With China’s popularity rising, there has to come a point where a country’s population decides to say:
“We need to follow a Marxist-Leninist model pronto if we want to remain a functioning society, because capitalism isn’t working anymore.”
Which country is gonna say it first?
the intermediate governing principle is socialism. using it to keep the (global) rich down while we transition away from capitalism, into communism. though this is just the path china choose to walk: play along with global capitalism to develop their industry, yes.
though despite all that went wrong, lenin later showed us that you can indeed skip straight to socialism without capitalism or free markets and have it be even more advanced than what we have now in china.
a new communist revolution would look totally different in 2026, and would take a different character depending on which country it’s happening on because it’s more about people choosing their own path instead of having the empire dictate the washington consensus to them. this is the main thing but is what makes socialism the most difficult to understand by westerners who haven’t lived imperialism.