While slurs like “Chinazi” and “Xitler” make for vulgar comparisons, there has been increased attention to how some Chinese intellectuals have demonstrated a strong interest in the work of Nazi thinkers
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According to these Chinese left nationalists, the West represents capitalism, which can only be opposed by Chinese state power. By this logic, socialism in China is yoked solely to state power and conceived of entirely in terms of the exercise of state power, with scarcely a mention of the classless society following the “withering away of the state” that Marx described. No global post-capitalist future is proposed, except for what is, at the end of the day, a limited vision of Chinese national prosperity termed conveniently as “socialism”...
The analogy of Xi’s China to Stalin’s Soviet Union extends to non-Western imperial projects and present-day formations of imperialism. In the 1930s, the Japanese empire developed the “Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” which promoted cultural and economic unity among East Asian countries. Japanese intellectuals of the time justified it by claiming that this was a world-historical project that would overcome Western modernity, which was thought to have disrupted a reified notion of Japanese “tradition.” An infamous touchstone for Chinese left nationalists is the 1942 Overcoming Modernity conference in Tokyo, yet they seem to remain willfully ignorant of the uncomfortable parallels between intellectual apologism for Japanese empire and their own political project. As sharp Chinese animosity toward Japan—a central component of contemporary Chinese nationalism—illustrates, other groups hardly found Japanese imperialism to be liberatory. So too is the case for Chinese statist projects disguised as internationalism.
