The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) new Strategic Concept document, adopted at the Madrid Summit at the end of June, is the imperialists’ attempt to give new mean
China
Michael Pröbsting - A highly interesting academic study – published nearly half a century ago – casts a light on the Chinese Communists’ position on Taiwan in the past.
Shortly after arrival of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, China began military drills surrounding the main island of Taiwan. Chinese naval vessels and military aircrafts crossed what had been an unofficial buffer zone between China and Taiwan for decades. And China continued the military drills. On August 4, ballistic missiles were fired. One of which flew directly over the main island of Taiwan and five of which had landed in the exclusive economic zone waters of Japan. Four missiles flew over Taipei.
Into the third decade of the 21st century, what does it mean to talk of imperialism(s) and empire? Can every unequal relationship of exchange, power and cultural diffusion be considered imperialistic? How do we sift through the complexities of imperialist power in a rentier state like Pakistan whose ruling bloc has cultivated multiple foreign patrons?
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was clearly a provocation to China. What’s less clear is exactly what the US stood to gain from it – especially as President Joe Biden publicly warned against it, telling reporters that ‘The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.’
According to Mao Zedong, the principal law of materialist dialectics is the unity of opposites. Thus, it is quite fitting to observe that we can find the unity of opposites on display in evaluations of Mao himself as represented by Domenico Losurdo and Alain Badiou. For Losurdo, Mao is praised for his realism, nationalism, and attention to economic modernization. By contrast, Alain Badiou sees Mao as an eternal rebel, a symbol of the communist idea, and a universalist. These positions could not be more opposed.
When today’s historiography refers to the debate about economic reforms in Eastern European countries during late communism, it often uses the term the “long transition”. It shows that the economic transformation from state socialism into neoliberalism was a process that took off in some of the countries in Eastern Europe in reaction to the oil crisis in 1973.
Why does China’s response so far to the Russian invasion of Ukraine "not add up"? On one hand, China has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has pushed its own state-controlled media to promote only pro-Russian propaganda, and even republished false reports by the Russian state media. China abstained from a UN Security Council resolution in March 2022 that condemned the Russian invasion. Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently announced that China and Russia "will always maintain strategic focus and steadily advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era," especially in the energy trade (Quoted in Torigian 2022).
Early March 2022 provided a surprising reflection of the extent to which dominant Western norms of international finance could retain hegemony, even as the world’s North-South polarisation suddenly worsened. The Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB) was set up by five countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) – at a 2014 Brazilian conference of presidents.
