The comical thing about this rag is that it is so consistent in its cheerleading agenda for Western imperialism and chauvinism since its creation in the early 19th century that both Marx and Lenin dunked on it.

"Having stood forward as one of the staunchest apologists of the late invasion of China" is how Karl Marx himself described "that eminent organ of British Free Trade, the London Economist" back in October 1858 regarding its support for the First Opium War. In October 1859, following the Anglo-French naval bombing of the city of Guangzhou during the 1857 Battle of Canton in the Second Opium War, Marx wrote "The Economist, which had distinguished itself by its fervent apology for the Canton bombardment" Over a hundred and sixty years since then, this rag has been just as anti-China today as it was back in Marx's time. Back then, it was the apologist of British "free trade," the pretext for both the Opium Wars it supported (along with supporting the Confederacy), now that the tables have turned, the "free trade" magazine's cover illustrations now depict Chinese EV exports as akin to bombarding the Earth like a meteor shower.

This closure is referring to the Economist's "Chaguan" column, penned by a single author in Beijing yellowface-cosplaying under that Chinese column name. It was analyzed in a January 2024 King's College London report as having not a single "clearly positive" story on China despite that this journalist "travels extensively in China to produce his reports, and on-the-ground anecdotes are a strong feature":

Another source of influential reporting on China is The Economist’s Chaguan column, launched in September 2018. It takes up one page of the print version of the newspaper (in the region of 1,000 words per article), and appears most weeks (The Economist is a weekly publication). Chaguan is written solely by one journalist, David Rennie, who is based in Beijing. [...] given that this period covered the COVID-19 pandemic in China, there were numerous reports on public health (12 in total) – particularly in 2020 (the first year of COVID) and again in 2022, when China’s COVID policy faced several challenges; when China was doing better than other countries in managing COVID, it was treated less by Chaguan and the media generally. Our framing analysis identified negative coverage in 84 per cent of Chaguan’s columns, with only four reports (1.5 per cent) being coded neutral-to-positive (and none clearly positive).

[...] Chaguan echoes the practice of other media in consistently repeating and emphasising particular terms or images of China, many of which are negative. For example, when discussing the economy, China’s economic behaviour towards foreign firms or governments is often described as ‘bullying’ or ‘threatening’. The use of negative terms is most common in reports on politics. Frequent keywords used in reports on Chinese domestic politics include ‘authoritarian’/‘authority’/‘autocracy’, ‘censorship’/ ‘controlling’/‘surveillance’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘violate’/‘limit human rights’. Keywords regarding China’s foreign relations include authoritarian/autocratic, bully/cheat/harass, aggressive/reckless and blame/accuse foreign countries. These words directly define the nature of China or its behaviour as negative, and their frequent appearance in political coverage creates their links to Chinese politics, subliminally transforming the framework constructed by the media into the reader’s own perception. This constitutes a normalisation of a strongly negative picture of China’s politics.

The way that Hong Kong or Xinjiang are referred to across all of these media outlets reinforces this pattern. These two places, and the central government’s policies towards them, have become media bywords for repression and authoritarianism. They are frequently mentioned in passing in reports on topics that are not related to either place, in a way that frames China negatively: a template to plug into any story that needs evidence for Chinese ‘repression’, even if that story does not relate either to Hong Kong or Xinjiang.

Summers, Tim. 2024. "Shaping the policy debate: How the British media presents China." King's College London.

Edit: Also just found out that this particular journalist is the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie. His brother was caught in the Hong Kong heroin trade which caused their father to resign from MI6. The fact that the Economist chose a literal MI6 failson as their "Beijing bureau chief" and that the son of Britain's top spy was permitted and trusted to "travel extensively" in the country at all and LARP as a "journalist" for six years is an excessive tolerance by the Chinese government and sinks whatever sob story they spun about being finally being shown the door.

There's too many fellow travellers here for them to see the point you're trying to make, some people in the West resist the New Cold War not out of any moral or principled anti-imperialist reasons but principally a selfish self-preservational fear from a potential MAD scenario they have floating in their heads.

We've been through all this before. Back in the 1980s, you had some Western "leftists" too busy celebrating over the supposed European nuclear disarmament through the "Zero Option" scam that Reagan pitched to Gorbachev to see the capitulation to imperialist hegemony that Gorbachev represented. There was a rather disgusting, though largely unserious at first, struggle session over on Hexbear a while back where they debated whether China should "bother" launching its second strike if the US suddenly launches a first strike against it. "Yes, 1.4 billion people will be murdered, 1/5th of the human race exterminated, but since things are already too late, China should prevent the loss of 'more lives' and let bygones be bygones." I'm sure they thought writing a few articles in Monthly Review afterwards condemning this nuclear holocaust would be a balanced recompense for this fantasy genocide scenario. You don't need enemies with "comrades" like these.

