Summary
China condemned JD Vance on Tuesday for calling Chinese people “peasants” in a Fox News interview, where he said, “To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry labeled the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful.”
The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.
Critics mocked Vance’s own “hillbilly” background and pointed to China’s advanced tech and infrastructure, highlighting rising tensions amid Trump’s trade war.
It’s both information and argumentation - the statements you can discard, maybe I’m lying, but the fact that it’s possible for a bureaucratic elite to not formally own anything yet factually own a country by itself should be something easy to agree with, no? And I’m bringing your attention to it.
Really hard to find sources for something as obvious.
Yes, because the stated value of Soviet ruble was irrelevant in a planned economy in a bureaucratic state. Should be easy to grasp the causation.
Yes, Putin doesn’t own his palaces, and any high-ranking official in Russia most likely has much more than they own. What they show is a drop in the sea of what they really control and use.
Oligarchs are a bit like publicity figures, they are one order of magnitude less significant that anybody in the actual ruling group. Sort of ambassadors.
Think of it like of mafia properties. It was similar in the USSR, the elites used and controlled a lot of state properties which nobody else used and controlled. Why would you need to formally own that if you own the state machine?
Peasants who owned the land they were working were called “kulaks” in propaganda and repressed, because they were a bit less of a herd of ignorant illiterate animals who’d just obey orders.
And Stolypin’s reforms were aimed exactly at changing the ratio. And they were succeeding, except WWI happened.
Military industry is the main thing all this was intended for until Stalin’s death.
You do realize USSR didn’t change that part, just rearranged it, right? At least until Khruschev.
Even in the 30s people were starting to doubt its shine. In 20s - oh yes, when you read things from that time, you feel amazed at how real it feels, people really believing into that steel monster.
I’m gonna stop engaging with your “I know better than empirical evidence approach based on my vibes of who controlled what”. Enjoy bootlicking the corporate overlords that plunge your country in imperialist war, at least now you have bananas and soda, even if people can’t afford housing.