The 90s were one of the blackest eras of reaction, with no exaggeration, in all of human history. The entirety of former USSR societies fell into a highly publicized humanitarian disaster of spiraling mass poverty. The fact that the DPRK suffered in this time is undeniable but it should be emphasized that the DPRK’s 1990s famine is to the anticommunist mythology of Western propaganda what the pre-WWII famines, including that infamous Stalin’s Giant Spoon-domor, were for the USSR and the Great Leap Forward coinciding famine was for China; appropriated by endless hordes of payrolled academics to outwrite any alternative accounts with their word vomit, with the intended agenda of establishing a discourse hegemony that wholly pins the disaster squarely on the man-made decisions of socialist leadership and the socialist system. This is all to say that, due to this slathering of Western propaganda and the hijacking of the narrative airwaves, so to speak, it’s difficult to ascertain the material conditions of the food scarcity circumstances of the 90s DPRK, including its extent and the particular catalysts and aggrievating factors.

I had a look at Steve Gowans’ “Patriots, Traitors and Empires,” and this is what he interpreted:

“the inevitability of a North Korean collapse, appeared, from Washington’s point of view, to be beyond question. North Korea was reeling from the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the concomitant loss of important trading partners, and had been wracked by a series of natural disasters which left it food-insecure. Its economy was shrinking and its people were hungry.”

It is true that under the allegations of an uranium enrichment program in 1994, the US put significant pressure on the DPRK right at the height of its unipolar hubris moment, which undoubtedly exacerbated conditions. The US would later, under Bush Jr., explicitly place food export licensing sanctions on the DPRK.

As for Chinese responses to this moment, here’s what the US-based so-called “Genocide Studies and Prevention International Journal” in a 2012 article alleged were the conditions of China-DPRK and Russia-DPRK relations in the 1990s:

… in the early 1990s, both Russia and China cut their food and fuel aid to North Korea. Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, had no interest in subsidizing Communist states abroad. Chinese exports of maize to North Korea declined by 80% from 1993 to 1994, in part because of a poor harvest in China itself and in part as punishment to North Korea for having opened up diplomatic relations with Taiwan (I have no clue what 90s lore this is referring to here). Both Russia and China informed North Korea that it would have to start paying market prices in hard currency for their exports.

One thing to keep in mind while miring through all this is that it’s clear that the DPRK weathered through its food-scarcity conditions of the 90s. This indicates that either 1) its systems of autarkic food self-sufficiency could be sustained and that those conditions were derived from principally natural causes, contrary to Western narratives of “inherent flaws of its system” or that 2) it was able to supply food imports despite the semi-public estranged relations with China (I agree with the cited ghouls above that it’s unlikely Yeltsin’s Russia would have stepped in). For the avenues in which foreign (i.e. Chinese) aid could have been made, as can be seen from the current circumstances of the Ukraine War, where while Chinese support is undeniable, the extent of it is still unknown and deliberately obfuscated and clandestine, I would argue that, in the midst of American 1990s triumphalism, any actions by China to support AES states, particularly the DPRK which fell under US crosshairs following the 1994 uranium enrichment allegations, would have been conducted through similar degrees of inconspicuousness and inherently contradictory to publicly stated positions.

There is some discernible evidence of this from the Jiang Zemin era China. For example, Adrian Hearn’s “Diaspora of Trust: Cuba, Mexico and the Rise of China” argues that Cuba’s painful Special Period sustained the survival of the Cuban revolution in a large degree through China’s substitution of former Soviet assistance: “China played an important but little-known role in seeing Cuba through this tumultuous period” and that with regards to Jiang’s private agenda:

According to a Chinese diplomat I interviewed in Beijing (who requested anonymity), Jiang conducted the visit to “save Cuba’s revolutionary project,” expressly against the advice of China’s increasingly pragmatic Communist Party.

That’s just the pre-New Cold War early-mid 2010s reddit r/worldnews top comment copypasta that would appear every time in a DPRK-related thread. “Oh, the only reason South Korea isn’t reincorporating the DPRK East Germany-style is because China fears the North Korean hordes (“Norks”) flooding in and uncontrollably eating all the grain in China with giant spoons after having been famined by “rocketman” Kim.”

Sino-Korean relations are actually a very fascinating study that go beyond Western propaganda’s vibes based assertions of “dependence” and “vassalage.”

