Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it’s important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism’s decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
China vibe report: something absolutely wild took place on the Chinese internet this past week and I’ll be the first to report it. The kids are NOT ok!
TL;DR: Chinese Gen Z kids went full ultra Gang of Four yearning for a revival of the Cultural Revolution on bilibili (Chinese Youtube), what the hell is going on?
This came absolutely out of nowhere and took everyone by surprise. It’s truly one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen in the many years I’ve spent on the Chinese side of the internet.
It started with one of those Movie Explained channels offering analysis and interpretation of films. Run of the mill stuff. About a month ago, one of those channels began to upload a deconstruction of the 2017 film 芳华 (Youth), a coming of age/loss of innocence movie set in the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution about the lives and drama of the military art troupe kids, based on Yan Geling’s novel of the same name, which has been suspected to be her own semi-autobiography.
The film itself wasn’t overtly political or anything. It wasn’t without controversy before the theatrical release due to the Cultural Revolution backdrop, but after extensive cutting and reediting, the film was eventually released and went on the become one of the highest grossing films of the year.
However, the Movie Explained guy (no doubt on the more extreme/ultra left) offered a re-interpretation of the film, painting the Cultural Revolution as being hijacked by the elites from the very beginning, and after the reform and opening up era, the Gang of Four was vilified by the liberal reformers who rewrote history. Wild conspiracy take but what’s even wilder was the response to the videos (which have been released in three parts, with the final part that came out on November 29th being the most controversial, which essentially reinterpreted the film’s male protagonist as Wang Hongwen).
To give you an idea of what an absolute phenomenon this is, the three videos have a combined 37+ million views before the censorship hammer fell. Averaging about 12 million views per video, this is an insane number for bilibili, and was trending #1 at the time the videos were “disappeared” by the censors. As a comparison, the most sensational anti-Japan videos garnered about 2-3 million views at most - this is easily 4-5 times the volume of that.
Imagine Youtube’s #1 trending video. That’s how huge it was. This was never seen before for a politically themed video, let alone one on the Cultural Revolution.
And because bilibili has what is called the “bullet comments”, where user comments stream across the screen while a video is being played, and with hundreds of thousands of comments here’s what the screen looked like:
人民万岁 = Long Live the People. Slogan of the Cultural Revolution.
Clearly the kids are more into Cultural Revolution than anti-Japanese propaganda. What the hell is going on?
Let’s start with the film’s story to give some contexts:
The story is the typical rich kids bullying poor kids story. The male protagonist was a model socialist youth, who embodied the ideal of a revolutionary, always offering help to anyone without expecting anything in return, but because of his lower class, was always taken advantage of and held in disdained by the other elite/rich kids who were in the art troupe for “performative” reasons.
The female protagonist was a girl whose father was in the reeducation camp, and naively believed that by joining the communist youth cadre, she would be treated as equals. Instead, because of her lower class, she ended up getting bullied throughout by the elite/rich kids.
This scene from the film has been memed all over the chat groups right now and embodied the class divide that had infected the Cultural Revolution even from its very onset:
The elite kids (官二代, or 2nd generation elites) and rich kids (富二代) were able to enjoy special privileges in the “revolution” while looking down at the other kids from the lower classes. Such distinct class divide amongst the communist youth cadres, in a way, showed that the Cultural Revolution was doomed from the start.
The ending was particularly bleak:
spoiler: do not click if you want to watch the film for yourself, which I highly recommend.
The male protagonist was ostracized and in the reform era, was tasked to enlist in the invasion of Vietnam, lost his arm and lived miserably in the post-reform society. The female protagonist was driven mad.
The elite and rich kids were able to take advantage of the reform era through their status and became the first to reap the benefits of the post-Mao era, and they all married rich.
The ending in the novel was even more bleak. The film version actually made some adjustments to make it seem more bittersweet.
