Europe is profitting off child slavery and other horrible shit worldwide. This isn’t a thing of the past only, and being dismissive like this is beyond disrespectful to the many victims of capitalism.

Europe still practices neocolonialism and imperialism. Hell, Australia and other European settler-colonies still exist.

economy war is when the west voluntarily hands you all its production and then gets mad that someone somehow handed the production over. i guess.

edit: the people actually waging economic war on you are your own god damned ruling class.

Nationalize your ports to prevent private foreign companies from buying them.

What do you mean “evil economy?” Is producing goods a bad thing?

What does this even mean

Can you provide a source for that claim?

They aren’t? Not only is the idea of mass Uyghur slave labor atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there’s “white genocide” in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the PRC is an incredibly industrialized country and as such doesn’t have a need for slavery. Slavery in general is a horribly inefficient system fir anything other than agrarian production, which is why the Statesian North liberated the slaves in the south, for more wage-laboring industrial workers.

In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of “genocide.” Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.

The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective’s Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.

I also recommend reading the UN report and China’s response to it. These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does.

Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn’t going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this.

Stupid and ignorant? Well maybe europeans should try to fix that.

It’s REALLY NOT that hard.

The republic must be restored

“We need to bring back the colonial government”

You guys are not beating the psychotically racist allegations. This is like saying we need to restore the British Raj in India

Europe: collaborates in the genocide of Palestinians

Europeans: “China is so evil and militaristic, look at all those hypothetical things they could hypothetically do to Taiwan!”

I want you to google the last time that china and taiwan had a military hostile interaction.

Please do.

Japan hasn’t even given a symbolic apology for their massive list of war crimes against China and all over Asia, Taiwan is part of China under international law, and the nationalist forces you defend were murdering communists while under attack by Japan. You fascist sympathizers…

Try to think why these supposed “threats” are such a big deal for an alliance of countries so far away from the region to be affected, and you might stumble upon the real reason why they hate China so much.

Spoiler alert, it’s because they can no longer take advantage of China like they did when it was under the boot of the British. They hate that it’s a sovereign country that works for its own benefit, and that their footholds in the region are unable to reverse the course of history as they’d like.

A rapist, a snitch and a liar walk into a bar. The bartender asks “The usual again Mr. Orwell”

I’m not a huge Star Wars guy. Can you refresh my memory as to when Luke went to the Ewoks’ planet, enslaved them, and chopped off their hands when they weren’t being productive enough in the rubber plantations? Because if I’m following the meme here right, Belgium would be Luke, but the guy that cuts off people’s hands is Darth Vader. Am I missing something?

They have to do something, which is why political instability is on the rise.

The EU has a much larger GDP and a significantly higher defense budget than Russia (about 457 billion USD vs. 146 billion USD in 2024)

The EU is far more financialized, in terms of gross industrial output the EU is behind the Russian Federation. This is a holdover from their soviet legacy. In terms of real production, Russia succeeds, despite lower GDP, because money stretches much farther in Russia. 1 million USD worth of Russian goods gets you a lot more than 1 million USD in European goods, to make things simple.

Europe could make up the gap, but it is so dominated by finance capital and energy dependency that this makes it incredibly difficult without adopting socialism.

Overall, the EU is economically and industrially stronger than Russia

This is false. The EU is financially stronger than Russia, largely thanks to modern neoimperialism in Africa, but industrially is far behind.

Since there is a noticable shift of power in the world the EU started to focus more on China and India as trading partners and leave the US who traditionally were European allies.

Correct, the EU is being demoted from imperial vassal to periphery, and since it would take devastating losses in open conflict with a major power without US backing it has to seek other allies.

What the EU doesn’t have, at least in the short/medium term, is energy. That industrial base needs (a lot of) energy. Russia was able to supply this cheaply, while the US is charging an arm and a leg. Of course in the long run, renewables can help keep that energy production local, but that means developing closer ties with China. And right now the US is trying to throw up walls to prevent other countries from accessing China’s renewable energy products.

The EU does indeed have a significantly larger potential industrial base than Russia. But that also requires coordination, intentional action, and long-term planning. So far the EU hasn’t seemed capable of doing these things but who knows, maybe Trump has been the wake-up call Europeans need.

I also hope Trump has shown Europeans that the US is the bigger threat to European sovereignty than Russia. And this will be true after Trump is gone, it’s not a one-time thing (Biden did things hostile to European sovereignty but that goes under the radar because he was more supportive of Ukraine). But yeah, if the EU makes some coordinated effort to build military defenses, they shouldn’t have a problem protecting their sovereignty against Russia. And that assumes Russia wants to try and military conquer parts of Europe, which I do not believe but even if I did, a more robust, domestic EU military would be enough to prevent an attack even if that was Russia’s intention.

The US is Europe’s fake friend - with or without Trump - and it frustrates me to no end that Europeans can’t see it.