It’s important to establish a macroscopic view of the Sino-Korean relationship to understand the material conditions which underpin it today. The basis of the relationship dynamics between China and the DPRK go back to the late Qing Dynasty which, to be plain, completely abandoned Korea to the predations of Japanese imperialism. The Korean Joseon government had refused to establish relations with Japan explicitly due to their loyalty to China and (misplaced) faith in its capacity to come to Korea’s rescue as the Ming once did against Japan’s invasion in the late 16th century. The Qing, having just lost their own war against Japan, were in no position to do so. The Japanese pretext for initiating its imperialist assault on Korea actually began with the pretext of “opening it up” as a direct result of this Korean diplomatic refusal. This soon forced Korea to sign its first unequal treaty with Japan and began the catastrophically traumatic Japanese invasion of Korea. The sense of Qing China having failed to live up to its obligations, and with such calamitous consequences for Korea, is the historical essence which permeates both Chinese and Korean perceptions.

This sense of past failure in historical obligations alongside socialist solidarity, a further indebtedness to Korean aid against Japan in Northeast China and, yes, pragmatic realpolitik calculus towards counter-containing the expansion of the American containment doctrine from reaching the Yalu River, were the reasons why China intervened in the Korean War. Following this, the China-DPRK relationship was actually the inverse of the big nation-small nation power dynamic for most of the 20th century, precisely because both sides were deeply historically cognizant of not making the relationship seem like such, particularly since China, following the Sino-Soviet split, had a vested interest in not making itself also appear to be the overbearing big brother when it was simultaneously accusing the USSR of being a “big nation chauvinist” within the socialist world.

To this end, the power asymmetry of the relationship under Mao actually came to skew towards the DPRK, with Mao personally offering Kim Il Sung de facto military and administrative control of Northeast China as the DPRK’s “great hinterland” and the border around Mount Paektu/Changbaishan was amended so that the DPRK would possess half of the mountain alongside its highest peak. At a time where the Sino-Soviet rupture had isolated China from fraternal nations that sided with the USSR, such as Mongolia and Vietnam, it became imperative for China to maintain its friendship with the DPRK. The DPRK under Kim Il Sung therefore not only benefitted from such asymmetry, but also could always fall back on the triangular relationship with the USSR to further cushion its position.

The Chinese perception of the Mao era relationship here is very telling, because Deng Xiaoping actually articulated it when the DPRK tried to block China’s normalization process with South Korea: “We should draw lessons from our dealings with North Korea. We should not give the North Koreans the wrong impression that whatever they ask for we will give them.”

Deng saw China’s relationship with the DPRK as not only asymmetric, but also the teleological next domino to fall over after the ruptures in similar relationships where China once gave great sacrifices to maintain: “Of course, the North Koreans are unhappy. Let it be. We should prevent them from dragging us into trouble. We have made huge efforts to aid Vietnam, Albania, and North Korea. Now Vietnam and Albania have fallen out with us. We should be prepared for the third one [North Korea] to fall out with us, though we should try our best to prevent that from happening.”

This perception, became coupled with revisionist views of the Korean War brought about through Western narratives that “if only China didn’t intervene (and humiliate America and the ‘United Nations’ coalition by fighting them to a stalemate), America might have even let China have Taiwan back,” which resonated particularly in the midst of the 3rd Taiwan Strait Crisis in the 1990s.

When China’s FM informed Kim Il Sung that it was going to normalize relations with South Korea, Kim allegedly responded "The DPRK will adhere to socialism and will overcome any difficulties on its own.” This mindset, along with the collapse of the USSR, is what led the DPRK to pursue an independent nuclear program outside of China’s nuclear umbrella. The disappearence of the USSR, its abandonment by Yeltsin’s Russia and the semi-estrangement with China following the latter’s normalization with the South at the end of the 20th century would have held undeniable parallels to the Qing failure to rescue Joseon Korea at the end of the 19th century. This justified, from the DPRK’s perspective, the idea that only with its own nuclear capabilities, could it be truly safe.

The explicit statement that the DPRK could not depend on China’s nuclear umbrella would have undoubtedly stung, which is one reason why China’s response against the nuclear missile tests in the 2000s was explicit condemnation, but I’d argue the more important reason, and the reason why Russia also joined China in supporting the American annual renewal of sanctions in the UNSC is the, in their view, disastrous precedent in terms of non-proliferation. If the DPRK could argue that the Chinese and Russian nuclear umbrellas were no longer sufficient, US-aligned lackeys like Japan and South Korea could also use it as a pretext to develop their own nuclear weapons. The nuclear proliferation of the DPRK has been the defining impediment hamstringing the last two decades which contributes to the undercurrents of tension in the Sino-Korean relationship. To be clear, the two countries are still allies and China’s treaty with the DPRK is the only explicit alliance it has in effect today, though Western propaganda and Chinese liberals have both tried to downplay its durability (the latter out of the typical Chinese liberal behavior of wanting to Gorbachev China’s interests to throw to the West in return for a pat on the back).

