What is the difference between a mistake, and unfortunate necessities? Why are lesser-evil arguments not theoretical mistakes on our part when we make them about China? I’m not disagreeing with what you’ve said about how China rationalizes their policies, but my point is that, as a massive obligation of all Marxists, we need to critically examine it both analytically and normatively.

The intention is important because it’s relevant to understanding how China will act in the future. For instance, if revolutionary situations emerge in the rest of the world, will China actively support them? China has showed little to no interest in the contemporary era in supporting radical movements. I agree that they may be right to do this. There is perhaps a ‘socialism in one country’ calculation which goes beyond the Stalinist one (as Stalinist Russia did continue to support revolutionary movements, tho massively shit the bed in the case of China). Perhaps it is the correct one. But it does introduce the fear that they may never change this position, including in revolutionary scenarios when it would be in the interest of the world proletariat for them to do so.

We can go back to my previous comment to note that it goes further than trade, and depends what they are trading. China is not a group of students. If they boycot Israel or just don’t trade with it, it has a bigger effect, and will not contribue, indirect as it may or may not be, to the active repression of Palestinians in an area that is one of the most important for politicala and ant-colonial struggle in the current world.

I think the issue goes deeper than mistakes. Vulgar marxists often seem to judge things either ‘mistakes’ or ‘determined deterministically by their historical conditions, so stop moralizing about it’ based on their vibes towards the choice in question; mostly because they havent actually properly thought through and analyzed as Marxists the relationship between normative thought and judgement, and explanation in the context of historical materialism (which we can understand to mean here, in a relatively minimal and non-metaphysical sense, as simply a theory of social reality or phenemenon which aims to explain them on the basis of class, and how the latter determines the control and distribution of the economic surplus and other social relations in virtue of how the class relations organize and are influenced by transformations between the classes and between them and the forces of production). So you often see some people act or speak as if any use of normative concepts is ‘idealism’ (whatever they happen to mean here, which often seems to fluctuate incoherently), and cite out of context and reductively the quote where Marx says that communism is not an ideal to be established but a real movement of history. Ofc, even beyond the context, Marxism is not a religious dogma. It is not a cult. It is the proletarian stage of human enlightenment and a continuation of the scientific method in its first real application to the social, hence to itself, which in term influences itself, thus the world, thus itself in term and so on (whereby the mind-bending aspects of dialectics in the social context). Marx himself, and all of us, and any Marxist, when you read about their lives, and first and foremost motivated to political radicalism not based on some metaphysical revelation or scientifc realization of the dialectic of the movements of history (athough perhaps this is the more advanced view which develops later). It is based on the experience of oppression, exploitation, abuse, repression, violence, coercion and alienation, which reflect something not coherent with our own material interests. What matters normatively, in a concrete and experiential sense, are the material consequences that affect the majority of people. Experiences of justice are a part of this. Political thought decisions require necessarily normative (thus ethical or moral) forms of thought, though the latter don’t exhaust the former. But we need to be able to respond when people ask ‘why should we have communism/socialism/anarchism’? And they are going to what normative arguments in terms of how that kind of society will be more beneficial for them and the people they care about. If fascism was a more likely ‘real movement’ of history I would still oppose it and hopefully be willing to die fighting it than to simply say ‘okay well history has spoken’. The reason why there is a movement of history towards the conditions of socialism and communism is because they are, from the point of view of socio-historical evolution of the species, more advanced, efficient, beneficial ways of organizing society. Societies evolve into new forms based on their tensions, instabilities and internal dynamics, and those which have the historical advantage, as capitalism did when it emerged due to its greater powers of production and control, will often take a historical lead. We’ll see if China can do this. But socialism is a normative necessity, not a metaphysical necessity, although the two are linked in virtue of my last comment.

Btw I’m not saying at all that you are doing the above ‘vulgar marxism’, just highlighting it as a relevant topic of discussion. Just to be clear that I’m not attacking you here.

Chinese foreign policy was definitely, I agree, filled with actual mistakes. But if we put in the context of the Cold War and the increasing revisionism of the USSR, the hostility of the latter towards China, and the fact that the interests of the CPC were now tied to those of a nation-state structure, it forces us to realise the difficulty of determining the historically progressive policies when there is an immense temptation to identity those with the more spatially and temporally localized ones of the nation state one happens to control.