Rev Left Radio - China, Covid-19, and the New Cold War

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Ian Goodrum joins Breht to discuss and dismantle the recent wave of anti-China propaganda emanating out of the US in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They also discuss China's response to the outbreak, the failures and indifference of the US ruling class, and much more!  Find Ian's writings HERE and HERE Outro music 'Paranoiattack' by The Faint ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have Ian Goodrum to talk about basically China, the Chinese response to COVID-19, U.S. imperial propaganda against China, anti-Asian racism, how to think through some of the implications of what we're coining the new Cold War, Cold War 2.0 rhetoric coming out of the West toward China. China's response to that propaganda, et cetera. We cover a lot of really interesting and important issues surrounding the pandemic and how the pandemic is being used by the imperialist and capitalist countries against the global South developing countries and against China particularly. A point that Ian makes in this episode maybe a couple times that I

think is incredibly important and worth reflecting on is that while the U.S. government is trying to pay German vaccine producers to make their vaccine U.S. only and stealing supplies that are being shipped to other countries and just being a world-class asshole on the global stage during this pandemic. You know, China is going out there helping countries, particularly those countries, brutalized and suppressed and oppressed by U.S. sanctions like Iran and Venezuela, helping those countries get access to crucial equipment and medical expertise, etc. So, you know, regardless of your feelings on whether China is socialist or not, it's really important that we understand how anti-Chinese propaganda is being employed by the capitalist West and the imperialist West and, you know, how they're doing it and why they're doing it. And it's important for us to know that so that we can push back on it and help other people be educated on exactly what's happening.

All in all, it's a really informative, important conversation, and we hope people find value in it. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Ian Goodrum on China and the pandemic. Enjoy. I'm Ian Goodrum. I'm a columnist and senior editor at China Daily. I've been in Beijing in that capacity for about two and a half years now. And before that I worked at newspapers in the U.S., and I've kind of gotten direct experience in both ends of the media machines. of both countries and kind of seeing a little bit how things work. And then that experience has helped me better understand things here and things back at home.

Yeah, definitely. I've wanted to have you on for a long time. I know we've talked back and forth about trying to get an episode going. I really enjoy and appreciate your presence on Twitter, particularly pushing back against a lot of this anti-Chinese rhetoric and helping inform the rest of us on the truth of the matter, which can sometimes be very hard to get to when you live. in a sort of media system dominated by U.S. corporate media. So I'm finally happy to have you on the show.

And today's show is going to be just a discussion about China's response and U.S. anti-Chinese propaganda surrounding the pandemic. It's timely. It's important. And hopefully this episode can serve to help listeners navigate some of this propaganda and think through the implications of it. So starting with this broad discussion of the pandemic and China's response, can you maybe just sort of summarize?

China's basic response to the outbreak of COVID and catch us up on where they currently are in terms of daily new cases and whatnot? Sure. Well, things right now, I mean, I'm hesitant to say things are back to normal because it's not exactly normal. People are still wearing masks everywhere they go. You're still getting temperature checks everywhere. You're still having to check with somebody for entry into residential communities.

There's quite a few policies still in place that were in place in the absolute. peak of the epidemic. Fortunately, though, being in Beijing, Beijing is several hundred miles away from Wuhan, which is the area of China where the epidemic was at its worst, hit the city hardest. And there was not as strange in a lockdown in Beijing and other cities as there was in the Wuhan area, the Hubei province area, the area is immediately surrounding those epidemic hotspots. But certainly there's a lot more people out in the streets. There's people out in the parks again, it is a return to a somewhat diminished form of normalcy. But as far as what was done in the immediate first two months of the epidemic, whenever

things were at their worst and the epidemic was mostly localized to China at that point, the response was very fast. It was very stringent. It was very severe. As soon as the full extent of the virus is contagiousness, not sure if that's a word, The infectiousness, I know that that is definitely a word, as soon as this was known, the response was very fast. The authorities in cities around the country, counties, communities, villages, townships all put together various levels of epidemic response depending on the severity of the outbreak in those areas. So in places like Wuhan, you had a very strict set of controls, the most notable being a total. total and complete lockdown. For people in Beijing, there was never an official mandatory lockdown. There was never a period in which we had to stay home no matter what. There was a kind of understanding that we should be staying home. And so when you went outside to get groceries, and that's essentially what I did. It was the, I made a triangular area of my movements during

that time where it was either home, the office, or the grocery store, and that was it. And, And when I went out, there was practically nobody in the streets. So there wasn't an official lockdown in Beijing like there was in Wuhan and other parts of Hubei province. But people understood the necessity of not mingling and staying home and wearing a mask and doing everything that was necessary to prevent the spread. In other areas, the areas that were harder hit, you had a mandatory lockdown. Some had an allowance of one trip every three days to get essential supplies. Some places totally shut down. you had to stay in your homes and supplies were delivered to you by the local government.

And this is part of what helped stem the tide. But the most, the biggest thing was that you had a multi-leveled system of testing, contact tracing, and treatment. So the overwhelming majority of cases, if they're symptomatic, if you're somebody who's been infected that shows symptoms, 90% according to the WHO will have a fever. And so the first line of defense in order to determine whether someone might have the virus is testing temperatures and seeing if somebody's running a fever. If that's the case, then there are within cities and within communities, there are networks of, this is mostly for cities because that's where obviously the greatest concentration of people would be. But you have the front line fever clinics, which is basically just you go in.

It's a sterile area. People are wearing PPE. You know, there's, for the first week or so, you know, for the early period, there was a moment where there was, in Wuhan, specifically, the rest of China didn't have this problem. But Wuhan, there wasn't enough PPE. There wasn't, there weren't enough essential supplies. But then part of what was so exemplary about the response was that the rest of the country moved resources to where they were needed and they redirected production in first state enterprises and then private enterprises. semi-private, whatever you want to call them, I'm of the opinion there's not really any such thing as a private enterprise in China. But let's say enterprises with greater autonomy

in terms of their management were basically given the order to start producing masks, ventilators, essential equipment, PPE, and instead of whatever they were producing before, so you have car factories that are making medical equipment. Now you've got the Sinapec, the biggest oil company, started processing masks, and, redirected its production toward getting the material for the masks and then producing the masks as well. So you had a productive capacity of about one to two million per day before the outbreak to about 116 million per day in terms of masks. That's not saying anything about any of the other things that China can produce and is producing still right now. But anyway, back to the multi-layered

system. So the fever clinics are the first line of defense. You get a, you get a CT scan because the CT scan, it was determined very quickly, would show certain symptoms that made it more likely that you had the illness, the virus, because it gave your lungs a certain characteristic, the so-called ground glass opacity, that is a telltale sign. And so if you had the CT scan and it showed that you would then get the actual nucleic acid test. And sometimes people would have those opacities for other reasons, but obviously with a severe and highly infectious virus, a lot of them would have the virus. So if you're test positive, you're basically shuffled into three different types of quarantine or treatment based on your symptoms. Now, if your symptoms are very severe,

you're probably already at the hospital anyway, so you're already where you need to be. But if you have a mild symptom in a hotspot like Wuhan or other parts of Hubei province, you would be sent to a centralized quarantine facility, which is a repurposed school gym, repurposed sports arenas, repurposed large facilities that became these basically large dormitories, hospital-like dormitories, you know, this is if your symptoms aren't severe enough to require hospitalization and treatment. So this is basically to choke out the virus and keep it from infecting new hosts because even if you have home quarantine, if you live with other people and you have the virus, you're going to give those other people the virus. That's just how it is. And so if you have your quarantine for two weeks, but then you've infected somebody else in your household, then they have to stay quarantine for two weeks and so on and so on and so forth.

