On the one hand, hooray for supporting the development of infrastructure in Africa and stuff. On the other hand, booooo for being a top trading partner with the Zionist Entity, and selling drones to Indonesia, and all that.

So what the Hell do you make of it all! Like I get that there's this term called "realpolitik" which is somehow relevant, but I'd like a longer explanation than just one word. Like how does the good and the bad fit together at its core?

You could certainly write tomes about this topic — many people have done exactly that — and maybe I'm being a bit incurious to expect someone to serve me a quick answer on a silver platter instead of diving into as many articles and PDF books as I can get my hands on... But I'm also just kind of tired of having such extremely underdeveloped views on the most populous AES state and country in general, after I came to unlearn or mistrust whichever views I'd had on China previously.

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[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 11 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Like you'd think that doing things like selling weapons to imperialist forces would be counterproductive to the ends of fighting imperialism, even if it does domestically help build the productive forces... But I suppose the alternative would lead to China becoming isolated or something, right?

Correct. What this achieves is personal investment by the bourgeoisie in the free participation of China in world markets. They lose money if China is disconnected, and thus they as individuals want it to stay connected even if they understand that for the wider interests of their class it is a negative in the longterm. Each individual member of the bourgeoisie still wants personal enrichment and is still driven by the pursuit of capital, since keeping China connected means they can acquire more capital then that's what they want.

In essence the entire strategy is to disincentivise the bourgeoisie from seeking to destroy China, as they did with the USSR, or as they do with Cuba, the DPRK, etc.

What this leads to however is untested. We can only speculate. What they have done with placing branches of the CPC inside every large business however is the infrastructural groundwork for a transition partial/fully socialist economy with a minimum of pushback.