It pays good money, for a job that doesn’t require much skill or thinking, and the job market isn’t doing so well right now.

I’ve always said that American will easily fix its military recruitment problem the moment it goes into recession.

1. Zootopia was the first Disney film in China and was absolutely massive phenomenon back then, one should not expect less on the anticipation level of the sequel
2. Very very poor state of Chinese film industry right now (full of nepotism and untalented people, it has “matured” into an industry driven by profit rather than artistic endeavor, you don’t really see auteur films coming out from China anymore)
3. People are tired of Marvel superhero movies, which used to be huge a few years back
4. People love animation films (see Nezha 2)

Having said that, the Mandarin Chinese dub is very bad and the audience complaints became a source of controversy a few days ago. I listened to a clip of the Cantonese dub (HK version) and it is so much better.

Despite an increase in free trade agreements outside the WTO’s purview, over 70 percent of global trade is still conducted under the WTO’s “most favored nation” principle. The point of the multilateral trading system is to ensure the fair and equitable treatment of all its members. Tariffs and other infringements of WTO rules end up hurting everyone.

The keyword missing from the entire article is “neoliberalism”.

The global trade over the past few decades has been sustained by the US running a permanent trade deficit and becoming the global debtor (as opposed to the previous superpowers e.g. British empire that ran a global creditor strategy), which allowed productive capacity to migrate into the developing world to drive global wages down and destroy domestic labor union movements that had grown very powerful in the post-war industrialization era.

The end result is a global overcapacity of production from the Global South, which is what made cheap goods possible. Trade is no longer used for exchanging goods between countries, but as a deliberate strategy to accumulate financial assets (US dollars) to make their budget deficit look small, as advised by the IMF. In other words, Global South labor produce real goods and services for the wealthy Global North countries to enjoy, in exchange for a number in their bank accounts.

The Euros had been enjoying the benefits of this US imperial strategy and it is only now that they are being outplayed by the US, their industries are uncompetitive against the Chinese, that they start worrying about “international trade is unfair”. Well, it has always been.

The wildcard for the global West in all of this will be whether the United States wants to preserve the multilateral world order it has been so instrumental in building and from which it has benefited so greatly.

Yes, and the preservation of this world order (or rather, the new iteration of this world order) requires Europe to make the sacrifice. The long-term deindustrialization of the US had intensified the contradictions of American capitalism, and the most prominent trend over the past decade has been the rise of Trump MAGA movement on the right and Bernie Sanders and now Zohran Mamdani’s movement on the left, after the great financial crash in 2008.

This contradiction cannot be resolved internally, but it can be exported to other parts of the world. The Europeans are being disciplined because after the fall of the USSR, the euro has emerged as a major competitor to the US dollar, which threatened the hegemony of the US financial empire. You can imagine what the US has ready for the Europeans now that their economic sovereignty has been strangled after the Ukraine war, and totally outplayed by the US.

Without examining the contradictions of global capitalism, geopolitical analysis is reduced to arguing which sport team is better or more fun to watch (which is what this article essentially is), but ultimately unable to understand the fundamental driving force of capital that shapes geopolitical tensions around the world.

The wildcard for the global East will be how China plays its hand on the world stage. It could take more steps to fill the power vacuums left by the United States in areas such as free trade, climate change cooperation, and development. It could try to shape the international institutions it now has a much stronger foothold in. It might seek to further project power in its own region.

Until China has finally come to the realization that neoliberalism needs to be abandoned, we will not see any fundamental changes.

The excitement about the rise of BRICS a few years ago only made it so much more disappointing when literally none of the BRICS countries shows any will to abandon neoliberal policies.

Where is the new economic doctrine proposal? You won’t find any, and certainly none in all of the BRICS summits since 2022.

How is the foreign currency-denominated debt of the Global South countries going to be resolved? Meanwhile, China is hoarding trillions and trillions of dollar reserves which has become an obsession, rather than putting them into good use. If a solution to this key issue cannot be found, the finance capital led by the US will continue to reign supreme.

