President Masoud Pezeshkian has voiced Iran’s readiness for “serious and constructive” cooperation with China, particularly within the framework of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), ahead of his planned visit to China later this month.
Sadly, a lot of people try to engage in mind reading the leadership of the PRC and claim that they will definitely dismantle colonialism from inside, despite the fact that their current economic (i.e. ‘material’) interests lie in perpetuating it. For some reason, people forget about the base and the superstructure stuff when it comes to the PRC. And they also generally seem to forget about the consequences of the presence of the profit motive in an economy in this case for some reason.
The PRC being dominant instead of NATO would be an improvement over the current state of affairs, but people are way too blindly optimistic in this regard.
EDIT: Actually, going to use this opportunity and address one of the arguments for the privatisation of the PRC’s economy (and the corresponding damage done to workers’ rights in the PRC):
The PRC has been increasing living standards very quickly for more than a billion people. If you think that the PRC’s economy is capitalist/not socialist, you must conclude that capitalism is the best economic system there is. Therefore, this criticism of the PRC is incorrect.
There are a few issues with that:
Seeing that one system is achieving the results that look good on the surface, and concluding from that that that must mean it’s the system that you liked beforehand is silly in a way that should be obvious. It’s just some wishful thinking - making a conclusion based on what one wants to see, rather than on how things are. Also, the PRC, the USSR, etc. had more impressive improvements made under planned economies, and the current PRC can’t replicate some of their achievements, so what the PRC has now is not even managing to be the ‘best’ system that we have seen.
The fact that the current PRC has more people than the states that maintain/maintained planned economies isn’t really relevant, unless one wants to argue that, when a state implements a policy, it picks some number of people for the policy to affect, and the policy then can’t affect any more people, rather than for policies to affect groups of people regardless of how numerous those groups are.
The way the PRC managed to get ahead after the privatisation, is by attracting some of the colonial spoils from the imperial core. It has become a semi-peripheral state, and is currently both a victim of colonialism, but also maintains relations of unequal exchange with other countries that are beneficial to the PRC. Colonial exploitation is, in the end, the only way for states that maintain economies with the profit motive to ‘win’ economically. Being the beneficiary of relations of unequal exchange are much better predictors of great economic power of a state than an economy being privatised.
Sadly, a lot of people try to engage in mind reading the leadership of the PRC and claim that they will definitely dismantle colonialism from inside, despite the fact that their current economic (i.e. ‘material’) interests lie in perpetuating it. For some reason, people forget about the base and the superstructure stuff when it comes to the PRC. And they also generally seem to forget about the consequences of the presence of the profit motive in an economy in this case for some reason.
The PRC being dominant instead of NATO would be an improvement over the current state of affairs, but people are way too blindly optimistic in this regard.
EDIT: Actually, going to use this opportunity and address one of the arguments for the privatisation of the PRC’s economy (and the corresponding damage done to workers’ rights in the PRC):
There are a few issues with that: