China

Promise Li - People in China are taking mass action to challenge authoritarian rule, capitalist exploitation, and a deadly lockdown policy. Socialists around the world can work in solidarity to support this movement. Here’s how.
Au Loong-yu - Taiwanese people are the smaller player in this great contest between China and the US, easily bullied or betrayed by either this or that superpower. Precisely because of this the international left must ask themselves: Who should be our first concern in this triangular relationship between Beijing, Taipei and Washington?
Sophie Chen - As China’s global impact grows, it becomes increasingly important to deepen international understanding of China, to amplify voices from grassroots social movements inside the country and, more importantly, to show solidarity and learn from their experiences and resistance.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is having profound repercussions for the international system and the global economy. In this conversation, Boris Kagarlitsky discusses the implications of the war on the Russian economy, its financial sector, and the Russian elite. Furthermore, he nalyzes the ongoing crisis of globalization, in particular Western sanctions, rising commodity prices, and the current role of China.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) new Strategic Concept document, adopted at the Madrid Summit at the end of June, is the imperialists’ attempt to giv

Michael Pröbsting - A highly interesting academic study – published nearly half a century ago – casts a light on the Chinese Communists’ position on Taiwan in the past.
Into the third decade of the 21st century, what does it mean to talk of imperialism(s) and empire? Can every unequal relationship of exchange, power and cultural diffusion be considered imperialistic? How do we sift through the complexities of imperialist power in a rentier state like Pakistan whose ruling bloc has cultivated multiple foreign patrons?

Reposted from RS21, August 16, 2022.

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.

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.

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).