This is just lib arguments lol. If you think Ukraine is anywhere close to winning the war or China is anywhere near to collapsing I have a bridge to sell you.

Why do Americans only think in black and white? Is it the Marvel superhero comics?

Read my comment here from the other day. There’s a good chance that the US has already “handled” Russia and China through various offers.

You have to understand that if we step out of the alt-media echo chamber and return to reality, Russia’s economy has been stagnating and the entire import substitution plan has pretty much failed, and China’s isn’t doing so well either especially after Covid that pretty much stopped China’s growth trajectory.

Both desperately need to negotiate with the US to lessen their burden, and the US empire doesn’t let you rest - it sees an opportunity and goes for the kill. There were alt-media commentators who told you that the US is so incompetent that they simply couldn’t get anything right up to the very moment Syria fell. Those of us who have been long enough here remember that.

My friend, I remind you that it took two world wars for Capital to resolve the contradiction of its overcapacity problem in the early 20th century. It ended with the near total annihilation of the European industrial capacity and gave way to the rise of the US and the USSR.

We avoided another great war in the late 20th century because the US voluntarily de-industrialized itself (to crush its domestic labor unions) by switching to a trade deficit strategy and exporting its manufacturing base to the Global South, and the USSR also voluntarily dissolved itself and got rid of its vast manufacturing capacity.

We are now overdue for another world war because China and the EU both want to run a trade surplus strategy, and with the US running a global tariff strategy that stifles consumption (thus intensifying overcapacity on the flip side), that can only mean a mercantilistic fight that, if not resolved in peace (through voluntary reduction or redistribution of productive capacity), will have to end with a war (physical destruction of the industrial base).

One of them will have to lose, or in the case of a war, likely both (and may as well be the entire world). The US as a financial empire will want to see both of them fight to the death and benefit from the fallout (just like it did during WWI).

Recall that after WWI, the US demanded repayment of the war debt of the Allied nations, which had not been a tradition prior to the 20th century. The US changed the game here, and the financial strain imposed on the post-war European nations led them to squeeze the defeated Germany even further, paving the way for the rise of Nazism and the militarization effort.

This has all the marks of the militarization of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The EU had its own calculation, and if their initial gamble had played out correctly, it would have been hailed as a masterful gambit by their Fourth Reich descendants.

To be specific, the EU had always wanted to plunder Russia and take its raw materials. In fact, did nobody else remember that the 2013 Maidan coup in Ukraine was directly caused by the EU wanting to destroy Russia’s domestic economy by flooding the Russian market with cheap European goods through Ukraine’s free trade agreement?

When the Ukraine war started in 2022, they saw the opportunity to colonize Russia by leveraging US sanctions. They had mistakenly thought that the combined US + EU sanctions (the two most powerful economic bodies in the world) would instantly destroy Russia’s economy whose GDP was smaller than Italy’s. Turns out Russia was far more resilient than that.

By August of 2022, merely months after the war started, Germany already wanted to resume Russian gas supply. Then in September, the Nord Stream pipelines exploded. They were outplayed by the US.

I don’t know what china gets out of this though because China is the main geopolitical rival and the one that the the US wants to eliminate.

China “wins” by letting the US understand that they cannot decouple from each other. You win by showing your opponent that it is too costly, both politically and economically, to start a fight with you.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the infrastructure investment-led growth phase is already coming to an end in China, if not ended already. Construction of new high-speed rails and subways are being halted due to over-investment and lack of revenue. Since most public transits are public services so they are not supposed to make a profit, many rail/subway companies also double as REITs to profit from the rising land value. Now that the property prices are plunging, these companies are under severe financial distress and unable to service their massive amount of debt.

Harbin, Qingdao and Yinchuan have just been denied their subway expansion plans last week, and other projects under construction are being halted. This signals the end of rail/subway expansion in China, especially for Tier 2/3 cities and below. In fact, back in 2021, the government had already stopped approving constructing subway systems in cities that do not already have them, so China’s subways will stay static at 54 cities for the foreseeable future. Luoyang was the last city to get onboard the last train (no pun intended) back in 2021 and managed to squeeze out two operational lines from that.

