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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That is speculation, not analysis. I actually agree with the normative point that I wish China were more militantly anti-Israel and would impose much harsher measures. But your counterfactual is still unsupported. Unless you are prepared to argue for a simultaneous rupture with the far larger US and EU support structure, you have not shown that a unilateral Chinese cutoff would fundamentally change the balance. The actual material record suggests otherwise. China’s current line is contradictory: civilian trade with Israel on one side, while on the other side China continues the relationship that helps keep Iran economically afloat under sanctions (dual use components, rocket precursor, BeiDou access, sanctions avoidance). The regional picture is not remotely captured by your one-dimensional indictment.
This is the best normative criticism you make. It is entirely reasonable to say that China should be more militant against Israel. I agree with that criticism. But that is a very different claim from saying China’s anti-imperialist positions are therefore fraudulent in essence. The first is a real socialist criticism. The second is the same old leap from contradiction to essence.
No one is ignoring them. But you still refuse to distinguish contradiction from principal line. A socialist state operating inside a world market dominated by imperialism will have contradictory external relations. The task is to rank them. China sells civilian goods to Israel. The US arms and bankrolls Israel on a scale that dwarfs everyone else. The EU is Israel’s biggest trade partner. China also buys the overwhelming majority of Iran’s exported oil, blunting unilateral sanctions and helping sustain the main regional state confronting Israel and US power. That is the contradictory material record. Your method erases contradiction because it wants a single moral verdict.
No, it is actually very easy not to interpret it that way. Reporting what a foreign party official said in routine, uncritical diplomatic style is not tacit ideological endorsement. It is state media reporting a foreign politician’s flattering remarks during a period of normal bilateral relations. If mere uncritical reporting equals endorsement, then every state outlet on earth is endorsing half the nonsense it republishes from foreign dignitaries. This point is extremely weak. You are taking banal diplomatic coverage and trying to squeeze ideological essence out of it.
First, the number is wrong by an order of magnitude. The China-Russia border is about 4,200 to 4,300 kilometers, not over 40,000. Second, proximity explains some trade everywhere. That does not make the trade politically meaningless. Reuters, citing Chinese customs, reported that China-Russia trade reached a record $244.8 billion in 2024 despite sanctions-related payment friction. So your attempt to wave it away as just “they share a border” does not work. The scale itself matters. And it also undermines your own bad habit of treating trade volume as decisive proof of strategic identity when it suits you, then dismissing it when it cuts the other way.
Yes, and that should be criticized. But again, contradiction does not equal essence. Some Chinese banks limiting exposure under sanctions pressure shows the pressures imposed by participation in a world financial system still dominated by imperialist institutions. It does not cancel the broader record of very large China-Russia trade ties and repeated Chinese opposition to unilateral sanctions.
What this all comes down to is method. Where your evidence is strongest, it supports serious but limited criticisms. China’s late anti-Soviet turn produced opportunist and at times reactionary alignments. China backed the wrong forces in Angola, above all the FNLA and to a lesser degree UNITA. China maintained relations with Pinochet’s Chile. China diplomatically supports a limited two-state line while materially supporting the opposition as opposed to being more openly and actively militant against Israel. These are all valid subjects of communist criticism.
But you are not content with criticism. You want condemnation. So every error has to become an essence. Every tactical convergence has to become strategic identity. Every trade relation has to become political endorsement. Every diplomatic article has to become ideological affinity. Every real contradiction inside the socialist camp has to be rewritten as proof that one side was fraudulent from the beginning.
That is not dialectical and historical materialism. It is dogmatic nostalgia regarding the USSR, moral accounting regarding China, and an inability to distinguish principal from secondary contradictions. It is exactly why you keep overstating China’s role in the collapse of the USSR. Ideological decay, bureaucratic stagnation, political capitulation, and the rise of Gorbachev and Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union. China did not do that. At most, certain Chinese policies formed part of an already hostile international environment. To elevate that into a major causal explanation is not analysis. It is displacement.
A materialist approach would do the opposite of what you do. It would periodize. It would rank contradictions. It would criticize China’s real errors sharply without pretending those errors retroactively abolish every real contradiction with Moscow, erase the anti-imperialist content of the Chinese revolution, or prove that socialism with Chinese characteristics is somehow merely a mask for imperial alignment. Until you can make those distinctions, you are not doing Marxist analysis. You are prosecuting China and calling the indictment “materialism.”
please allow me first to adress a few of your points in your initial reply to my first part, that i hadn’t yet managed to formulate proper responses to prior. i’m sorry for making this whole discussion so cumbersome and inconvenient to sort through, this was by no means my intention.
the line guiding chinese foreign policy may have been motivated by the best anti-imperialist intentions, but its de facto outcomes remain quite evident: not only accomodation, but at times outright collaboration with western imperialism! the material impact of beijings foreign policy, beyond the human cost, was an objective weakening of many socialist states, as well as the communist movement as a whole. simultaneously, beijings historical domestic policy of increasingly allowing western capital penetration strengthened global capitalism by providing it with new markets and helping shift production from the imperial core to the periphery.
