• marx_mentat [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    There’s something extremely funny about the president of the US looking at what’s going on China and saying out loud, “Their economy is a ticking time bomb.” This is almost an onion news story.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    If you think China’s economy is a time bomb wait til you hear about what it means when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency around the world.

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Yeah yeah, I’ve heard that before. There’s a whole cottage industry of “experts” that have predicted the imminent collapse of China going back decades. Call me when it actually happens.

    • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      China’s economy is stacked like a house of cards and could come crumbling down due to some unforeseen global financial shock, but then again that sounds like most modern economies. I think people just pick on China because, instead of having a group of billionaires stack up the cards, the government does it themselves.

      • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Even if that shock happens, China will still be in a better situation. Like, they actually manufacture stuff there, and the government builds infrastructure aggressively. That’s two massive benefits to economic security and health.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Well, actually it’s because China’s roaring economic success is both deeply embarassing and existentially dangerous to international fascism and it is absolutely vital that they both discredit China and prevent their thoroughly indoctrinated population from learning anything about China at all costs.

  • Flinch [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Man leading country with the largest homeless population in the world says country which eliminated extreme poverty within its borders is about to collapse, of course this is true and should be taken seriously very-intelligent

  • btbt [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    biden-troll Don’t worry about having to work 30 hours a day at the sisyphean torture factory to be able to afford your ten square foot apartment Jack, look at what’s going on in China! A sexpat YouTuber who got kicked out of the country says their economy will collapse any minute now! Don’t trust any of the actual data on China’s economy, you can’t fall for those [REDACTED] and their tricks, Jack! They’re weak even though we say they’re strong! THEY’RE WEAK EVEN THOUGH WE SAY THEY’RE STRONG!

  • maynarkh@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know about China, but Biden is really throwing stones from glass houses here as the leader of a country which is teetering on the edge of civil war, had a full blown insurrection in the past few years, and not only has it failed to prosecute the leader and instigator, it has allowed him to run for election again and there is a possibility of him being elected.

    And this is not mentioning that so many in the highest offices “on both sides” are so hilariously corrupt in a country with its national ethos being “the land of the free”.

    I’m not happy about this by the way, I don’t think a world order built by China would be better than the shitty one we got from the US.

    • FakeNewsForDogs [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      It 100% would be better. There is nothing in modern Chinese history that remotely approaches the level of imperial devastation the US has wrought on the world. This is not up for debate by any serious person. How many countries has China invaded recently? How many coups have they instigated? Is their “foreign aid” designed to help countries develop, or to extract as much wealth as possible while keeping them impoverished, underdeveloped, and dependent on the west for their most basic needs? Has the standard of living in China been going up or down in recent decades? Now ask yourself the same questions about the US.

          • u_tamtam@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            It could be that. Or it could be the exact opposite (which it is, would you want to see my hukou?), and the fact that you can’t tell the difference while thinking that you could and that it matters makes you an angry little person.

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              The fact that all you ever do here is shit on China shows what your agenda is buddy. The only angry little person here is the one who can’t say a single nice thing about a country that’s lifting millions of people out of poverty each and every year.

              • u_tamtam@programming.dev
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                1 year ago

                “agenda”, I like how you make it sound like my posts are some kind of greater, organized operation or conspiracy. Projection maybe? Because between the two of us, you are the only one whose post history is consistently made of political activism disguised as news. Not that it automatically makes you a bad person, but you can’t reasonably expect people to take you and your opinion seriously when you have the pretence to simultaneously speak from position of authority on geopolitical topics as broad as China, Russia, West Africa, North America, Central America, Eastern Europe, all at the same time. You should realize that you can’t possibly have such a broad life exposure, or your time would be better invested outside of Lemmy, don’t you think? The only reasonable alternative, and sad reality, is that you are just repeating talking points conveniently arranged for you and repeated inside your echo chamber.

                As of me, I am equally entitled to my own opinions, equally partaking to information bubbles, with the difference that my life is actually forever bound to China and that I can legitimately pretend that I have something to contribute to that discussion. Unlike you, I am not brigading from a far-away continent. I don’t “shit on China”. Had you any idea of my situation, you wouldn’t even think of saying something like that. You do may find that some of what I have to say on certain topics is contrary to your ideals, but so is China: it isn’t the monolithic strong fortress people make it to be in the media (in either side of the discourse).

                • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  I’m actually pretty open about my political activism. I’m not disguising anything. Having grown up in USSR, and moved around the world a lot, I do think I have a much broader exposure than majority of people. The fact that you presume to know so much about me exposes the sad reality about you projecting what you know of yourself to be true onto others I’m afraid. I also love how you accuse me of doing what you yourself regularly do here, unless you’ll have us believe that you have some deep expertise on the political situation in Africa. Seems to me that you’re trying to speak from position of authority in comments such as this one, while clearly demonstrating utter lack of knowledge on the subject. I don’t know why you felt the need to be “brigading” that far away continent.

                  Meanwhile, nowhere have I claimed that China is some monolithic strong fortress or that there aren’t legitimate problems in China. My only claims has been that despite the problems China has, it shows a better alternative to what the west is doing. While you seem to be fixating on problems such as unlimited freedom of expression, that affects a tiny majority of the people, I’m looking at the problem of meeting the material needs of the people. China has done a far better job in ensuring that people have things like food, housing, education, and healthcare than the supposedly enlightened western liberal societies.

