TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – China’s military sent 103 warplanes toward Taiwan in a 24-hour period in what the island’s defense ministry said Monday was a daily record in recent times.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – China’s military sent 103 warplanes toward Taiwan in a 24-hour period in what the island’s defense ministry said Monday was a daily record in recent times.
Honestly a pretty good write up, my only mild rebuttal would be involving the following quotes.
The island was first colonized by Europeans, then the han, the Japanese, the qing, and finally back to the han via ROC. It kinda predates the notion of modern nation states, and thus is difficult to to claim that it’s been part of the Nation of China for centuries.
Europeans were colonizing Taiwan before the Han, I don’t think that really justifies the colonialism any more.
I think co-existing is granting the government a little more grace than what really exist. The settler colonial structures are just the window dressing for the same colonialism practiced throughout human history.
The Chinese government violently overthrows the ruling government and sets up an “autonomous” government filled with party loyalist. They then subsidize immigration until the native population is a minority to Han immigrants.
I think one of the problem we have in the left is that there is an a knee jerk reaction to excuse the imperialism we see in leftist states by comparing it to the imperialism of the west. Which is understandable, the west has done some horrific stuff.
However a lot of these actions are only somewhat justified in juxtaposition to the same types of actions from people like the US. It’s the same tactic that the US does when they juxtapose themselves against the actions of literal nazi. It’s kind of a low bar we keep running into.
I just don’t think criticisms of any leftist nation should automatically be followed by people calling them shills or libs. Self criticism is an essential tenant of Marxism, and it just doesn’t seem to be allowed anymore.
Lolwat?
Colonized my dude… not occupied. The dutch colonized the island in 1624. The first Chinese populations were brought to the island as forced labour by Europeans.
Believing that what China is doing is imperialism is completely at odds with the critical analysis of what imperialism is. If you hold this position, you’re going to have to defend it with substantial argument. Right now, the two dominant sources of this position are chauvinist Western Europeans and ultra leftists like Hoxhaists.
Autonomous zones do not see any massive influx of Han attempting to replace indigenous peoples. The tibetan autonomous regions does not see this, Xinjiang does not see this. Instead the autonomous zones see a flourishing of indigenous culture, language, teachings, religions, cuisine, etc. The fact that there are party leaders participating in the management of the autonoumous zone is literally the exact way you would make an autonomous zone and not in anyway imperialist or colonialist. The party leaders exist as a leadership conduit and collaboration between the state and the region and they work to resolve conflict between the region and the state in a way that does not necessitate dominance.
You say “the same colonialism that has existed throughout human history”. This is a dehistoricalization, that is to say, it is a line of thought that actively divorces the discourse from history. Colonization as we know it is distinctly European. Even the Japanese colonization efforts are quite explicitly an effort on the part of the Japanese to emulate the European system. China does not have colonies, it does not engage in colonialism, and it is actively working to dismantle the history of colonialism in its sphere - history that is exclusively European.
As for Marxists, we engage in self criticism all the time. The position on China emerged from self criticism. The idea that parroting USA state department propaganda is self criticism is delusion. The idea that fighting against these narratives is somehow blind automaticity is a combo strawman and ad hominem.
China itself engaged in self criticism when it acknowledged it’s action in Southeast Asia as chauvinistic and they changed their policies to incorporate this criticism.
As for the USA juxtaposing itself against the Nazis, it’s not quite the same, because the Nazis were emulating the USA, and when the USA took control over the victory negotiations they incorporated Nazis into their society, built a transnational nuclear military and staffed it with Nazis, built Nazi leave-behind forces all throughout Europe, supported the Nazis in their battles against the USSR, and intervened at the UN to prevent Nazis from coming under scrutiny.
Juxtaposing China against the USA isn’t to say that China is better than the USA, it’s to say they are engaged in fundamentally different projects of state craft and that China’s project necessarily involves the opposition to and dismantling of the American project.
The false equivalency of Chinese actions with USA actions is not self criticism, it’s lazy.
Lol, okay semantic dispute time I guess. What exactly is your definition of a “critical analysis of imperialism”.
“Han and Uyghurs made up respectively 6.2 and 82.7 percent of Xinjiang’s population. Since 1982, the percentages have changed, to ca. 39–41 percent and 46–51 percent, respectively.”
“The Han Chinese population share has increased sharply in the TAR, encouraged by massive subsidies from the central government that exceeded 100 percent of the TAR GDP from 2010 onwards”
Yeah, spending more than 100% of the TARs entire gdp on subsidizing migration… not insidious at all.
Lol, and how many of these ethnic minority leaders have ever been in charge of their region?
“In PRC history, ethnic minority leaders have never made it onto the Politburo Standing Committee, the de facto nexus of power in China. For the five ethnic minority autonomous provinces (the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region), the region’s top post of Party secretary has been given to a Han Chinese over the past 35 years, reflecting Beijing’s firm grip on power in minority-populated political units.”
Again, this is just a semantic dispute surrounding the meaning of colonialism. Even if colonialism was invented by the west, you yourself admit it was imported and practiced by the Japanese. China is obviously not in a vacuum of influence and is perfectly able to modify western colonialism to suit their needs.
Lol, okay… sure. You just spent a page defending imperialism, but sure.
Ahh yes, highlighting data made public by the 2020 Chinese census , automatically means I’m working for the state department.
I’m guessing your talking about their invasion of Vietnam? The one that had running conflicts until the 90s, the one that is still hampering Sino-Vietnamese relations till today?
How is that any different than Tibet, other than Vietnam could actually defend itself?
I would have to partially agree with this to a degree, America has always had fascist leanings. But, it’s be a lot more accurate to say that they were emulating Italy.
My rebuttal to this would be that the CCP also emulated the United States when they switched to a socialized market economy.
Ahh, were bad because you made us be bad… makes more sense when applied to the soviets… not so much when applied to Asia. What American scheme required dismantling in Tibet or any of the autonomous regions?
Again, my point was that we should develop criticism that are not automatically juxtaposed to western imperialism… and you just can’t allow it.
Real big self criticism moment there bud.
Part 1
Definitely not purely a semantic dispute. Have you read Lenin? Lenin’s analysis of imperialism still stands as the dominant critical analysis of imperialism, though there has been some recent attempts to update it to adapt to the new form imperialism caused by unipolar hegemony under the name superimperialism or hyperimperialism.
The context of that sentence in the report shows that in culturally Tibetan regions outside the Tibet Autonomous Region are showing opposite trends, meaning that “ethnic minorities” are becoming majorities. Clearly this is not a program of Han supremacy but of social integration. Autonomous regions are not meant to be insular, but integrated into one country with multiple systems. Compare this to actual colonialism, where colonists use rape, child separation, enslavement, cultural repression, starvation, land fractionalization, and other techniques to dilute and dismantle ethnic minorities. China is doing none of this. In the TAR, the Tibetan language is used to conduct nearly all business and all education, from grade school through university. That is not colonialism.
It’s only insidious if you presuppose the intent.
Well, considering that the top position of party secretary is the only referenced in your quotation, and considering the autonomous regions experience a significant amount of indigenous cultural practices on all dimensions, we must imagine that a Han Chinese party secretary can’t possibly be anyone that has the requisite social history to be responsible for that flourishing. Given that, we come to the conclusion that, in fact, the indigenous members of the autonomous regions wield significant influence over their regions and that the party secretary does exactly what a party secretary that is correctly managing an autonomous region would do - ensuring alignment with the state’s core strategic direction. That means ensuring the autonomous regions are not infiltrated by Western spoilers, elevating compradors to positions of influence or power, and ensuring party resources are allocated in ways that maintain good relations with the region. If this was not what was happening, then you would be seeing separatists and sympathizers all over the place. Instead what we see is separatists are almost exclusively associated with Western programs for destabilization and most of the population in the autonomous regions are aware of the need for protecting their region against these interests. When the US is training Tibetan terrorists and air lifting them into the region to conduct acts of violence and build terror networks, it’s pretty important to maintain a counter-intelligence posture even in autonomous regions.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m not saying that the West invented colonialism. I’m saying the colonialism you are talking about is explicitly a phenomenon of Western society. Japan adopting it doesn’t stop it from being a Western social project, that would be race essentialism. China is actively working to undo the damage of colonialism qua the Western social phenomenon. It cannot do so by replicating it.
But more to the point, you assume that China would get the same benefit of colonialism that the West did and is therefore incentivized to engage in Western colonialism. This is where your belief about the world does not match the reality of the world. The reality is that Western colonialism is fatally flawed and those countries that engaged in it are being undone by it. China is aware of this and is actively working to bring about the conditions that ensure the contradictions of Western society move inexorably towards the resolution of those contradictions by the undoing of the colonial project. If China were to then begin its own colonial project, it would be doing so with the full knowledge that it would ultimately destroy China. This is what Western chauvinists can’t seem to grasp. The anti-imperialist movement is fully aware of how unsustainable the North Atlantic project is. They have no desire to emulate it. Western chauvinists just think that imperialism worked really well and now all the anti-imperialists just want to become imperialists in their own right, because obviously your opponents are guilty of the same things you are guilty of, right? But that’s just projection. Modern anti-imperialists movements are based on Marxism-Leninism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and are fully aware of the absolute death trap that imperialism is. Their understanding of the world and how it works is that if they engage in imperialism, they will collapse, just like the West is collapsing. Don’t project your bad behavior onto China.
You don’t know what imperialism is. Your definition of imperialism is so anemic that it cannot distinguish between imperialism and anti-imperialism.
(Continued in Part 2)
I mean you’re entire argument is based upon a different understanding of the word imperialism, I’d say that’s pretty semantic.
And yes, I have read Lenin. And while I agree with a lot of the overarching theory of imperialism seen through a capitalist lens, I think it fails to explain the nuance of a lot of historic and modern conflicts. For one I believe that it fails to recognize historic form of imperialism that happened before the industrial age. It’s overarching themes can be forced into perspective, but it requires the use of a very plastic definition of capitalism. Secondly, I think that Lenin’s theory of imperialism being a stage of capitalism is a product of its time, and is thus is a extremely eurocentric view of history and geopolitics.
I do t quite see how you’ve made that you interpretation? It just sounds like the native people of Tibet are being pushed out of their own homeland. How does directing more funding to immigration than the entire autonomous regions gdp equate to social integration?
And there isn’t a history of reeducation camps that have been accused of rape, family separation, and cultural repression in any autonomous zones?
Lol, that’s like saying the US didn’t colonize Puerto Rico because they still use Spanish as the official language. China has jailed and killed hundreds of priest and nuns in the country, going as far as disappearing their religious leader.
It’s only not insidious if you ignore the possibility of ill intent. If the US started funding immigration to Puerto Rico for white people, to the point that it exceeded Puerto Rico s entire gdp… would you hold your judgment until you understood their intent?
You can’t substantiate that claim? There’s been plenty of evidence to suggest that indigenous cultures have plenty of limitations imposed by the state.
Again, this statement is predicated on an unsubstantiated claim.
You are basing your entire argument on a post hoc fallacy, you have not substantiated the claim that indigenous people are flourishing.
Lol, okay so your logic is that if there were oppression going on that it would cause separatist movements, but according to you all separatist movements were started by western powers … very convenient.
Yes, my point is that china is not immune to adopting certain aspects of western colonialism.
That’s another unsubstantiated claim.
Ahh yes, now you get to make claims for me. I sense a strawman argument coming around the corner…
That would be if the Chinese were practicing the same extraction based colonialism, which is not a claim I’ve made. I believe the type of colonialism we have seen is more of a slow boil version of Americas expansion west, which involves more assimilation and subjection, and placation until the he local popular can be replaced.
You don’t get to define imperialism as you see fit, Lenin was a brilliant man, but his ideologies aren’t all encompassing. Theories like historic materialism may be the best overarching theory of the motives of human conflict, but it leaves a lot to be desired when you try to utilize it to explain every conflict. Yes material needs might be the inherent reason for the racism that started the first war, but the fighters of the following reactionary wars aren’t going recognize that, or even remember the material needs being the base for their own racism.
I don’t. I use Lenin’s work on the topic and all the people that came after him that used and refined it.
I don’t know any analysis that agrees with you. Unless you can back this up with actual analysis, I assume you’re just vibing in order to maintain your cognitive dissonance.
Oh, I see. So you think historical materialism is good except when its conclusions disagree with your liberal programming.
This is an individualist perspective, a liberal one. As though whether each individual is explicitly conscious of their interests matters. You’re not a Marxist. At least not yet.
Based on exactly what? China has not expanded AT ALL. It’s reintegration of Hong Kong and it’s plan to reintegrate the island of Taiwan is not expansion, it is reclamation territory that was stripped by European intervention. There isn’t a theorist in the world that supports your conjecture. You imagine China is running a Han supremacist program based purely on what you understand America did. That is textbook psychological projection. Do some actual research.
You are literally claiming that China is doing imperialism and colonialism. They could be doing it thinking it will benefit them or they could be doing it thinking it will harm them. I assume you don’t imagine China is actively working to harm itself consciously, so the only option left is that China believes imperialism and colonialism will benefit them. They don’t believe this. They write about it all the time. The theory is clear and has been clear since Lenin. Imperialism is a dead end. China knows it, which is why your claim that it’s doing imperialism is ridiculous.
My god. China quite literally says it out loud on a regular basis. Their state officials, their party announcements, their diplomats, it’s constantly said. Read. Don’t just vibe. Read.
Again, read. Just do research. Taiwan has a separatist movement, it is part of Western programming. Hong Kong had a separatist movement, mostly youth. Their parents and grandparents literally threw the kids out their homes because those that lived under British rule have zero desire to go back and want to integrate. The Hong Kong movement itself was part of the British program. The East Turkestan separatist movement is a tiny group of extremists with a completely unsubstantiated interpretation of Islam that emerged around the same time the British and USA were meddling in the Middle East to create new Islamic extremist groups to fight communism. Tibet was a slave society and the Tibetan working class supported the ouster of the owning class. The British and the USA were involved heavily in supporting the owning class, to the point where the CIA has been working with Dalai Lama for decades. The Dalai Lama’s own brother wrote a book about how much he regrets working with the CIA. And Falun Gong is a cult and when they were pushed out of China they had no problem collaborating with the CIA and with fascists.
I know it’s hard for you believe that you’ve been lied to so thoroughly, but that’s the reality. Harvard did a 15-year study of Chinese satisfaction with their government. The government has a 95.5% approval rating across that time. Completely unheard of in any Western country. There are no internal separatist movements because China has done a great job building a society that meets the needs of all its people, not just the Han majority. It’s not built on the contradictions of Western capitalism, it’s not built on the contradictions of Western colonialism, it’s not build on the contradictions of Western imperialism. It is explicitly seeking to build a society that resolves contradictions in order to proceed towards the future without the threat of collapse from the inside or defeat from the outside.
Provide the evidence. The evidence we have includes literacy in indigenous languages being higher than anywhere in the West, more mosques per capita than anywhere in the West (and even more than some Muslim countries), validation of the claim by the Arab League, a coalition of 30 Muslim countries. What evidence do you have of plenty of limitations on indigenous cultures?
The TAR is not their entire homeland. The TAR is a subset of their homeland. In the entire Tibetan region outside of the TAR, Han representation is decreasing, as per the article you pulled your numbers from.
If the TAR’s existing GDP is really really low, it’s easy to spend more than the entire GDP as a percentage. The TAR’s GDP is $31B USD. If GDP is useful (which generally it’s not, but let’s use it as a stand-in) for determining the economic vibrancy of a region, and that economic vibrancy is useful for general social integration and defusing conflict (which it is), then finding ways to improve the economic vibrancy of the TAR would be a priority of the state. Using the party secretary as one member of the TAR’s government, the secretary can identify what would be the most effective and most acceptable without causing conflict within the region. This is likely the outcome of many years of discussions, negotiations, and collaborative decision making. You don’t get 95.5% approval ratings by being Han supremacist and just throwing bodies around in order to outbreed minorities. Again, that’s what white people do, and it’s pretty obvious to anti-imperialists that they shouldn’t do it because it leads to contradictions that will unravel their entire society.
There’s a history of the West lying about these things, yes. You act like reeducation is a bad thing, which again means you haven’t read enough. Do you know how the PLA won the war against the KMT? There were PLA units that experienced greater than 100% casualty rates and still kept fighting. How do you keep fighting when all your soldiers are dead? The PLA won the war by perfecting reeducation. They captured KMT soldiers and then they socialized them into the PLA unit. They ate meals with them, they swapped stories, and they educated them. The KMT soldiers had been fed lies by the KMT about the evil commies, and the lies had to be more extreme than the KMT’s actual treatment of their soldiers. When the KMT POWs saw how the PLA treated them and the common folk, they eventually joined up with the PLA. This reeducation process has been a major part of the Chinese social fabric ever since the PLA was formed. Reeducation camps are working in China to reduce terrorist attacks by massive proportions. But the West continues to spread lies, and just like the KMT they have to make the lies extreme in order to make it look worse than what the West actually does and people see with their own eyes.
Look at the outcomes over the decades. Puerto Rico is getting picked apart, the TAR and Xinjiang are being developed. There is no comparison.
I mean, this right here is a completely fallacious statement. I can fully embrace the possibility of ill intent, but that possibility doesn’t imply it’s insidious. You have taken a logical leap that is unfounded. I agree that the possibility is there, but the solution isn’t to fallaciously assume the possibility is reality but rather to use the possibility to guide your research. There is no data that bears out your accusations EXCEPT as comes from the US State Department and the propaganda machine of the West.
Part 2:
Just because you regurgitate propaganda doesn’t mean you work for them. I would never accuse you of having the requisite skills to work for the US State Department. You cherry picked data from the 2020 census and repeated a narrative around those isolated facts that fits the Western narrative. It’s not my fault you can’t see through the bullshit.
If you don’t know the answer to this question, then you don’t really have any business talking about this. Ignorance is not a position that must be respected. Your position is based on ignorance, not research and analysis. In essence, you can’t tell the difference between Vietnam and Tibet because your analysis is based purely on vibes and moralizing. Suffice to say, Han chauvinism regarding Vietnam was based on the idea that China knows best, whereas the TAR is based on the rectification of that idea that national security and foreign policy have wholly different qualities than domestic policy and that autonomous regions are a dialectical unity between the need for national security and the need for cultural autonomy.
No, it wouldn’t. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that one of his goals was to bring the American system of apartheid and dominance to the Slavs. It would not be more accurate to say the 3rd Reich was emulating Italy. The 3rd Reich openly studied Jim Crow, American eugenics, frontier and border town strategies, the Indian reservation system, etc. The 3rd Reich literally grew from the Western European project that the USA perfected and helmed. When the 3rd Reich fell, the movement was absorbed back into the USA where it continued to develop.
Which again is more vibes than anything else. If you actually read Chinese party publications, 5-year plans, and everything else they publish, you would see that nothing could be further from the truth. China is not emulating the US, they are arranging their economic policies to ensnare Western bourgeoisie. In fact, that phase is nearly over, having successfully convinced the Western bourgeoisie to put their capital into China to develop China beyond the West while simultaneously convincing the West to deindustrialize. There is no equivalent to Mein Kampf in China, nothing that analyzes the American or European system as effective or better or something worth reproducing and advancing. There is nothing similar in China to Japan’s wholesale adoption of the Western imperialism program (though there is that interesting point in Japanese history where they wholesale adopted the Chinese system of social organization and then tailored it to their context).
