Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered an important speech at the Conference Marking the 70th Anniversary of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence on Friday in Beijing.Here is the full text of his speech.Carrying Forward the Five Principles of
This is interpreting history with hindsight. Post-WWII was a very different world that culminated in mass decolonization as a result of a confluence of factors including the war bankrupting the British empire, and decades of independence movements that had been working toward national liberation.
The USSR either let those independence movements fend off for themselves (which actually happened to some countries, under Stalin but in the European communist context) and be crushed by the bourgeois counter-revolutions, or provide weaponry and support their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist cause.
There is a reason why even after 30 years of the USSR dissolution, the vast majority of the people in the Global South still throw their support behind Russia, even though it is no longer under a socialist government.
Ask yourself this, what made them so appreciative of Russia even to the present day, if the aid from the USSR only caused unnecessary deaths and violence in their countries?
I mean how else do you interpret history if not in hindsight?
I’m not saying they shouldn’t have done it, or I don’t understand the context in which they are doing it, but it didn’t create a very long-lasting coalition of socialist countries and the USSR no longer exists.
China is taking a different path, I think understandably, and we will have to wait and see if it works.
It’s not as if in a similar vein a lot of Global South counties aren’t throwing their support behind China because of the BRI as well.
Today’s China already has a larger economy than the US. To think that China is still “too weak” to take on the US (which is inevitable because the US is already actively trying to take out China) simply don’t understand that on a real economy level, China already has the productive capacity to self-sustain if they orientate their industries immediately (actually, should have been done yesterday). What the US has is the power of its currency that is propped up in the virtual sector (real estate, finance, and likely soon, cryptocurrency).
The problem with China is that their economy is still far too reliant on export (especially to high income countries like the US and Europe) which makes them a beneficiary of the status quo arrangement, and upsetting that status quo will adversely impact their own industries, which is why they have been reluctant on taking on the US directly.
BRI is not a critical advantage for China right now because 70% of their infrastructure loans were denominated in US dollars, which really is just a consequence of China realizing they were accumulating junk papers from the US for giving them cheap goods made using Chinese labor and resources. China stopped buying US treasuries around 2013-ish and put those dollars into BRI investments, but all those dollars are still under the US banking system which means the US can seize them just like they seize Russia’s foreign reserves easily. Another reason why China is still scared of taking on the US directly.
China needs to restructure those loans into yuan and cancel them altogether and the only way forward is really for China to re-distribute the global industrial capacity more evenly to the rest of the world (and at the same time, destroying the US’s ability to impose its imperialist ambitions on the rest of the world), otherwise there is no way out of this huge trade imbalance deadlock where the US gets total control over the global market that is the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism.
This is interpreting history with hindsight. Post-WWII was a very different world that culminated in mass decolonization as a result of a confluence of factors including the war bankrupting the British empire, and decades of independence movements that had been working toward national liberation.
The USSR either let those independence movements fend off for themselves (which actually happened to some countries, under Stalin but in the European communist context) and be crushed by the bourgeois counter-revolutions, or provide weaponry and support their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist cause.
There is a reason why even after 30 years of the USSR dissolution, the vast majority of the people in the Global South still throw their support behind Russia, even though it is no longer under a socialist government.
Ask yourself this, what made them so appreciative of Russia even to the present day, if the aid from the USSR only caused unnecessary deaths and violence in their countries?
I mean how else do you interpret history if not in hindsight?
I’m not saying they shouldn’t have done it, or I don’t understand the context in which they are doing it, but it didn’t create a very long-lasting coalition of socialist countries and the USSR no longer exists.
China is taking a different path, I think understandably, and we will have to wait and see if it works.
It’s not as if in a similar vein a lot of Global South counties aren’t throwing their support behind China because of the BRI as well.
Today’s China already has a larger economy than the US. To think that China is still “too weak” to take on the US (which is inevitable because the US is already actively trying to take out China) simply don’t understand that on a real economy level, China already has the productive capacity to self-sustain if they orientate their industries immediately (actually, should have been done yesterday). What the US has is the power of its currency that is propped up in the virtual sector (real estate, finance, and likely soon, cryptocurrency).
The problem with China is that their economy is still far too reliant on export (especially to high income countries like the US and Europe) which makes them a beneficiary of the status quo arrangement, and upsetting that status quo will adversely impact their own industries, which is why they have been reluctant on taking on the US directly.
BRI is not a critical advantage for China right now because 70% of their infrastructure loans were denominated in US dollars, which really is just a consequence of China realizing they were accumulating junk papers from the US for giving them cheap goods made using Chinese labor and resources. China stopped buying US treasuries around 2013-ish and put those dollars into BRI investments, but all those dollars are still under the US banking system which means the US can seize them just like they seize Russia’s foreign reserves easily. Another reason why China is still scared of taking on the US directly.
China needs to restructure those loans into yuan and cancel them altogether and the only way forward is really for China to re-distribute the global industrial capacity more evenly to the rest of the world (and at the same time, destroying the US’s ability to impose its imperialist ambitions on the rest of the world), otherwise there is no way out of this huge trade imbalance deadlock where the US gets total control over the global market that is the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism.