Joined May 2009
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15 Jun 2023
I wrote a book about why the left should support Chinese socialism and why all peace-loving people should stand up against the US-led New Cold War. It's called 'The East is Still Red – Chinese socialism in the 21st century'.
Get it from Praxis Press: redletterspp.com/collections…
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Carlos retweeted
Truth About Mao ZeDong & #China
"....life expectancy rose by 32 years – fastest in history. Adult illiteracy fell from 80% to 33%. Land redistributed. Women emancipated. Industrial base built. Treaty ports abolished. The country was unified after the Century of Humiliation
The Chinese socialist project from Mao to Xi: one continuous revolution.
The standard Western story about modern China is that Mao has been quietly buried by the Communist Party, that Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy, and that the China that emerged after 1978 is no longer really socialist. By implication, China’s success is the success of capitalism, not of the revolution.
So why do ordinary Chinese people still travel in their millions to Shaoshan – the village in Hunan where Mao was born, now one of the most-visited tourist sites in China – to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic? Stand there among the crowds and the Western story falls apart on contact.
In this video I draw on a recent trip to Shaoshan, and on the hard development data from the Mao era, to answer that question: the Mao era and the reform era are not opposed phases of Chinese history. They are two stages of a single revolutionary project, and the Chinese people know it.
Between 1949 and 1976, life expectancy in China rose by 32 years – the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Adult illiteracy fell from over 80 per cent to 33 per cent by 1978. Land was redistributed. Women were emancipated. A complete industrial base was built from near-zero. The treaty ports were abolished. The country was unified after a century of fragmentation. This is the China the post-Mao leadership inherited – not the impoverished backwater of Western myth.
Without Mao, no Deng. Without 1949, no 1978. As the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin put it, the take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.” It is also exactly how the Communist Party of China understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “the two cannot negates.”
youtube.com/watch?v=4LuBmu87…
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China is the world’s undisputed leader in green energy.
In 2025, all of China’s increase in energy needs was covered by renewables.
Newly installed renewable power generation capacity in China accounted for more than 60 percent of global additions.
Renewables accounted for 82.7 percent of newly installed power capacity in China in 2025.
China’s electricity generation from renewable sources exceeded the combined power consumption of the European Union’s 27 member states.
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The Chinese socialist project from Mao to Xi: one continuous revolution.
The standard Western story about modern China is that Mao has been quietly buried by the Communist Party, that Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy, and that the China that emerged after 1978 is no longer really socialist. By implication, China’s success is the success of capitalism, not of the revolution.
So why do ordinary Chinese people still travel in their millions to Shaoshan – the village in Hunan where Mao was born, now one of the most-visited tourist sites in China – to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic? Stand there among the crowds and the Western story falls apart on contact.
In this video I draw on a recent trip to Shaoshan, and on the hard development data from the Mao era, to answer that question: the Mao era and the reform era are not opposed phases of Chinese history. They are two stages of a single revolutionary project, and the Chinese people know it.
Between 1949 and 1976, life expectancy in China rose by 32 years – the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Adult illiteracy fell from over 80 per cent to 33 per cent by 1978. Land was redistributed. Women were emancipated. A complete industrial base was built from near-zero. The treaty ports were abolished. The country was unified after a century of fragmentation. This is the China the post-Mao leadership inherited – not the impoverished backwater of Western myth.
Without Mao, no Deng. Without 1949, no 1978. As the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin put it, the take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.” It is also exactly how the Communist Party of China understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “the two cannot negates.”
youtube.com/watch?v=4LuBmu87…
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Jun 12
Utterly despicable.
It seems that protest against genocide poses such a threat to the status quo that the British ruling class is willing to dispense with even the pretence of democracy.
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Jun 12
The whole fiasco is perfectly obviously a message from the security state and the military-industrial complex to the next prime minister: if you try backing off from war against Russia, you’ll soon be reacquainted with your P45.
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Jun 12
“No bomber can do much against facilities buried more than 70 metres underground. Watching B-52s drop multiple bunker-buster bombs on a single site looked terrifying. Yet, only a few hours later, missiles were being launched from the same location. They cannot be destroyed. Full stop!”
The US and Israel may have the most expensive and sophisticated weaponry in the world, but they’re up against an opponent that’s smarter, more resilient, more courageous and more committed than them.
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Carlos retweeted
Jun 12
Good to see China firmly keeping up the fight against corrupting, degenerate Western influence ✊✊✊✊✊
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Jun 11
The US destroyed two reservoirs in southern Iran – 20,000 people now without water in 50°C heat. Add it to the schools, hospitals and bridges already hit. This is collective punishment of a civilian population and the continuation of the Epstein class's Gaza playbook.
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Jun 11
Twenty-two countries demonising Iran and promoting false flag narratives.
“The statement was issued by Albania, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the United States.”
So it’s essentially a global “rights for whites” campaign?
