Oh please.

There are people in China who are Chinese nationalists. Not necessarily along some sort of racialized supremacist lines as in the US but who are less communists and more nationalists and who in a hypothetical where a US blockade and missteps led to economic problems and suffering might easily turn on the party just as soon because the economic headwinds have changed and they no longer see the party as benefiting them. And there are a ton of fair weather communists who are so because it’s the path of least resistance and because they were educated in such. Such people at times get into various levels of leadership and such people at times also take the path of least resistance in engaging in corruption and taking money as we have seen.

To assert Chinese people are somehow special and the ‘white-brain-pan’ is the only one that can possibly be vulnerable to the siren song of liberalism is itself a racially reductive and problematic take. There are traitors within China including within the CPC as there were within the USSR and the party there. China has taken steps with lessons learned from the fall of the USSR to attempt to address many of these problems and that is good but given the amount of corruption Xi had to root out, the existence of liberal cliques, etc there are inevitably as part of China’s opening up necessary playing with fire economic liberalization and penetration by foreign capital (to secure that capital) those who feel a certain way and have not been necessarily purged but who fester, tolerated so as to not scare off foreign capital and economic partnership and only reigned in as Jack Ma was if they openly go too far against the party. This however says nothing to what some of these traitors may privately think but be smart enough not to give voice to at present. Rot starts small with little concessions. Kruschev did not set out to destroy communism or the USSR and there is more than one way to fell a tree.

What I am saying is it is the mandate of the party, the vanguard to maintain vigilance. To not grow slack, to not assume liberalism can be so easily extinguished as you do. It is a weed and it must be plucked and it must be understood it can sprout up time and again from apparently cleared soil and that the vigilance here will need to be a longer one.

Importantly the USA has not yet failed. It is the strongest empire in history with a lot of cultural hegemony still built in around the globe and seeped into a lot of thinking in ways people don’t even realize. It will likely be decades before the danger lessens significantly as that is how long it will take assume the Iran war really does bring US power and image low (a Suez Crisis moment) for this all to really fully manifest in the illusion and its remnants falling away. In that time China will almost certainly transition to a new leader. Like an injured scorpion it isn’t wise to count it out but be more cautious than ever in its death throes. Future generations next century may live free of this watchful vigilance if we are successful. But we owe it to all who have struggled not to presume too much too soon. Until the enemy is buried and long dead and discredited the risk remains and so must worry and watchfulness.