FOSC: 3 Axes to evaluate China’s revolution. Brilliant article on the significance of China’s rise 評估中國革命的三個軸。關於中國崛起意義的精彩文章 by Andrew Murray:
Perhaps the significance of the People’s Republic of China proceeds along three distinct but closely entwined axes.
The first is the “standing up” of China itself, its transformation from the mutilated prey of sundry imperialisms and a laggard in world standards of social development, into a mighty power in sight of having the world’s largest national economy.
This reverses what has been called the “great divergence” in economic power and prosperity, which began with the 19th-century opium wars, imposed on China by the British, which opened up an enormous gap in favour of the West over succeeding decades. This is the developmental axis.
Second, it both represents and further encourages a global shift of power from the West European/North American bloc, which dominated two centuries of history, towards what we now call the global South. It challenges the monopoly of global violence at the state level exercised by the United States and its allies. This is the democratic and actually anti-imperialist axis.
Third, by maintaining a socialist orientation after other developments in that direction have faltered it both keeps open the possibility of plural systemic options in the world, defeating Washington’s dreams of ideological unipolarity, and prevents socialism itself from being pushed into the shadows of history, even as it reconceptualises what socialism might mean (as revolutionary movements have always done). That is the socialist axis, and it may be the most contested on the left.
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