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Jun 10
Britain is fast-tracking a new law allowing the home secretary to designate foreign state-linked organisations – Iran's IRGC is the headline target – as national security threats. Supporting such a group, or benefiting materially from it, becomes a crime.
You wouldn't have to be a nutty conspiracy theorist to wonder if the timing of this is linked to the fact that Britain's close allies are engaged in a patently illegal war against Iran at this very moment.
Will this law be used against groups with ties to the Israeli state? A state which has been engaged in genocide in Gaza for nearly three years; which detonated thousands of pagers in Lebanon? The Israeli embassy was caught on film plotting to "take down" a British government minister, working through lobby groups that count hundreds of MPs as members. It's before the ICJ on genocide charges. Its biggest arms company operates ten sites across Britain, selling weapons "battle-tested" on Palestinians.
We need to understand that "foreign power threat activity" doesn't mean threats to Britain. It means activity by anti-imperialist states and movements.
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Jun 10
A resolution submitted to the International Atomic Energy Association by the US, Britain, France and Germany has passed, calling on Iran to declare its remaining enriched uranium stocks and let inspectors verify them.
The purpose of the resolution is quite obviously to bolster the US-Israeli accusation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and thereby provide some sort of moral and legal justification for this criminal war.
A fun irony here is that, of the countries that drafted the resolution, three (the US, Britain and France) are nuclear powers, and the other (Germany) is considered to be a nuclear threshold state – and which anyway hosts US nukes.
The three countries voting against were China, Russia and Niger. Well done 🇨🇳🇷🇺🇳🇪 for upholding the principles of peace, justice and international law.
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Jun 10
Four of the world's least popular politicians discuss how to keep fighting a stupid and unwinnable war that's doing massive harm to their own populations
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Jun 10
🤣🤣🤣 The Cold War propaganda machine has outdone itself. We're being asked to believe the Communist Party of China (which all but eradicated organised crime, drugs and prostitution on the mainland, and whose forces the triads have always bitterly opposed) is secretly directing triad brothels in Britain to blackmail MPs.
The "evidence" consists of one regional police officer's report, built on interviews rather than facts, warning of what triads "could" do. Pure conjecture, laundered into a national security threat by a hawkish anti-China press.
This is the Fu Manchu yellow peril playbook, updated for the 21st century: associate China with criminality, vice and sexual menace, so that every Chinese person in Britain becomes a potential agent and every call for cooperation with Beijing becomes suspect. It softens up public opinion for hostility, militarisation and decoupling that serve Washington's New Cold War agenda.
Britain's real problems – collapsing living standards, rising poverty, crumbling services – aren't made in Beijing. Sinophobia is a distraction, and a dangerous one.
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Jun 10
The Economist – house journal of Western liberalism – understands pretty clearly that the war on Iran is a failure. The US bombed Iran's civilian and energy infrastructure, killed thousands, brought chaos to the world's most important energy chokepoint into chaos, and inflicted brutal economic conditions on the Iranian people.
And the result? No surrender, no agreement to restrict Iran's civilian nuclear program, no regime change. A major weakening of the US's military position in the Persian Gulf, Iran's permanent control of the Strait of Hormuz, another bloody nose for Israel, the global economy on the cusp of a very serious crisis, and an extremely fragile ceasefire that Washington is trying to dress up as a deal.
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Jun 9
The Pentagon just added BYD, Alibaba, Nio, CATL, JA Solar and Trina Solar to its “military company blacklist”.
What do these companies actually produce? Electric vehicles, batteries, solar, e-commerce, internet technology.
The definition of “military threat” has quietly become “any Chinese company that’s beating us”.
It’s containment and protectionism dressed up as national security.
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Jun 9
On whatever planet is inhabited by the good people at the Economist, Cubans have been suffering from “ideological certainties” for many decades, and Donald Trump can help them with that.
Back on Mother Earth, what’s causing Cuban suffering is the illegal blockade – the longest economic siege in modern history, condemned at the UN every year by all but the US and Israel.
Lift the blockade, then we can test this hypothesis around “ideological uncertainties”, m'kay?
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Jun 9
Look how beautiful Pyongyang looks. And think about how there was not a building left standing in 1953 after the genocidal US-led war on Korea.
youtube.com/watch?v=OQFELYh4…
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Jun 9
“The shared socialist ideal is the defining character of China-DPRK relations. The Communist Party of China and the Workers’ Party of Korea are both Marxist ruling parties, and China and the DPRK are fellow travellers on the socialist road. I firmly believe that as the two parties and two countries join hands to push forward each side’s party and state cause and continue to strengthen pragmatic exchanges and cooperation, this will powerfully promote national prosperity and strength and the happiness and well-being of the people, and will continuously demonstrate the marked advantages and bright prospects of socialism.” 🇨🇳🇰🇵✊🏽❤️
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