xiaohongshu

joined 11 months ago
[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

and sometimes their arguments ring close to michael pettis

Ridiculous. Pettis thinks that China is gaming the trade imbalance and caused de-industrialization in America. He is right about the balance of payments stuff but please don’t even try to equate my arguments with his. If you actually understood what I have written, they could not have been more different.

I am literally one of the few people on this site that says China is already strong enough to take on the US economically and financially, unlike others that still find excuses like “but China is still weak…. China needs more primitive accumulation of capital from Western countries first….”

For reference, China already has 31% of the global manufacturing capacity, compared to 18% in the US, and 5% for Germany and Japan each. If this is still not enough productive capacity, then our entire socialist project is doomed lol. How else are other Global South countries ever going to accumulate enough productive capacity? Surely one day, one day it will happen lol.

These are the same “leftists” that are regurgitating the same Western imperialist lines that “poor Global South countries have to export cheap goods to the West in order to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to become high income countries”. Be careful whose propaganda you are falling for.

Any other country, like Russia, that even tries to open themselves up to the West would have been instantly labeled as a “comprador state” on this site. I am literally providing an explanation - which may not be perfectly correct, but at least reasonable enough backed by evidence - on why China behaves the way it does.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

every other post I see of xiaohongshu they're doing the "The CCP is collapsing"/"Xi is finished" meme

Please provide a single example of me even saying that.

Everything I have said is at least based on published data from the Chinese side, and from actual policies published from the State Council of the PRC, and I gave literal explanations for why I think things are going the way they are based on these information, with arguments that are fully compatible with Marx (and I always laugh when people try to “reture” arguments I’ve given by regurgitating neoclassical nonsense).

You can disagree with my conclusions but I never said anything baseless or fabricated, and certainly not anything about “CCP collapsing” lol.

People always ask “why China didn’t do this or do that”, for example, why is China is even increasing the retirement age and we don’t get adequate welfare and free healthcare in China, when China already has the world’s largest productive capacity and are leading in robotics and automation? And I provided the logic - as best as I can as a lay person without insider knowledge - behind these decisions (i.e., the Chinese leadership aren’t naive or stupid) if you bother to read up what I have written.

If your model of China cannot explain that obvious disparity, then it’s clear that the model is wrong.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

During the first week of the war, half of Hexbear was condemning Russia and Putin for being reckless and launching a pre-emptive strike against Ukraine, basically condemning the world to a nuclear war. Iranian response is more in line with what the Western left wants, hoping that cooler heads will prevail, whether you like it or not.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 21 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

China will absolutely respond if its sovereignty is violated. For other countries, China will adopt a non-interference policy as usual. This is consistent with their foreign policy especially after Mao.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I mean, from Beijing’s perspective, the more Russia and Iran turn into cannon fodders and soak up Western munitions and drawing attention away from itself, the lesser threat and more distraction it will be for US foreign policy to derail its economic development.

Just like how 9/11 took away Bush’s attention from China, and how the 2008 GFC took away Obama’s pivot to China, the current events will ensure that China is able to retain its stability and prosperity as a dominant economic power for decades to come.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

China is not capitulating, it is in fact making strong plays with all the cards it has. What you’re seeing is two countries with the world’s largest economies negotiating and positioning to maximize the bargains for themselves, and potentially setting the geopolitical stage for the coming era.

It only seems like China is “capitulating” because you’re expecting China to antagonize the Washington-led neoliberal consensus, when in fact China has shown no indication of wanting to abandon the very arrangement that has benefited both the US and themselves for the past few decades.

To be fair, I used to think that too but have come to accept that the Chinese leadership is simply not interested in forging an alternative.

Heck, even at the height of US-China trade war, literally just two weeks ago, the head of People’s Bank of China, Pan Gongsheng, held a meeting with the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon discussing “issues including global economic and financial development, China-U.S. economic relations, and China’s macroeconomic policies”:

Like, can you imagine that? Can you imagine China’s central bank asking an American investment firm what is a good macroeconomic policy for China?

I still have a hard time believing that but it’s all true. Imagine Putin meeting the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Everyone here would have instantly called him out as a comprador lol.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The founder and chief economist of American Compass, Oren Cass, is a long-time economic adviser to and associate of Trump’s present Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Wait, Virgil Texas’s brother runs a conservative think tank?

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

The Chinese economy is strong enough and its political situation stable enough that China’s not going to be “destroyed” lol. Japan miscalculated its move during the Plaza Accord and suffered greatly for it (contrary to popular narrative, Japan wasn’t stupid or being coerced into signing the Plaza Accord, they thought they could beat the US at its own game, but miscalculated greatly), but still that didn’t lead to the Japanese economy collapsing even with a 35-year run of zero growth.

If anything, if China plays its cards right, it is poised to retain its dominant partnership role with the US empire at the expense of the rest of the world (Europe in particular seems screwed no matter what). The declining US empire wants a reshuffle, potentially to decouple from China, and China can still convince the US that it is indispensable for the empire through its actions. Both countries need each other more than they’d like.

China can build the global supply chain for the US and let the US financial capital in as a compromise, and in return they get to keep the value of their $4.5 trillion dollar reserves and use them productively to finance its own internal development, and foreign capital can help save its slumping property and stock markets and help stimulate consumption growth. It’s a “win-win” cooperation depending on your perspective.

