Kaplya [none/use name]

Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (~1913) was probably his best work.

Lenin loved it so much that he proclaimed it to be “the Bolshevik Party’s definitive declaration on the national question”.

Even Trotsky, his arch-nemesis, considered it a great work and had to throw in the jabs “hmm… why has Stalin never published another work of such quality before and after this? very suspicious… don’t you think… was it really written by Stalin himself??” lol.

Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question also became the theoretical foundation of the People’s Republic of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic nationalities, based on the criteria that Stalin had laid out.

Having said that, the Comintern did make a lot of mistakes when it comes to advising anti-colonial struggle in the third world. Mao’s theses were far more applicable to poorly developed colonies in this regard.

The economic growth and societal transformation under Stalin (in particular under his Five Year Plans from 1929-1955) registered the fastest growth in the history of humanity that has never been surpassed.

Not even China with all its achievements came close to what transformed the USSR from a poor feudal backwater of Europe into a space-faring nation within a single generation. And the USSR achieved all this while being isolated and without relying on cheap labor (workers rights were on par with Western European standards) and influx of foreign capital.

If you’re a Western capitalist, you’d be worried too. A country full of illiterate peasants and barely electrified, is now threatening to overtake us because of communism?

Khrushchev reversed much of Stalin’s policies that worked and marked the beginning of an end to the greatest socialist project of the 20th century.

Space warfare is much closer to naval warfare on Earth, so naval tactics and strategies are more transferable when applied to space. For example: taking weeks to maneuver, and firing at your opponent 100,000 of kms away.

Air sorties are typically completed within hours, because it is ultimately limited by the fuel they can carry.

It’s from one of Mao’s poems: 《沁园春·雪》.

It’s a bit complicated to describe what the title means, but the first part 沁园春 is a 词牌 (lit. name cards, but more commonly translated to “to the tune of…”), a specific type of poem from the Song dynasty popularized by the famous poet Su Shi (Su Dongpo) that follows a specific set of rules. 沁园春 is characterized by its bitonic 114 characters with flat rhyme. 沁园春 derives its name from the Han Dynasty’s Princess Qinshui’s Garden, which translates to “Qin Garden Spring”. There are dozens of other name cards (which specify a specific style of poem) that have their own explicit set of rules.

Following the name card is the name of the poem, 雪, which literally means “snow”, or “snowscape”.

So, the first part specifies the name card (style?) of the poem (i.e. “To the tune of 沁园春“), followed by the title of the poem. Here, Mao’s poem is titled 雪 “snow”.

Others have translated the title to “ Snowscape - To the tune of Spring Garden Show” (see link below) which is fair I guess.

The poem was mostly about the beautiful scenery of Northern China and the patriotic fervor towards his country.

Supposedly written in 1936 when Mao led the Red Army arriving at Shaanxi to fight against the Japanese, and published in 1945 in Chongqing when Mao was negotiating with Chiang Kai-shek, and during his stay, the democrat activists he spent time with asked him to publish the poem in a local Chongqing newspaper.

Here is a translation that is quite decent: https://www.backchina.com/blog/257064/article-222619.html

What is quickly ending the war going to do for Russia, except for risking higher casualties and giving Europe the room to breathe, as the latter is already going into austerity mode due to their increased military spending?

Russia’s only win condition in this war is economic in nature.

Remember, this is an industrial war - Russia can keep doing this forever while the EU is constrained by its monetary system and fiscal rules. The eurozone will not survive this if they truly want to defeat Russia in military terms. Europe ultimately has to make a choice, and all options available are worse for them.

Russia has no interest in destroying the Ukrainian forces, because the latter is already a spent force.

For them, the only means of destroying NATO is when Europe increases their defense budget spending and leading to the crumbling of their own economy. This is already happening, and ending the war now gives room for Europe to breathe and rebuild their economy.

As you might have noticed, the militarization of European NATO states will paradoxically lead to the demilitarization of NATO instead.

I have said it before: this conflict ends with the demilitarization and denazification of NATO. Ukraine is irrelevant at this point. It has’t been for a while.

All the money being lost for nothing

I can assure you that the money spent isn’t “lost” at all. They all ended up “somewhere”. There is a reason why Biden is so keen on pushing the $60 bil funding to Ukraine even though everyone knows there is no way Ukraine can win. But yes, agree with the rest of what you said.

It’s not posturing. It’s a commitment to increase defense spending which will then be used as excuse to impose austerity and budget cuts this year (“it’s the Russians, not your own capitalists who are doing this to you”), and preparing the countries for shock therapy in the very near future. Everything is going exactly as planned.

I didn’t expect the state propaganda campaign to convince their people to accept welfare cuts and to embrace austerity to work this well.

You are not giving Biden enough credit.

Take a look at this:

From 2016-2019, white family wealth had stagnated under Trump. From 2019-2022, white family wealth exploded upwards while black and Hispanic family wealth had remained in stagnation, and that’s just the first 2 years of Biden administration.