The New Cold War has changed the dynamics of East Asian geopolitics considerably as both Japan and South Korea (under its latest President who shifted his country’s entire foreign policy position to outright fealty to the US and Japan through his stirring democratic mandate of a 0.73% margin victory) have now openly sided with the US. This outright alignment with the US lessens China’s fear of condoning DPRK proliferation in affecting its bilateral decision making. This fear, that condonement would lead to the proliferation of the US vassals, is now less significant as there’s now a non-trivial chance they’ll do it regardless of what China’s position is or if the DPRK has nukes, since their principal target has now shifted explicitly to China itself.

Last week, actually, the biggest diplomatic shift for the DPRK occurred in that this year, when the annual March DPRK sanction supervision UNSC resolution came up for renewal, it was vetoed by Russia and abstained by China. This is a promising sign that the necessity to comply with the punitive sanctions by China (and Russia, for that matter), which has hamstrung the enhancement of Sino-Korean relations since, may now begin to be alleviated.

For further readings, I’d reccommend Shen, Z. and Xia, Y. 2018. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976. Columbia University Press. As can be guessed by the “Western University Press” publishing association, this is a fairly lib take by Chinese liberals who I surmise, through the overarching narrative in this work, wanted to make a case to sell out the DPRK to the Trump era US in hopes of this somehow improving China-US relations, so their modus operandi is to downplay the resilience of the Sino-Korean relationship and to highlight Chinese grievances. However, the fact that they’re university professors tenured in China prevents them from making any outright chud takes and so the work is useful and informative so long as this is kept in mind.

Your issue made me realize how land acknowledgments are basically the equivalent of those little provenance placards in every Western museum: “This masterful example of 17th West African jewellery is from Mali.” The way people puff up their chests from making those little land acknowledgment declarations compared to that.

Okay, cool story, so how did it get here then, to where it is now? Crickets, of course, from the curators. And sure, if you consider it better than the alternative of them straight up claiming it materialized out of thin air and rendered corporeal form inside the glass case or them lying that the West African jewellery was actually made in Birmingham, thus making it their national property, it is “better” than those things.

But there’s no acknowledgment of the process; the nature of now things ended up as they are now; whether maybe, just maybe, there should be more sharing with the descendants of its original owners rather than hoarded by the failsons of Western imperialism, let alone reparation and repatriation.

Through this, it also reveals the fundamental conceit of land acknowledgments. They’ll never get away with declaring some random Anglo-Europeans autochthonously sprung out of the dirt, making them indigenous to their stolen lands. They’re too proud of the claim to heritage to old Europe and their perception of the settler-colonial story, in any case. As such, these land acknowledgments are no concessions at all for them to make. There’s no threat of cognitive dissonance to their settler narrative when they spout such acknowledgments. All the thorns of the real flower have been trimmed away, leaving just the plastic rose petals representing their modern narrative of “reconciliation” glued on top.

Anyway, this one was not.

Oh you get to decide that, huh? Ma faute, didn’t realize I was talking to the UN General Secretary here.

Reread your own citation. The press release is quoting the US ambassador who claims it is “non-binding.” The UN press office is allowed to publish partisan and deceitful material so long as it is attributed and not in the UN’s own voice.

The Arab group statement in no way insinuates the current resolution is “non-binding.” It is comparing the resolution to an ideal resolution not based on prisoner exchanges or time-limited, as the current resolution only demands a ceasefire until after Ramadan.

China has additionally stated that the UNSC resolution is binding. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/un-resolution-in-gaza-is-binding-china-challenges-us-at-security-council/

Yes it represents the leftist fetish for unilateralist martyrdom.

(I believe it’s a conch shell)

The only lesson that people in the West would learn is this:

UNSC resolutions are prima facie binding unless stated otherwise. It’s a opt-out circumstance. Article 25 of the UN Charter simply states: “The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.” See this post for the legal explanation: https://verfassungsblog.de/why-todays-un-security-council-resolution-demanding-an-immediate-ceasefire-is-legally-binding/

The US claim that the resolution is “non-binding” is simply the expression of a cynical disdain for the real international legal order under the UN Charter prevailing for once over the interests of its “rules-based order.”

The US position is simply trying to eat its cake and have it too: they want to escape the international notoriety of imposing yet another veto, thereby forcing them to abstain, and yet “narratively veto” the resolution by claiming it’s actually “non-binding” and thus as worthless in promulgation as it would have been if it was actually vetoed by the US.

