https://archive.is/FKuhi (reuters)
https://archive.is/MIdNc (afp)
Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met for about eight hours with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Geneva in their first face-to-face meeting since the world’s two largest economies heaped tariffs well above 100% on each other’s goods.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that an 80% tariff on Chinese goods “seems right”, suggesting for the first time a specific alternative to the 145% levies he has imposed on Chinese imports.
Neither side made any statements about the substance of the discussions nor signaled any progress towards reducing crushing tariffs as meetings at the residence of Switzerland’s ambassador to the U.N. concluded at about 8 p.m. local time. (1800 GMT)
The discussions are expected to restart on Sunday in the Swiss city, according to an individual familiar with the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The 80% number is just something that Trump posted on his social media early on Friday morning, before any meeting ever happened.
UPDATE Trump posted on truthsocial, 1 hour ago. He describes the meeting with the phrases “total reset” and “great progress”. I won’t believe this until I hear the perspective from China’s government.
This is all gang of four ultraleft nonsense and vibe-posting, with zero sources, to try to drivie home the long-debunked propaganda that China abandoned the socialist road.
If you’re going to claim that the PRC is a liberal country now, and that the CPC “hasn’t been a marxist party since the 1990s”, then there’s zero point in engaging.
No offense, you NEVER lived in China. You have no idea what China was like in the 1990s, in the 2000s.
Deng’s reform had effectively ended in the 1990s with China experiencing an economic crisis with an unemployment rate never seen before under Mao. By 1998, Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing program and fully opened up the property market to private capital in China. By 2001, it would join the WTO and stripped the last vestiges of worker’s rights in China.
China returning to its Marxist roots is a very recent phenomenon, with Xi ascending to power in 2013. He had vowed to take on the neoliberals on many occasions, which I fully support. As I said, it seems that the libs are still too powerful in China (especially after sabotaging Zero Covid) and if you have been paying attention at all, Li Qiang, the new Premier, has been running the show for a while now, engaging with business leaders and private capital, vowing to open up China’s capital markets etc.
Again, most Western leftists have zero idea on what they’re talking about when it comes to the pre-2018 history in China. They only know Xi and Deng, but what happened in between, few had any clues at all.
All ultraleft vibes, not a single source, yet again.
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For the record I lost all of my notes and references that I had been writing for over a year. This is literally my first day back on Hexbear and I typed all those out from memory lol.
Funny that you literally had a chance to converse with someone who knows so much more about China than you do, and instead of taking this as an opportunity to learn and ask questions, you stubbornly chose to remain ignorant. Typical arrogant Western leftist lol.
You said not two comments ago that you, “know better than the PRC’s planners on how to correct its economy”.
You also claim than the PRC abandoned workers rights by the 90s, and purged all Marxists from the CPC’s leadership stucture.
You apparently know better than the 100 million members of the CPC, that their country is a neoliberal one now? Who’s being arrogant?
I literally named the key authors of the theories I wrote in one of the comments above: Jia Genliang and Zuo Da Pei, who are both Marxist economists who understand the Chinese economy better than most of the neoliberals (for example, who could have seen the consumption problem coming from more than a decade ago?)
If you want a good read (or if you can find someone to translate into English), I strongly recommend Jia Genliang’s 《国内大循环：经济发展新战略与政策选择》 (The Great Domestic Circulation: Economic development strategy and policy choices, 2020) and 《现代货币理论在中国》 (Modern Monetary Theory in China, 2023). I was already doing some of the translation and posted sporadically here until my laptop blew up a couple months back. Nearly all of the author’s points about the mistake of not building up a strong consumer base and doubling down on export led growth, some made as far back as 2013-2015, and how that would make the Chinese economy vulnerable to US unilateral ending the longstanding economic arrangement, is all being played out today.
And somehow you think Justin Lin Yifu, literally the protege of Theodore Schultz and co-founder of Chicago School economics with Milton Friedman, is somehow the beacon of Chinese socialist economics?
And for the record (this is going to shock you), you know I’m a firm supporter of Deng’s reform right? I literally explained above how Deng’s reform ended in the 1990s and the entire 2000s was a wild neoliberal ride for China until Xi came to power in the mid-2010s to rein in private capital.
If you don’t know anything about this period, then I’m here for discussion and education, no need to be so arrogant and dismissive about a topic you don’t understand. The claim that my arguments are somehow “ultraleft” is complete nonsense and only exposes how little you understand China’s history. You have not put up any argument (any substantive pushback is totally fine by me, I like to engage in discussions, that’s the point of this forum) and simply dismiss them as “ultraleft” without anything to back them up.
And for all the historical events, you can simply look them up. How is China joining WTO in 2001, the US-backed organization that literally demands developing countries to strip off labor rights in order to gain a foothold in the global market, somehow a controversial topic here? Are we not agreeing that the WTO is an imperialist arm of the US empire?
The PRC does not suddenly become a liberal country because it has some advisors who studied in the US or worked for the WTO, nor do the excesses and missteps of the wild 90s negate the socialist character of the CPC. The claim that the PRC is now a liberal country, and abandoned Marxism, because it became a member of the WTO, is equally ignorant. The PRC did not join the WTO because it “became liberal”, it did so because its one of the larger international trade orgs, and the PRC’s socialist market economy tends to do a lot of world trade.
Cuba and Vietnam are also both WTO members. Are they also liberal countries now too?
I apologize if I unduly called you an ultraleft, but this one drop of blood fallacy you’re committing here is typical of ultraleft critiques of AES states. “You’re a member of the WTO? You must have abandoned Marxism!”
What argument are you making exactly? There are a lot of members of the CPC therefore it is definitely communist and couldn’t be infiltrated by liberals? It’s not exactly unheard of in history that a communist party would be infiltrated by nationalists and/or liberals.
I would definitely not like that to happen to China but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Also xiaohongshu seems way more knowledgeable about recent Chinese history than you, you moan about sources yet you haven’t posted any yourself.
Claiming that the CPC abandoned communism and has been taken over by neoliberals is a very bold claim, and you shouldn’t accept it without some sources.
I can provide some alternates, but I don’t know what basis XHS is claiming that on. Is it the standard ultraleft position that the “reform and opening up” was a liberalization? If that’s the case here are some on that:
For a longer text on why the PRC is still absolutely communist, and communist thinking drives the party, I recommend Jin Huiming - Marxism and Socialism with chinese characteristics. Or any of the chinese marxist journals from the academy of marxism which go through what the current difficulties and focus points.
I don’t agree with the claim that it has been completely subverted by liberals, but there does seem to be a strong liberal current within the CPC.
Why hasn’t the CPC in the current global situation move more strongly towards socialism and liberation of Global South countries? The idea of a Chinese “Marshall plan” that Xiaohongshu outlined seems like a reasonable step, do you have any information about that actual plans of the CPC?
I’d also like to say that its extremely sus that XHS goes after defenders of the PRC, jumping to arguments of authority that (since we must not live in China, or must not be Chinese, we don’t know how liberal/bad it is!). XHS talks down to anyone who dares defend the socialist character of the CPC. This is exactly the strategy that we’d expect from an intelligence or influence op, to claim indigeneity to a country that they then demonize on any ground.
The belt and road initiative is that plan. The PRC has infrastructure and development partnerships from countries in Southern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
https://qutnyti.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/belt-road-initiative-an-anti-thesis-of-colonialism/
Wikipedia I know, but this is a good outline: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_of_the_Belt_and_Road_Initiative
I encourage you to ask for sources, don’t take anything on faith, especially long-winded diatribes filled with unsourced stats from people claiming that AES countries abandoned socialism. The fact that so many people upvotee their posts (claiming that the PRC is run by liberals now), without a single person questioning it, is shameful.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2: