So some fellow with an odd name joins one of our foreigner wechat groups. Says he’s from Ukraine. Someone posts an ad for what we used to call a white monkey job, a day’s modeling for cash. Mostly ended as the government cracked down hard on illegal work. He asked if it could be permanent employment and he could get a work visa with it. No, those jobs never are. People had plenty of them back in the day, you’d see people you know in trade show videos, hotel advertisements and the like. Another insensitive prick in the group cackled, well, it’s not illegal work if you have a green card like I do! The Ukrainian then asked how he could form his own company to issue his own work visa but the government cracked down on phony companies like that long ago. Have to have investment, a physical premises, money going in and out and employ Chinese people. As for a China green card, it’s one of the most difficult in the world to get. If you’re a Ph.D. in AI research you can get one. Or a very highly paid professional job that pays a ton of taxes. Or after five years of marriage to a PRC citizen and continuous residence you can get one, if you buy an apartment (outright with cash or have a mortgage completely paid off and banks don’t like to give loans to foreigners because too many up and leave.) Plus put down a deposit of ten years living expenses ($50,000 or so.) Also survive five years with no work as spousal visas are really meant for Chinese men who marry Vietnamese or North Korean women so why does she need to work? It’s not meant for whitey but the Lawful Neutral Confucians will allow it if you can come up with a convincing story as to why you can live in China without a job. He’s probably on a tourist visa so he’s got 30 days to find something, which he probably won’t be able to. It’s a sad story. If he overstays he’ll get picked up by the cops and deported at his own expense. If he can’t afford a ticket he’ll languish in immigration jail, once a year or so the commies will pay for a flight home for indigent illegal aliens. I had a friend who was in there after getting picked up for playing guitar at a bar for pay. He said it was unpleasant, bright, wooden benches as a bed and food was terrible, whole fish with tiny bones, rice and boiled cabbage. A few years ago after the war started we had a bunch of Ukrainian young men show up, which I thought was odd but we get people from all over the world so I didn’t think much of it. Looking back they were draft dodgers. They’re all gone now, I haven’t seen one in years.
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No one said declassified US documents are automatically worthless. The issue is the method you apply to them. A declassified US document can establish what US officials discussed, planned, or believed. It cannot by itself settle the truth of the matter.
Even taking this at its strongest, what it proves is limited. It shows Chinese-origin arms sales intersecting with a reactionary geopolitical environment in which the Reagan administration was running Iran-Contra and anti-Sandinista operations. Fine. Criticize that. But this still does not prove your larger original claim that the PRC had become a de facto auxiliary of imperialism in essence. Tactical convergence in one conjuncture is not the same thing as strategic class identity. You keep collapsing those categories because your conclusion is fixed in advance.
Thank you for the sources however the scholarly record is more nuanced than your presentation suggests. The Angola conflict was exceptionally complex, with shifting class characters and alliances. UNITA itself originated with Maoist influences in the early 1960s before later realigning with Washington and Pretoria, a trajectory that itself reflects the contradictory pressures of anti-colonial struggle in a Cold War context. China’s engagement in Angola was real and should be criticized: Beijing provided support to the FNLA and some episodic assistance to UNITA in a specific anti-Soviet conjuncture. But the attempt to inflate this into a simple narrative of “China backing reactionaries” misses the dialectical reality. The principal contradiction for Beijing at that moment was containing Soviet-Vietnamese expansionism, not a strategic alignment with US imperialism. That does not excuse the error. Backing the FNLA against the Soviet-Cuban backed MPLA was a serious mistake with real consequences. But a materialist analysis asks why that error occurred, what contradictions produced it, and how the line was later corrected, not simply compiling damages to prove a pre-established essence. Your $800 million figure for UNITA aid is not firmly established in the scholarly literature you cite, and the emphasis on scale serves your moral indictment more than it serves historical clarity. The point stands without embellishment: in a specific period, China’s anti-Soviet strategic conception led it to support forces that objectively served reactionary ends. That should be criticized. But criticism is not the same as extracting an eternal essence from a contingent error.
Yes. That is part of the record. And it should be criticized. But once again, contact, training, and even episodic aid do not prove the metaphysical essence you want them to prove. A Marxist asks what line was governing policy, what the principal contradiction was believed to be, and how that line misfired. You skip all that and go straight from historical error to timeless essence.
This is one of your stronger criticisms. China did maintain relations with Pinochet’s Chile. That was politically ugly and should be criticized. I am not interested in denying it.
But again you insist on making the criticism do more than it can. There is a difference between maintaining diplomatic relations with a reactionary state and proving strategic identity with that state’s class character. The principle that trade must not be confused with participation in war or with rendering assistance was articulated by Mao not as a temporary excuse for poor countries, but as a general point, citing Soviet trade with Germany and Italy during the Spanish war while the USSR materially assisted Republican Spain. Your attempt to say this principle “no longer applies” because China is richer simply shows that you have not understood the argument. Trade is not aid. If it were aid, it would be called aid.
Here your evidentiary standard drops sharply. The continued diplomatic relationship is easy to support. The stronger claim that China personally handed Pinochet millions of dollars is much thinner than you present it. You are taking a defensible criticism and attaching a much weaker allegation to intensify it. That is a pattern throughout your argument.
They should not be ignored. They should be ranked correctly. The dissolution of the USSR was driven above all by internal contradictions: ideological collapse, bureaucratic stagnation, national tensions, weakening party authority, and a reform line that unraveled into surrender under Gorbachev and then counterrevolution under Yeltsin. China did not produce Gorbachev. China did not produce Yeltsin. China did not hollow out the CPSU from within. Your argument vastly overstates China’s causal role because you are still reading Soviet decline through the lens of anti-China nostalgia instead of material ranking of causes.
Yes, the late anti-Soviet turn produced real intelligence cooperation with the United States and serious opportunist alignments. Yes, that should be criticized. But again, what does it prove? It proves a serious deviation in a specific period. It does not prove that every earlier Chinese criticism of Moscow’s hegemonic behavior was insincere or invented. You keep divorcing the late anti-Soviet line from the material conflict that produced it, above all the attempt by Moscow to subordinate Beijing strategically and ideologically within the socialist camp. Once you remove that material context, all that remains is moral storytelling. That is not historical materialism.
This criticism is fair as far as it goes. China’s official diplomatic line is a two-state solution. From the standpoint of full anti-colonial justice, that is limited and reformist. I have no problem saying so.
But here too you immediately overreach. As materialists, we do not ask which slogan sounds most pure in the abstract. We ask what forces are materially sustaining the occupation and what forces are materially constraining imperialism in the region. So long as Washington and the major EU powers retain the ability to arm, finance, and diplomatically shield Israel, calls for the immediate dissolution of Israel by a single outside state are not a serious political program. They are posture. Posture that is overwritten by the major support China provides to the axis of resistance.
This is simply not a serious ranking of the material facts. The EU itself states that it was Israel’s biggest trading partner in 2024, accounting for 32% of Israel’s total goods. China was Israel’s third-largest trading partner in 2024 (even without taking the EU as a bloc it still falls short of Ireland), after the EU and the United States. More importantly, the military backbone of Israeli power is American. Brown’s Costs of War project estimates at least $21.7 billion in US military aid to Israel in the two years after October 7, 2023, excluding additional committed arms deals, and notes that Israel’s combat aircraft, helicopters, bombs, missiles, and major targeting systems are mainly American. So no, Israel’s wealth and war-making power are not primarily “from China.” They are underwritten above all by Washington and Brussels. If you are going to talk like a materialist, rank the material supports correctly.