All these nonsense stories about Ukrainian "dirty nukes" or NATO escalatory gimmicks, that tries to make it seem like the Western leadership is more like the fictional General Ripper rather than the chicken-hawk it really is, obfuscates the fact that Russian nuclear superiority, particularly its still-active Perimeter program will always ensure that there is always a bottom line the West will avoid stepping on. China has completely bypassed the nuclear unilateralism nonsense that gripped the USSR, having rejected so far all Western attempts to shackle it to "trilateral arms agreements" (where the West combines its stockpile with Russia's against their own) when it still has not reached nuclear parity. The material conditions of a contemporary arms race are different from the first Cold War in that China's industrial capacity can afford it to outcompete the West in a nuclear buildup when this had once been an active US strategy to drain the Soviet budget.

The difference in the treatment of Libya and the DPRK, the first having drawn back from its nuclear program and the latter having heroically ensured its sovereignty through a mere modest nuclear capacity is plain to see for anyone in the Global South.

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called "virgin soil" populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent - a sad, but both inevitable and "unintended consequence" of human migration and progress. This is a modern version of what Alexander Saxton recently has described as the "soft side of anti-Indian racism" that emerged in America in the nineteenth century and that incorporated "expressions of regret over the fate of Indians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically," Saxton adds, "the effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had decreed." In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere's native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.

From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically - whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink - and often over the brink - of total extermination.

Stannard, D.E. 1992. "American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World." Oxford University Press.

The real underlying answer is that socialist governments bought into the Western propaganda narrative of "legitimacy." This is where, if socialist governance fails to deliver economic growth, it loses its "legitimacy" and should then be overthrown in favor of capitalist restoration.

Socialism, therefore, is not seen of intrinsic value in of itself, nor are the socioeconomic achievements and benefits of a socialist society recognized. The "purpose" of socialism is solely for delivering and maintaining perpetual economic prosperity agnostic of externally suppressive economic pressures. This is due to the cyclical nature of 1) socialist governance buying into the need for "legitimacy," 2) pursuing "legitimacy," 3) creating public cognizance in their population on the idea of "legitimacy" - and 4) then setting their own population's expectations on the necessity for their governments to maintain this "legitimacy or else ..." approach - which then further 5) reinforces the narrative of "legitimacy" for socialist governments.

Meanwhile, all of this happens as Western propaganda further eggs on the narrative through channels like Radio Free Europe which expands the class of capitalist restoration comprador aspirants in those socialist states.

The 80s were a time of international economic headwinds through the export of the fallout of Reaganomics to the global economy. This caused economic crises most famously in places like Japan, but even though the rest of the world was going into the shitter through the American weaponization of their financial hegemony under Reagan to rescue their own domestic economy, socialist governments weren't "permitted" to stumble themselves, even though everyone else was, through the buying in of the "legitimacy" narrative.

Governments in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia then, through desperation in maintaining "legitimacy," approached the IMF with its poison pill loans and structural adjustment program austerity mandates. Because the conditions of these loans were purposely designed to sabotage socialist societal stability, this then further exacerbated the economic stagnation such that eventually the socialist governments fell victim to the appeal of pursuing the ultimate Western poison pill - shock therapy - which led to the collapse of these socialist states.

The result was that, rather than being overthrown by the collective people as Western propaganda had fantasized, these governments voluntarily, and unilaterally, committed suicide due to the idea that they, and the entirety of socialism, had "lost legitimacy" and the only remedy to this being full-on capitalist restoration.

Pretty momentous occasion as far as UNSC affairs go. This is the infamous March resolution that has been renewing the sanctions supervisory regime that was first implemented in 2014 and renewed every spring since. This year's would have been the 10 year anniversary of it and having it squashed by Russia and abstained by China is a positive step towards drawing back from a long cooperation with the West on this matter and a necessary preliminary move to re-legitimize any re-establishment of economic relations with the DPRK.

Her biggest accomplishment is paying homage to Mao with a kowtow when she fell down the stairs of the Great Hall of the People. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Evr9IJCUUAEbGzR.jpg

The truth is that there's some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist "unity" is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It's been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it's still the case today as seen with "ML" takes on China.

I remember reading Keeran and Kenny's work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western "MLs" actually celebrated its collapse at the time because "now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin."

Xi’s seeming belief in supernatural forces.

And of course, we all know the most supernatural force of all is the eternal science of Marxism-Leninism 😎

The initial book that radicalized me as a early teenager was reading Victor Malarek's "The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade" precisely on the massive wave of human trafficking that arose from the former USSR and Eastern Europe through the economic genocide enacted on the former Socialist peoples.