Strangely enough, when the film was aired in 2017, nobody really thought too much about it. It was mostly seen as a nostalgic film for the 50s/60s elderly who reminisced about their youth during the Cultural Revolution. The Gen Z kids were still too young/at school to appreciate its subtexts.
Remember that 2017-2019 was the peak of China’s economy. It was a time when everyone was very much positive about the future. Nobody even thought about such concerns as unemployment. As long as you’re willing to work hard, there will be jobs for you.
8 years later, the situation has completely changed. Upon re-watch, many young people, especially kids who saw it for the first time, felt the incomprehensible horror in the film itself.
Of course, visual language is everything, take a look:
At the start of the film, the red mural had a Mao painting with a hammer and sickle, which was very much emblematic of the revolutionary era.
By the time the protagonist returned in the reform era, the mural had been replaced with a red Coca-Cola advertisement, signifying the end of an era.
So how did we get here?
First of all, I do think that the re-interpretation videos had indeed over-interpreted the film itself, even though the visual languages are well representative of the latent contradictions of the time.
Second, I don’t think the Gen Z kids are really yearning for a real Cultural Revolution, widely held as the most destructive era of the PRC history.
Whether this was irony pilled Gen Z black humor, or whether they truly yearn for a rerun of the CR, it doesn’t matter. The explosive outbursts of their emotion had to be real. This was something that you could only feel when interacting with the youth, their hidden anger buried underneath, but nothing really actually manifested in real life.
Their collective outbursts in the form of bilibili comments revealed their true reaction to the film - the loss of their Youth, a funeral of their Future.
And it makes sense. As I have said before, post-Covid China is a very different world than the 2010s. Chinese kids are seeing their futures evaporating in front of them. These are the kids who studied hard for years, just to be told that there are no jobs for them, the houses are way beyond what they could possibly afford, and that a bright future that had been promised not even 10 years ago is disappearing before them.
It’s like being told that the train is already full, and you are being left behind at the train station. The train that just departed was class mobility - a door that has now shut for most Chinese youth.
They are experiencing a strong dissonance that while the country is becoming stronger, as China is becoming a world superpower, yet the fruits of the hard work do not belong to them. The future of a nation where they are not a part of.
Their anger is to be expected, and a yearning for a Cultural Revolution that at least promises shake up the entrenchment of the social classes. The chaos and destruction would hurt the rich elites the most, dragging them down to the level of the average working people who are struggling for the next paycheck.
For context, understand that the accumulation of capital that took several hundred years in Western capitalist countries, occurred in China in just 50 years. Everything has been evolving so fast, and so does the wealth inequality.
In 2007, nobody would have anticipated what China would look like today. That’s what it feels like to grow up in China. In Western countries, the wealth distribution is divided in generations, where the boomers/Gen X reaped the industrialization benefits while the Gen Y and especially Gen Zs are already accustomed to a relatively bleak future since they were born.
However, in China, this was not the experience. If you’re a Gen Z kid born in the late 1990s (in China they’re called post-90s and post-00s), you would have grown up just after the recession, with your parents having a relatively well paid job in the 2000s (compared to the 90s). Things were starting to look better. By the 2010s, in your middle and high schools, your parents likely bought a new house. An upgrade. The economy was looking better by the day. You’re promised that as long as you study hard, you’ll be able to find a good job and raise your own family one day.
Then Covid hit just when you’re about to graduate college, and the economy never returned. Years of hard work down the drain. All this rollercoaster happened in less than 30 years of your life.
Bonus material: Class mobility in China
It is crucial to understand why education is held with such utmost importance in East Asian culture.
In 103 BC, the Han Emperor Wu (aka the Martial Emperor of Han) made a decision that would change world history forever. The nomadic Xiongnu tribes in the north have always been a nuisance for the Central Plains governments. The periodic raids into the border towns have mostly been opportunistic raids, with the nomadic tribes taking advantage of their cavalry mobility. It wasn’t that the Central Plains armies were not capable of defeating the Xiongnu tribes, but it had always been a question of costs. Usually, you settle with some bribes, they go away for some years before coming back for more. It was the cost effective solution that held the balance for a long period.
