https://archive.is/FKuhi (reuters)
https://archive.is/MIdNc (afp)
Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met for about eight hours with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in Geneva in their first face-to-face meeting since the world’s two largest economies heaped tariffs well above 100% on each other’s goods.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that an 80% tariff on Chinese goods “seems right”, suggesting for the first time a specific alternative to the 145% levies he has imposed on Chinese imports.
Neither side made any statements about the substance of the discussions nor signaled any progress towards reducing crushing tariffs as meetings at the residence of Switzerland’s ambassador to the U.N. concluded at about 8 p.m. local time. (1800 GMT)
The discussions are expected to restart on Sunday in the Swiss city, according to an individual familiar with the talks, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The 80% number is just something that Trump posted on his social media early on Friday morning, before any meeting ever happened.
UPDATE Trump posted on truthsocial, 1 hour ago. He describes the meeting with the phrases “total reset” and “great progress”. I won’t believe this until I hear the perspective from China’s government.
This is all gang of four ultraleft nonsense and vibe-posting, with zero sources, to try to drivie home the long-debunked propaganda that China abandoned the socialist road.
If you’re going to claim that the PRC is a liberal country now, and that the CPC “hasn’t been a marxist party since the 1990s”, then there’s zero point in engaging.
No offense, you NEVER lived in China. You have no idea what China was like in the 1990s, in the 2000s.
Deng’s reform had effectively ended in the 1990s with China experiencing an economic crisis with an unemployment rate never seen before under Mao. By 1998, Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing program and fully opened up the property market to private capital in China. By 2001, it would join the WTO and stripped the last vestiges of worker’s rights in China.
China returning to its Marxist roots is a very recent phenomenon, with Xi ascending to power in 2013. He had vowed to take on the neoliberals on many occasions, which I fully support. As I said, it seems that the libs are still too powerful in China (especially after sabotaging Zero Covid) and if you have been paying attention at all, Li Qiang, the new Premier, has been running the show for a while now, engaging with business leaders and private capital, vowing to open up China’s capital markets etc.
Again, most Western leftists have zero idea on what they’re talking about when it comes to the pre-2018 history in China. They only know Xi and Deng, but what happened in between, few had any clues at all.
All ultraleft vibes, not a single source, yet again.
For the record I lost all of my notes and references that I had been writing for over a year. This is literally my first day back on Hexbear and I typed all those out from memory lol.
Funny that you literally had a chance to converse with someone who knows so much more about China than you do, and instead of taking this as an opportunity to learn and ask questions, you stubbornly chose to remain ignorant. Typical arrogant Western leftist lol.
You said not two comments ago that you, “know better than the PRC’s planners on how to correct its economy”.
You also claim than the PRC abandoned workers rights by the 90s, and purged all Marxists from the CPC’s leadership stucture.
You apparently know better than the 100 million members of the CPC, that their country is a neoliberal one now? Who’s being arrogant?
What argument are you making exactly? There are a lot of members of the CPC therefore it is definitely communist and couldn’t be infiltrated by liberals? It’s not exactly unheard of in history that a communist party would be infiltrated by nationalists and/or liberals.
I would definitely not like that to happen to China but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Also xiaohongshu seems way more knowledgeable about recent Chinese history than you, you moan about sources yet you haven’t posted any yourself.
Claiming that the CPC abandoned communism and has been taken over by neoliberals is a very bold claim, and you shouldn’t accept it without some sources.
I can provide some alternates, but I don’t know what basis XHS is claiming that on. Is it the standard ultraleft position that the “reform and opening up” was a liberalization? If that’s the case here are some on that:
For a longer text on why the PRC is still absolutely communist, and communist thinking drives the party, I recommend Jin Huiming - Marxism and Socialism with chinese characteristics. Or any of the chinese marxist journals from the academy of marxism which go through what the current difficulties and focus points.
I don’t agree with the claim that it has been completely subverted by liberals, but there does seem to be a strong liberal current within the CPC.
Why hasn’t the CPC in the current global situation move more strongly towards socialism and liberation of Global South countries? The idea of a Chinese “Marshall plan” that Xiaohongshu outlined seems like a reasonable step, do you have any information about that actual plans of the CPC?
The belt and road initiative is that plan. The PRC has infrastructure and development partnerships from countries in Southern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
https://qutnyti.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/belt-road-initiative-an-anti-thesis-of-colonialism/
Wikipedia I know, but this is a good outline: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_of_the_Belt_and_Road_Initiative
I encourage you to ask for sources, don’t take anything on faith, especially long-winded diatribes filled with unsourced stats from people claiming that AES countries abandoned socialism. The fact that so many people upvotee their posts (claiming that the PRC is run by liberals now), without a single person questioning it, is shameful.