China, the steno apologists and tankies, and real foreign policy

The Nation has a very good overall piece by David Klion on how "progressives" should have a China policy that rejects neoliberal based free trade AND calls Beijing out on human rights abuses, but yet looks to avoid military or military-related "solutions."

As for the Uyghur issue? Uyghurs living abroad, per Klion, would like to see actions by the US like the Global Magnitsky Act being applied to China.

It's not perfect, starting with Klion not going further left than the DSA roseys, but it's a start. I'm sure that not only the allegedly outside the box stenos like Maté and Blumenthal, but today's tankie types like Richard D. Wolff and Rainier Shea of The People's Republic of Humboldt Bay likely don't accept the facts on the ground that Klion presents.As an ex-Green, I know the tankie train runs there, too.

There's nothing new to the stenos. It's just a new version of neoliberal "engagement" with tankie lipstick smeared on that pig. The tankies themselves are of course heirs to those who tried to pretend away the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and other disasters.

One thing Klion gets at is we need to reject other twosiderism beyond that of "confront bluntly" or "appease" — namely, that of "capitalism" vs "communism."

Anybody who's not a tankie or a wingnut knows that China is some version of state capitalism. And, no, NOT state capitalism in the sense of classic Marxist-Leninist ownership of the means of production. Rather, it's more on the lines of state control, indirectly but far beyond the US regulatory state, but kind of like American GSEs — indirect control or quasi-ownership. Given the degree of Chinese economic ownership like this, one could bring out the third label of "fascism."

I don't totally agree with something like this, though:

Isabella Weber, a German political economist whose recent book How China Escaped Shock Therapy traces the origins of the economic liberalization implemented by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and ’80s, rejects these simplistic labels. “I think of China as a state-constituted market economy that relies on a strong capitalist dynamic,” she told me. “This is a new kind of economic system that we have to study on its own terms.”

That comment still gives too much of a capitalist fetish to the whole idea of "markets." (And, with that, shows that The Nation remains left-liberal, not actually leftist.)

That's even more true when one looks at the reality of these markets. This:

In Weber’s analysis, over the past four decades China’s powerful one-party state has created enormous markets that have reintegrated the country into the world economy (enriching capitalists and undermining unions in the process), but it has always done so in pursuit of China’s long-term economic development and political sovereignty.

Is certainly not 100 percent true. State-owned industries, owned at the provincial, county or municipal level, have been a hive of Chinese-style corrupt crony capitalism, and in a country with nearly four times the US population and more land area, even a top-down government in Beijing can't track all of that.

Klion misses other issues here, ones that aren't about human rights, etc., but are straight fiscal issues.

Most notably, he doesn't discuss monetarism and China's continued refusal to let the renmimbi fully float on world exchanges. That would be a non-military stick to be used with things like the Global Magnitsky Act, and with various carrots as well.

Other than that, Klion doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, attempted solutions, or actual or attempted partial solutions. Trying to nationalize an "essential industry" like computer chips may help, but the biggest players there are Taiwanese, not Chinese.

IMO, what would really help would be applying the Global Magnitsky Act to US companies, not just Chinese, who participate in human rights abuses. If it currently doesn't allow that? Fix it! Raising the cost of doing bad business in Beijing would be neither carrot nor stick, but Archimedian leverl.