Imagine Trump wanting to mobilize the entire US military to expel the Canadians into Russia Far East. It is not that the US is not capable of doing so, but the costs would be exceedingly high, all three of the political, economic and social costs.
But that’s the Han Emperor Wu wanted to achieve. He would launch the greatest Northern Expedition ever seen at the time, and with capable generals like Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, absolutely steamrolled the Xiongnu nomadic cavalry.
The third and final Northern Expedition would double the territory of the Han Dynasty, reaching as far as modern day Xinjiang! The Xiongnu nomads were forced migrate west and eventually their descendants became the Huns, who would wreak havoc in Europe centuries later.
But… at what cost? lol, you ask.
The cost is that to sustain the huge logistics necessary for the Han military for their long expeditions, the peasants were coerced to increase their output under excessively demanding conditions. The people would be squeezed to their death, fighting a war that most of them had never even heard of.
This was when the feudal lords (豪族, haozu) began to take center stage. Amidst hardship, coercion, forced conscription and levy from the government, the peasants took refuge under the protection of the feudal lords, who often held their own private army, land, farms, and production bases. The peasants voluntarily turned to slavery, because at least you are not left to fend for yourself against banditry, and the evil government officials who want to squeeze every grain out of you to embellish their results, or worse, dragging you to join the army.
The rise of the feudal lords would eventually evolve into the infamous Guanlong group by the 5th-7th century AD, an oligarchy holding very important positions in the imperial court and in regional provinces.
To fight back against the overarching influence of the oligarchs, the Imperial Court Examination began to take shape starting in the 5th century AD during the Northern Wei dynasty to seek talented and qualified officials from the lower classes (寒门), as a means of counter-balancing force against the oligarchs (门阀). The examination would become a fully mature institution by the 8th century under Wu Zetian during the Tang dynasty, the first and only female emperor in Chinese history.
The significance of the Imperial Court Examination would influence Chinese culture for the next 1500 years. This became the only chance that a person from the lower class can ascend to the higher class. A mechanism for upward class mobility.
As the saying goes, 一人得道，鸡犬升天 (one person gets promoted, even his chickens and dogs get to ascend to the heaven), meaning that if you won the examination prize and become a government official, it would be a ticket for your entire extended family, including those of your teachers, to ascend to a higher class. A much much higher class, with a lot more material benefits to reap.
As such, for many poor families, usually one kid (the eldest son) was tasked to study, while his brothers and sisters worked in the farm. This coincided with the invention of woodblock printing, and later paper, that drastically reduced the cost of accessing books for the lower classes. If the son became a local official, then their fate would be completely changed.
Even in the modern days, examination offers a one-way ticket for class mobility. It is no different for Japan and South Korea, having been influenced by Chinese culture. Getting a job at Samsung will literally change your life in South Korea, you simply have to compete with the rest of the nation to get there.
In China, that’s what gaokao is about, for getting into higher education. That’s why the kids study so hard. To be a civil servant, you also have to take the civil servant exam (考公), which is equally as competitive. Once you are part of the 60 million civil servants in China, you are “in the system” (在体制内), you have guaranteed employment, good salary, social benefits and welfare that are inaccessible to the rest of the working class.
Funnily enough, back in the 2000s and 2010s, becoming a civil servant was actually not very encouraged. It was seen as a boring career choice with not much upward trajectory. If you’re a civil servant, you could be tasked to some random town and that’s easily the next 20 years of your life. And because your supervisor isn’t that much older, you’re probably not going to get promoted any time soon. You won’t have much choice, but you will at least have guaranteed employment and benefits.
Back then, it wasn’t an attractive choice. However, since Covid, with the economic downturn, the number of people taking the civil servant examination has exploded. The total number of people taking the examination was 2.8 million people this year (!!), with an intake ratio of 74:1 (1.65%). That’s totally wild. People would rather have a stable employment and boring career than to risk it in the private sector. This tells you just how much the times have changed. Totally unthinkable even back in 2018-2019.