In fact, black families found themselves getting poorer under Biden, while the opposite is true for white families:

Source: Federal Reserve

Under Trump, everyone suffered. But under Biden, rich white people are experiencing some of the fastest growth in their wealth in a long time, while screwing the other minorities along the way. That’s the difference between Trump and Biden.

I’m not going to waste 2 hours watching this but have you seen Bilibili?

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Wp421R7aa/

The top 4 mirrors of the interview already racked up some 300k views combined in just 12 hours since they were published, and this is in the middle of Chinese New Year celebration so most people are busy with other stuff.

I actually did post it once in my previous account, which I have since deleted. Most of the property bubble information came from this Wen Tiejun’s video which I translated myself from Chinese. It’s actually only the first one of a three-part series and I never found the time to translate all of them, since they are very educational and informative.

I’m too lazy to type up everything again but do check out the News Mega on Hexbear, if I ever found the time to the post some materials about Chinese economy, it’s going to be there.

90% of the information on property bubble came from this Wen Tiejun’s video, translated by myself from Chinese.

If you don’t know Wen Tiejun, he’s a Marxist economist and an expert on the “three rural/agricultural issues” (三农问题), and a close collaborator with Michael Hudson (a lot of Hudson’s lectures is also on the youtube channel).

Information about trade came from various blog posts from Zuo Da Pei (左大培) and Jia Genliang (贾根良), both of whom are well respected Marxist economists in China. You can search for them if you know Chinese and their articles will come up. Information about internal circulation model came from Jia Genliang’s《国内大循环：经济发展新战略与政策选择》 (The Great Domestic Circulation: new strategies for economic development and policy choices).

I am actually surprised the comment got deleted by the mods, since what I have been trying to show is to educate about the complexity of challenges that China has had to face, which has been way too over-simplified and trivialized by OP, and misses the fact that China has to constantly adapt to a changing global environment imposed by a hostile global hegemon, and along the way made many mistakes that are deemed conservative by many Marxists in China.

“I’m a Stalinist but I’ve also been reading a lot of Mao lately and really starting to appreciate his work”

This accomplishes three things at once:

1. The standard left/right framing is completely off the table now
2. It demonstrates that there are different strands of communism and you know the differences
3. The attention is now completely off of “so you’re saying you’re a commie” and instead goes to “wait what’s the difference between Stalin and Mao?”

That’s your way in. About 2/3 of the people I’ve talked to ended up being more curious about why I make it such a big deal between Stalin and Mao rather than going straight into their preprogrammed “oh you’re just a commie” schtick. You now have a small window to educate them.

You have overly simplified China’s economic growth without looking at it as distinct phases of an economic development history.

Deng’s reform was only possible because of the first 30 years of industrialization under Mao (helped massively by the Soviets in the early years). China already had world-class heavy industries (e.g. shipbuilding and infrastructure building) when it opened up to the world. This was what attracted Western capitalists to China, instead of other developing countries.

Dengist reform worked really well for the first 20 years, until it didn’t. The PRC experienced its first economic crisis in history in 1995, which led to record unemployment and poverty:

The transition period was challenging. This was the first critical hinge point where China could have transitioned into a domestic consumption (internal circulation) economy, but instead they decided to join the WTO in 2001 to save the economy. This was accompanied by a huge loss of labor rights and deteriorating working conditions just to compete with the rest of the world to produce cheap goods made by hard working Chinese labor to satisfy the insatiable demands of Western consumerism.

It worked well for a few years, then the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis quickly turned into the 2008 Wall Street financial crisis, then into the 2009 global economic crisis. Western consumer demand slumped, and Chinese manufacturers were at severe risk of shutting down production.

This was the second hinge point where China could, once again, have transitioned into an internal circulation economy. Instead, China decided to invest massively into infrastructure building and rampant real estate construction. Property market, that never existed under socialist China, emerged for the first time in 2009. This may sound like a good idea at first, but it is accompanied by far reaching consequences that China is still struggling with today.

How bad could it be? Let’s dissect this in detail:

In an attempt to save itself from the Wall Street financial crisis, the US turned to large scale currency issuing, and through quantitative easing (QE) created $3.9 trillion US dollars. More than 60% of this dollar liquidity ended up in the international commodities market and caused serious inflation. China as a manufacturing country imports nearly 70% of their raw materials and energy (as well as food), and the inflated commodity price had resulted in a severe hike of PPI (producer price index) which plunged the profitability for the manufacturers.

This plummet in the real sector (as a country enters a recession) triggered vast capital outflows. Where did they all end up? The real estate sector.

This over-investment in the real estate has created a serious problem for the central government down the road. >50% household debt and >50% of corporate debt are now mortgage debt. This means that much of the national income was not spent in the real sector (for consumption), but instead went into servicing mortgage debt and inflating the real estate sector.

Additionally, 60% of household assets are now in the real estate. What this means is that if the real estate sector crashes, there is going to be a serious plunge in household assets as well - a lot of people are going to lose their wealth. Similarly, much of corporate assets are also in the real estate, which means that corporate asset value and the stock market will plunge if the real estate bubble is allowed to burst. A lot of companies are going insolvent if that happens.

