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My gut reaction to this nonsense article can be quite succinctly summarized in one quote:

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.

However the marxist in me would die a little if I didn't explain why i feel this way. This article fundamentally misunderstands China because it approaches global politics from an idealist and Eurocentric framework rather than a materialist one. It treats power as attitude, assertiveness, and spectacle instead of grounding analysis in production, class relations, historical conditions, and the balance of material forces. This is not a minor flaw.

Power does not emerge from bold gestures or rhetorical dominance. It emerges from control over productive forces, industrial capacity, technological development, logistics, energy security, labor organization, and surplus distribution. China’s rise is not a matter of posture but of material transformation. It became the world’s largest industrial producer, built comprehensive infrastructure, lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, and retained state control over finance and strategic sectors. These are the foundations of power. Any analysis that ignores them is not materialist but psychological speculation.

The article also makes a serious theoretical error by equating global leadership with imperial behavior. It assumes that to matter geopolitically China must behave like the United States. Military intervention, regime shaping, and coercive alliances are treated as the natural expression of power. This assumption is the normalization of imperialism itself.

Lenin defined imperialism as monopoly capitalism, finance capital dominance, capital export for profit extraction, and political coercion to enforce those flows. The article never examines capital ownership, surplus extraction, or financial dependency structures. Instead it defines hegemony almost entirely in military terms. By that logic any state that refuses imperialist violence is framed as weak. That is simply imperial ideology stripped of its moral language.

China’s foreign policy cannot be understood without its historical origins. Modern China was born from a century of humiliation marked by colonial occupation, forced trade, famine, invasion, and civil war. The Communist Party emerged from anti imperialist struggle, peasant revolution, and resistance against both Western powers and Japanese fascism. Sovereignty is not an abstract principle in Chinese politics. It is the foundation of survival.

This history directly shaped China’s modern policies such as the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Non interference, respect for sovereignty, and opposition to regime change were not invented as public relations tools. They emerged from lived experience of what imperial intervention actually does to societies. To dismiss these principles as naive is to erase the very conditions that produced them.

The article also ignores the central contradiction of the modern world. The primary global divide is not between competing great powers but between the imperial core and the oppressed nations. China’s foreign policy is not aimed at replacing the United States as global ruler. It is aimed at weakening monopoly control that allows imperialism to function at all.

This is why China focuses on infrastructure, trade diversification, development finance, and industrial cooperation rather than military domination. Projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative are not instruments of territorial control. They are responses to a world in which Western capital refuses long term infrastructure investment unless it produces immediate profit and political submission. Global South states engage China not because China forces them to, but because IMF austerity and Western conditionality devastated their economies.

The article treats the Third World as passive terrain where great powers compete. This is colonial thinking. The Global South is not a chessboard. It consists of nations actively seeking paths out of dependency. China does not create this demand. Imperialism does.

Another major flaw is the complete absence of class analysis. China is discussed as a generic state actor identical in nature to capitalist powers. This erases the distinction between bourgeois states ruled by finance capital and a socialist state managing contradictions within a capitalist world system. China operates with state owned banks, long term planning, capital controls, and political authority over private capital. These are not cosmetic differences. They shape foreign policy, investment logic, and strategic behavior.

The article also misrepresents strategic patience as passivity. Dialectical materialism teaches that quantitative accumulation precedes qualitative transformation. China prioritizes technological independence, domestic market expansion, energy security, food security, and military deterrence because premature confrontation under conditions of encirclement would be idealism, not strength. Avoiding war while consolidating productive forces, it's not weakness it's 孙子兵法 level strategy.

Multipolarity is also badly misunderstood. A multipolar world does not require China to dominate others. It requires the breaking of monopoly power. When multiple centers of production, finance, and diplomacy exist, imperial coercion weakens automatically. No single hegemon is required for that process to advance.

At its core, the article seems unable to imagine a world beyond empire. It criticizes the United States yet measures success using imperial standards. What it ultimately desires is not the end of domination but a more competent empire to replace the current one. That is why anti imperial restraint appears as failure and aggression appears as leadership.

From a Chinese, Third World and Marxist Leninist perspective, the goal is not a new hegemon. The goal is the erosion of the imperial system itself. China’s approach is contradictory and imperfect, but it has materially expanded the space for national development, weakened Western financial monopoly, and reduced the ability of imperial powers to dictate global outcomes.

The tragedy of the article is not simply that it is wrong about China. It is that it mistakes imperial behavior for historical necessity and cannot conceive of power existing outside domination.

If you are serious about understanding the current world order, you must analyze material conditions, historical struggle, class relations, and the lived experience of the oppressed nations. Without that, analysis becomes commentary. And commentary, no matter how confident, is not theory.