And because the civil service force is not going to expand much (mostly replacing the retiring employees), with the local governments experiencing increasing financial strains as their debt bubble becomes unsustainable, and with AI starting to replace all the desk jobs, the situation is only going to get worse. The people’s concerns are not unreasonable.
That’s the picture the youth is seeing in China today. What is the point of studying if the door for class mobility is being shut?
Ok so what I’m really curious about after thinking all this over some more: what paths forward are there for expressing this yearning for socialism for the youth? From my external perspective, I see a few potential directions this all goes. Lemme know if any of these are actually possible or what I’m missing. I’ll refer to this whole phenomena as “Youth Maoism” for lack of a better term.
sidebar on Chinese socialism
This is coming from the take I’m coalescing lately about China that it is socialism in stasis, where deeply rooted democratic and socialist structures exist in contradiction with powerful oligarchic and capitalist structures throughout society, and the CPC’s careful balancing act has made moving forward very difficult without some kind of internal or external shock, especially when so much astounding technological and economic progress is at stake.
First, Youth Maoism could simply remain in the space of ideas, memes, literary criticism. In the west, political trends often sweep through the youth in almost entirely online spaces without ever coalescing in any coherent real world or organizational sense. Since they’re reflections of real material conditions, they do inevitably end up feeding into something, but that real world expression need not reflect any particular online trend, especially if there’s a significant time gap. In this case, we would eventually see some other form of anti-systemic expression emerge unless China effectively handles the economic issues through institutional methods - a strong possibility, given the PRC’s frequently demonstrated flexibility and problem solving capacity.
Second, Youth Maoism could become an actual anti-institutional political movement. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere in the thread, that’s not something Chinese people have much experience with since Reform and Opening Up. There are no lasting protest movements because of both state repression and the state’s ability to effectively address popular concerns before they bubble over into irrepressible unrest. As dialectical marxists, that second component is important - it is impossible to construct a society where suppression alone eliminates resistance. Therefore, forming that movement would be incredibly difficult, a lengthy process of trial and error to discover what methods can succeed and grow in the PRC’s particular conditions. If this remains external to the CPC, it will obviously face huge pressure and the power of the state. This is the most dangerous path forward, because it’s where imperialist forces can find a foothold to influence these movements. I don’t think the CIA has the juice to pull off anything like that in China, but it would also be naive to totally rule it out. And the long term course of something like this impossible to predict. Could there truly be a socialist revolution within China? In a way, that adheres to an orthodox ML analysis, where the socialist state eventually gives way to popular pressure and begins the process of withering away. I dunno.
Third, Youth Maoism could become a current - and potentially a powerful, influential one - within the CPC. The CPC has undergone dramatic political changes before, developing new orientations and strategies in response to new pressures, including from the masses. This would be a sort of institutional, peaceful Cultural Revolution. Vigorous mass youth engagement with the Party and its external organs could reform the organization and drive China towards a more socialist road. The party is made of its membership, and Xi has worked on building a more rigorous Marxist current in the party. This could be taking that effort and running with it. This, too, is an interpretation of that same orthodox ML analysis about popular will leading to the demise of the state and the progression to communism.
Finally, there could be a grassroots, non-oppositional expression that I predict would be expressed primarily in rural China. State and party media like to prop up rural revitalization efforts that, in their English-language presentation, focus on a few main themes I’ve identified: Grassroots democracy, entrepreneurial youth returning from the city, ecologically sound development, and cooperative rural enterprises. I have very little understanding of the depths of these on the ground, but I’ll operate on the assumption that they represent growing trends, whatever their current scale is. If that’s the case, Youth Maoism could express itself as a grassroots organizational process that adheres closely to the Party’s objectives and methods but carries out creative socialist innovation on the ground. Here I’m back on my Venezuela communes bullshit (everybody read Commune or Nothing!). In Venezuela, these same four elements (although the youth movement looks quite different) lead to the communard movement that is rapidly advancing socialist construction in the Bolivarian Republic. If the Youth Maoists look outward to other socialist projects and study their comrades in other countries (is there any Proletarian Internationalism to this trend?), they could go into the countryside, utilize state support, and build more complex and democratic collective economic structures. Interestingly, the communards in Venezuela consciously wield the collectivist trends of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean history as a potent cultural weapon in the construction of their new model. What country on earth has a stronger living memory of collective ownership, communes, and rural socialism than China? This is not, on its own, an overturning of Chinese society. It would certainly represent a new evolution of the rural-urban contradiction. Perhaps it could find expression in Chinese cities, especially longer-standing communities with well-established collective structures. This, I think, is the ideal path forward and the best possible expression of the withering away of the state.
Of course, if this Youth Maoism actually becomes a movement in any material sense, it would find expressions in all of the above and other possibilities I’ve not imagined. Any real political movement rooted in a Marxist analysis of actually existing conditions is a varied, complex process of historical change on all available fronts.
sounds like graduating into the subprime mortgage thing.
the children yearn for
Final thoughts
If the first two parts of the videos were critiques of the wealthy elites that have infested the highest level of the CPC, which, believe it or not, are still tolerated by the party itself (there has to be an outlet for the people to channel their anger into), then the third part was what made it all the more controversial.
The author of the video series ended part 3 with: “Big brother (referring to Mao), your ideas were too forward for your time, which made you almost a god-like figure to us, this is what we [mere mortals] could never compare with… and only after years of experiencing the brutality of life, fighting for our last breaths, that we are only beginning to understand your insistence back in the days [for a Cultural Revolution].”
The ban hammer finally came. But it already reached a record of 37+ million collective views within a few days.
Whatever it is, it can never be taken back. The Gen Z kids have made their voices known. Perhaps the energy behind the so-called Gen Z protests happening around the world was real after all.
The government will have to respond. On the one hand, the government relies on the bourgeoisie to deliver the GDP numbers (very important numbers!), on the other, they have to take care of an increasingly dissenting youth who see a bleak future for themselves, which is made more dissonant by the fact that China is actually growing into a superpower.
I believe there will be more strict crackdown on revolutionary ideals to prevent a re-run of the Cultural Revolution. All of the leadership today, the liberal reformers, were victims of the Cultural Revolution. They are deathly afraid of it.
Finally, if you want to watch the film for yourself (which I recommend!), try to find the extended version. The absolutely breathtaking rendition of the Steppe Women Militia dance sequence was missing in the standard version, which you can watch here , starting at 1:40 mark!
You can also watch the original version here taken in 1976 (remastered).
Do NOT let Redditors find this out lmao
I support the Maoist youth. The CPC needs that internal pressure to strive for socialism. With all the wealth China has accumulated, why shouldn’t it be time to take those big strides away from the capitalist mode? It won’t happen top-down.
They’re not going to recreate the cultural revolution because the conditions are so wildly different. But maybe youth rage can coalesce into organization, and if it’s distinctly Maoist in character it certainly won’t be easily swayed by capitalist influence.
Mostly because of dependency on imported resources. They need to get the country off oil and uranium imports for energy security in the event that they are cut off from international markets if they take the socialist mode. They import 70% of their oil needs.
Russia and Iran and Venezuela are not gonna withhold oil from China if they start improving worker rights, expropriating property, and establishing collecting economic structures. China would remain the center of the world’s economy.
Sure, which is why the west is setting up the chessboard against China by assaulting them.
The west doesn’t actually have to take them over either. If they block the Malacca Strait they cut China off from most of their imports. 80% of China’s oil comes through the Malacca Strait
But Chinese trade and diplomacy marches on. The west continues to fail in their objective, but so far they can’t afford to flip the chessboard, either.