I wouldn’t say “right behind,” Europe was very happy to buy Russian energy for decades until the US sabotaged Nord Stream. The US Empire is by far the most dangerous.

Vast industrial capacity and tons of oil and natural gas, both of which the EU needs but does not have.

unrelated: just finished “state and revolution.” liked it a lot, was able to let it sink in. thoughts on next?!

i concur. i feel like the op meme is just slop. not ai just … bog standard slop.

Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy in the PRC, and the working classes control the state. For example, when looking at publicly owned industries, we can see the following:

Even checking Wikipedia, data from 2022 shows that the overwhelming majority of the top companies are publicly owned SOEs. This is China’s strategy, they’ve been honest about it from the beginning. The private sector is about half cooperatives like Huawei or farming cooperarives and sole proprietorships, with the other half being small and medium firms. As these grow, they are folded into the public sector gradually. This is China’s Socialist Market Economy.

As for the state being run by the working classes, this is also pretty straightforward. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, and we can see the class breakdown of the top of the government itself:

Overall, this system has resulted in over 90% of the population approving the government, which is shown to be consistent and accurate. If you want to learn more, while not nearly as in-depth due to time limits as Roland Boer’s work (and mostly focused on the Xi Jinping era), Red Pen’s A Summary of Xi Jinping’s Governance of China can be a good primer! There’s also This is how China’s economic model works: Explaining Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Geopolitical Economy Report.

me when I do liberal reductionism and don’t understand anything Lenin, Chairman Mao or Stalin wrote.

Edit: To more properly explain.

You rely on a crude, ahistorical definition of socialism and treats China as a static abstraction rather than a real society developing under concrete material conditions. You reduce Marxism to a legal-form checklist and ignores class power, historical development, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a fundamental error.

In Marxism, “who owns the means of production” is not a question of paper titles but of class rule. Ownership only matters insofar as it expresses which class holds political power, controls surplus, and sets the direction of development. Defining socialism as the immediate abolition of all private enterprise is not Marxism; it is utopian liberal nonsense.

Lenin addressed this explicitly. Under proletarian rule, state capitalism is a socialist tool. His formulation is unambiguous: state capitalism under a dictatorship of the proletariat is not capitalism in the bourgeois sense but a form subordinated to socialist power and goals. The decisive issue is not whether markets or private firms exist, but which class commands them.

In China, the commanding heights of the economy are publicly owned and planned: land (state-owned in cities, collectively owned in the countryside), finance, energy, heavy industry, transport, telecommunications, arms production, and strategic resources. These sectors form the backbone of the economy. Private capital exists, but it does not dominate accumulation or political power.

The Chinese bourgeoisie does not rule. It has no independent state power and no ability to capture the party. Capitalists are subordinate to the Communist Party and can be regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, or eliminated when they conflict with socialist objectives. Recent crackdowns on tech monopolies, finance, real estate speculation, and billionaire figures demonstrate this class relation. In capitalist states, capital disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines capital.

Surplus extraction and allocation further expose the difference. Under capitalism, surplus is privately appropriated and reinvested for profit. In China, surplus (especially from state and regulated sectors) is redirected toward long-term national development: infrastructure, industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, and technological independence. The largest poverty reduction in human history did not occur through laissez-faire capitalism, but through state-directed socialist accumulation (nearly a billion people lifted from poverty).

Chairman Mao was also clear that socialism is not a finished endpoint but a long historical process filled with contradictions. He emphasized that class struggle continues under socialism and that development occurs through uneven, conflicting processes. Socialism is transitional by definition: it emerges from capitalism, contains remnants of it, and advances toward communism through struggle and transformation. Treating socialism as a stable, contradiction-free end state is anti-Marxist.

Calling China “authoritarian capitalism” is ridiculous. I’ve already dealt with the “capitalism” issue but also authoritarian is a useless modifier used by liberals to easily bundle together countries that opposed the status quo as evil and immoral. Try reading On Authority

“Everything else follows from there” is exactly wrong. Everything follows from class power, historical conditions, and the direction of development. Your reductionist liberal framework cannot explain why China plans five-year strategies, suppresses finance capital, controls land, resists imperialism, and openly declares socialism as its goal. Marxism can however.

The people, the people.

Good luck trying to state the obvious here, lots of tankies on lemmy.ml (as you can see from the other replies)

support North Korea

Good.

all the drama in Hong Kong, Taiwan

You 白左 really hate the liberation of your owners colonial holdings and fascist attack dogs.

The Russian Federation and DPRK are better than the west, though, as neither is plundering the global south. As for Hong Kong, it’s good that they are no longer colonized by the UK, and the PRC’s stance on Taiwan is that they will rejoin the PRC when they decide, and can wait it out.