So you'd never actually cut off the spread and it becomes far too difficult to manage. And eventually some people get more severe symptoms and they have to be hospitalized, so you don't want that. So the WHO has said basically this quarantine system is the magic bullet, essentially. It is what is what has turned the outbreak. that had an infection rate, an R-0 infection rate of about three per patient. So that is to say an average patient would infect about three people. All these measures combined dropped it down to a point four-four, which means that the infection starts to drop because there's no host.

You've cut off exposure to other hosts by the virus because the people inside the centralized quarantine are all infected. They're not going to infect people again. the people inside the hospital are getting the treatment they need because the people with the less severe symptoms aren't in that kind of intensive care situation and you've got all this this material this product that that is necessary to treat this disease where it's needed the most and so this is some of this was done the the most famous the big images that came out I think in the first few weeks were the new hospitals being built

You had a few hospitals in Wuhan and Hubei province, other places that were built in 10 or so days. And it was a, it was a massive feat of engineering and worker power essentially, like, this is what labor can do in a short period of time. And that was to also create more intensive care hospital capacity because in the areas where the outbreak was most severe, you've got the most severe patients. and they need the highest level of care. And if your hospital system on its own can't do that because no hospital system can, really. You're not setting up a hospital system on the expectation there's going to be a black swan pandemic

every year. You're setting up a hospital system to treat the average number of people you need to treat with the certain level of care they need. And usually that's adequate, but in a pandemic situation, you know, all bets are off. So all these things combined, have created this exemplary epidemic response, some of which was done during the SARS outbreak too,

like the blueprint for the rapid fire hospital construction, that happened during the SARS outbreak as well. So this isn't all new measures being taken, but certainly the playbook has been improved upon, and this has been another object lesson for the healthcare system, for emergency management and crisis response. And other countries are taking a page from from the book as well. You got you got the same kind of multi-tiered level of contact tracing and testing. The other thing is, of course, that if you test positive, if you've gone anywhere, there has been basically a record. Like, for example, when I went to get a haircut a couple weeks ago, everywhere I went, I had to write down, they took my temperature, I wrote down my temperature, my phone number, the time I was in. Because if you end

testing positive, then there's a record of where you were and what time you were there. So there's also a record of whoever else was there. And so then those people can be put under observation to see if they've been infected. So it's a, it's a wide-ranging system that has worked. I mean, this is the thing. What is the measure of an outbreak in its severity? Well, there's quite a few people, I know that I've asked personally whether they know anybody who was infected or anybody who passed away from it. And I haven't, I haven't heard anybody say they know anybody who's been infected. Compare this with the U.S. and it's a very different story. People know, people know tons of people that have been infected or who have been hit with severe symptoms

or even passed away. It's a, it's a really awful contrast to have to notice, but it does show you kind of how this thing is, how this thing affects a country. that doesn't take the kind of measures that China did, or the kind of measures that Vietnam did, Cuba, Venezuela, so on and so forth. You see the pattern. It's not only socialist countries that have responded in this fashion. There have been good case studies in terms of capitalist countries, but socialist countries have uniformly responded well, as they tend to do for any kind of crisis management or emergency response. Cuba being a good example of disaster response, they get hit by a hurricane regularly, and they minimize casualties and they minimize damage

because of the top-down readiness they have for these emergencies that you don't see in other places and other Caribbean countries. So the pandemic response is just another example. Yeah, absolutely. And even by the lower standards of bourgeois nation states, the U.S. has been an absolute embarrassment on this front. And that's part of the reason we're going to get into why the anti-China rhetoric is ramping up so much, in part to obscure the fact that the American government is utterly incompetent and unable to do basic, you know, pandemic treatment and tracing and testing, etc. You say incompetent, I say indifferent to the suffering and deaths of workers, but, you know,

I suppose it's a distinction without a difference. Absolutely, yeah, I agree with you. But just to talk about these criticisms because they're worth sort of addressing and shooting down, a popular criticism you hear a lot in the Western media against China at the moment is that when the outbreak started, China, you know, suppressed information. And the U.S. has now obviously used this as an excuse to cover up for their own failings. But can you talk about this idea that China's early response and just the breakdown of the idea that they hid the truth from the world or that they're even still hiding the true body count

from the world? Sure. I mean, it's a load of hooey, of course. But if you can look at the timeline and see that this, is not really true. The most you can say, and even this is, I can't find too much. Because of the nature of this pandemic and the nature of the virus, this being a totally new thing that nobody really saw coming, it's hard to really say. It's easy to look back with hindsight and say, oh, well, they should have been doing this or that, but you can't do something before

you know how serious it is. And for a period of time, in December, when the first hospitalizations happened when there were, you know, single-digit cases. This is not a massive influx of patients. This is a slow trickle of one or two people at a time. And there's a thousand hospitals in Hubei province. So the idea that a few people circulating through a province or a city that has many, many hospitals, exhibiting pneumonia symptoms, well, there's lots of things that cause pneumonia symptoms. There's lots of viruses that cause pneumonia symptoms or other coronavirus. that cause pneumonia symptoms. So this idea that a doctor treating a patient who's exhibiting pneumonia-like symptoms is going

to say, oh, well, this is a brand-new virus, of course, is a little ludicrous. But this notion of suppressing information, look, I mean, I don't know what people want China to have done differently with the information that we know they had available at the time. Now, it's different now because we know a lot more. But in late December, the first reporting of cases came from Dr. Zhang Xijian, and this was on December 26, 27th, depending on your time zone. This was a couple days before the famous case of Dr. Li Wang Liang sent a private message to his WeChat saying this was a new SARS, which it was not.