Ships can go around. The Yemenis blocked tons of trade through the equally important Suez and ships went around. Costs and delivery times went up, but trade carried on. The diversion around Sumatra is way, way less than the diversion around Africa. And the west would need the support of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia in killing their most important economic tool in order to piss off their biggest trading partner. Otherwise the west would need to block it militarily, and that would necessitate an occupation of Singapore - all in waters where China’s navy could easily operate. And they’d probably have Vietnam’s support, given how important the strait is to them as well. All of this for China-bound or -originated ships to just take a few days longer to go around Sumatra and harbor in Jakarta instead of Singapore.
Sure, ships can try to go around. But most of the other gaps are not viable for large scale shipping as they are too shallow and the Indonesian sea is not calm nor does it have developed ports for shipping at large scale. Most of the shipping will have to go all the way around Australia.
Additionally piracy has not been eradicated in the Strait of Malacca, which is only 2.5km wide at its narrowest point. The routes through the other straits feature considerably more piracy and you can bet on the US quietly boosting the pirates.
I think you underestimate the harm that raising the cost of energy in the country will do to Chinese manufacturing, European manufacturing essentially collapsed as energy costs became economically unsustainable.
I think you’re underestimating how significant this would be for China due to its manufacturing.
I haven’t really done the math but how many millions of barrels can Iran and Venezuela even supply? I am suspicious that they would not be able to fulfill China’s existing needs:
All of this is somewhat moot, China recognises this problem itself and is aiming to completely electrify the country to get off oil entirely. My point however is that moving to the socialist mode before removing the vulnerability would be a bad move. They should get self-sufficiency first. Luck of geography meant the USSR was able to fully provide everything it needed within its own borders, China doesn’t have the same circumstances.
Europe in the 19th century was haunted by the spectre of the French Revolution.
The world bourgeoisie in the 20th and 21th century are haunted by the spectre of the Russian Revolution.
China in 2025 is haunted by the spectre of the Cultural Revolution lmao.
This seems like trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
The genie is already out when they started to teach Marxism-Leninism in schools and the nation portrayed itself as a socialist country.
When the economy was trending upward in the last two decades, people don’t mind too much about which political ideology and economic system.
Now that the kids are increasingly realizing that they do not, in fact, live in the socialism as portrayed everywhere in the media, and that this is in fact, not the Marxism they were taught in school, suddenly they begin to question everything.
Even though the so-called Marxism-Leninism class is somewhat of a joke these days, and it’s more of a patriotism class, the ideas have been implanted into their minds. With the youth taking up the tangping (lying down) movement, they now have more time to read and study Mao and Marx and Lenin! Funny the things you do while being unemployed.
Having said that, I doubt there will be a re-run of the CR. It would take a lot more coalescence of the dissatisfaction to get there, and the government still has a lot of authority to crack down on the dissent. Furthermore, I don’t think the rest of the people would want something like that.
But the youth have already made their demands: they want to have a slice of the cake, and a seat at the table too. And that’s up to the government to decide on how to meet their demands.
It doesn’t seem like the liberal faction are going to be able to do anything to stop this in the long term that wouldn’t also destroy the country. Capitalism is never sustainable forever as a mode of production, so it was a foregone conclusion that it would have to either be replaced (as is the stated plan) or the country would be destroyed (what has historically happened from most capitalist collapses). I don’t see how a crackdown would accomplish anything but intensifying the unrest, as you say there are a huge number of class-conscious proletarians with Marxist educations. The only thing that I think would realistically slow these developments would be a resumption of improvements in living conditions, which isn’t just a switch that can be flipped without changing anything else.
Hmm… if we look at the Lost Decade Japan, the trajectory was similar. The Japanese government saved the older employees at the expense of youth employment, and the end result was that Japan had to endure zero growth for 30 years until very recently, when enough of the elderly have died to allow the wealth to trickle downward again. So it’s always possible to keep the stagnation going for decades. I don’t believe that a sufficiently developed society can easily “collapse” just like that.
I think it will be interesting to see how seriously the youth take up the revolutionary ideas? Is it just cosplay? A ritual to vent their anger into the internet? Or is there more substance behind it. I do agree that the Chinese kids are more class conscious than most other countries.