OK maybe I digressed a bit, but the point is that China is now becoming even more dependent on export, since the Dual Circulation Strategy proposed in 2020 has failed to spur domestic consumption. So, the US consumer market becomes more important than ever. If the US goes into recession like it did in 2008, it will send a massive shock wave throughout the world and adversely affect the exporter economies.

If China can get the US to keep importing from them, it’s a win because it keeps the export industries alive and the workers employed. There has been major push towards high tech manufacturing but those cannot possibly sustain the economy of such massive population.

Of course, the other way out is like I said, China needs to give up its neoliberal obsession of balancing the budget and starts deficit spend to drive domestic consumption.

The sad fact is that South Asians and Africans have faced quite open discrimination and prejudice across other parts of Asia for a long time now. This is just Western libs taking their masks off after years of having to pretend under a faux-progressive facade.

I recently read something interesting from the Chinese left-leaning commentators. People have pointed out that since the second half of 2025, China has abstained 5 times in UNSC votes and all of them related to ME/NA. Even more interesting is that all of them happened in the recent sessions, after the Trump-Xi meeting.

UNSC Resolution 2797 on October 31st on Western Sahara, which practically handed Western Sahara to Morocco. Passed 11-0. China, Russia and Pakistan (current member) abstained. Algeria (current member) did not participate, as expected.

UNSC Resolution 2799 on November 6th on Syria, which lifted sanctions against ISIL and Al-Qaida. Passed 14-0. China abstained.

UNSC Resolution 2801 on November 14th on Yemen, which extended sanctions against the Houthis. Passed 13-0. China and Russia abstained.

UNSC Resolution 2803 on November 17th on Gaza, which allowed establishing the ISF in Gaza. Passed 13-0. China and Russia abstained.

UNSC Resolution 2804 on November 25th on Libya, which extended the arms embargo imposed on Libya. Passed 13-0. China and Russia abstained.

That’s 5 out of 5 for the US in terms of imposing its strategic ambitions on the region.

While Russia is actively withdrawing its strategic interests from ME/NA due to the extended war in Ukraine, China has also quietly abstained from filling the gap.

Some are suspecting that the US is enticing Russia with a Ukraine peace deal that would be favorable to Russia, and China with its latest trade negotiations that promises to restore the status quo.

I don’t know how the US response to Taiwan/Japan comes into play, but some people are speculating that this could be to exchange for China’s abstention from the US actions in Venezuela.

There is no surprise at all.

Wang Jian (王建) from China Society of Macroeconomic Research, who proposed the Great External Circulation strategy back in 1987 that was officially adopted by the central government, talked about this in an interview in the early 2000s:

中国是享受到美元霸权的好处最大的国家……美国巨大的贸易逆差，是对中国产品的巨大需求， 拉动了我们经济的增长……我们现在要担心的是，美元贬值引起国际金融大动荡，美元失去国际的货币的霸主地位，没有能力继续用经常项下的逆差来拉动亚洲，特别是对于中国的经济增长的影响，这才是最可怕的事。”

China is the greatest beneficiary of the dollar hegemony… the huge trade deficit of the US also represented a huge demand for Chinese products, and spurred our economic growth… What we have to worry about now, is the global financial instability caused by the depreciation of the US dollar. If the dollar loses its global currency hegemonic status, it will no longer have the capacity to sustain its deficit to drive Asia’s growth, and this will especially affect China’s economic growth. This would be the most terrible thing to happen.

In September 2020, months after China proposed the Dual Circulation Strategy (export balanced by domestic consumption), Wang Jian reasserted the importance of dollar hegemony in an interview:

中国是最依靠美元体系的国家，因为人民币没有国际化，而欧元、日元、韩元等都是国际化货币。过去，中国一直享受着美元霸权的好处，人民币不是国际化货币，但是中国的生意可以做到世界最大，因为中国用美元结算。如果美元体系崩溃，即美元作为储备货币和结算货币的比例发生断崖式下降，比如从60%下降到30%，受到伤害最大的一定是中国。 所以在 “十四五”期间，一旦美元出问题，会对中国产生非常大的影响。

China is the country that relies the most on the dollar system, because the RMB is not internationalized, whereas the Euro, the Japanese yen, the Korean won, are all internationalized currencies. In the past, China has continuously enjoyed the benefit of the dollar hegemony - the RMB is not an internationalized currency, yet Chinese businesses can expand to become the world’s largest, because transactions in China are settled in US dollars. If the dollar system collapses, then the proportion of the US dollar as a reserve currency and settlement currency will fall steeply. For instance, if it drops from 60% to 30%, the country that is hurt the most must be China. Hence, if the dollar system encounters trouble during the 14th FYP period (2021-2025), it will cause great impact to China’s production.

Source is from Jia Genliang’s Modern Monetary Theory in China (2023)

Once you understand this, you will understand that China cannot and will not give up the dollar system, especially its hegemonic status. The status quo greatly benefited the Chinese economy and there is no reason to give up even when the US itself is threatening to end the arrangement, because China still has plenty of cards to play (e.g. rare earth export). The US will find itself unable to decouple from China.

This is also why when the US confiscation of Russia’s $300 billion foreign reserve at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Fed rate hike that caused dollar liquidity crisis in many Global South countries and spurred strong interest in many to leave the dollar regime, China has been the one that was and still is the most reluctant to abandon the US dollar. If China doesn’t want to, then nobody else can do anything about it. The Biden administration correctly gambled that China would not threaten the dollar hegemony during the rate hike in 2022.

You’re missing a lot of steps here.

Post-war Japan fought a 20-year trade war with US and won each time. By 1980, Japanese cars were cheaper and more energy efficient and had already overtaken American car manufacturers. The same went for their shipbuilding, electronics and various high-tech industries that handily beat their American counterparts in the world market.

And this was a time when the American industries were nowhere near as dilapidated as they are today. Japan really was the OG China before today’s China. And there is no way that the Americans don’t understand the lessons during their long struggle against Japan 40 years ago.

What did the Japanese in was their hubris during the Plaza Accord, which resulted in the poor handling of the crisis in the 1990s.

And to understand this, you need to understand the post-war political situation of Japan. Even though Japanese economy was soaring, on the international stage, they were not part of the permanent members of the UNSC, and their constitution actively forbade the formation of a conventional military (they are only allowed self defense force that is used for defensive purpose only - any other country with a conventional military are allowed for both offensive and defensive purposes). This constricts their ability to power project as a global power.

So when Japan began to overtake the US economy in the 1980s, they were not satisfied with just becoming an economic powerhouse. Japan wanted to own America. Hence, by 1989, Mitsubishi bought the majority stake of Rockefeller Group with $1 billion as though it was nothing. Japanese businessmen spent lavishly in America as though it was nothing. This tells you how much Japan yearned to become the master to the Americans.

So it is wrong to say that Japan has merely been a colony of the US. Yes, it appeared subservient to the US, but if you look throughout history, most vassals are ready to rebel against their hegemon when the opportunity comes. Abe, and now Takaichi (who was Abe’s protege) are doing whatever they’re doing precisely because of this. These are all calculated moves. Of course Takaichi knew that her words about Taiwan would cause fury from the Chinese side. Of course she knew how the Chinese would react on the international stage. They’re not stupid, these are all calculated. They wanted to use this opportunity to amend the constitution such that Japan can begin to form its conventional military again. And you can see that her popularity soared to 69.9% after her speech that veers on reviving the Imperial Japan militarism. None of this is a coincidence.

There has been a whole lot of non-historical analysis that pervaded even the Western online leftist spaces that only see the EU and Japan as some sort of mindless vassals that simply obey what the US tells them to. The EU are stupid! Japan is stupid! This would assume that these countries don’t know what they’re doing, and such superficial understanding of the world often comes from people who don’t think deeply about how material forces (i.e. capital) shape global geopolitical tensions (plenty of them on Twitter). The EU’s economy is being destroyed not because they are stupid, it’s because they lost in their maneuvers against the Americans.

