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Louis Proyect wrote

Still a tinge of Maoist red in China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/china-s-virus-vaccine-will-be-global-public-good-xi-says?utm_content=asia
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Maybe we're seeing the response of a society and economy that has until now been on its way up and isn't floundering around trying to figure out where all the brownie points went.

Last time we were in trouble globally, the Chinese government basically rescued global capitalism with its gigantic post-2007-2009 stimulus package, and as John Smith says "helped to fuel the rise in raw materials costs that itself gave rise to speculative capital, and that money was to be made by further boosting the price of raw materials" and temporarily saving the economies of the raw materials-exporting poorer countries.

Smith doesn't see how China will be able to exercise that option this time around, and the countries of the global south will share in the general debacle big-time, especially with the late and even more tragic arrival in their countries of the full brunt of the corona virus, and as northern investors continue to flee their markets. Again quoting Smith, G20 "creditors are resisting calls altogether for a voluntary standstill to loan repayments on commercial sovereign debt [in the global south]. In other words, they are resisting even a postponement of their debt payments...[according to Smith that includes China among the G20 countries resisting relief to the poorer nations, by the way. So that "tinge of Maoism," if Maoism really had that effect by design on poorer nations and not extraction and exploitation of others in Africa especially from the get-go, appears to be pretty thin. I was in east Africa during the time of Mao when the Chinese were building rail lines from the copper mines of Zambia to the seaports, constructing roads and a bridge across the Nile through southern Sudan and its petroleum deposits to the Red Sea, ass over teakettle, with cheap African labor overseen by Chinese foremen and engineers]. All of the full force of the economic crisis of the world and in their own countries is going to be placed on the shoulders of the workers and the farmers of these countries without any relief whatsoever. None whatsoever."
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