The move to restrict exports of the important rare earth metals that China has a 90% monopoly on has provoked Trump to declare a 100% tariff on Chinese exports and other retaliatory measures, reports DYLAN MURPHY
Xi Jinping in context
JULIDE YAZICI explores the ideological struggle in China today
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a New Year message in Beijing to ring in 2024, December 31, 2023
[Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP] 
Ben Chacko pays tribute to the author of our much-missed Frosty’s Ramblings column, a champion of the countryside and working-class culture
Giving a personal insight into the Labour Party conference, Sinn Fein MP CHRIS HAZZARD slams the lack of mention of the North of Ireland and the need to take the next steps in the journey from peace to Irish unity
The ferocity with which Labour in power has cracked down on protest within its own ranks and also on the streets is unprecedented — and championing those protests is the only way we can turn this ship around, argues ALAN SIMPSON
ANSELM ELDERGILL is a member of Your Party and he suggests how the new party should reform Britain’s constitution
Trump’s Gaza deal is a transient, self-aggrandising spectacle that barely distracts from the West’s outright complicity in the massacre in Gaza and our slide into warmongering, writes MATT KERR
ALAIN BADIOU, in his book Petrograd, Shangai: Les Deux Revolutions du XXe Siecle (the two revolutions of the 20th century), describes the revolutionary impact of the Cultural Revolution on his generation as follows: “Every subjective and practical trajectory has found its nomination in the tireless creativity of the Chinese Revolution.”
The Cultural Revolution was a creative project of engaging new militants to the revolutionary ideological struggle. Mao conceived the Cultural Revolution as a “struggle“ against an objective reality, the danger of deradicalisation that every revolution faces.
The Cultural Revolution, so to speak, emerged as a forced creativity. The harsh reality that the desired society could not be achieved immediately after a socialist revolution, the paradoxical nature and unique challenges and responsibilities of continuing this struggle from a state position were being learned by experience, and the leaders of the Chinese revolution had no ready-made prescription, neither from theory nor from experience.
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Speaking to a CND meeting in Cambridge this week, SIMON BRIGNELL traced how the alliance’s anti-communist machinery broke unions, diverted vital funds from public services, and turned workers into cannon fodder for profit
Lenin’s theory of the weakest link shifted the centre of gravity of the proletarian revolution towards peoples’ struggles in the developing world, contrary to the expectation of Marx and Engels. The effect was to hinder the cause of socialism by decades. Time bring it back to its natural home, argues FAWZI IBRAHIM
From defeating illiteracy to tackling student stress, China’s system transforms lives while putting people before profit — British educators should consider what we could learn from the world’s largest school system, writes LOGAN WILLIAMS