This was precisely the problem that the 20th century European socialist states encountered, which is that people typically don’t appreciate something until it’s taken away and have a tendency to believe the grass is always greener on the other side.

In some ways, China has become better equipped than the USSR at combating some particular elements. There won’t be any Chinese liberal dreaming of throwing away the socialist state just so they can get their hands on Levis blue jeans, because the CPC has strategically situated post-Deng China as the producer of all material goods in the modern world (I’d say with combatting this mentality that the USSR faced consciously in mind). The Gorbachev/Yeltsin/Yakolev types lurking in China aren’t at least going to be morons that converted to anti-communism because they visited the West and saw a Walmart. The recent RedNote incident shows that this paradigm has flipped the other way around, with normal Americans losing their minds over the endless variety on Chinese supermarket shelves.

In other ways, China faces the exact same challenges that 20th century socialist states encountered, which is that where the West has Orientalism; the socialist world had “Occidentalism.” Orientalism for the West is a chauvinistic boogeyman projection of everything the West is not, where the existence of the “Orient” itself defines what it means to be the “West.” At the end of the day, it recapitulates and engenders a form of collective gratitude where a “Westerner” is meant to go “well now, aren’t you glad you’re in the West and not in the East?”

Occidentalism is the exact opposite where the “Occident” is everything the “Orient” ought to be. Orientalism is a chavinistic negative foil while Occidentalism is a toxic positive one. America, for example, is therefore held to be a land of milk and honey. Just as it was in the USSR, everything China has done wrong or has disappointed them on, for those people, is something the America-in-their-heads has surely done right. The same RedNote incident shows how prevalent this mentality was among the normal Chinese population. It was thought that a dishwasher living in America could afford a middle class Homer Simpson lifestyle, providing for an entire nuclear family to boot. It was a case of “never meet your heroes” that you could witness being disrupted in real-time on that app. I’ve seen them post retrospectives of how many Chinese intellectuals have poured endless ink shouting the same thing to them in China, but they only began to believe it when some American made a RedNote account posting about having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. It’s like that post-Soviet Russian joke about how “Everything they taught us about Soviet socialism was a lie, everything they taught us about the West was the truth.”

It is without argument that there is much more that China can do, though some parts of this come from a fundamental historical asymmetry. I’ve recently read Jiang Shigong’s 2021 article “A History of Empire Without Empire” posted on Redsails and he frames the Chinese confrontation against America as “better characterized as China, a rising sovereign state, facing the U.S.-dominated world empire or world system. It’s not a question of managing a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China faces the U.S.-dominated world empire.” I’d personally expand this characterization to the 20th century Cold War as well. The USSR and the socialist world was never fighting a “peer” in the West but a world empire formed by 500 years of imperialism. The modern history of the world has only ever known an unchallenged paradigm of Western supremacy. Any challengers like China itself in the Opium Wars and Boxer Uprising were beaten down until they accepted this paradigm. The failure of the USSR and all 20th century socialist states in combatting Occidentalism should also account for the wider historical context that they were fighting an uphill battle not just against the contemporary material conditions of the socialist world vis-a-vis the West but also the engrained intergenerational societal and cultural propaganda of Occidentalism.

To be honest, I think this is a sort of psychological confrontation that socialist education is ill-equipped to confront without generations of consistent reinforcement. Even then, there have been many socialist states that attempted to do so (with varying degrees of imperfection) and failed. The short and medium term means of securing ideological security against the West might be better addressed by a careful toleration of nationalism. It’s indeed what worked for much of history and is what all capitalist states rely on today as a means of ideological cohesion. The Indian Marxist argument has been that Third World/Global South nationalism shouldn’t be prejudiced inherently just because Europe mucked it up in the 20th century. I’m not entirely convinced that the risks of European nationalism are entirely inapplicable in cases of Global South bourgeois nationalism like BJP-run India today and I’m cautious about its compatibility with actual socialist states. However, this is something observable in all AES today, particularly China and Vietnam (I’m not sure about the DPRK/Cuba/Laos), where there is a greater emphasis on (largely socialism agnostic) patriotism as a rallying banner than was the case with 20th century socialism (non-existent in some cases like the DDR, where any national sentiment was squarely defined by socialist pride). The challenge is, of course, in subordinating it so that it never cannibalizes the socialist state in a fit of nationalist stupidity like how Yeltsin’s Russian nationalism-pandering destroyed the USSR.