This is not an ideological, Cold War struggle. China is not pursuing Marxist theory, although its domestic policies certainly have nothing to recommend them. Xi is not only crushing Uighurs and other non-Han minorities, but also extinguishing religious freedom and crushing Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. American minds do not take kindly to "civil-military fusion," or "social credit scores," whereby Beijing measures the worthiness of its own citizens. This is not Communism at work, but authoritarianism, pure and simple. Misreading it as Marxism 2.0 will impede strategic clarity, not enhance it.
See how Bolton immediately pivots from claiming that China isn't Marxist to going through all the standard lies about how China is "crushing" its minorities and engaging in "authoritarianism?" Something is deeply off about this kind of rhetoric, which we also often see promoted by the "libertarian" leftists who seek to discredit China as a successful socialist experiment through claiming that "China is capitalist" and repeating CIA propaganda about "Uyghur concentration camps." And this offness is apparent to anyone who's studied deeply into Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory.
Firstly, despite what manipulators like Bolton say, China is as much of a workers state as it was under Mao. As Carlos Martinez of Invent the Future wrote in 2018:
In a socialist society, the state must serve the interests of the working class and its allies; it must protect working class power, defend it from the inevitable attacks from capital, and build a better life for people. Such a state can certainly incorporate market mechanisms, as long as these operate under the guidance of the state and introduce some benefit for working people, and as long as capital is not allowed to become politically dominant"The Communist Party of China (CPC) conceptualises the capitalist elements of its economy as being at the service of socialist development. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics' leverages the market to stimulate production, attract investment, encourage technical development, support peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world, and thereby raise the living standards of the Chinese people and pave the road for a higher stage of socialism, built on advanced technology. Market socialism can reasonably be considered a pragmatic and entirely Marxist answer to the exceedingly difficult problem of building socialism in a large, underdeveloped country under constant threat from a hegemonic US imperialism.
Since then, the PRC has totally eliminated extreme poverty, a feat that the country's communist party accomplished last year amid a pandemic and global depression which had pushed tens of millions into extreme poverty within the capitalist world. China has also gone through with a green new deal that's set it on track to make its carbon emissions peak by 2025"--"-five years earlier than the date that Xi Jinping has pledged to the UN. China also has lower emissions per capita than all of the G7 member countries, in comparison to the U.S. with its ongoing global lead in per capita emissions. In other words, China only has a third of the per capita emissions that the U.S. has, despite having a population several times bigger.
Nonetheless, the agents of the Sinophobic narrative machine continue to paint China's government as a moral equivalent to Washington, and therefore the communist theory that China's government represents as something to be discarded. The other day, Greta Thunberg tweeted that "Yes, China is still categorized as a developing nation by WTO, they manufacture a lot of our products and so on. But that's of course no excuse for ruining future and present living conditions. We can't solve the climate crisis unless China drastically changes course."
It's no surprise that Thunberg's rise in the climate activism scene has been facilitated by Extinction Rebellion, a group that isn't even anti-capitalist and that's tasked with defusing genuinely radical environmental movements. Thunberg's reinforcement of the perception that China deserves some kind of special condemnation for its environmental policies, despite being leagues ahead of the capitalist world in climate action, further serves to blunt the development of the masses towards revolutionary consciousness.
As Andre Vltchek observed last year, the Western media's efforts to paint China as "capitalist" are ultimately purposed with destroying hope itself. When the people are told that China is just another capitalist-imperialist power, or that China's neighboring socialist power the DPRK is nothing more than an oppressive dictatorship, they'll accept capitalism, empire, environmental destruction, systemic racism, and the violent police state as inescapable facets of civilization. Or they'll gravitate to anti-Marxist factions of the left that spend their time vilifying China to try to discredit the "authoritarian" communists. Sinophobia fosters an endless exercise in political nihilism, which Vltchek says comes from the numbness Americans have developed when it comes to being lied to:
People are used to lies. They are obedient, brainwashed. And they like it when other, non-Western nations are smeared, especially when they are accused of the same crimes which Europe and the United States have been committing for centuries. It makes them feel less guilty. They can then say: 'The entire world is disgusting. We are all equally terrible!' Perhaps, after these propaganda assaults, there is no more hope left. But at least, in the West, there is no rush to shed those complexes of superiority, and to get rid of the privileges. AND so, 'China is capitalist!'
Don't accept this false view of the world. Learn to see through all of the war propaganda that's constantly thrown your way, and study the proletarian revolutionary theory which can liberate us from the U.S. empire's internal rule.
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