On the one hand, hooray for supporting the development of infrastructure in Africa and stuff. On the other hand, booooo for being a top trading partner with the Zionist Entity, and selling drones to Indonesia, and all that.

So what the Hell do you make of it all! Like I get that there's this term called "realpolitik" which is somehow relevant, but I'd like a longer explanation than just one word. Like how does the good and the bad fit together at its core?

You could certainly write tomes about this topic — many people have done exactly that — and maybe I'm being a bit incurious to expect someone to serve me a quick answer on a silver platter instead of diving into as many articles and PDF books as I can get my hands on... But I'm also just kind of tired of having such extremely underdeveloped views on the most populous AES state and country in general, after I came to unlearn or mistrust whichever views I'd had on China previously.

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[–] blight@hexbear.net 4 points 4 hours ago

Yeah, it is odd, but it is as you say, the alternative is isolation. You could argue that selling arms to imperialists is kind of like paying a “don’t kill us” tribute. You could argue that China is not yet self-sufficient enough to pull the rug, or you could argue that they have actually reached that maturity, or you could argue that they are stuck in a trap and will never pull any rug, or that they never even had any intention of it.

There’s another dimension of making the West economically dependent on them. So yes, selling some weapons now, but in the long term, replacing the West’s industrial capacity so that they can’t keep up. But even our ghouls are smart enough to realize this and have specifically prevented offshoring a lot of military production, at a huge cost.