The work was such a categorical denunciation of the living conditions of that region since the 90s, not through any ideologically-inclined argument but through its coverage of this atrocity that it was impossible for me to ever accept afterwards that the collapse of the "enemy" system was a "good thing" worth celebrating. At that point, it didn't matter how many redditors came up to me with their "my friend's neighbor's grand-uncle had a bad time under communism" bit and the libertarian emphasis on legalizing the sex trade alienated me at a fundamental level from those groups as well, even before I remotely touched any theory or met any comrade groups.

The truth is that there is nothing substantive that China could do and in fact, the small amount China could do would actually make the situation worse.

Currently, the only thing holding back the West from being completely rabid mask off in their support for Israel (like the EU reversing the aid ban) is because it would completely alienate the Arab world, which they started to care about once again due to their fear that the people they've bombed for three decades would now side with China. This conflict being currently seen as an Israel vs. Arab/Muslim world confrontation is the only thing restraining the West and preventing their anti-Palestinian propaganda from really reaching the Global South.

If China fully sides with Palestine, they'd be able to claim the Palestinians are just Chinese puppets (they recently tried this already by claiming Palestine is just an Iranian lackey) and that'll allow them to push propaganda that this (and all the atrocities they're abetting) isn't an anti-Muslim thing, this is just another part of confronting China (they might even claim "saving the real Palestine from the Chinese influence controlling it").

Another thing is that adding China into the mix and letting the West reframe this with their old Cold War rhetoric would eliminate the substantive progress Gaza's sacrifice has bought on the world stage. One important thing that hasn't been recognized is that the material outcome of Gaza's uprising is that it has been a massive blow against Saudi normalization efforts with Israel. The enemy of the Palestinian cause isn't just the West and Israel, but also the sellout Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, who has basically outright revealed in the past month that they'd happily abandon Palestine if it meant the US would reward them with an expanded military pact and nuclear energy development.

MBS doesn't give a fig about Palestinian suffering and he actually threw Palestine under the bus right before the uprising. Just this month, there was a rumor in the Western press that the Saudis wanted to pause the normalization talks due to Israel's refusal to give concessions for Palestine and MBS was so desperate for normalization that he literally personally went on an US interview to deny the rumor. However, his dilemma is that he has to pretend to care about Palestine because the Saudi reputation as the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" and the "leader" of the Islamic world is contingent on appearing to defend Palestine. Part of the consequence for this uprising is ruining the Saudi attempt at treachery. If the Saudis managed to normalize with Israel, the Palestinian movement is effectively over, because a domino effect would take place. Undoubtedly, the other Gulf monarchies like Qatar, Oman and Kuwait are waiting in the wings for the Saudis to act as the windbreaker to justify their own normalization with Israel. Gaza's uprising brought all of that to a halt and here as well, if China intervened, US propaganda that Palestine was just acting on Chinese orders would give MBS plausible deniability to resume his normalization goals.

"the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class.” - Karl Marx

"The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires." - Vladimir Lenin

Having both Marx and Lenin speak out against a publication shows how this rag has been consistently on the wrong side of any struggle for the past two centuries. Their modern flashy r/designporn-bait cover designs and tidy site UI hides the sociopathy of their publication history.

For starters, the modern day sinophobia of the Economist is no surprise. They're the original China haters, and I mean that with zero exaggeration. They've been calling for war and imperialism against China for two centuries now. They lobbied in the UK for the Second Opium War using sociopathic mercantilist justifications:

"We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake"

It's an unsurprising stance when their founder literally earned his fortune from the forced opium trade imposed against China following the First Opium War.

The British capital-centric profit driven agenda they've followed puts them even on the wrong side of a "liberal" perspective of history. They've historically opposed the UK abolitionist movement, protesting that "the boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves."

They were the only British publication to support the Confederacy, arguing that:

"It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor."

In a mask-off moment, they said that the slavery issue was secondary compared to the lucratively low cotton tariffs the Confederacy could offer, which made Marx himself ridicule the rag when he wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, saying that the Economist was finally: ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy (for American emancipation) is a mere question of tariff’

Their chief editor at the time, the Confederacy apologist Bagehot, still has a "cutesy" little column named after him to this day.

Showing that they've learnt nothing in the centuries since, in a 2014 book review on a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they unironically complained without a shred of self-awareness that:

"Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy."

For more further reading, the Citations Needed podcast had an episode on "The Refined Sociopathy of The Economist." https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist-4966767e1688

American biotechnology companies commercially exploit genetic resources obtained at low cost from developing countries and apply for patent protection, so as to gain huge profits.

Meanwhile on CNN today: "China’s sitting on a goldmine of genetic data – and it doesn’t want to share" https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/11/china/china-human-genetic-resources-regulations-intl-hnk-dst/index.html