalism of the Soviet Union are basically different; the former is an administrative division under unified state leadership, while the latter is a loosely-connected union of constituent republics, which are essentially ethnically-based proto-states.”

The truth is that much of the leadership and policy groups in the Global North have come to the implicit decision to see the "bright side" of climate change. Going from the US to Canada to the UK to Russia, there's been numerous environmental studies published in those countries on how they would "benefit" from climate change. This is why there's a fixation on Greenland and the Arctic. They've come to understand the unspoken truth about climate change, which is that the same Global North which has contributed the most historical emissions is also the same region estimated to be set to suffer the least through the coincidence of their geography. They're more excited about the potential Italian vineyard country climates that the Midlands and Minnesota are estimated to develop towards as climate change is more and more exacerbated than the apocalyptic scenarios slated for elsewhere, like the submerging of Jakarta or the wet-bulb temperatures of South Asia.

SE Asia, Africa, Latin America are likely to suffer severe climate-induced hardships, but the most that the West needs to worry about (apart from the submerging of places like the US Eastern Seaboard, Florida, and the European Low Countries, which they believe they'll always retain the national wealth to spam dikes and levees and sea walls) is "climate refugees," which is telling in of itself. The arrogant conceit displayed here is also potentially backed by the current climate estimates, which is the danger of it all. You can see the falsehood that "everyone will suffer equally together so we must all work together, we're in the same boat" that climate scientists have tried to defend starting to be pierced with climate change-enthusiast leadership like Trump coming to power. From a relativistic sense, so long as your enemies suffer more than you, this is acceptable for them. They don't need to be better off than themselves in the past (and the Global North is absolutely not completely unscathed from climate-induced catastrophes like they want to believe) but they must be better off than the rest, which is enough for them.

The truth is that there's some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist "unity" is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It's been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it's still the case today as seen with "ML" takes on China.

I remember reading Keeran and Kenny's work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western "MLs" actually celebrated its collapse at the time because "now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin."