It’s just… the same ideological tendencies that led to the USSR taking a liberal class-struggle-devoid view of “coexistence” with the West and increasingly led them to some kind of “situationally practical” negative peace until it caused their self-destruction, the same tendencies which people here will rightfully criticize as “Krushchevite revisionism” and which made China break from the Soviet-led bloc, are now reflected in China’s internal and external policy and within the CPC’s ideological line in a massively bigger way than the USSR and the CPSU ever did. China has just managed to avoid the self-destruction part, probably cuz the West was cool with China as long as they remained a non-threat competitively on the world market and they kept sending extremely cheap input goods to the economy of the West (and we can see the ruling class of the global imperialist bloc is no longer cool with this arrangement from their recent actions toward China but the flow of cheap commodities never stopped so it’s probably for the former reason (without getting into implications of what that could mean given that China is now a financial and industrial superpower))

Imo it’s not possible to be critical ideologically of China while remaining uncritical structurally (if we assume being “uncritical” is ever a good thing, at least in political economy) cuz one of the basest conclusions of Marxism is that the oppressed classes don’t have to remain passive objects to the material conditions of history (which the ruling classes have, until recently, had asserted the most control over) but that we can use ideology to understand these forces and exert influence on them for our own benefit using the state as led by the communist party like in China. The current structure of China and China’s role within the larger structure of the imperialist world-system is highly influenced by the ideology of the CPC. Like… yeah, China was in a particularly difficult situation in the mid-to-early-late 20th century because the CPC had broken all ties with the USSR and “their” (social imperialism or whatever hehe) anti-imperialist bloc and after their attempt to build their own competing bloc wasn’t going so well, they willingly chose to cooperate with the West and give the West’s economy a massive boost while it was in the middle of completely and finally wrecking the USSR and their bloc, which… definitely means something about their ideology cuz China didn’t just accidentally end up like this (however someone views the goodness or badness of “this”). To criticize ideas on a basis other than relations to other ideas (which we definitely want to do cuz we are materialists) is to criticize their effects on the world, and the world isn’t looking too good rn while China isn’t doing a whole lot about it despite no longer being powerless to effect it (ofc that assertion is extremely contentious and complicated to get into lol)

And ofc, it depends how we define what “cheerleading” is cuz when I just used it, it was vibes-based lol. What I mean is a whole tendency of this site sometimes to overfocus on the cool things China does like build trains or forgive loans (I do like trains and free stuff :3) while overlooking massively concerning things like the role of capital, especially finance capital, plays in China’s economy and the extent to which it has penetrated into the state and the party to not only siphon state resources through state contracts but even through direct corruption or changes that have taken place since the end of the Maoist period like the massively reduced role of central economic planning or agricultural communes and similar local economic organizations in the economy while substituting capital or even the extent to which multinational corporations extract surplus from China to export to the West

Imo it’s not even just a tendency of this site but, more broadly, a tendency in the entire western left that didn’t immediately out themselves as imperialist chauvinists when the latest cold war against China began. Idk, ofc as someone in the West I will always criticize my country more than China and defend China from one of these “leftists” if they start going off lol. Idk, we have to figure out wtf is going on cuz passively “cheerleading” AES and tepid third-world social democracies or just being a running dog for imperialism isn’t gonna help us. I know this site is overly hostile to criticism of China, mostly cuz the site was once was filled with those running dogs who had to get purged but, idk am voicing these feelings for once

Am sry if being too long-winded or unnecessary expositiony of things you already know, is just kinda how I think through stuff