Highly recommend reading The Changing World Order from Ray Dalio. It does a good job explaining where US empire is at in a historical context. https://ca1lib.org/book/17400989/38bcf4

Meanwhile, China prevented the horrors I lived through when USSR collapsed in 1989. China would in now way have been better off once US ran a color revolution there. Again, recommend some reading on the subject https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/

Given what you know about China, does that make you happy somehow? It’s about as communist as the Russian Federation is, though I guess that’s easier to pretend untrue, given that the regime change was a little quieter.

Given what I know about China, I completely disagree with that assessment. Once again, I recommend actually reading up on what China is actually like.

Seems to be that they are at least as much your enemy as mine.

You appear to have a deep misunderstanding of what China is actually like. China has plenty of problems, and their system is obviously not perfect. However, this system has proven itself to be very stable and to consistently work in the interest of the people.

China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that these people do in fact understand what socialism is and what sort of system they have.

Having special economic zones where capitalism is allowed does not make China capitalist any more than having some social services make Canada communist. One key difference with China is that all the essential industry is state owned, and capitalists do not appear to be in charge of the government. However, even Marx argued that capitalism is likely a necessary stage for developing productive resources needed for socialism and communism to be possible.

One simple test to consider is that China doesn’t suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.

And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.

China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. Social mobility in China is also higher than western capitalist regimes.

And then there’s the handling of the pandemic where it’s all but eliminated in China with life getting back to normal and the economy growing. On the other hand, we anxiously look at our fourth wave where our government left people out to dry in order to protect business interests as one would expect a capitalist state to do.

Chinese government has recently passed massive regulation on big business and released a a five-year blueprint calling for greater regulation of vast parts of the economy. The government has also openly stated that the era of capital expansion is over and the interests of the majority outweigh the interests of shareholders.

This is something that simply does not happen under capitalism. We can also compare China to India to see a stark contrast in their development with India going the capitalist route.