CHYNA 
Feels like back in the 90's people were a bit more chill and didn't go into a genocidal lunatic rage at the mere mention of the country. Wild to think people used to get down with hong kong action movies.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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chapotraphouse
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i remember so many articles as a kid breathlessly describing "the rise of china" as a sort of neutral/neutral-good thing. everyone thought they were going to get addicted to a market economy and politically "liberalize" aka become a heavily manipulated and corrupted multi-party parlimentary liberal "democracy". i guess there was a bunch of excitement about looting the place
i think the anti-corruption crackdowns basically saved the country and the Party
They wanted to do to China and Russia what they did to Japan, South Korea and their other allies (make obedient puppet states that they could suck dry) so there was a brief period in the 90s where they were less openly hostile to China and Russia "It's the 90s! The cold war is over, Russia's our friend now!"
But China and Russia have not fully become subservient to the US and so the war drums start
Russia is more baffling because it was 100% a US client state, the reactionary lib compradors the US chose and propped up are still in power, and Russia was licking America's boots and begging for approval right up until 2014. The way American officials managed to alienate their own handpicked puppets like that is astounding.
Like I genuinely can't understand how and why the US decided to do that, it's like the real scary, cynical old cold warrior demons won and got the complete American hegemony they'd spent their lives angling for, and then they retired happy and their successors just flailed around and undid it all within twenty years. Like it's this self-defeating blend of grifters trying to engineer conflicts so their arms dealer stocks go up, and dipshit true believers who think the US is some divine force of ontological good and purity who are entirely guided by the unhinged propaganda the grifters draw up for them, and nowhere in any of this is there a single cynical statesman monster capable of coldly planning for hegemony left holding any sort of power.
It's a truly impressive level of rot and collapse that's only picking up speed as the world catches on to the fact that the machine of imperial hegemony has been hollowed out by graft and no one's going to fix it.
I'm going to say it's probably ego. Look at how easy Australia folds to their every whim, for example.
They didn't realise that trying that with a powerful country might back fire. Especially because they did tried to debt trap Russia after the cold war
This is beautiful
chef's kiss
I think what happened there was that the Russians refused to allow the US to dictate all the terms of the relationship, which is obviously something that's unacceptable to the poo-brained empire.
The US started pushing Russia and China into hostile relations with the US after the West screwed up the Yugoslav war.
At the time, they were really against the NATO air strikes in Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic and his brother proposed that Yugoslavia join the Union State of Russia and Belarus. And NATO almost attacked Russian troops near the border between Kosovo and Serbia for no reason. In addition, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in 1999, which further deteriorated relations, which never improved.
The 90s peace should have never happened.
Soviet union come back please wreak holy vengeance on the empires
That's because the Westoid capitalists were making huuuuge buckets of money in China either ! manufacturing for export or selling to the domestic market. Back then China wasn't a credible military threat or economic competition, so those articles were the capitalist's feeding call.
They were also high on end of history histrionics and genuinely believed that economic prosperity would lead to an american style free market economy. And I don't think people were silly to think that way in the 90s. You had to be in the know to realize the fundamentals at play. That China, unlike the Soviets, did not privatize the commons but instead implemented a market economy. The only hint of how things were going was how Japan was forcefully turned into an american sharemarket economy. China by all indications did not have to and didn't.
my grandfather used to describe Hong Kong as like this burning ember of liberal market capitalism that would basically spread across China eventually. that they would become addicted to the wealth generated there and replicate it everywhere (this was in the 90s).
he couldn't predict how utterly irrelevant Hong Kong would become
Ouais, Des...