China

Reposted from RS21, August 16, 2022.

A unity of opposites: The Dengist and the Red Guard

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.

How China escaped shock therapy in the 1980s: An interview with Isabella M. Weber

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.

Strategic ambivalence or disguised conflict? China’s reactions to Russia’s war on Ukraine and to Covid

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).

The BRICS spall, fall and (try to) reconstitute

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.