notably, much of chinese foreign policy was conducted under assumptions, that were seen as mistaken by most other socialist nations, like that capitalism had supposedly been restored in the ussr, a ridiculous notion given how actual capital restoration in the region during the late 80s/early 90s went, or, also quite dubiously, that the soviet union had at some point turned imperialist. in that case, what capital did it export? by what financial oligarchy was it controlled? what colonies or neo-colonies did it posess?
please correct me if i’m wrong, but as far as i know, neither mao nor any other chinese leader ever really explained what the material basis of a “social-imperialist” state would be, and what the social formation of such a state looked like. to my knowledge, marxism-leninism traditionally holds that the class character of a state changes only through (counter-)revolution, and not through reform alone. with this in mind, it would propably be correct to deem that the theory of “social-imperialism” lacks a material explanation.
it’s far from me to deny that the soviet approach towards other socialist countries had a fair number of problematic aspects to it. yes, there was a certain arrogance towards later revolutions, as well as a certain tendency to see itself as the “older brother guiding the rest”. these attitudes were wrong and they should be criticized. they were also a point of significant frustration for states like bulgaria or cuba, with the notable difference that they didn’t go around offering their territory for the cia, or export guns to afghan reactionaries.
let’s also not pretend like china didn’t launch its own bid to exert influence over communist movements around the world, leading in many cases to local communist parties splitting in two, confusing fellow travelers and weakening the overall communist movement. beijing saying the soviet union had fallen into the trap of “social imperialism” and portraying it as the greatest threat for the proletariat to face, not only constituted an unfortunate and avoidable propaganda service to western imperialism, but also a grave threat to soviet national security. the prc then proceeded to make matters worse by making overtures to the united states and other imperialist powers, ultimately culminating in the 1972 nixon visit to china and the informal alliance between the two countries that followed. “neither moscow, nor washington!” far too often ultimately meant “washington”.
under what material conditions did the soviet union’s involvement in spain, as well as its simultaneous trade relations with the reactionary regimes in europe take place? it was only ca. 15 years after the end of the civil war, electrification and industrialization were far from finished, and while no longer in total diplomatic isolation, the ussr was still essentially under siege. in fact, for most, if not all of its existance, the ussr was under constant, unrelenting and unremitting targeting of much stronger adversaries and thus significantly curtailed in regards to choosing political and economic partners.
meanwhile, modern china enjoys a degree of international political and economic freedom and influence that no previous socialist country would have dared to dream of, with the economies of it’s ideological enemies largely deindustrialized and thus being in a position of unprecedented import dependence.
as i’ve stated previously, the internal problems in the late soviet union were severe and numerous. however, the hostile external environment of constant anti-soviet pressure, as part of which the people’s republic acted, served as a catalyst and breeding ground for precisely those internal ills. foreign antagonism exacerbated and amplified pre-existing issues in regards to fiscal difficulties, delegitimized institutions, empowered reformist critique, and sought to intensify nationalisms. the exorbitant military spending, that had been essentially imposed onto the ussr by it’s adversaries, had severe impacts on quality of life and lent credibility to gorbachevs promises and rhetoric.
all this was of course well known and understood among moscows opponents, with these precise effects being one of the main reasons for conducting all this pressure in the first place.
of course, europe and the united states bear infinitely greater responsibility for israels crimes, since it is, after all, their settler colony. however, it must be noted that nations do not survive through their military alone.
the average settler is accustomed to a certain level of luxury and consumer goods, goods that, due to the deindustrialization of western countries, are now largely produced in china. should these goods become unavailable, the settler would have a strong incentive to return to their home country.
as mentioned earlier, chinese support to the islamic republic is very much commendable, absolutely no denying that. nonetheless, china has scaled back it’s historical involvement with palestinian resistance factions and at certain points, it seemed as though the country had little interest in iran and the broader axis of resistance beyond its own economic interests. the recent strengthening of military co-operation is an extremely happy development, though.
thank you for correcting my mistake about tge length of the border, it’s much appreciated!
the large trade volume, as compared to ukraine, is of course further explained by russias much larger and more sophisticated economy and stronger willingness to rely on non-western partners. nonetheless, reuters also reported, that in 2025 two‑way goods trade fell by ca. 6.9%, compared to the previous year, to ca. $228.1 billion, partially as a result of western pressure.
at least in my view, china does not seem to have taken sides in this conflict, preferring instead to sit on two chairs at once.
finally, at no point have i claimed to know some “essence of Chinese foreign policy as such”, nor do i want to state that chinese socialism is merely a “smokescreen” or something similarly perfidious. in my eyes, the question is less whether or not china intended at any point in time to act as an ally to imperialism, but rather that it de facto oftentimes did. imho, certain aspects of chinese foreign policy have sadly been contributing to the strengthening of reactionary forces worldwide and that should not be sugar-coated.
at no point was it my intention to demean or degrade the positive impact that that the chinese revolution had upon the world, nor have i wanted to call into question the chinese peoples’ and leaderships commitment to socialist construction. if that’s how it came across, it is a reflection on my ability to express myself and my character, not on my point, and i must apologize. short-temperedness is one of my worse traits and one i need to work on.