It's a totally new virus, but at the time, of course, nobody knew that for sure. It's just the symptoms looked a little bit similar. There's a private message that he asked to not be made public, but then it was made public and then it created a big panic and firestorm, and so. But the thing is that a doctor had already reported this to the administration, and it had already gone up the chain to the local Centers for Disease Control. Now, whether the case of Dr. Li Wen Liang was handled properly, I think China has already spoken to that by officially rebuking the reprimand that was given to Li Wen Liang and other doctors by the top court of China have said

that that was an inappropriate action. There was a formal apology made. So even that is kind of a dead letter in terms of how it reflects on the pandemic response, because, number one, you already had this information working its way through official channels from somebody else who reported it. And number two, the government recognized that that was an overreach and should not have happened. After the fact, sure. But this is a clear understanding of how best to handle a situation like this. Anyway, so this takes place only a few days before China informs the WHO that there is a, there is a pneumonia of unknown origin. At this time, it wasn't known that it was a new coronavirus. It wasn't known that it was a new coronavirus until early January, about the 9th of

January, when finally the research had borne this out. But even though they knew it was a new virus, they still weren't entirely sure how infectious it was. The thing about it is, there is a certain element of the right-wing propaganda machine that either doesn't know or doesn't care, and I'm leaning towards the latter, they're willing to rely on people's lack of scientific literacy, as well as their own lack of scientific literacy, because there's a difference between a virus that creates what's called limited human-to-human transmission, which is to say that can infect, if you're infected with the virus, you can then infect people that you have very close and regular contact with. So limited human-to-human transmission means you're infecting family members,

people that are close to you. That includes also health care workers if there isn't the proper protection in place. And at the time, because this was a pneumonia, it wasn't clear whether it was a highly infectious virus, the treatment wasn't necessarily covering all bases in terms of protecting people from being infected. And so some health care workers are being infected. That could be what's called sustained human-to-human transmission or community spread, which means that it just spreads. You don't have to have constant close contact. You could spread it through close contact that's momentary. But at the time, the kind of epidemiological tracing that was happening and the study that was happening had not yet revealed that. So what we were looking at

was the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission throughout most of January. And then by the 20th, it became clear that there was sustained transmission. So in that period in January, See, the thing is the – it's hard to pin down what people are saying is the period in which China suppressed information and covered things up and didn't do the right thing because for a while they were talking about not doing enough in December. And now the AP story that came out a week or so ago and some other accounts of it are saying there wasn't enough done in January. So they're moving around because they can't really nail down a time that they think China should have been doing better because their story keeps changing. It's just like in the early days of the lockdown, which started on January 23rd, the immediate response from the Western Press and from the human rights industrial complex and others and the U.S. government itself, although I repeat myself when I say these organizations, they criticize the lockdown for being authoritarian and violating human rights and being an overreach and too far and blah, blah, blah, you know, this was their line that it was too much. The head of Human Rights Watch said in typical Communist Party fashion, China locks down 35 million people without regard for human rights. Well, personally, I think the right, I think people also have a right not to drown on their own lung fluid, but that's just me.

But then later, then now, of course, that that response was shown to be absolutely necessary and has helped to stop the spread of the virus here to the point where there's, since you asked how many new cases there are, we're talking about single digits now. And that's in specific areas of the country. You're not seeing the kinds of numbers that indicate a new wave or a new spike in cases. You're seeing single-digit cases that show symptoms, and you're seeing maybe a couple dozen that are asymptomatic. So this is a very low, we're back down to December levels of infection and even less than that now. But this is the wavering nature of the response, right? it was first that it was too much and now it's now it's too little they assume probably correctly that a lot of people are not really closely looking at this stuff because we're in the u.s.

certainly like more passive media consumers it's the people don't I mean it's fair people don't have time to be doing this kind of intense media scrutiny because they've got their lives to live especially right now and so it's understandable but it's also something that that is taken advantage of, just like a lack of scientific literacy is taken advantage of, a lack of a critical eye toward our own media outlets, our own kind of ideological apparatus of enforcement of certain ideas. That critical eye has turned frequently to media outlets like the one I work for because it happens to be a quote-unquote state media outlet. But those same kind of critical lenses aren't turned on the corporate media, the monopoly media of the United States and other

countries. And so you get, you get this shifting narrative that people passively accept and don't think, again, I'm not blaming the people for this. I'm blaming the people that are lying to the people for this. Right. You don't get a kind of understanding of this inconsistency because there's more important stuff going on. Absolutely. And you know, you mentioned the lockdown. And obviously here in the U.S. we're seeing the rise of these astro-turfed, you know, anti-lockdown protesters. Oh, yeah. The president talking about liberating various states, just the absurdity of it. And there's very, you know, to think of that sort of happening in China is very difficult.

And I wonder what you chalk the different responses up to. Is it cultural differences? Is it media and media savvy and the ability to navigate it? Is it past experiences with things like SARS that, you know, have equipped and sort of educated the population over there? on how to respond to these pandemics? What do you chalk up those different responses to? I think certainly the memory of SARS being fresh in people's minds does matter. People I've talked to have lived, they live through it. They live through that outbreak as well. And I was curious about

it myself. But I think also there's a certain understanding that there are things that are more important than economic growth, right? The economy, the capital E economy. this mystical kind of thing up in the ether that determines all our lives and how we live. To me, at least, there has been an absolute emphasis on the need for epidemic prevention control, keeping people alive and keeping them healthy and safe over rushing into reopening the economy. It's only just gradually starting to open back up. Schools have only just started to open up. there's only just been a reopening of tourist attractions and things like that and they have and they're maintaining those strict control measures the the national museum of china one of my favorite places in

Beijing is only let is has a staggered entry system where there's you can only let in a certain amount of people at a time and it's it's certain hours of the day you can go in and of course temperature checks masks all that stuff because even with the the kind of economic hit that China took and it was huge. There was a giant dip in GDP growth for the first quarter. Even with all that going on, there is an understanding that there are more important things at stake and almost more important than that is that there is an infrastructure in place to absorb those kinds of shocks to the point where you don't have to deal with an economic crisis because of this pandemic. You deal with an economic downturn, but the economic downturn is not the

of the world because the real economy still matters. And the key industries, the industries that actually affect people's daily lives are state industries. So there is a firewall in terms of how the ability to extract surplus value and generate profits, the lack thereof, the lack of being able to do that will affect the economic health of these industries, these enterprises and the economy as a whole, which is to say it won't affect it that much. Because these enterprises aren't designed to generate profit. That's not their purpose. It's a bonus, of course, because China is incorporated to a degree in the world economic system, and that economic system is a capitalist one. So there are certain things China has to do to accommodate that troublesome, though we may find

that as communists or socialists. But the important industries are not beholden to those same factors, those same motivators, at least not in the same way as a private enterprise would be. And so it's a general understanding that there are important things and more important things in economic growth, one of them being people's health. But that doesn't mean anything. I think people understand that the United States just fine. That's all well and good. And it's, of course, obviously true. But that doesn't matter if you don't have the political and economic infrastructure to prioritize health over profits. And what we're seeing right now is the kind of clash, the contradiction between those two things.

