August 4, 2022
The crunchy granola caucus on the left needs to learn a thing about the reality of US China relations. China may be making a big to-do about the continued US affirmation of the rights of Taiwan and Taiwanese to independence, but a large majority of these reflective Leftists only identify with China because they're sold out on this false notion that China is a "successful example of a communist country" which is balderdash. As I already wrote in a previous recent instance, China has no labor unions, no sufficient labor laws, no freedom of speech or religion, and is, overall, a repressive police state, where the people have no sufficient democratic right of participation. The support of the crunchy granola Left for mainland China seems to me to be projection. China is not a communist country, and certainly not a democracy. Communism hasn't ever been sufficiently implemented in a place where the conditions would allow for it. The Marxist would say "-Yet." and I wouldn't disagree. But it's a complete absurdity to call any country a truly communist country.
The history of early modern China shows this pretty well. On the one hand there was a pro-democracy movement that actually overthrew the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty, and on the other hand, a communist movement, not democratic, with which significant factions of the pro-democracy movement made an alliance with, at great cost, to fight Japanese imperialism. But the pro-democracy movement made too limited an effort to include the communist elements, from the communists' perspective, and the communists continued their tendency to instigate problems, and the result was the communists abandoned the unity effort and decided to fight the pro-democracy elements instead of the invading Japanese fascists. This caused a splintering of the anti-fascist coalition to the detriment of the war effort against the Japanese, to the effect that the US had to end that war.
This is "ancient" history, but it's relevant. The relevant recent history that has duped the Left is the sequence of tacit agreements in the diplomatic realm that confuses everyone. The so-called "normalization" of US-China relations was done in 1972 by Richard Nixon, and for Leftists to glorify a regime set in place by this man is absurd, completely absurd. The Taiwan Relations Act was put in place the same year by Congress, but before that Taiwan was explicitly an ally, fully recognized. If you understand the reality of East Asia, Nixon abdicated our moral responsibility to support Asian democracy, in order to support a failed so-called communist state that had regressed into autocracy. The following set of US-China relations documents, the Three Communiqués and Six Assurances, were issued in 1982, by President Reagan. Again, it's absurd for any Leftist to glorify a policy set in place by that man.
What happened next can be read about in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, in the appropriate chapter. The Chinese ruling class, having long since given up on any illusion or fact of communism, explicitly cut the Chinese middle-class loose to endure the vagaries of predatory capitalism, while maintaining the lower classes in communal peonage to keep the ruling class supplied with goods at little or no cost, so that the ruling class could capitalistically exploit the Chinese middle class. Pro-democracy demonstrations broke out, and the Chinese government responded by perpetrating the Tiananmen Massacre. This is 1989. Since then-nothing. This apparently froze this so-called "normalization" effort in shock, unless, of course, the whole "normalization" effort was done in bad faith in the first place anyway. The issue was reentered into the records of Congress quite recently, but it's about time for someone to say that "normalization" was a mistake. And it's about time for Leftists to abandon this reflexive, un-thinking, and unexemined identification with the CCP just because it has the word "communist" in its name. To be a Leftist today without that nuance, seems to be me to be just embarrassing.
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