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Western Anglophone leftists--even self-proclaimed internationalists--really know so extremely little about China, huh? Or even English-language discourse about China.
So here's the thing about western Anglophone leftists--there's a very limited set of non-western struggles they pay attention to and then, outside of that, they are prone to backing tankies
What tankies offer is the ability to project their own western contexts and domestic struggles onto non-western ones, by centering the West as the sole big bad. So they jump board with backing them, because of their superficial resemblance to their own politics, and because it
...centers contexts with which they are more familiar. Tankies make a lot of noise but seem to do very little. Yet as a phenomenon, in this way, they prove a key obstacle to genuine internationalism
Tankie-ism as a phenomenon arguably has its roots in failed internationalism, going back to the Soviet Union and the /Stalinist/ Third International, in which a set of narrow nationalist interests was framed as being internationalist, and tons of people jumped onboard with it...
...including the backing of the crushing of uprisings against Soviet states (such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, from which the term originates) because of projection onto the USSR and Soviet states from those outside of it
It has continued as a phenomenon precisely as a product of failed internationalism, backing idealized Others because of the sharp juxtaposition they offer to one's own domestic context
But, at the end of the day, failing to think beyond one's domestic context, and projecting it onto other places. So typical. And yeah, this is why internationalism more usually fails, than not
I subtweet too much and it's gets confusing, so...
