1. Ok let's actually fucking do this. Let's talk about China's role in supporting American imperialism and in their role in the US winning the Cold War, because none of these people want to talk about that either.

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2. (Quick note I'm not affiliated with Lausan in any way, this is my work, not theirs). So let's start with the Iraq War, since Dan Cohen specifically mentions it. China obviously didn't force the US to go into Iraq. They did however fund it.

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3. In coalition with the East Asian American military protectorates (and we will fucking get to how China got to a point where it's coordinating monetary policy with America's "allies" in East Asia) China filled the massive budget shortfalls

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4. that resulted from the combination of the Iraq War and the early 2000's recession. This pattern continues of China buying US bonds to fund the Iraq War continues, here's spending on the Iraq War in millions of dollars vs Chinese bond purchases.

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5. So why is China doing this? China’s economic strategy revolves around propping up the US economy through bond purchases, which allows the yen to retain it’s low value relative to the dollar by propping the dollar up when it looks like it's

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6. going to collapse, thus giving China a competitive advantage in manufacturing. But this strategy RELIES ON KEEPING THE US GOVERNMENT SOLVENT AND CAPABLE OF PAYING FOR ITS WARS. Now China isn't the only country that does this, we've already seen

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7. countries like Japan and South Korea taking up their share of the debt burden, and Germany also is an important purchaser of American bonds. But there's one massive difference between those countries and China: all of them are American military

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8. protectorates, which allows the US to make demands of their fiscal policies at gunpoint (see for example Reagan devaluing the dollar relative to the Japanese yen and the West German deutschmark). China is not an American military protectorate.

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9. They’re in this solely for their own economic gain. And in the process they’re willing to fund every American imperial project so long as they can keep their manufacturing base competitive and the global economy stable.

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10. So how did we get from Chinese troops sweeping across the Korean peninsula to drive out the Americans to China funding the Iraq War? The answer has to do with two crises the CCP faced in the late 60's and early 70's, the Sino-Soviet split and

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11. a Chinese production bottleneck that plagued the developmental regime since it's inception (a bottleneck which is in large part a product of the USSR de-industrializing the Manchurian industrial belt and hauling it to the other side of Russia

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12. at the end of WWII to rebuild it's own manufacturing base). The production bottleneck, to simplify a fairly complicated economic problem into a few sentences, works likes this. Chinese agriculture was devastated by both WWII and the Chinese

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13. Civil War. In order to increase agricultural output, however, the CCP needed industrial capacity in order to modernize Chinese agriculture with stuff like tractors. The problem is in order to build that industrial capacity the CCP needed to

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14. expand its food supply to support a larger urban population to do industrial work. And there you have the production bottleneck. In 1958 the CCP attempted to blow through the bottleneck by shifting production into rural areas, increasing labor

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15. productivity by intensifying agricultural labor, and pulling agricultural workers out of the fields to do infrastructure projects. The Great Leap Forward, on top of ideological considerations and quieting urban strike waves, was designed to

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16. solve the problem by throwing people at it. It was an epochal disaster and the famines that followed killed millions of people. Meanwhile, Chinese Soviet relations worsened over Khrushchev's Secret Speech and the USSR pulling out it's advisors

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17. and technicians as a protest against the Great Leap Forward. This intensified the bottleneck by denying China access to Soviet technology, and as the 60's wore on Sino-Soviet relations continued to deteriorate. In 1969 open conflict between

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18. Chinese and Soviet troops broke out on Zhenbao Island, which nearly caused a war between the two countries and saw divisions of the Chinese and Soviet armies staring each other down across almost the entire Chinese Russian border.

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19. This caused a decisive break between the PRC and the USSR. Mao's solution to this problem was to begin negotiations with the US to both build an anti-Soviet alliance and to give China access to American technology. Those technology transfers

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20. were absolutely VITAL to the future of the Chinese economy. Import substitution schemes like the one the CCP was about to attempt largely fail, as was the case of Venezuela in the 70's, because multi-national companies refuse to sell

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21. the technology countries need to create domestic industrial competitors. The US, on the other hand, was willing to ship China entire factories as technology transfers, but for a price. That price was the CCP selling out the global communist

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22. movement. You can see the first signs of this in China's backing of Pakistan during their 1971 genocide in Bangladesh. By the middle of the decade the CCP was giving out loans to Pinochet, opening diplomatic relations with everyone from the

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23. Marcos regime in the Philippines to Japan. You can see the full anti-communist pivot in Mao's meeting with Nixon, set up by one Henry Kissinger, in 1972. With this pivot China became a close American ally and the bulwark of anti-communism in

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24. East Asia. Deng Xiaoping sealed this alliance by invading Vietnam in defense of the US backed Khmer Rogue, which the Vietnamese government was attempting to overthrow. The CCP claims to have killed 100,000 Vietnamese communists in that war,

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25. which broke the back of the communist movement in East Asia and essentially ended it as a Cold War front, allowing the US to fully pivot to it's massacres in Latin America and Africa and the defense of Europe against the USSR and domestic

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26. communist movements. China would continue to back anti-communist movements across the globe, probably most famously backing the US and apartheid South Africa against Cuba in Angola. China backing the US against the USSR and the rest of the

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27 global communist movement was a DECISIVE shift in the Cold War towards the victory of capitalism. The communist movement was sent into an irreparable tailspin when ended in the fall of the USSR and the total victory of American capitalism,

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28. backed at every step by the Chinese "Communist" Party. The realignment also solved another problem for the capitalist block: declining rates of profit causing overcapacity of unprofitable industry, matched by capital that was impossible to

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29. valorise. This capital began to flow into Chinese industries, a process which intensified through the East Asian bubble collapsing in the 90's. American military logistics lines could then be fully converted into servicing Chinese exports to

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30. the US through the advent of containerized shipping. China's highly educated but extremely poor population could thus be integrated into the global capitalist system, granting it a new lease on life in a period of intense global meltdowns.

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31. The CCP would eventually begin to ally with other American military outposts, most notably Israel, and adopt American counter-insurgency techniques and technology from the rapidly burgeoning trade (and eventually hiring American mercenaries

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32. Erik Prince for themselves). This brings us back to the beginning, with China, having won the US the Cold War, financing the Iraq War through bond purchases. So yeah, China is complicit in and in some ways responsible for American imperialism.

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33. The CCP picked the side of capital in the Cold War and doomed the international communist movement in the process, and continues to fund American imperialism to this day. But all of this, broadly, is to miss the point. Imperialism in it's

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34. modern form is a product of capitalism. Capitalism is a world system, not something individual countries do. Thus our response to it has to be international anti-capitalism, not pitting one of the faces of capitalism against another.

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35. I leave you with a passage from issue 2 of @chuangcn, maybe the most elegant description of imperialism I've ever encountered, and with a simple reminder that anti-capitalism means opposition to the entire world system of capitalism.

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