Don’t watch him and never heard of him before but going off on his video titles+thumbnails, this seems like average breadtuber stuff which is like some guy making ‘video essay’-adjacent videos either constantly rebutting right wingers and/or just dipping their toes into leftism while researching their video topic. Not actually familiar with any serious theory, spotty and/or dubious citations, doesn’t like AES, engages more with rightwingers (even if it is in opposition) than any ‘leftists’ because that’s the most prominent way to get views on youtube, that kind of ‘breadtuber’
LOL I’m literally 1 minute into ’ “Socialism Always Fails”: A Dishonest Claim (3 Times It Worked) ’ he literally says “I do believe old communist states devolved into tyranny and state capitalism”. Then he echoes a bunch of common anti-communist “leftist” claims like that the bourgeoisie wasn’t dismantled and the state just replaced capitalists in subordination of the proletariat; USSR is technically bad because human rights violations; and nobody should look up to (my guess is this includes reading or studying… come on) Stalin or Mao and also throws Pol Pot in the same group as them (the insinuation I’m getting here is that he buys into the narrative of “holodomor” or kulaks or great leap forward or cultural revolution are actual genocides of which includes the Cambodian genocide). It’s somewhat disappointing but also funny that I had him pinned… these types of anticommunist “leftists” like to have this moralist/perfectionist position where successful socialism is when you never ever make mistakes, or rather, don’t survive long enough to make them because their projects were cut short due to intervention (the 3 he names as “worked in the past” are Sankara’s Burkina Faso, Arbenz’s Guatemala, and Allende’s Chile). idk, maybe come back in a few years and hope he gets serious like 2nd thought.
I typed a bunch of stuff and then just remembered: the USSR backed the KMT (fascists) over the CPC in the Chinese civil war. (side note KMT also got USA backing, and continued beyond KMT retreating to Taiwan into the formation of the UN and beyond) That relationship already started on a bad foot, I’d say paranoia was absolutely warranted.
If you take a closer look into the relationship of the two countries in the area of scientific cooperation, I think it might highlight/magnify the issues from China’s POV.
Sovereignty was a core issue/theme for China under Century of Humiliation, and brushing that off as paranoia is making light of that… perhaps the Soviets did not understand why sovereignty (and why if China joined under the USSR banner it would lose a good chunk of hard-won sovereignty) is so important to a people who struggled under a series of occupations. But because of that decision to not join the USSR, Chinese scientists who went to the USSR for scientific cooperation/exchanges were met with gatekeeping from tech as well as patronizing attitudes.
Each country came out of their own revolutions in a different place. USSR was already industrialized while China was largely agrarian. China had a lot to catch up on in terms of industrialization and research/technology. From China’s POV, if their supposed ally was truly for advancing socialism/communism, why withhold an ally from advancement in development? Because you don’t follow the exact same model or fold into the same (a larger) body? I’d say that if you want to characterize China as paranoid here, it would also apply to the Soviets. This experience clearly influences China’s modern foreign policy, from covid vaccines to infrastructure loans.