The contradiction between people's general understanding that we need to keep people alive and keep people safe and healthy and the contradiction between the ruling class, which sees these lives as expendable in service of continued extraction of surplus value, continued exploitation of workers because, you know, workers aren't people to them. They don't have, they don't have agency. They don't have lives. They're expendable. There's, you know, the Dickensian surplus population, as Scrooge would say, is just out there waiting to replace whoever, whoever goes down from this illness. So you've got these astroturf protesters coming out and demanding that Ruby Tuesdays gets opened back up. But then you've got only 10% of people, actual people in the U.S. who say that the protesters have the right idea. There was a great, I love this, I love this post the other day.

I forget who said it, but that there are fewer people who believe that the open-up America protesters are right than there are who believe that vampires exist in the U.S. It's like 11% to 10%. And it's just such a huge disconnect, but there is this impetus. And it's already happening in some states. You know, my mother in Texas has told me that some places they're already opening up. the governor has put out a kind of gradual opening up order that started in late April. And I told my mom, like, do not go out. Do not do it. You know, she drives a cab.

She drives a cab for a living. And I have to tell her, like, limit your, I'm, you got to, the, the system that you live under means that you have to get a paycheck. But, you know, try not to if you can help it. And, and so this is, this is the, this is the situation we're in. The people, people understand that this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, unicy. People want actual solutions that protect them. People want a government and economic system that protects them, but they don't have it. And so the question is now, well, what can people do to make that happen to make things different? And so to me, China is an example of that, right? I mean, the, what is it, like 30 million Americans have lost their jobs. And that's just the people who filed for unemployment. We don't actually know how many people have really lost their jobs

in the last few weeks. But in China, there has been a government mandate, basically. Like, good luck trying to lay people off because we're not going to let you do that. And if you, if you try to take it to court, we're going to tell you to pay people their wages. There's a couple of good posts from, funnily enough, I actually do recommend this to some people. If you're if they're looking for halfway decent. It's not, it, beggars can't be choosers, I suppose. And you're not, there's not, there's not, there's not an abundance of communist reporting anywhere except for socialist countries. But in terms of who can accurately tell you the realities of policy in China, some of the best resources are legal firms, law firms do have China related blogs.

and some, depending on who it is, some employment advisories. So you'll get law blogs basically saying, like, because, and the reason for this is because they interact with Chinese policy as part of their daily work lives. And so I've seen a few of these, and they're really decent, they're decent resources about how the realities of being an employer in China during the pandemic is, you're not going to be able to lay people off. you can try, you will not succeed. And so because they're interacting with Chinese policy on a day-to-day basis,

they have a more accurate picture, I think, than a lot of ostensibly left-wing reporting in many ways. But this is the difference, right? The difference is that if you, and of course, there have not been no, there have not been zero casualties in terms of employment for this crisis. people have absolutely lost their jobs. There's no question about it. But already places like Wuhan, Hubei, all over the country, there has been a huge resurgence

in digital or social distancing compliant job fairs where the government has basically told firms like get back to hiring people, even if you can't, even if they can't, if they have to work from home, even if they can't come in right away, we want to get things back on track. there has been a reshuffling of some positions, a lot of service positions have been reoriented to be more digitally focused for the same reasons. There has been a pretty comprehensive response to make sure that as few people as possible lose their jobs and those that do have recourse to fine employment now that the crisis has waned. Right. So to me, it's an incredible contrast. Yeah, absolutely. And the U.S.'s entire system when it comes to access

social safety programs like unemployment is built infrastructure and architect to be very difficult to get through and always acting as a disincentive to get those programs. And so when you have a pandemic in the U.S., you try to go get your unemployment, like my wife who filed, you know, over a month ago, you just don't hear back from them. And, you know, they're overwhelmed. They can't pay it out, et cetera. So that alone is just one minor contrast, but worth stating perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, the last job I had before I had this one, I was actually, actually laid off as well. And unemployment was not as bad as I know it is in some states, but I couldn't even imagine going through that right now when everybody else is doing it too.

Yeah, it's absolutely terrible. Another criticism at the moment is aimed at China's live animal markets called wet markets, quote unquote. Of course, these sorts of markets are not unique to China by any means, but anti-China propaganda aside, there is possibly a kernel of legitimate criticism given the transfer of zoonotic viruses that have occurred in such places. So, in your opinion, how should we think about this issue and is there a legitimate critique buried somewhere in the propaganda surrounding this specific issue? Well, I mean, as you say, you're right, that the term wet market has become this kind of weaponized, racialized in a lot of very obvious ways terminology to be used against China, used against Asian people in general. I don't know that there's a lot of validity to it. I mean, we're not even sure right now that the virus is linked to the market, the seafood market in Wuhan, because the science is still figuring it out.

We're still tracking, we're still tracking the origins. I'm sure you're going to get to the ludicrous conspiracy theories related to the origins of the virus at a later time in this interview. But we're still figuring it out. I think it's premature to start to start throwing accusations around. We don't even know where the virus came from. We don't even know these, you know, we know a lot, right? China released the genomic data, the sequence of the virus on January 11th. That has been what has allowed the research into vaccines and treatments to take place.

But in terms of the actual epidemiological tracking of the thing so that we know where it came from, we now know what it looks like. We don't yet know exactly where it came from. There's a lot of competing theories, some of which are absurd and without any basis, in fact, some of which make more sense. there's discussions of perhaps an intermediate host between, we can be reasonably certain that it came from bats. But there's not yet any clarity on, I mean, there's lots of competing theories with good, decent amounts of evidence behind for each, but we still don't know if there was an intermediate host between bats and humans, if there wasn't, if it just jumped straight from bats to humans. And in the meantime, what we're talking about with regard

of these so-called web markets is basically a farmer's market. The only different It's a wet market versus a dry market, which just means that it's fresh vegetables and meats being offered up for sale in addition to dry goods. And this is common everywhere. I do mostly go to a grocery store, the Chinese grocery store, but on the way there, I walked by a couple of these places that you could turn wet markets, and it's, you know, like vegetable stance. We do have to be careful when we're talking about this stuff because, as you say, there's a

misinformation trend out there that creates confusion and doubt and suspicion about something that is very commonplace, very normal. If there is a situation where there is a market with unsanitary conditions or that is not following proper protocols in terms of the animals it has and all these questions, well, then they're violating the law because that's already illegal. So the question then needs to be, well, how do we enforce it? Well, could it be better? I'm sure it could. Just like I'm sure a lot of things could be better, but it's, it is disingenuous to me to bring this up. First of all, we're not, I don't mean you bring it up. I mean, I mean, I mean the general kind of criticism that gets thrown around. When we don't

quite know whether this was directly linked to one of these places, we don't actually know what the situation is in the vast majority of the rest of the country. I can say from experience that generally it's safe. I mean, 99 out of 100 are fine. This is a, this is kind of a tempest in a teapot. Despite all this, the wildlife trade has been made illegal officially. Wildlife consumption has been made illegal. So if this is happening, it's happening in violation of the law. And if violators are found, they are dealt with according to the law. If this is happening, it's happening illegally. So the right thing to do would be to report it. Right, right.