                  To sum up, you pretend to have some sort of high ground and sling feces at me, but the only difference is that you support western empire and all its horrors whether you realize it or not.

      • MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I’d rather be under the rule of a hegemony that is composed of many different cultures and in the process of healing than one who is still actively genociding their minorities.

        EDIT: Welp, I guess there is no war in Ba Sing Se. Ya’ll are expert brigaders, well done.

        • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          If we pretend that what the USA does to its own people is acceptable, you still have to consider what it does to the rest of the world. I’m sorry, but in light of all the evidence, I see the US hegemony as evil. I also doubt the western media’s portrayal of the Uyghur “genocide” and I don’t agree that China is in the process of a Holocaust against its own people.

          I’m lucky enough to have a job that puts me in contact with a lot of countries all over the global south of the world, and the general opinion from all of them is that China is a lot better prospect than old Western imperialism.

          • MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            The Chinese propaganda made to counter the satellite images, testimony from victims, and video evidence consists of some YouTubers visiting the same handful of uncomfortably smiling Uyghur families under the careful eye of Chinese censors and fluff pieces that amount to “nuh-uh”.

            China is trying to erase the culture of people within their borders, again, and there is a long tradition of this forced assimilation in China. They are not pluralistic, and don’t want to be, and their attitude towards non-chinese within their borders lead me to have very low expectations on how they will treat minorities outside.

        • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Who would the US have bombed? Canada? Mexico?

          The US didn’t have the logistics to project power globally like they can today. What exactly would you propose they drop a bomb on? Moscow?

          People love to criticize famines in China and Russia as being mismanagement by government (and they are), but they’re missing the forest for the trees. Prior to the communist governments, famines were a common occurrence in China and Russia.

          The Sichuan famine in 1936 killed 5 million. The famine in 1928 killed 6 million. The Chinese famine in 1906 killed 20 million. The Chinese famine in 1876 killed 10 million.

          Yet, since the Great Leap Forward? China has not experienced a single famine. Similarly, the last famine in Russia was in 1947. People sit in their ivory towers where food can be imported from around the world and 40% of food is wasted and wonder why so many people died trying to get something so accessible. Meanwhile, places in Africa are still experiencing mass famine and nobody cares.

    • oatscoop@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, some of these posts get wild. It’s a shame, since the actual communists are cool.

      It is interesting seeing the left’s version of MAGAts, though.

        • oatscoop@midwest.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s not, and those aren’t the comments myself or the person I responded to were talking about. And yes, that take is dumb.

          We were talking about the tankies – in the original meaning of the word as coined by communists, not as a slur against communists in general. Authoritarianism and its apologists can get fucked. People that think we’re in a zero-sum-game where they have to offset the (legitimate) evils of “the west” by being equally disgusting and brutal while on “the left” are fucking morons and don’t deserve the title “communist”.

          • emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.

            To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).

            The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.

            There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.

            The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.

            It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.

            And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD [5]. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.

            Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.

            Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, DPRK, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.


            from https://redsails.org/tankies/

    • Outdoor_Catgirl [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, same. But I’m having fun sending pig poop balls to liberals before they can’t handle the heat and block our instance. By the way, here is a picture of a hog with shit in its testicles. Please look closely.PIGPOOPBALLS

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            What do KKKlanadians even do with their time? Come up with excuses to explain their housing crises without questioning capitalism? Develop asthma from the wildfires? Cheer on resource extraction companies as they poison the land and brutalize first nations people?

            • ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              What do KKKlanadians even do with their time?

              Here are just a few small selections.

              1. Unlimited genocide on the Native peoples of the land. (Everyone)
              2. Recreational blackface. (Politicians)
              3. Beating people up for buying “gay” beer. (Citizens)
              4. Doing false flag bombings on behalf of oil companies. (Police)

              As you can see there’s plenty of fun activities to do here.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      China has massive demographic problems stemming from decades of the one child policy.

      So the “new federation” is just going to be made up of mostly elderly Chinese (because of the one child policy) and elderly Russians because the young people died fighting in Putin’s stupid war or left before they could be drafted.

      Yes comrade, the future will be run by elderly fascist federation LOL.

      Fascism is a self-destructive thing, we’re seeing it happening in Russia, and we’re starting to see the signs of China’s fascist regime (ironically called a Communist Party) self-destructing.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        idk if youve read any of the papers on AI research coming out of china like i have (i translated them from mandarin to english), but they have little concern for the economics of this, the CPC’s goals are to increase automation so less people output more, and have been doing so in the construction sector at a breakneck pace. china recently built the world’s largest hoover-like arch dam in four years (which would usually take 12-16 years in other countries with modern standards), and plans to reduce it even more down to two years, all while cutting the number of people working on the project. theyre basically ‘3d printing’ dams by having robotic cement trucks act as extruders and have automated sensors that determine the density of concrete to insure safety. workplace accidents are very down as well.

        also idk if you know this, but china is increasing reliability and durability of appliances and making it easier to hotswap factories from different types of production easier in order to meet public demands for goods. theyre really a powerhouse scientifically, and are focusing on far more important issues than the west are

      • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        For the second time I beg of you please pin down what a fascism is

        you just said two countries with completely different economic and political systems are both doing a fascism

        please what is it