But this is not all. We’ve talked about property developers and financial investors above. But there is an even deeper problem to this crisis: as the investment outflow from the real economy all went into real estate, local governments in China found themselves no longer able to generate adequate revenues from the real economy. Their solution? Convert land from a long-term cultivation/development resource into short-term revenues to make up for the losses from the real economy through land sales (more precisely, through land enclosure and making profit from the price difference of the land development).

Through this, local governments became entangled with real estate developers. But this is still far from over. As the local government expenses grew from a slumping economy, its debt inflated as well. Local governments were then forced to take out loans from commercial banks to service the interest payments of the old debt, just so they can be granted the issuance of new debt to finance their operations. In other words, borrowing and selling land to pay off old debt just to get new loans to continue financing the local governments - an endless spiral of debt crisis in the making.

How bad is all this?

China now has already built enough housing to accommodate for 6 BILLION residents, in a country of only 1.4 billion people. Most of the properties will NEVER be sold. There will never be enough prospective buyers for those newly constructed houses. But why did they keep doing it?

This, once again, stems from the debt bubble of the local governments. The total local government debt amounts to 37 trillion yuan (2023), but this is not counting the hidden debt from city investment firms etc., which adds another 66 trillion yuan - a total of 103 trillion yuan indebted. A huge proportion of these loans were taken for the purpose of servicing mortgage debt.

According to research, 90% of the local government debt came from prefecture-level and county-level cities (mostly cities below Tier 3 and Tier 4).

But why? Why is everyone building new housing properties when everyone already knew those properties will never find their buyers? This is because real estate development generates a huge amount of GDP for the local governments. The current system of evaluation judges the performance of local government weighed heavily on GDP numbers, and local officials who want to be promoted simply could not do it by investing in the real economy when cheating through real estate is the way to go. Every city government raced to boost their GDP by investing in real estate to compete with one another, resulting in an over-investment in the real estate.

This was the strategic decision made by China after the 2009 economic crisis. The second hinge point that could have led them into an internal circulation model instead of the mess they have right now - too much money is being tied into the real estate sector that everyone will lose something, if not a lot, if the bubble bursts.

As you can see, there is no easy way out of this. The crisis is complex that entangles various key players in the economy. Everyone from your average households, to the corporations that had nothing to do with real estate, to the financial institutions and shadow banks, to the local governments - they are all at risk because so much investment and debt have been tied to real estate.

No, China is not going to collapse like some people are fantasizing, but let’s not pretend like it’s not a challenging crisis to resolve.

As I have always emphasized, an internal circulation/consumption economic model is the only way forward for China.

So yes, to answer your question, the US has messed China up. Just not enough to collapse it.

China has no interest in exporting its culture, or catering to a foreign audience. This has always been the case for centuries.

We have our own internet platforms that are mostly insulated from the rest of the world. A popular video on bilibili can easily get several times the view count than that of a popular video on Youtube, and yet the vast majority of the world will never have heard of it.

I think a lot of this has to do with the failure of the Cultural Revolution, which set in a conservative trend where the national policy has become averse to attempting anything that significantly deviates from the status quo. Instead, the cultural richness of present day China is drawn from the vastness and depth of its historical past, a civilization that spans over several thousand years.

For a country with nearly 1.4 billion people, it is far easier to make people identify with their cultural past and use that as a national unity project. The last thing the leadership wants is something that retreads the madness of the Cultural Revolution, even if it comes at the cost of stifling cultural innovation.

The decline of Western imperialism is going to lead to the rise of regional blocs in the form of multipolarity. The cultural hegemony of the US will slowly give way to an reinvigoration of local cultures as these countries, bound together by regional ties, began to reassert their sovereignty. You’re not going to see Shanghai as the world’s sole cultural center that displaces the role of New York, but instead the emergence of multiple regional cultural centers across the world.

That doesn’t mean the Europeans didn’t try though.

The US financial capital took a huge hit in the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis and at the same time, Nord Stream 1 came online in Germany that allowed Europe to recover its industrial sector relatively quickly and pulled it out of the eurozone crisis and the recession. Euro went up to 30% stronger than the dollar. It was Europe’s chance to gain its energy sovereignty and independence from a weakened US capitalism. That’s why they went and built a second Nord Stream pipeline. And that’s why this motion had to be stopped.

Not really, the whole point was to destroy Europe.

The US simply cannot afford to have Europe backing China in the coming showdown between the two giants. Nord Stream 2 construction was completed in 2021, and its certification kept getting delayed to prevent the Europeans from gaining energy sovereignty, after which they will no longer need to be dependent the US. Hence the war in Ukraine was needed to sever the connection between Europe and Eurasia.

The Ukraine war was dragged out precisely to allow this strategic goal of the US empire to be achieved.

The Lancets are already taking care of them. So many burning Bradleys in Ukraine that never saw combat penetrated by small drones they are never equipped to fight against. In fact the Lancets are killing pretty much every class of NATO and Ukrainian tanks they can find these days.