This is like, you know, instead of going, instead of running off to the Daily Mail or somewhere and telling your sensationalist story about the crazy wet market you saw open, well, okay, but you understand that the whole point of their being laws is so that they can get enforced. And if somebody's violating it, you can say something to them instead of your local media outlet or whatever. And to speak on the Daily Mail. specifically, you know, their so-called story about how the wet markets are supposedly opened up again,

used photos from countries that weren't China and photos from 2012 and 2015. So, you know, let's put that to bed. That's total nonsense. Yeah, I mean, so it's important to put this into context. It's important to better understand the reality. And the reality is that the vast majority of these markets are perfectly safe. They sell, quote unquote, what we would consider normal animals and they're not live. They might have been slaughtered or butchered that day, but that just means they're fresh. I mean, this is the thing, right? Chinese cooking is all about fresh ingredients. You get ideally the day of and cook with them the day of because that's the palate. That's the sensibility. Like this idea that Chinese people eat anything and everything, well, that's definitely not true,

a lot of Chinese can tell the difference between processed and unprocessed foods, and they hate processed foods. So, I mean, it's not, it's not necessarily a common practice to, to consume these exotic animals. But the situation in these places is very often perfectly safe and perfectly clean. And it's mostly vegetables as well. Like the, you know, the reality is that, again, this is an accusation that only gets thrown around when it's about China or other Asian countries, you don't hear a lot about farmers markets in the U.S. You don't hear a lot about game meats being sold in the U.S. I mean, you know, hell, I can remember it's probably still open. I remember the place that we went to just outside of town where we got, we didn't get all this

stuff, but there was fresh game meats available. Some normal, relatively normal things like venison, but also some kind of out there stuff. It's not, it's not that unusual to see this in in places like the U.S., but it's this selective kind of analysis, so this selective kind of criticism overlooks these things and, again, racializes these accusations to paint, to paint a picture of a quote-unquote dirty people. And you see a lot of that kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge implication of that stuff in something like the New York Times where they call China an incubator of disease. It's like, well, what do you mean by that? Well, you're clearly suggesting something, just go ahead and say it.

Just go ahead and be, just go ahead and be the durstermer you've always wanted to be. Just go ahead. Exactly. Yeah, and just to talk about eating game, like I remember going to like fishing and hunting little festivals when you were younger, you have game meat. I remember eating like alligator jerky and, you know, nobody even blinks an eye in that case. And then just the hilarious irony of some U.S. reactionary dip shit who eats hot dogs and brottwursts, you know, and lives off 90% of his diet coming from fact.

factory farmed meat, criticizing a country he knows nothing about about their quote-unquote wet markets. It's absolutely absurd. Yeah. And I mean, and the interesting thing, I'll just toss this one thing in there is there is some burgeoning factory farming in China, but for the most part, the vast majority of agriculture and meat production is still done in local farms. Like it is still most of it. I mean, there are some factories certainly for like mass production of pork, for example, the Chinese pork reserve does need that kind of industrial production. But most of the food that's domestically produced is happening in villages and towns and smaller farms. Interesting. So, I mean, the chances of, so your average, you take your average piece of pork

or you take your average vegetable in China versus the U.S., and you're going to, nine times out of 10, you're going to have a locally produced something or another that's made it to a store and made it to a, again, these scary, dangerous wet markets, and it's going to be of infinitely higher quality. Yeah, absolutely. So going on to the next phase of this conversation, I want to talk about how the U.S. is reacting, and basically I want to get your opinion on why you think

that both major U.S. parties right now are playing the China blame game at the moment, and then what your fears are regarding, because there's been more and more talk lately on the left, at least, about a new Cold War, or Cold War 2.0, right? The sort of rhetoric and the amping up of antagonisms that the U.S. is aiming at China is reminiscent in some ways of the Cold War of the Soviet Union of Times past. So, you know, why do you think that both major U.S. parties are playing this China blame game at the moment?

And where do you see this conflict and the momentum behind it going in the short-term to medium-term future? Yeah, I mean, I think it's for the same reason that the Democratic and Republican parties take off all positions on many issues. It's because of the class interests they represent, right? The Democrats represent the more touchy-feely wing of the capitalist class, and the Republicans represent the more virulent, terroristic nationalist aspects of that class. And in both cases, for all the talk, some on the left want to say about how China is intertwined with business and Davos and Wall Street, it's a load of bull, but. But they want to say that as if it somehow proves makes it okay for them to regurgitate the same tired talking points about China that the right wing does, which thankfully some of them are finally waking up to this a little bit too late. It's, you know, we've been shouting this stuff on the rooftops for a long time and you're only just now starting to listen. Anyway, I mean, the reality of the situation is this.

Capital does not want to keep manufacturing in China. And the reason for this is because China has presided over an enormous increase in wages, living standards, working standards, worker protections in the last 20 or so years. Enormous, enormous increases in quality of life. What that means for the capitalist is that they're unable to extract the same kind of surplus that they were able to before. And so you've got companies that made the bargain with China and agreed to some, things. Some of them agreed to make joint ventures with Chinese state companies. Some of them

agreed to share technology and expertise. They essentially didn't think, they didn't think that China would be able to compete, whether out of racist paternalism or general imperial superiority, whatever the reasons for a capitalist to think this, everybody's got their own reasons and the result is the same, so it doesn't really matter all that much. But they didn't think that Chinese industry would be developing as fast as it has. They wouldn't think, think that the, you know, the quote-unquote labor costs, which, of course, when you hear labor costs, that means workers are getting paid more. They weren't expecting this to happen quite so soon. And so the reality is whatever,

whatever rhetoric these people want to use, I don't care. It doesn't matter. The reality is that U.S. capitalists haven't been able to get the same kind of profits. They haven't been able to choke the same kind of profits out of Chinese workers that they were just a few decades ago. And this is happening coincidentally or not coincidentally, as you want to frame it. With Trump in the White House, who was always an aggressive kind of China hawk type of guy, he's been criticizing the trade relationship with China for a very long time. And so this all kind of coalesces into an organized and coordinated push to decouple manufacturing from China. Now, the particularities of Trump and the particularities of his nationalist project mean that right now the talk is about moving production back to the United States. But if that weren't the case, then there would be talk about moving production to Malaysia or Bangladesh or Vietnam or other countries where you can still get away with paying workers a lot less for their labor.

