History disagrees with you. The Soviet Union and the PRC inherited the contradictions of Tsarist Russia and the Qing Dynasty, and you can’t just handwave that away. Russia was one of the eight nations in the Eight-Nation Alliance that came to oppress China during the Century of Humiliation. Russia also had unequal treaties with China. To make a long story short, Lenin was cool about annulling those treaties while Stalin was less so. Meanwhile, Khrushchev threatened to nuke China. Russia should be paying China reparations for its role in the Century of Humiliation if anything. The relationship isn’t equal because Russia owns China for historical wrongs and ought to repay China in the form of reparations. “Uh aktually we’re no longer Russia we’re the Soviet Union.” Yeah, and look what that got you.
Uh aktually we’re no longer Russia we’re the Soviet Union."
oh so you’re just weirdly vindictive and petty about this, and hide it under historical dynamics without an actual class analysis beyond “they inherited the contradictions” (without naming these contradictions, in their specifics and implications with real class analysis — and ignoring the actual industrial aid and capital transfers and sending specialists and bringing their political, scientific, military, and industrial leaders to study in their schools for free, and sharing intelligence operations and countless other things; and also somehow holding up historical power imbalances as justifying some of the most unhinged foreign policy decisions the socialist world has ever seen, as if you’re more interested in the concept of exacting revenge than in maintaining national and international unity through repairing wrongs)
I just disagree that they’re fully subservient to Adults in the Room type decisions between imperialism or more imperialism that “geopolitics” can be used as a stand-in for. I don’t think China had a responsibility to suffer the indignities that Khr*shchev and/or the USSR in general put them through. Obviously significant responsibility fell on the USSR to actually not be dicks
History disagrees with you. The Soviet Union and the PRC inherited the contradictions of Tsarist Russia and the Qing Dynasty, and you can’t just handwave that away. Russia was one of the eight nations in the Eight-Nation Alliance that came to oppress China during the Century of Humiliation. Russia also had unequal treaties with China. To make a long story short, Lenin was cool about annulling those treaties while Stalin was less so. Meanwhile, Khrushchev threatened to nuke China. Russia should be paying China reparations for its role in the Century of Humiliation if anything. The relationship isn’t equal because Russia owns China for historical wrongs and ought to repay China in the form of reparations. “Uh aktually we’re no longer Russia we’re the Soviet Union.” Yeah, and look what that got you.
USSR did give China massive help in military and industrial equipment, tech transfer and help in education of specialists. Does it count?
oh so you’re just weirdly vindictive and petty about this, and hide it under historical dynamics without an actual class analysis beyond “they inherited the contradictions” (without naming these contradictions, in their specifics and implications with real class analysis — and ignoring the actual industrial aid and capital transfers and sending specialists and bringing their political, scientific, military, and industrial leaders to study in their schools for free, and sharing intelligence operations and countless other things; and also somehow holding up historical power imbalances as justifying some of the most unhinged foreign policy decisions the socialist world has ever seen, as if you’re more interested in the concept of exacting revenge than in maintaining national and international unity through repairing wrongs)
I just disagree that they’re fully subservient to Adults in the Room type decisions between imperialism or more imperialism that “geopolitics” can be used as a stand-in for. I don’t think China had a responsibility to suffer the indignities that Khr*shchev and/or the USSR in general put them through. Obviously significant responsibility fell on the USSR to actually not be dicks