It’s painful to see the article lay out the pieces but leave the puzzle unfinished like this. The PRC’s leadership would have no desire to upend the existing international order if this “order” wasn’t so intent on choking off any attempt at Communism.

The fact that the ideal wall street company is one with endlessly scalable profits but no capital assets is merely a confirmation of the labor theory of value. It means that capitalism is fundamentally incapable of maintaining or growing production beyond narrow horizons, except in the circumstance of genocide/prinitive accumulation, which the article unironically posits as a solution by invoking the settlement of the western United States.

I guess this is just the limit of how far a liberal can go, no matter how materialist their analysis is.

the PRC not merely succeeded in subjecting the developed countries to trade competition, but also engineered the deindustrializa­tion of both developed economies and many middle-income ones

“Please help, China shit my pants 😭”

Deng Xiaopeng’s famous “South­ern Tour,” which opened the floodgates to foreign investment in Chinese manufacturing, took place about a year before Bill Clinton became president, and for most of the three decades since, the PRC was more a source of workhorse products than advanced ones. The G7 countries appear to have believed that either the PRC would democratize, or it would cease ascending the ladder of growth and sophistication.

Just straight up implying China should’ve become a full-on western puppet, ffs