The unfortunate outcome, if this is indeed played out, is that we won’t be getting an alternative economic and financial system to the current IMF framework (China seems very insistent on defending free trade, even accusing the US of violating the sanctity of free market principles), and that means many of the Global South countries will likely become very vulnerable to be harvested by US finance capital if their economies fail due to reduced export demand or if cheap Chinese goods flood their markets because there is nowhere else for the goods to go.

At the end of the day, if you think about it, if the US confiscating $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves did not lead China to give up on the dollar, then Trump’s tariffs is even less likely to do it.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 27 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I am currently writing something up about China’s price wars and how that relates to the global economy, but since the news dropped, I might as well just make a quick comment: it is in China’s interest to see the US inflation going down.

One of the major reasons (but certainly not the only one) is that Fed’s Powell has stubbornly refused to lower the key rate of the Federal Reserve until the inflation in the US has gone down. That means the local (provincial and municipal) governments in China continue to be squeezed by huge amount of debt they have taken out over the past decade for infrastructure building, and it also adds to the systemic instability of the financial institutions that have made those loans (if you have been paying attention to Chinese news, the largest banks in Jiangsu and Zhejiang have recently been exposed for corruption scandals and the heads of all the largest banks are being prosecuted for frauds. the entire system has rotten to the core, to say the least).

This is why if the tariffs are causing higher inflation in the US, it would be even harder for the local governments in China to pay off their debt, and that squeezes the ability of the local governments to run public services, pay wages etc. Since there is no debt cancellation mechanism in China, and the State Council’s policy from November 2024 was very clear in that it was to allow the local governments to “borrow cheaper to pay off their expensive, outstanding debt” (by raising the debt ceiling by 6 trillion yuan), this strategy requires the Fed to lower its key rate, so Chinese banks can follow in response.

Ironically, this together with the deflation made the Chinese economy even more dependent on the export sector, since they have not been able to stimulate domestic demand, which is another huge topic in itself. As I’ve said before I don’t think this is a coincidence. It is in fact an imperial strategy of the US empire.

A lot of the anti-imperialist pro-BRICS bloggers focus solely on the trade aspect and don’t understand the complexity of China’s economy well enough to understand that both US and China need one another. Until China decides that it wants to give up its net exporter status (the IMF “export led growth” model) and creates an alternative demand within China to absorb the global export surplus, it will have to play the rules set by the neoliberals.

All the talks we’ve seen on the anti-dollar spaces like Petrodollar, China dumping its trillion dollars of US debt (like how lol?), bond yields, China issuing its own dollar-denominated bonds, gold/crypto etc. are all distractions. The only way to kill the dollar is if the world doesn’t want to export their goods to the US anymore, and this cannot happen if everyone still wants to play the “export led growth” game since demand cannot magically appear on its own. Somebody has to step up and create the demand to take the place of the demand created by the huge US trade deficits.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 22 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I’ve said this before: these countries aren’t stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Trump’s tariffs against China is curbing exports to the US, and unlike in 2008, China’s property market bursting means that it can no longer turn to massive infrastructure investment to drive economic growth like it used to, and the Internal Circulation strategy that was supposed to promote domestic consumption has ended with a whimper. The post-Covid consumption spending did not happen, and we’re actually getting deflation, which is even worse than inflation.

France knows this. It knows that China is now more dependent on export than ever before, because the surplus export goods have to go somewhere that is not America. The EU will be forced to absorb them, and France also knows that if they just let China dump all their cheap goods inside the EU, it will also be the end of their domestic industries.

With Europe in austerity since Nord Stream bombing, France has even more incentive to take maximum advantage of China’s current predicament.

These countries know exactly what they’re doing. They are all calculating to position themselves as the winners of Trump’s global tariffs.

Instead of forging a new alternative to neoliberalism, both Europe and China have chosen to become the true defender of global free trade, claiming that it is the US (Trump) that has violated the mythical sanctity of free trade agreement. And so, a mercantilistic fight it is.

And while trying to screw one another up, they also secretly hope to get a good deal from Trump behind each other’s back so they can be the winner of the race. This is the true goal of Trump’s global tariffs - to unleash a dirty mercantilist war while it hides itself behind tariffs so as to reap the harvest from the fallout, with the ultimate aim of controlling and reshaping the global supply chain to the interest of the declining empire. It was never about re-industrializing America.

All the “haha European leaders are so stupid, they’re just vassals of the US” takes that we often see on online anti-imperialist spaces aren’t grounded in material reality, as if building Nord Stream itself wasn’t an act of defiance to assert their energy independence from the US. They are only “stupid” in the sense that they are guided by the ideological indoctrination of neoliberalism. Once you understand this, Europe’s and China’s actions will make sense.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 40 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 36 points 1 month ago (9 children)

A bit late to the topic here, but I know this was extensively discussed when it happened during the short India-Pakistan conflict: did the Pakistani air force destroy India’s S-400 batteries using Chinese-made missiles?

If so, that pretty much settled the score between Russian and Chinese military equipments? If the Russian S-400s can be so easily destroyed by Chinese missiles, then it’s pretty much game over for Russia as a major arms dealer?

I sort of see this as a “proxy war” between Russia and China in their competition to carve out the share as global arms suppliers. It is one of last remaining major industries for Russia and I can see how losing that market in the world will be harmful to their economy.

view more: ‹ prev next ›