However, I honestly doubt it can grow into a tangible movement because unlike Western capitalist countries, there is no history of trade unions in China. The people don’t even know how to organize protest movements, don’t know how to strategize to make demands from their own government. Everything would have to start from scratch.
This is actually a big advantage for the Western left wing movements who have faced off capitalists for more than a century and have an actual history of trade union movements that succeeded in making real gains and progress in the late 19th and early 20th century.
More importantly, it would require organisation. The actual CR had the country’s strongest revolutionary organiser agitating it on a backdrop of far stronger student organisation that had been inherited from the actual revolution.
They are not as organised anymore and they would be doing it all themselves without experience and without that agitating voice.
Could you kindly verify it’s the extended version? (Can’t find info on the lengths of different cuts) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XoThanE2Q4
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Well, if western Internet culture history says something is that what the kids might meme about can become serious in the future.
8 years ago, Hitler memes, Anne Frank jokes, racist jokes, and stuff like that was meme material and not taken seriously. Now look at the rise of fascism worldwide.
Cause and effect must be clear though: meming likely follows the same material conditions which result in fascism also becoming more open in recent years
37 million in a day Oh my
Not in a day, but more like over the span of 5-6 days. But the last 24 hours picked up the pace significantly so easily a few million views in a day.
At the beginning of the year when XHS blew up over here I got on to see what the hype was about.
Pretty quickly I got into the communist algorithm and ended up in a group chat with around 100 self identified communists from around the world.
The user who started that one was a youth league member from Hubei who was in college and was saying he and his peers identify as new Maoists and were saying they want a cultural revolution but without all the violence and failures of the original one. He made it seem like it was becoming a large movement in that age range, which was good to hear at the time.
Hearing your report almost a year later keeps that hope alive
That sounds based, hopefully that makes
come faster
Hasan Piker streams on bilibili for 2 weeks and the Chinese zoomers yearn for the Cultural Revolution again. Coincidence?
I know you are joking but honestly come on, do Chinese people need a foreigner who knows nothing about China to teach them about their own history?
Yes, I am joking, but the joke is just the standard joke about Hasan radicalizing children, not teaching Chinese people about their own history.
this is the general MLM take over the events of the cultural revolution, still this seems to have gotten popular because the youth in china have a negative view of the current system so the turn to basic MLM takes, better than what happen in the west at least
West is turning fascist, China is turning Maoist lol.
makes sense, when looking at the past China has Mao while the USA has the KKK
Without the KKK, There Would Be No New Amerikkka.
Uphold GroKKK Thought
New Nazi Germany vs USSR vibes
Are the 3 parts videos mirrored somewhere? Maybe on Youtube? I’d like to watch them if there are some english subtitles for them.
I’m a little lost with how to interpret the cultural revolution and its legacy in China. Is it something that is considered a positive influence? Is it considered less important to other moments in the country’s history, such as the great leap forward?
I think it’s seen as a pretty huge moment and a turning point. I’m by no means an expert but I generally see the reform and opening up period as a backswing from the CR, with the CR being the point where they fully leaned into the attempt at a radically progressive and new society, free from the legacy of feudalism and colonialism, followed by a period of reckoning with the impossibility of those goals. That’s why the reaction to reform and opening up from the more ultra-left/MTW crowd is that of wishing the CR had kept going and that Deng had never won.
The most recent review of this movie on Letterboxd is a Chinese liberal review referencing the Billibilli videos, I think. Their taste in movies also sucks ass.
https://letterboxd.com/masami_mouse/film/youth-2017-1/
I just hope something like this is properly addressed and ends up doing good in society.
I’d be worried that this is astroturfed by the west, a massive cultural revolution style movement that destabilises and weakens the Chinese government (possibly even leading to a civil war) is exactly what the west would want to see right now. Not the actual cultural revolution part, the destabilisation part, but it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve hijacked the youth’s frustration with the system and attempted to use it to destroy China.
