No, they’re right, Xi would be helpless trying to explain dialectical materialism to a reader of the Wall Street Journal
I love checking the byline on these opinion pieces.
The author is a member of the “Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong” and has based most of his career on fearmongering Tiananmen Square. He was banned from entering China years ago, so obviously is extremely unbiased.
his “B.S. in chemical engineering” came out of a hollow program for politically favored people, and his 1998-2002 “doctorate in Marxism” was written by his staff.
Sounds like a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours
he is widely disliked within the party
What.
he controls the levers that keep him in place.
I hate it when liberals try to talk about other country’s political systems. The fuck are “levers of power”? Are there a set of levers in the NPC that if you control you can change the weather in china or something? Joking aside, there is no explanation of what the fuck mechanism there is by which xi can be chair of the party despite being disliked by it.
Its utter emptiness is evident when you set it side-by-side with his parallel claim to inherit Confucius
This is the closest the article comes to making a valid critique of xi’s grasp on Marxism. While I am skeptical of the value of confusian thinking myself, it is ironically anti-materialist to assume that a pure Marxism untainted by the values and traditions of a person can exist.
I would much rather chinese communists openly proclaim the influence of their culture on their thinking than for them to assume that they have surpassed the flow of time. As althusser puts it, the distinguishing mark of ideology is that it proclaims itself to have no history. As such, Xi’s view is far closer to the scientific practice of Marxism than to ideology (in the marxist sense).
Sounds like a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours
Even Wikipedia, which straight up starts talking about censorship in his article’s intro, says nothing about these claims. Even the sources they use for facts about his education background, one of which is a lib Guardian article, mentions nothing about this. So it’s likely he made it the fuck up or an “unnamed source” told him about it.
To be fair, Confucianism is extremely reactionary and should be combated. It would make much more sense to have a Daoist Marxism than a Confucian one.
I wouldn’t say “extremely” reactionary but it does have reactionary elements. Probably not more than Abrahamic religions do, though i will admit i’m not an expert on Confucianism. (And yes i know it’s a philosophy and not strictly speaking a religion, but i think the comparison is fair in the sense that it’s one of the ideological frameworks that left a very big historical imprint on the cultures and systems of government in the region, much like religion did for Europe and West Asia.)
Whether it should be combated or not is not for me to say since i’m not from that region or culture.
I wouldn’t say “extremely” reactionary but it does have reactionary elements. Probably not more than Abrahamic religions do
That’s like saying “He’s not ‘extremely’ violent, probably not more than Mengele”
Whether it should be combated or not is not for me to say since i’m not from that region or culture.
This is extremely backwards, anti-marxist thinking. To get a good grasp on the nature of things might take you much more investigation because of your lack of baseline familiarity, but you are not fundamentally and unalterably excluded from criticism. Chinese people aren’t space aliens.
I don’t know anything about daoism (or taoism, are they similar?). Got any books to recommend?
This article is hilarious. I am not even sure who the target audience is meant to be -sinophobic liberals who know what dialectical materialism is? That seems very niche. Maybe it doesn’t have to make sense, maybe they were going for a word-salad vibes-based character-assassination.
Also the “shrodinger-style” attack; apparently Xi is both a very smart CPC president and also not able to explain dialectical materialism. Obviously no citations or proof offered for any of the allegations including the attacks of his higher education credentials.
The imperialist intelligensia must be getting more and more desperate as the contradictions of their parasitic economies draws on evermore deepening crises.
Addendum - I just saw someone else make a similar comment before me. I’ll just leave it here rather than deleting this.
this just caters to ultras, who funnily don’t know what dialectical materialism is.
Maybe but I am not sure ultras as a group have any sufficient political presence globally. I am not sure the author/editors are smart enough to target them specifically let alone WSJ be aware of their presence to merit propaganda aimed at them. Collectively western propaganda and intelligence win historically because of the sheer size of capital they put behind their schemes (backed by populations benefiting from the unequal exchange and security apparatus barbarism) - individuals may be evil and smart but as organisations they are large and blundering. You would think by now they would deftly versed in marxist-leninism - you know just from the viewpoint in defeating their enemy. However, their propaganda is so weak in substance that a superficial overview of an ML understanding of the world is sufficient for westerners to breakthrough their smokescreen (if they wanted to). I think one of Marx’s key breakthrough is how capital after being reified can defend itself “organically”.
its definitely weird, but i do think there is an abundance of ultras in the west who despise China more than the US itself. Also not every article has to cater the largest groups, articles like this can cater liberals and ultras alike.
I read exclusively wsj to learn concepts like dialectical materialism