Yes, I’m pretty sure the accounts are registered outside Russia.

Soyuz MS-28 has been rolled out on the launch platform of Baikonur Cosmodrome and will be launched in the coming hours.

The paint job features beautiful drawings of children fighting cancer, depicting their “innermost desires”:

This is also a joint Russia-US mission that will carry an American astronaut, Christopher Williams, together with Mikaev and Kud-Sverchkov, as shown on the mission patch:

It’s a clear sign that internet bringing the world together isn’t what it has been touted to be. Together with the US regionalizing its own TikTok platform, we are going to be seeing more siloing of internet content rather than widespread dissemination. Neoliberal globalization in its current form is coming to an end, with the US leading the way for decoupling, although there are still many countries (looking at the BRICS) that still want the status quo to remain and not realizing that the current era will be over soon.

On the other hand, this is going to cause a significant ad revenue loss for the Russian content creators. Say what you want about Youtube and Google, they still pay the ad revenue much better than the other platforms. It’s also a reason why most popular Chinese content creators in bilibili also have separate channels on Youtube, because bilibili pays like shit for their content creators, so you can have millions of views in mainland China but still earn a fraction of what you get for a couple hundred thousand views on Youtube (Taiwan/HK/overseas Chinese audience), and that’s not accounting for the dollar exchange rate yet.

So some of the Russian creators are probably going to have a second channel on Youtube like their Chinese counterparts do, but how they can get the payment under sanction, I’m not sure. There are still many Russian content creators who have their Youtube channels, so they must be getting paid in one way or another. Others have switched to crypto/bitcoin and I don’t blame them a bit.

Meanwhile, rutube is really not that good yet compared to Youtube in terms of functionality, but maybe this will incentivize them to improve.

No disagreement there, and I agree criticism and even some level of cynicism against American social democracy (lol) is very much warranted, but I am still ready to give them the win here.

It dispels the myth that I see being perpetuated in many radical left spaces that Americans would rather support fascism than a brown Muslim immigrant socialist. In fact, as I pointed out in another comment, white men (often deemed the most reactionary) turned out to be the ones that went the furthest for Mamdani than any other demographic, again dispelling the myth that white American men are all crypto-Nazis who want to turn the country into the Fourth Reich.

Of course, you can say that social democracy is the moderate wing of fascism, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. The America left isn’t even close to that stage of political struggle yet. It is a nascent movement that still have a lot to learn.

All of what you’re saying is true, but that doesn’t take away the significance of Mamdani, who has become a beacon of hope upon whom the rest of the movement in the US could rally around, as another poster has commented that their campaign saw a huge surge of support because of Mamdani.

It is an important victory and milestone for the American left. This doesn’t mean they are on the right track (as I’ve always said, they’re not even at step one yet, they are still at step zero) but we cannot deny them the win.

He is an important beacon of hope in this time of need.

If you only spend time on Hexbear or similar leftist online space, you’d think that Americans are total lost cause with no redeemable quality, and that socialism can never be achieved in the country.

Mamdani’s win breaks this extreme cynicism that has infested many so-called Marxist-Leninist revolutionary online spaces that have cultivated a defeatist attitude because they once supported Bernie/AOC.

The extra irony here is that white men (often deemed the most reactionary) went the furthest for Mamdani than any other demographic, which really shows why you should always take the online Western left commentary with a huge grain of salt.

Thanks for sharing, you are doing great work!

Yeah Mamdani’s win is more significant than many people think. It shows that left wing ideas are still popular in America, and not at all as portrayed by the more cynical here that America is a total lost cause and completely irredeemable.

This is not to say the American left organizing is heading in the right direction (I have said before that the American left is not even at step one yet, they’re at step zero, with a lot of things still being figured out), but what is undeniable is that this is a clear referendum that left wing populism is still very much relevant.

He will be America’s Lenin. You’re seeing a lot of Hexbears coping because this place is too cynical/defeatist to take the W.

Funnily enough, I have also been accused by some of those people as a “doomer” on this site.