Thread by @nise_yoshimi

for all that "Dengism" represents a break with Marxism-Leninism in some ways, ultimately it's a continuation of the wartime developmentalist logic of Stalin. this quote from Kotkin's "Magnetic Mountain" struck me as being at the core of post-1978 China as well as the 1930s USSR

and since I think we're past "Stalin betrayed the revolution" now, I would say that in this sense you *can* find a Marxist logic to modern China. Deng's reforms were an inevitable result of MLism the Chinese context made possible (unlike in Europe), not a sudden departure

this of course is not an endorsement. it's just i think an important distinction missed when we say "china isn't even socialist" or that "china perfected socialism". it did neither. it simply witnessed the next stage of the logic of vanguard-led developmentalist marxism

i would also say that while there is a real tension between nationalist/socialist goals in China, this is not "Chinese tradition defeating alien Marxism" but just another tension inherent in 1917; as modern Russia's confusion over whether something is Russian or Soviet attests to