This cannot possibly be astroturfed lol. The numbers we’re talking about are absolutely wild, and so far beyond that the Western intelligence could feasibly pull off. And don’t forget all of these platforms are under the watch of the Chinese government and censors. You don’t get to be the #1 trending video on the largest video streaming platform without the government knowing about it. So far, Hu Xijin (the guy who always toe the establishment line) from Global Times has said that the guy over-interpreted things, don’t take it too seriously etc.
In fact, I don’t even think the government expected such overwhelming response in favor of the Cultural Revolution. Otherwise they would have “disappeared” the videos much faster than they would have allowed them to stay up. There were tens of thousands of views even at 2am after midnight (on bilibili, you can see how many audience there are in the video). There were thousands and thousands of comments from the youth writing in the comment section of the videos about how difficult and bleak their lives are (sadly the videos have since been taken down). It is as organic as you can get. Then the next morning the plug was pulled.
It seems like there’s always this hidden undercurrent within Chinese society which expresses itself as yearning for the CR. The CPC addresses it to some degree, but the undercurrent never goes away. Bo Xilai relied on CR iconography after all, and I can’t help but see Xi’s tenure in that light.
That’s certainly good to hear. I would just hope that this youth frustration is channeled into something productive. In the west, the same despair for the future is used to turn our youth into fascists, so left without direction, I would worry that Chinese youth could be pushed in a similar direction. Blind worship of the man without proper understanding of his actions and writing is easily co-opted by groups with ulterior motives (as Mao himself warned about). Though the US federal agents have been especially poor at manipulating things of late, though they don’t need to be successful every time, they only need to succeed once.
To paraphrase things others in this thread have said, China has developed into the wealthiest nation on the planet, yet it seems like the youth aren’t feeling like the prosperity has trickled down to them, so it seems like they’re hitting a tipping point right now. The CPC seems to want to keep the status quo going as long as possible, but it isn’t sustainable, and hopefully this is a wake up call to them and they actively try to reform things, otherwise I could see a youth movement moving in a direction that ultimately benefits no one in China, and only their enemies overseas.
If it’s grassroots, the only thing I hope is the movement secures its power well enough from because I’m afraid something else reactionary might bubble about too in crises and fill in the vacuum, when the more revolutionary progressive forces don’t get secured enough to get into power. Not something from the west, but from something close-to-home. At least from what I read from ‘If We Burn’.
That’s my two cents there, disagree with me when you will.
Anyways, good luck to the organic revolutionary wave, when the time comes!
It is still very far from being a real movement. This was an internet sensation after all. The collective outburst of long repressed dissatisfaction that one could always feel its latent presence, but could not actually see it being manifested in the real world.
As I have pointed out in another comment, it is the youth making their demands: they want to have a slice of the cake, and a seat at the table. With the implicit threat that if this continues, maybe something like a Cultural Revolution is not impossible. But at the end of the day, it’s dissatisfaction of the current economic climate and losing out their upward social mobility, so this is their form of “protest”.
The government will have to respond, one way or another.
They can’t astroturf a “Gen Z” protest in Mexico, what hope do they have of trying to sway radicalized youth in China?
They actually tried that BTW, that was Tienanmen Square in 1989.
Better start forming Red Guard units. A real democracy would’ve started the purges already, China is 1984 authoritarian just like America.
Thanks for this. I’m going to try watch the movie now, it sounds really interesting.
Is there a mirror of these videos anywhere?
You can search for “芳华 解读” on Youtube and there should be some mirrors (I haven’t looked closely).
But notice that the videos are very “meta” and frequently made references to other media, as well as various substitute names that are easily recognized by the Chinese audience but would otherwise be incomprehensible for a foreign audience. This is due to the long-term Chinese internet censorship that prohibits certain sensitive words so you end up having an entire alternative lingo on the internet.
I still recommend watching the film though. It’s not overtly political or anything but you can feel the class divide that already existed back then. The director came from that background.