I don’t think it’s possible to separate this idea’s specific nature of appeal in the contemporary age from its modern roots as a latent fear in the West that there will come an inevitable day where the 500 years of genocide, settler-colonialism and imperialist butchery that they’ve commited will come back to roost. Most “peaceful” decolonialization movements in the 20th century were only permitted by the former Western colonial power because the new leaders at the top promised to turn the other cheek with regards to the collective trauma and destruction inflicted by the West.

India is the most notable example of this where the British promoted “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” Gandhi as the spiritual voice of the new Indian nation. There’s a self-serving calculus to why the West treats figures like Gandhi with such hyperbolic praise, even successfully shooing off pressures for assessing his anti-African racism during the brief 2020 moment of racial consciousness, where he’s one of the only post-colonial leaders the Western educational standard curriculum will ever cover in a positive light. He’s the poster boy of the West’s ideal attitude for what their formerly colonized should adopt.

The repressed collective retributive desires of the new South Asian nations in the post-colonial era, rather than disappearing, were then redirected from the target of Britain towards each other and their neighbours which has resulted in many conflicts since.

I always felt it was interesting from an intellectual sense how much that contemporary Western political philosophies and media loves to revisit the “retributive justice (“revenge”) is bad” trope. It wasn’t until I started learning about post-colonial movements - which ones succeed, which ones failed, who were the leaders feted by the West and which were the ones silenced (nearly always the communist groups) - that I begun to connect the dots. It’s no surprise that there was such an overreaction and fixation on the Oct 7th uprising by the West, when the oppressed ignored Gandhi and went for the eye, and why the West cared little for patient explanations of the history that led up to that moment.

This is not to say that the idea of “revenge is bad” should be inherently discredited, but the fixation upon this narrative as an article of faith and a philosophical mantra in the Western media, and collective consciousness in general, should be recognized. Its appropriation as a means to tautologically condemn (“revenge is bad because, well, revenge is bad”) any retributive justice character of decolonial movements is a way to invalidate and dismiss the history which led up to it through the inherent “ontological evil” nature of that retributive character itself. This process is both a historical and ongoing motif.

I’m not sure I follow.

It’s not necessarily relevant in this particular instance since the source is straight from the horse’s mouth. Every once in a while, they brag about things like this because they understand there will be no recourse from their own side on the hypocrisy and belligerency of what they did. The conversational register they’re aiming for isn’t the crowd that thinks this is wrong, but those that would be delighted that the CIA and Trump were taking action to be “tough on China” and trying to “regime change it.”

The journalistic paradigm you’re referring to is the “anonymous source says they personally saw Stalin eating all the grain with a big spoon” skit where they use the “unverifiability gimmick” to attack an adversary. It’s not a reporting tactic done against one’s own side. Reuters would have never published this if it could not verify the sources.

Except we already have the conclusive natural ontological symbol for “family” right here: ☭

It’s not going to happen.

Nor would its proposed forced sale be “level headed” or a good “long term strategy.” The rightful focus from leftists on the social health impact of short form apps has apparently also consequently given tunnel vision from seeing what’s really at stake in the eyes of the American state apparatus.

Yes, Bytedance’s CEO is a complete wannabe comprador who constantly stated how much he worships the West before his company got into the crosshairs, but we’ve been seeing the “Tiktok Forced Sale” skit happening for 4 years now. Trump first tried to do it before in the summer of 2020 as a last feather in his cap before the election. His attempt failed as well.

At that time, in reaction to the attack on Tiktok actually, China released a technology export law restricting the sale or transfer of sensitive algorithms. That’s what this is really about on the business side, the US wanting to steal a free lunch from China and setting a long lasting precedent through Tiktok’s forced sale so that future Chinese tech can be expropriated. This happened to France when Alstom was forcibly sold to GE back in 2015. That export law is what’s going to ultimately block this forced sale attempt. It would be better in China’s interests for Tiktok to be banned than allowed to be stolen by the US.

Additionally, what should be said is that Tiktok really is a “threat” to the US state apparatus. All the whitewashing, misdirection and partisanship over the Twitter Files evidently has successfully misdirected people from the real bombshell confirmations they showed. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have active communication channels with US state officials, where they algorithmically boost accounts and content created by the US and suppress the visibility of contrary content via email contact directives.

Tiktok USA/Global, while basically controlled by US personnel, including ex-NSA officials, at this point, is still ultimately connected to its parent company. This makes Tiktok a “perpetual outsider” and the establishment of similar censorship channels much more vulnerable to exposure, at least psychologically. The existence of Tiktok is, with no exaggeration, a massive challenge to the US state’s complete hegemonic monopoly on social media platforms in the English speaking world.