And so you have this phenomenon that we've seen before, right? You've got manufacturing based in China and you've got raw materials based in other countries that are farther out in the periphery in the imperial system. So you've got the core countries of imperialism, which is the U.S., Western Europe, Canada, scattered other compradure nations that have made a bargain with the U.S. and others to allow, for example, troops to be installed in order to facilitate a more integrated relationship with the world economy. You've got the most profitable in terms of things like design, things like the highest levels of technology, the quote-unquote skilled labor that requires the most education. You've got those industries that are still, those aspects of industries still based in the U.S. You've got raw materials based in the far-out periphery, and you've got manufacturing based in the semi-periphery. So you've got a country like China that was the manufacturing hub for the world for a great deal of time and still is. but because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,

you can't stay like this forever. And so now there is a concerted push to get manufacturing out because it's not as profitable. So because everybody is an agreement on that. And again, I don't care how cozy the Davos crowd might appear to be with China. It's they're talking with forked tongues. They're talking through gritted teeth. They don't like it. But it's necessary for now because it's still,

there is still a degree of exploitation that they can that they can fulfill with their relationship with China. But the rhetoric is heating up and the tensions are getting higher and the political differences and the and the hobby horse issues that are being talked about are a means to facilitate that mood among regular people and among people that might not be totally on board with this cold war. But the root motivation is that there's not enough exploitation of Chinese workers being done by U.S. firms. There's places where people can be even more exploited and generate even greater profits. And so it is in their interest to move their production to those areas instead of China. Now, if production goes back to the U.S., the capitalists aren't

just going to say, well, we were upset because we lost a good deal of our profits to workers' wages and better living conditions and this, that, and the other. But we're out of the goodness of our hearts going to start paying American workers more because we're just such patriots. No, of course not. They're going to automate whatever they can. They're going to drive the cost down to a level where it's profitable to move back if they're going to move back at all.

They might get some subsidies from the government, but this is, again, a situation where, you know, the one hand washes the other, right? the capitalist state does a favor for the capitalist class. That's not surprising. But this is a, this is a combination of a grand capitalist project and a grand white nationalist project because the other result is going to be with ice raids, with the kind of terroristic treatment of migrants going on that will still be going on and probably intensify in the near future. You're going to be, if you're moving production back to the U.S., you're also moving people out. You're kicking people out. And so the idea is not about getting a better deal for American workers.

It's about getting a better deal for American capitalists and just exploiting American citizens instead of migrants and Chinese workers. So it's all about this kind of, again, it comes back to what capital wants and what capital is willing to do to mitigate that natural, not natural, but the tendency we all know of the rate of profit to fall. So, I mean, it all comes back to, it all comes back to Marx. as it always does. Well said. Yeah, absolutely. And so, like, what has China's response been to all of this anti-China propaganda emanating out of the West?

And maybe you can even talk about what China's been doing for other countries in the midst of this pandemic as they're getting attacked from all these different angles. Oh, yeah. I mean, there has been some in the media and in the official government organs a response to some of this. There's been a general understanding that. this is just how it is and that there's it's going to be hard to i mean the thing about it is china still wants to have a good relationship with the u.s like this is the thing they're they're a lot

more open to that i think than well obviously than the u.s is but i think you know me i'm like i'm almost skeptical of the idea of like a a warmer relations between china and the u.s because now you're seeing this bipartisan attack the cat's out of the bag it's hard to to put it back in because it's politically, it's going to be politically unpopular to try to warm relations. It's going to be politically unpopular because of these factors at play, because it's not in anyone's interest now to be more conciliatory toward China. But, I mean, again, they're still trying because they still believe that it's possible and they don't want to, they don't want to escalate tensions. They don't want another Cold War. Part of that is as you,

as you alluded to, sending medical supplies, medical experts, equipment that's needed, PPE, masks, ventilators, tons of stuff to all kinds of countries, including in the U.S. The statistic from the General Administration of Customs that came out about a week ago was that from March to April, China exported about 21.1 billion masks to the rest of the world. Some of that was donations. Some of that was selling at cost. I don't think there's a lot of profit being made off this, number one. China donates to countries and countries that are poorer and sells to countries that are more rich. But I think even with the selling, it's not crazy exorbitant prices. It's maybe slightly above cost at most. And this is, this includes the U.S.

This includes countries in Europe. This is not about, this is not about only supporting socialist countries or only supporting countries that are targeted by U.S. Empire, although that's definitely happening. China has been giving a lot to Iran and Venezuela and Cuba as well, thumbing their nose at the embargo and it's sanctions. And this has kept people alive, right? These are countries that are under heavy sanction from the U.S. and other bodies. And that means that it's harder to get necessary medical equipment inside. It's harder to, it's harder to get people the things they need to survive. And the U.S. has escalated sanctions during this period. It's escalated bombing campaigns in Yemen and elsewhere.

And I don't know. I mean, to me, there's a huge contrast there, too. China doesn't care. And this is where some people have a criticism. Some of the left do have a criticism of China not being this kind of revolutionary, proletarian, internationalist outlook and that they don't discriminate based on ideology in terms of who gets a trade relationship or support. And, you know, I'm sympathetic to that, of course, but I also understand the geopolitical

realities that require a more neutral approach. Because for all the bluster from the U.S., you know, there is a whole rest of the world out there. And China does want to present a positive image. And so, you know, we're not in an era where there's a Soviet Union, right, where there's another large geopolitical counterweight to U.S. imperialism. And so this is the reality. China is the largest of the socialist block of nations, but also has needed to be somewhat integrated into the world economic system in order to develop and modernize. So this is what it does. It doesn't care what kind of ideological outlook your X, Y, or Z government has. It doesn't care what economic system you have, especially right now with a pandemic on. It's about need and it's about giving

support where it's needed. And because China has been able to redirect its productive capacity, to such an extent where it can make all this stuff that people need, it doesn't need all of it, so it's going to send it where it's needed. And, I mean, to me, that is an important distinction, but it's hard to break through the propaganda machine in the U.S. and elsewhere that is now trying to paint this aid, this pandemic support, as some kind of nefarious plot to garner influence and curry favor with other places. So, you know, it doesn't matter what China does, right? The, the consensus in the U.S. press, whenever China was producing masks and distributing it within its own borders because it was at the time the hardest hit country, well, it was hoarding. That was the

headline word in a lot of places that China was hoarding masks, hoarding equipment, all this stuff. And then, and they still say hoarding, even though China has been delivering, as I said, billions of masks. billions of pieces of PPE, thousands of ventilators, like, the results should speak for themselves, but the problem is when you're distorting all this, you can basically say whatever you want. And again, with passive media consumption, people will internalize it, and that'll be pretty much it. You know, there was a period in early March, late February, early March, whenever China had turned a corner on the epidemic. and the WHO had just gotten back from their research trip into China

and they talked to a few Western corporate media outlets and the corporate media actually, to their credit, briefly, reported somewhat positively about China's response. Well, I think the U.S. government just had a collective aneurism about this and immediately went on the offensive.

