The answer that
Sue has given is where I am at.
I can understand, given what you have said , why China is a personal thing for you however jumping enthusiastically and uncritically onto Masons Mind Map proposal isn't going to solve those issues. In fact your mistaken enthusiasm for it just diverts you into an energy sapping he's '100% right, correctly identifies, maybe he is wrong , but he does identify, perhaps he was wrong on this but etc etc' rather than be able to focus on the issues that you feel are important.
Whatever political froth he covers it in his proposal isn't for some quality assurance programme on the left that issues a watermark that will protect the left from being treated as foreign assets by the state . Its actually for the left and the state to work together in somehow tackling state sponsored disinformation by indulging what inevitable lead into ( especially looking at the last arms length disinformation service) state sponsored disinformation. You might be right that the mindmap is right on China but what about the rest of that's haphazardly thrown to the wolves on there plus the collateral damage and bystanders?
The problem with seeking to adopt such an off the peg ( and frankly off the wall) one size solution from Mason is that anything he touches he inevitable makes it more about him that the issue and it, therefore, becomes tainted. I'd be interested to read , with an open mind, more of your posts on China but I'm not going to give you any leeway on backing Mason state surveillance and rebuttal nonsense.
I have no idea about the rest of it because I don't know that much about Russia.
If he is indeed advocating state surveillance then I don't agree with him; but the original article that prompted this discussion was rather vague and the specifics of what he was suggested was a bit vague.
What I would like is simply for the left to be more genuinely internationalist and universalist - it still seems that some people are locked in a strange Cold War mindset where they desperately want there to be a socialist camp opposed to the capitalist west, but such a camp does not exist; there are only capitalist powers and other capitalist powers. The behaviour of these "anti-imperialist" western leftists has real world effects on democracy activists in the global south, either by throwing around unsupported allegations of protests being supported by foreign powers which then leads to persecution, or by sapping the energy and morale of people on the ground, giving them the impression that nobody cares about them and causing them to waste their time refuting false claims online.
The ultimate problem with this, and also why I do not agree with Paul Mason working with the state to achieve this, is that I do not think the differences between the interests and demands of protesters in the west and in the "global south" are radically different anymore and there is some kind of convergence underway in socio-economic conditions as well as a convergence towards authoritarianism and nationalism.
Most "global south" countries are now urbanised middle income states with fairly educated populations who have Internet access, so creating solidarity and common cause is less difficult compared to e.g. a society of largely illiterate subsistence farmers. But in many cases, the behaviour of western tankie leftists makes it difficult to make common cause with democracy activists in somewhere like Thailand, Lebanon, Myanmar, Belarus or Hong Kong because they so often dismiss their movements as colour revolutions and side with the oppressors.
And I don't think the political demands are so different, or at least they should not be. Globalised neoliberal capitalism has tended to favour fascist states like China who use a repressive state to create a compliant workforce for global capital. This is why Elon Musk and Wall Street love China. The race to the bottom has contributed to a collapse in bargaining power of workers in the west, which has in turn weakened unions and therefore civil society, which has contributed to a transformation into an increasingly plutocratic and authoritarian state which the UK appears increasingly to be today. So from that angle, rather than allowing our leaders to hypocritically claim to be on the side of democracy, it would make more sense to make common cause with democracy activists in other countries and echoing their demands towards our own establishment. Knee jerk support for authoritarian states which the west doesn't like (but from whose repression our elites profit nicely from...) does their work for them by causing divisions between activists in the west and those in the global south who should actually be on the same side.
Also, achieving basic right to assembly in China would transform the power of labour worldwide, so the left should be the strongest and most vocal supporters of political change in China. It would also make things tougher for the Chinese government if political demands for more democracy in China were also aligned with demands for more democracy in the west as it would be more like a global revolutionary movement than the perception of the west trying to change China's indigenous system.
In summary - the conditions for a genuine internationalist socialist movement exist today, and the prevalence of campist tankies amongst the people most motivated to work on building this is a major hindrance, and I don't think the left can be revitalised as a global anti-capitalist force until this kind of thinking is discredited and there can be identified a common left in both Asia and the West. So Mason's solution is wrong, but I am defensive about it only because I think it would be good for there to be an organised effort on the left to challenge and expose the worst examples of this kind of behaviour.
I suspect that time is on my side here and the kind of "anti-imperialist" worldview will have less resonance as western countries become less relevant. For instance, by 2050 Europe's share of global GDP is anticipated by PwC to fall to 10%, and the US share (which has already halved since 1960) will also fall significantly. Already, of the top 5 economies, only 2 of them (US and Germany) are western economies. I think as these trends become more obvious, a worldview based on assuming that only the west has agency will begin to look increasingly ridiculous.
(Why would you work with people you couldn't trust?)
