this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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There is a massive gap in communication between China and the Western world that I think a lot of very "Internationalist" Marxists would like to pretend does not exist. If you are a non-Chinese leftist in America (and often even if you are Chinese), your idea of the priorities of the CPC and the general attitudes of the Chinese public and the problems they face is incredibly vague.
To word it another way: we have almost as good of an idea of how things stand in France or Germany or the U.K. as we do the United States; and those who are paying attention have a good grasp on even Cuba and Venezuela and Mexico and such. But with China, we are still solidly in the "Sovietologist" era of information.
Western Marxist-Leninists of the late 80s/early 90s operated on the assumption that China's liberal reforms meant that it was abandoning Socialism in favor of Social Democracy. China's return to stronger Socialist reforms over the past decade or so has shown that this was in fact a gambit and that it has paid off, but it is difficult to say for sure whether this was always their trajectory, how much Parenti and his contemporaries knew, and the internal currents of Party.
In the case of someone like Parenti, who vigorously resisted anti-soviet inclinations, I wonder how much of it was related to the sino-soviet split.
I have no material basis for this, and I have done no investigation. I may be way off base and I'm happy to be corrected:
But I have to imagine if you are a public intellectual in the '80s, trying to point out that the Soviet Union is not an evil empire, that more often the United States are the bad guys and the Soviets are the ones acting in good faith, the sino-soviet split had to be an unwelcome complication. Especially with Chinas rapprochement with the Nixon/Carter admins, their actions in Vietnam/Cambodia, etc.
In 2025, I pray for the day that Chinese amphibious carriers land troops on the west coast. If it were 1978 I would probably feel a little differently, and would probably be much more sympathetic to the Soviets.
One of these days I'm going to sit down and read a few books about the sino-soviet split. It is one of my biggest blind spots. I've avoided it because It feels so tragic, and unnecessary.
When in reality their healthcare reforms were abandoning socialism for neoliberalism
(You can argue about the utility of market mechanisms in some fields but healthcare was completely gutted)