And that's why you see things like the memo that came out to, from the White House to other, government departments about the need to criticize China for the so-called cover-up, you're seeing this push, this push on various aspects of government to find, quote-unquote, evidence for a lab leak or a bioweapon point of origin theory. You know, the week or two weeks where there was actual positive coverage about China's response, I think scared the hell out of people in the in the in the u.s. intelligence military apparatus and they have been on the war path ever since yeah absolutely and as my my co-host alison on our sister podcast red menace

said in our most recent episode a lot of this anti-chinese propaganda and rhetoric you know it's not just aimed at the chinese state it's aimed as you even alluded to earlier in this conversation at chinese people and at asian people broadly and one blowback of that has been an increase in race and hate crimes here in the U.S. against any Asian people that happen to be seen on the streets, you know, they become the target of people's confused, ignorant rage. And so it's not just governments versus governments, but this anti-China propaganda really results in actual hate crimes and racism in this country by itself, you know, and around the world, of course. Yeah. There's that, well, there's that trope, of course, of people who say, well, I don't, I don't hate the Chinese people. I just hate the communist party. Um, it's, it's a load of bunk, of course. It's, you, it's inseparable. I mean, like, they cannot conceive or, or they know, but they choose not to care that Chinese people actually do support their government. They do have faith in the CPC to do what's necessary to, to, to continue to advance their situation and to, and to make things better for, for the people. And so there's this denial of agency, essentially. And the only true testimony, the true perspective can be a pro-America perspective and anti-China perspective. And those are the only ones that are going to entertain from Chinese people. So you get, you know, you get sort of trying to be not bigoted, but actually just doing it.

I mean, I don't hate the people. I hate the party thing. Well, okay, fine, but you're still regurgitating the exact things that get people to hate Chinese people anyway. so what's the point? Why are you making this distinction except to make yourself feel better? Exactly right. And of course that denial of agency and that condescending, patronizing view of Asian people as like brainwashed masses or whatever is at the core of a lot of Orientalism and anti-Asian racism. So anytime anybody touts that, they are materially and directly causing and helping perpetuate that sort of racism. And it's fucking disgusting.

It needs to be pushed back on. Two more questions before we end. I know it's very late where you are, so I don't want to keep you too long. Nah, no, it's okay. I'm on a roll. It's all right. How do you think China will emerge from this crisis and how do you think the U.S. will emerge from this crisis in the eyes maybe domestically and also in the eyes of the world at large? Well, I mean, if we lived in a world of perfect information, then the differences would be very clear.

But this is not the world we live in. We live in a world of ideology. And I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say. I think that the results speak for themselves, really. But the problem is that you've got a media industrial complex that is trying to tell people that the results are not real in one place based on nothing. There's no evidence for it.

There's just a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations based on ludicrous things like the number of mobile accounts that were shut down during the pandemic, as if people who have multiple SIM cards for multiple different provinces wouldn't shut those down when they're not traveling between those provinces, among other reasons why that would happen without there being millions of people who died. It's so absurd. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, like, I don't know.

To me, it seems self-evident, but it's different for regular people. I mean, in the U.S. especially, there is this desire, despite all the claims of dissent. And people say, oh, well, you, you know, you can criticize the government in the U.S. It's very different. But, I mean, the criticisms are pretty toothless. There is absolutely, despite all the hubbub and the anger about Trump or whomever, there is still a certain level of faith in the system in the government, even as people are dying on mass. There is still this belief that, well, you know, at least we're not somewhere else, at least we're not in X, Y, or Z bad country.

We heard that constantly with Venezuela. We hear it with a lot of places, and this is just another example where you can say, oh, well, they're lying about it. So it doesn't really matter that their results have been so much better clearly because it's not true. That's essentially what they can get away with in order to justify the country's awful, criminal, criminally negligent response. I mean, again, keeping in mind the class motivation. here, you could also say, well, it doesn't matter whether it's intentional or not, but certainly it doesn't hurt the capitalist to have a bunch of people die that aren't directly related to them. I don't know. I mean, I hope the results speak for themselves. I hope that

it becomes clear as things continue to get worse. It's a hard road to hoe. It's a hard hill to climb because the media in the U.S. is so pervasive and well-funded and powerful and authoritative across the world, not just in the U.S. There's lots of people, there's people in China that believe the U.S. press more than the Chinese press. I don't think it's a majority by any means or even a strong grouping, but there are certainly people who do believe that. Fewer now than there were just a few years ago, but some people still do.

So it's hard to say. I mean, my hope had been that the differences in response would be clear and that China's assistance that was being offered around the world would also be appreciated. I think it is still but it's it's hard to say how this is all going to shake out you hear stuff about there's going to be demands for reparations there are going to be lawsuits this that and the other

I think a lot of that is hot air but you know politicians and capitalists in the U.S. are deranged enough to try to do this I'm not going to put anything past them to save their own hides from election losses or whatever or, I mean, really, criminal liability, I would say, but that's just me. But again, I'm not asking China to make accusations of criminal liability.

I'm asking the people of the U.S. to do it because, you know, I don't believe, and I don't believe that China should be doing that, just like I don't believe the U.S. should be doing it about China. So, I mean, it's hard to say. It's still up in the air. Anything can happen, right? We're in a brand new era of possibility here. It's not looking good, but I also believe that there is organizing potential, that there is potential of new solidities, new cooperations between people of all countries, but even people within the United States as well, that there is a way to build something out of this and turn it into something that isn't, you know, the wholesale disaster that it is right now and the terrible tragedy it is. that so many people are dying and will continue to die, you know, obviously we can't do this

right now, but when we come out of it, there needs to be, you know, a stronger sense of, of cohesiveness and sense of fellowship and solidarity. And that applies to cross-border relationships. And so I, I want to see a better relationship, if only because I don't want war. I don't want the kind of high tensions that lead people to make rash decisions that cost other people their lives. I don't want to see a proxy battle in Iran or Venezuela. I don't want to see this stuff that we saw. Again, for movements of national liberation that were supported during the Cold War, you know, I still want to see that stuff happening, of course. Like you want you want people to get out from under the yoke of capital, but you want to do it.

with the minimal loss of life possible. So I mean, so if there's a way, if there's nonviolent solutions to these problems, I would like to see them. And I would like to see positive results. I don't know that it's going to happen, but I'm still maintaining some level of hope. Absolutely.

