When I visit my parent's place I will look to see if I can find it again and give it a real read this time
randomquery
Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy is the first ever book on philosophy I tried to read as a child: I found it in my parent's bookcase and I was curious to know what philosophy was about. Even though I gave up very quickly, the first distinction it makes between materialist and idealist philosophy had left quite an impression on me. Seeing the title brought back some memories
My very limited experience (I have been to China a few times for work, and managed to find 3 days to visit Beijing and 1 day in Shanghai):
The PRC was founded on the 1st of October, which is yearly celebrated: the first week of October is official holiday, and during the month of October it's not uncommon for Chinese to travel around for their holidays. The positive is that you see lots of red flags around, the negative is that touristic places will be busier than usual.
I agree with others that your plan is overly ambitious, traveling from the South to Beijing sounds too much. Guangzhou is also very beautiful to visit, and I was told also the same for Xiamen (that others mentioned).
For Beijing (in case you are still adamant about going): I spent 3 days in Beijing and I couldn't see much first because there is much to see but also because you need to book things in advance (not sure how much in advance, but definitely more than 1 week which is what I tried to do). Everything that you visit will have long queues, and also going from A to B in Beijing takes forever because the city is giant (I had 1.5 hour metro rides). If you do want to spend two days, the Great Wall would be 1 day on its own, I think it's 100% worth it because it is something really unique (October is a popular time to visit it also because it's the season that maple trees turn red so it's very beautiful). The second day would be Tienanmen square, and the forbidden city? Beijing has also many museums and very beautiful parks and palace gardens, that you can spend a whole day there if you want (and are lucky with the weather), but with two days I think it's very hard.
For food, I second what someone said about Sichuan cuisine, it's great (but very spicy). I would also suggest trying a hotpot dinner if you haven't had it before.
As others said you need WeChat and AliPay (and add a payment method in advance) and Amaps. For WeChat you need someone to activate your account I think, while AliPay you can do on your own. You can pay anywhere with your phone (with WeChat and Alipay), your credit cards won't work, and you can also pay in most places with cash (at least that's my experience) if you can get some before you arrive. Through WeChat and AliPay you also have access to taxis (I think they call it DiDi), and public transportation (but I think the public transportation you need to activate in advance). If you want to travel with the train, I would suggest the train app (Railway12306). You need to add your passport in the app, and after that you can book train tickets, and you can enter the train with your passport.
My experience is that most people don't understand or struggle with English even in very touristy places, so you need a translator (deepL as others said). People are still usually helpful and friendly, so you do survive in the end. You do need a VPN if you want to stay in touch with family etc. There are travel e-sim cards that have automatically a VPN (they are more expensive than chinese sim cards but I guess it's a convenience). If you don't go for some travel sim card, I would suggest getting a chinese sim card at the airport.
I hope some of it is helpful.
I think people should not underestimate the usefulness of people like Sachs. He is definitely not a comrade, but he is a voice coming from people who used to be very close to power that does express criticism of American empire and some positive attitude towards "multipolarity" and China. He is also very well connected, in the sense that he does have personal relations with people currently close to power or in power so he might have insights and inside knowledge that he is willing to "leak" to the public.
I take no position on his opinion on COVID, I have 0 expertise, and I think he also has very little expertise when it comes to this topic.
Trump is preparing for war with China. The tariffs help with decoupling the economies and figure out potential allies (whose economies also need to be decoupled if they are to help in the war effort), trying to "reindustrialize" the country, instill militarism in society and in education, greatly increase the military budget, focusing on "rare earth minerals" and raw resources needed to fight a war. Seems like the empire is preparing for the salto mortale within the next decade.
It's very much a leader-centered party. Their leader, Zoe Konstantopoulou, used to be a quite prominent member of Syriza (actually her father was for a time the leader of "Synaspismos" a left party from the 90ies whose members were mostly communists who split with KKE and later became Syriza) but she left the party after the 2015 capitulation. Around 2012-2015 she was known for pushing for reparations from Germany for the Nazi occupation, at the time what some people thought was a useful argument for forgiving the greek debt or turning around the discussion from "we owe money to Germany" to "they owe us too". During the first Syriza government she was named as the speaker of the greek parliament. She is known for being a firebrand, always speaking in parliament over the allotted time, and getting into arguments very often. She is also a lawyer who has been involved in some interesting/public cases: In the past, she was representing a journalist who started a motion against Henry Kissinger for his involvement in the military dictatorship in greece as well as part of a motion in the ICC against British officials for crimes committed during the Iraq war. She defended the family of Alexis Grigoropoulos (the 15 year old boy who was shot by a police officer in cold blood in 2008 which led to some of the biggest riots in modern greek history). Her recent surge in popularity has to do with the fact that she is currently defending pro-bono the families of the youth that died in the Tempi train crash in 2023 (I wrote a post a few weeks back about the greek protests related to this), and has been the most vocal critic of the government for the handling of that case.
I think that her politics are incoherent, and I agree that the "we are not left or right" will have to face reality if she ever gets close to power. It's unclear whether her popularity will keep going up or it will burst. Greek politics right now are too chaotic to tell.
Joseph Stalin