This is why the attempts to ban Tiktok are currently the predominant “China” concern and have been for the past 4 years.

I recall that their Twitter account got suppressed back when the collective West was in full mask-off censorship repression mode regarding the Ukraine War. They continued after that and moved onto Telegram but I think that stunted their outreach momentum quite a bit.

The top brass crème of compradors have had that happen to them once they got to the land of milk and honey. The former finance minister of Afghanistan now does Uber driving in DC.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/18/afghanistans-last-finance-minister-now-dc-uber-driver-ponders-what-went-wrong/

It’s nearly impossible to get a factual grounding of the status of LGBT peoples in China through English media, since rainbow imperialism has been fully weaponized against designated enemy regimes. Western media describes China’s official policy as “no approval; no disapproval; no promotion.” I can’t find any literature that actually attests to this as written policy, but even if true, this position has given relatively meager ammunition for atrocity propaganda so far compared to other fronts of propaganda assault against the country. China is the chief designated enemy regime today and the only major thing I’ve seen thrown is primarily the “muh censorship” shtick. There is an undeniable fact that organized LGBT groups can and have been appropriated by Western interests in terms of NGO collaboration with Western funding and support, however. The chief obstacle to securing LGBT rights in China will never be the allowance of these dubiously affiliated groups, but overall societal reception. With the latter, wholly independent and organic means of collective organization will naturally form.

Through my personal trawling, the current situation as I understand it is that the more conservative elements of Chinese society see it as a foreign intrusion, similarly to how reactionaries in Russia view LGBT there. Uniquely, however, the main hurdles are mainly cognitive however and can be overcome by LGBT allied advocacy:

• LGBT toleration is not against Chinese historical tradition. There are countries where historical tradition is legitimately in opposition with the fight to secure LGBT rights. China is not one of them. The core of heteronormativity doctrine that prevails today across the world is derived from Western Christian dogmatism. However, China has had a long history of homosexual toleration and practice before heteronormativity was imposed at gunpoint by the proliferation of Western Christian missionaries, whose allowance to propagandize the population was a stipulated condition enforced onto China after the First Opium War by the Treaty of Nanjing. Paradoxically, conservative groups intent on defending Chinese tradition are in reality preventing the restoration of China’s historical tradition of toleration in favor of the 19th and 20th century Western imposed heteronormative dogmatism.
• The latest concern is that for those who see China’s aging population as a national security threat, they consequently therefore see LGBT peoples as abetting this demographic trend. This interpretation of conjoining LGBT liberation with declining demographics is entirely unfounded. Not only is a truly LGBT tolerant society no obstacle to stable demography, this is putting the cart before the horse.
  • The principal impediment worldwide to declining fertility rates is the absurd cost of living for the global Gen Z and Millennial generations, particularly housing costs, and China is not an exception here. As usual with Western coverage of China, if they screech something is going to collapse the country, it’s more likely a good policy decision. The recent popping of the real estate bubble is the government’s campaign against the skyrocketing housing prices. The fixation on enforcing heteronormativity to “resolve” demographic trends is therefore completely misinterpreting the issue.
  • LGBT peoples are not categorically anti-natalists, the clarification of this point must be fully advocated. In the current medical context, LGBT peoples will only be a contributing drag on demographic conditions if they inhabit a social and legal jurisdiction which inhibits their ability to participate in child rearing. A society that establishes an institutional adoption progress by LGBT parent aspirants would find that they are no more proportionally inclined to anti-natalism than heteronormative peoples.
    • Additionally, the developing medical context in terms of reproductive technological advancements see the real possibility of neutralizing the biological hurdles to LGBT contribution towards birth. The promotion of achieving this technological condition would be entirely synergistic with China’s national objective of ensuring the vanguard of a socialist state at the leading edge of human biosciences advancement.
• I’ve seen it suggested from a geopolitical basis that the calculus of securing the liberation of LGBT peoples would alienate China from its Global South colleagues whose societies face similar objections to advancing LGBT rights as neocolonial assaults on traditionist lines, along with the weird social conservative bedfellows that are currently chummy with China, like reactionary Russia and (wtf) the German AfD. The logic of this cynical argument must be connected to the reality that China, by its nature as a socialist state, alienates the capitalist elites (and therefore the media culture) of Global South and capitalism restoration countries like Russia far more than LGBT rights ever will. If the goal was to make Global South social conservatives happy, the logic of that sort of accomodation followed to its conclusion would lead to the overthrow of socialism in China. Rather, China must remain at the vanguard and set an independent standard for how the Global South can liberate LGBT peoples without resorting to the commercial and imperialist appropriation and two-faced perpetual legal and political semi-toleration of LGBT in the West.