The DPRK is a socialist country, that more than any other has been the subject of constant misinformation and mythologizing in the west. It’s the single most misunderstood state on the planet. No, it isn’t some utopia, but it instead is a real country with real people living their lives. It isn’t Mordor.

The Black Panther Party famously supported the DPRK, as do many African countries for the DPRK’s role in African liberation movements in the 20th century. Cuba maintains friendly ties. More than anything, it’s been mythologized about to the point of absurdity.

The problem with reporting on the DPRK is that information is extremely limited on what is actually going on there, at least in the English language (much can be read in Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and even Spanish). Most reports come from defectors, and said defectors are notoriously dubious in their accounts, something the WikiPedia page on Media Coverage of North Korea spells out quite clearly. These defectors are also held in confined cells for around 6 months before being released to the public in the ROK, in… unkind conditions, and pressured into divulging information. Additionally, defectors are paid for giving testemonials, and these testimonials are paid more the more severe they are. From the Wiki page:

Felix Abt, a Swiss businessman who lived in the DPRK, argues that defectors are inherently biased. He says that 70 percent of defectors in South Korea are unemployed, and selling sensationalist stories is a way for them to make a living.

Side note: there is a great documentary on the treatment of DPRK defectors titled Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul, which interviews DPRK defectors and laywers legally defending them, if you’re curious. I also recommend My Brothers and Sisters in the North, a documentary made by a journalist from the Republic of Korea that was stripped of her citizenship for making this documentary humanizing the people in the DPRK.

Because of these issues, there is a long history of what we consider legitimate news sources of reporting and then walking back stories. Even the famous “120 dogs” execution ended up to have been a fabrication originating in a Chinese satirical column, reported entirely seriously and later walked back by some news outlets. The famous “unicorn lair” story ended up being a misunderstanding:

In fact, the report is a propaganda piece likely geared at shoring up the rule of Kim Jong Eun, North Korea’s young and relatively new leader, said Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Most likely, North Koreans don’t take the report literally, Lee told LiveScience.

“It’s more symbolic,” Lee said, adding, “My take is North Koreans don’t believe all of that, but they bring certain symbolic value to celebrating your own identify, maybe even notions of cultural exceptionalism and superiority. It boosts morale.”

These aren’t tabloids, these are mainstream news sources. NBC News reported the 120 dogs story. Same with USA Today. The frequently reported concept of “state-mandated haircut styles”, as an example, also ended up being bogus sensationalism. People have made entire videos going over this long-running sensationalist misinformation, why it exists, and debunking some of the more absurd articles. As for Radio Free Asia, it is US-government founded and funded. There is good reason to be skeptical of reports sourced entirely from RFA about geopolitical enemies of the US Empire.

Sadly, some people end up using outlandish media stories as an “acceptable outlet” for racism. By accepting uncritically narratives about “barbaric Koreans” pushing trains, eating rats, etc, it serves as a “get out of jail free” card for racists to freely agree with narratives devoid of real evidence.

It’s important to recognize that a large part of why the DPRK appears to be insular is because of UN-imposed sanctions, helmed by the US Empire. It is difficult to get accurate information on the DPRK, but not impossible; Russia, China, and Cuba all have frequent interactions and student exchanges, trade such as in the Rason special economic zone, etc, and there are videos released onto the broader internet from this.

In fact, many citizens who flee the DPRK actually seek to return, and are denied by the ROK. Even BBC is reporting on a high-profile case where a 95 year old veteran wishes to be buried in his homeland, sparking protests by pro-reunification activists in the ROK to help him go home in his final years.

Finally, it’s more unlikely than ever that the DPRK will collapse. The economy was estimated by the Bank of Korea (an ROK bank) to have grown by 3.7% in 2024, thanks to increased trade with Russia. The harshest period for the DPRK, the Arduous March, was in the 90s, and the government did not collapse then. That was the era of mass statvation thanks to the dissolution of the USSR and horrible weather disaster that made the already difficult agricultural climate of northern Korea even worse. Nowadays food is far more stable and the economy is growing, collapse is highly unlikely.

What I think is more likely is that these trends will continue. As the US Empire’s influence wanes, the DPRK will increase trade and interaction with the world, increasing accurate information and helping grow their economy, perhaps even enabling some form of reunification with the ROK. The US Empire leaving the peninsula is the number 1 most important task for reunification, so this is increasingly likely as the US Empire becomes untenable.

Nodutdol, an anti-imperialist group of Korean expats, released a toolkit on better understanding the situation in Korea. This is more like homework, though. I also recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance for learning about the DPRK’s democratic structure.

That “drama” in Hong Kong is the result of 100 years of British colonial occupation. North Korea is the result of the US bombing the entire country until there were literally no structures left. Koreans in the North needed to live in caves to avoid being covered in napalm (and if you haven’t read about how napalm interacts with human flesh, please do).

China is not the bad guy in these situations. Britain, the US, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany - these are the bad guys.

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