Oh boy. I don’t know if we can have this conversation. I’m not really equipped to be your teacher here. Your question, rephrased is “Why did China make autonomous regions and what does it have to do with America?” The first problems is that you see America as the background but America is the foreground, the background is the North Atlantic project of Euro-centric imperialism through racialized capitalism. If you look at the history of the North Atlantic in the Asia-Pacific region, you’re going to see a lot of the things China has done are very closely matched to things that the North Atlantic countries have done. Vietnam was a French colony, and America took the torch from them. The Philippines were occupied by the Spanish, and America took over from them. America turned half of Korea into a wasteland and the other half into a nuclear base, but it took it over from the Japanese who had made Korea a colony. The UK was in India and doing all sorts of anti-communist fuckery at the time but also had spent a century building their imperialism and especially their dominance of China. And then of course you have everything happening in the “Middle East” by the USA, UK, France, and other European imperialists, and that’s yet-another-front through which to isolate, encircle, and destabilize China.
China isn’t doing anything “bad”. There is no “bad”. The moral framing is a useless one. My sentence was “China’s project necessarily involves the opposition to and dismantling of the American project.” There’s a lot to understand from that. First, when China pushes the USA, UK, and Japan out of their space, it’s not imperialism, it’s anti-imperialism. Second, what China is doing is explicitly NOT replicating what the West did and then tuning it to meet their context. What China is doing is finding a path that involves exactly not replicating the colonialist and imperialist structures that are going to destroy the West because China doesn’t want to be destroyed like the West is being destroyed. The fact that you think I was saying “China is bad because other people made them bad” shows you have no idea what China is actually doing.
You can’t develop self crit from a position of abject ignorance. Stop trying to figure out how to be morally superior by engaging in criticism of the fantasy China that you have not investigated at all and start trying to develop criticism of China by studying it thoroughly and with intellectual honesty. There are plenty of things to criticize China for from a Marxist perspective. You haven’t found a single one of those things.
Did you want me to just cite the entire census? Of course I picked data that supported my argument, that’s how debate works… now it is your job to rebuttal my argument, which isnt just throwing ad hominems btw.
Lol, you only specified actions in South East Asia. It’s of my opinion that there are plenty of actions commuted by china in South East Asia that could be interpreted as negative.
Lol, Tibet is not in South East Asia my dude.
Ahh, okay I was right. You were just being sassy.
Again, I’m not defending America? I agree that he studied and utilized American system of oppression, but the way he organized his economy and structural hierarchy was more influenced by the actions of mousselines Italian fascism.
And a lot of people seem to think that utilizing capitalism to destroy capitalism is like trying to put out a house fire by drowning it in gasoline. I think there are some pretty valid criticism laid out in from victory to defeat by Pao-yu Ching.
Lol, that implies that they have some sort of manifest destiny over territories they’ve never historically controlled… Tibet is their space? You just reiterated yourself without actually explaining how they justified their expansion. That’s unless you are claiming they preemptively expanded their territory to deny possible future western intent.
Again, you are utilizing an unsubstantiated definition of imperialism that requires the unnecessary prerequisite of a specified type of capitalist intent.
My dude, just because we came to different conclusions doesn’t mean I haven’t investigated it at all. I could make the same dramatic claims about the willfull ignorance of obvious human rights violations committed against indigenous populations, but of course it would be justified as Western propaganda.
And they would be? You keep making large sweeping claims and then just using a series of logical fallacies to justify them. You haven’t really expanded on your claims, You’ve just regurgitated party platitudes. It’s like I’m criticizing US foreign policy and you keep utilizing memos from the state department to justify them. The whole point is I don’t believe the state department to be a dependable narrator.
Have a great one, but I don’t really feel like breaking down anymore logical fallacies. Nor do I really feel like explaining the historic racial schisms of the east to white people who have never been to the continent. But as a fun experiment, next time you meet a Han from mainland China, ask their opinions about Manchu people. It should be a fun learning experience!
This has been a great rundown!