And one thing is absolutely for sure, and that is that the heart of the U.S. fails, the more it will ramp up. It's xenophobic and outward facing attacks and try to spread the blame around and find scapegoats. And so at the very least, principled socialist and communists should be able to anticipate it, see through it, and help educate other people to not fall prey to it. And that's at least something that we can do to try to help.

And that leads well into this very last question. And I think this is important because I think it's important to distinguish between thinking or supporting China as an explicitly socialist state and then just not being a chauvinist and being a principled anti-imperialist. These things don't need to necessarily be entangled. So for those on the U.S. left who, for whatever reason, may be skeptical of the claim that China is building socialism, but sincerely do not want to perpetuate or partake in any anti-China chauvinism whatsoever and want to remain principled in their anti-imperialism, what would you personally say to them? How would you reach them? And what would you argue is the principled position with regard to China at this time? And you can think whatever you want to think about the nature of China's economic system and political system. You know, it's fine if you don't think they're socialist.

I mean, I don't think, I mean, China itself doesn't say that they're in a perfect state, right? The theory, the official theory of the CPC is that this is still the primary stage of socialism and that there's going to be a lot of contradictions and there's going to be a lot of issues arising between now and when we're in the next stage of socialism and even, you know, communism is not in this lifetime. That's just, that's just a fact. At least, you know, at least here, that that's just not the path that the country is on because of the nature of the country's development. But whatever your, whatever your opinions are, it's important to also think about how a country relates to imperialism, right? Like this is, this is the important thing. If we take imperialism to be the primary contradiction in the world, right? If, if, if U.S. imperialism, the facilitation of exploitation of the global working class via a genocidal war machine, via

the leveraging of monopolies. This is the key thing to remember about imperialism itself, as Lenin would have it, is that there's monopoly capital and there's non-monopoly capital. And there's monopolies that can be leveraged to enact all kinds of exploitation, and there's monopolies that don't have that same kind of strength. And so you need to be thinking about the, The economic reality is that whether you think China is a socialist country or not, it is being exploited. Still, even with all its growth, even with all the growth that's happened in the last 70 years since the revolution, and it has been substantial and incredible.

Even with all that growth, the U.S. has outpaced China's growth by a factor of six or more, even during that period of explosive growth in China. In the early 1970s, the U.S. GDP per capita was $10,000. China right now has only just hit $10,000 GDP per capita. The U.S. is about $60,000. So in that time, even in the time after the U.S.'s big industrialization, when it was already the most advanced economy in the world, it was still able to exploit and leverage monopolies and do all these things we know about from understanding how imperialism, works and how capitalism works to a far greater extent than China was. So for all the things about

China being, this is the other thing that I actually wanted to bring up. One of the reasons why the Cold War policy against the Soviet Union was successful was this idea that the Soviet Union was a direct competitor and a rival to the United States. But the economic reality, the geopolitical reality of that was that the Soviet Union was never a direct competitor and direct rival. It was never at the same footing economically that the U.S. was. It was certainly incredibly advanced, and that was because of what you were able to accomplish with the revolution, with the governance of a communist party, with the commitment to socialism, with the marshalling of resources you can do in that system, there's no denying. Post-war industrialization was incredible. The huge upswing

in productive capacity and quality of life for workers was phenomenal. But it was never really a rival. It was never really in the same camp. The U.S. was always, always several steps ahead in terms of its own economic advancement, not just because it can leverage these monopolies and use this imperial apparatus to extract surplus value from the global working class. The Soviet Union was already at a disadvantage of not doing that. Famously, the relationship with Cuba, they never bought commodities from Cuba at a rate that would actually give them surplus.

It was always below cost. The same goes for China. This positioning of China as a direct rival to the United States is just not true. It is still a developing country. It is still, despite its size and despite the size of its GDP, per person, it is still nowhere near, even the least rich European country. And this has many purposes. The same as the Soviet Union. Making the Soviet Union the enemy and the quote-unquote other superpower meant

that the Soviet Union was always playing catch-up and was always devoting more resources to things like its military in order to stay at pace. And that meant depriving the people of certain things that they should be getting if they weren't focused on so many ways of competing with the United States. The same thing could happen here. It's a little different because China is more integrated with the world economic system and has a trade relationship with the U.S. far greater than the Soviet Union did. But making it a rival, making it a competitor, making it this new threat is the exact same strategy as the Soviet Union.

And it's an attempt to get China to try to catch up, try to redirect its resources and spending into categories where it cannot continue to build on the successes it's already made since the revolution happened. It's the same with the Soviet Union, could happen with China. I don't think, I think that's part of why China has the foreign policy it does. It doesn't want to get into any entanglements the way that. the Soviet Union did, whether we can say that's a bad move or a good move. I mean, I think it's a geopolitically wise move, even if it's not what I would like to see personally. I understand

completely why that is the course they're taking. So again, we don't need to be thinking about this in terms of the China threat or the China rivalry. We need to be removing those words from our vocabulary completely because that's not what the reality of the relationship is. And when we do it, when we do frame it in this way, we are doing the capitalist work for them. We are creating this opposition that doesn't actually exist. And in the long run, all it's going to do is undermine China's development and the development of other countries that are trying their best to avoid the boot of imperialism and try to avoid sanctions, try to avoid embargoes, trying to continue to build a better quality of life for their people. You know, Olivia, just a recent example

of a place that's been hit hard by this. We need to be excising this idea of rivalry from our vocabulary completely. We need to be thinking about China as a country that is still, just like the other socialist countries, still being exploited, still being targeted, still being attacked. We need to keep that in mind with our discussions. And if we do that, we can have a more realistic basis, a better footing for the conversations that need to be had. So, and there's a million other things we could talk about, I know, but it has been going on

for a little while. Sorry. No, absolutely. And thank you so much, Ian, for coming on. You're definitely a voice I look to when it comes to siphoning through these matters and thinking clearly about, you know, these tensions and these implications. So I really appreciate you coming on our show. And I will love to have you back again.

Before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you in your work online. Yeah, I'm at Twitter. I'm at I.S. Goodrum. And then for my writing, I write for China Daily. And pretty much everything I write for China Daily. I also either send over or I write other stuff for People's World as well. So you can find me at Chinadale.com.com.c. And then People'sworld.org in those places. I try to put out something once a week, but sometimes it's once every two weeks. So, you know, I should be keeping to a better schedule. But you'll see something for me on those places eventually. Cool. Yeah, and I'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible. And if anybody wants to hear more about what we've talked about today, especially if you want to hear more about certain conspiracy theories around 5G and whatnot, I would recommend Ian's recent interview with Abby and Robbie over at Media Roots Radio. They're friends of the show as well. And if you like this conversation, you'll love that conversation as well. So thank you again, Ian. Keep up the amazing work, and we will definitely be in touch in the future.

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