Interesting piece by Wolff pointing out the ways China-bashers contradict themselves. This passage is particularly germane:
Scapegoating China joins with scapegoating immigrants, BIPOCs, and many of the other usual targets. The broader decline of the U.S. empire and capitalist economic system confronts the nation with the stark question: whose standard of living will bear the burden of the impact of this decline? The answer to that question has been crystal clear: the government will pursue austerity policies (cut vital public services) and will allow price inflation and then rising interest rates that reduce living standards and jobs.
As Yves Smith puts it,
Richard Wolff provides a wide ranging yet comparatively compact tour of the incoherence of America’s official posture on China, using that as an example of late imperial disfunction. This would be a usefully provocative piece to send to China detractors.
Might be a useful piece to send to liberals inevitably screeching Yellow Peril nonsense.
This quotation reminds me of settlers malding literally every time I talk about trying to find a way to China. “You know they hate Black people over there, right? You know you’d never find a home or a job over there, right?”
Well, my crackerish ‘friend’, how do they feel about the royal us over here? How’d the pigs feel about the chalk outlines they make week by week by week by week? How do the Karens feel when they see someone different walking down the road out their kitchen window? How do the statesmen feel when they redline our neighborhoods further and further into the ghetto, kick the can on the replacement of our water lines, pipeline us from dilapidated, Jim Crow-assed schools into prisons? How do they feel here?
Then cue the shrieks of ‘that doesn’t happen here’ and ‘whataboutism’ and ‘that’s russian/chinese/enemy-du-jour disinformation’ and… tl;dr the natural state of the imperial settler is contradiction and dissonance.
The irony is that not only are there already many, many black people who live, study and work happily in China (there are a ton of students and professional trainees from Africa), all indications i’ve seen are that, while there is racism in China (like there is virtually everywhere), there is far less of it and it is much less malicious (i.e. it is more born out of ignorance and unfamiliarity) than it is in the West, especially Europe and the US which are the hands down the most racist societies in the world.
On the very rare occasions that you hear of properly malicious Euro-American style racism occuring in China it is exclusively due to some Chinese people having been influenced by racist stereotypes and prejudices that they have picked up from consuming too much American culture.
As usual it is pure projection from the West whenever they accuse a non-Western country of anything bad.
the natural state of the imperial settler is contradiction and dissonance.
I guess this is why we produce so many good (terrible) debate-me-bro types. From Vaush and destiny, to ‘friends’ and family, to the bargaining team my union is facing, and the state itself, there are so many paternalistic, conniving, obtuse, and disingenuous people ready to talk over you for hours at a time.
o7 to wolff for upholding China’s good example, and pushing back against the imperialist “left” like jacobin, naomi klein, etc.
