As far as I'm aware, China has been giving loans to various countries in Africa and building infrastructure in exchange for money and maybe some stuff like recognizing Taiwan as part of China. But why do people say China is imperialist for doing this? Is there truth to it or is it another strain of radlibs eating state department propaganda?

  • Sasuke [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    In 1953, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. went to the United Nations as the United States ambassador. He was horrified by the way in which the new nations that came out of colonialism had a positive attitude towards the USSR. Lodge created a Psychological Strategy Board to advise him in how to make the Soviets appear like the imperialists. Arthur M. Cox, who would later head the Brookings Institute, wrote negatively of Lodge’s plans. ‘I think we have made a great mistake as a nation of assuming that because Soviet power and subversion is the greatest problem facing us today,’ he wrote in a memorandum in 1953, ‘it is therefore the greatest problem facing everybody else.’ Cox was a liberal who respected reality. ‘No amount of horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main problem because they know,’ he said sharply, ‘that it is not.’ Lodge was deaf to this. He understood that if the United States battered the USSR by using its vast cultural apparatus – from the media to the films – it could succeed. Paint the Soviets as the imperialists, went the final programme of the Psychological Strategy Board, call them the ‘new colonialists’. ‘While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the liberation of dependent peoples,’ the US officials wrote, ‘it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.’ This was written in August 1953, while the CIA overthrew the democratic leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

    from Washington Bullets by Vijay Prashad