I am a Marxist in China
Orthodox Marxists in the Chinese internet community often view Russia and Iran as weak links in imperialism, rather than as anti-imperialist forces .However, in the view of Chinese Marxists, opposing the global hegemony of the United States takes precedence over opposing secondary imperialisms (Iran, Russia).
The person in the picture is Yang Heping, a US citizen with a Chinese green card, and he is the most popular orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Maoist self-media figure on the Chinese internet (with 3 million followers on Tiktok and 800,000 on Bilibili). Yang Heping advocates that whether it’s Ukraine, Russia, or Iran, “the truth is on the side of the proletariat, not on the side of any government or capitalist.”
In China, those who unconditionally support Iran and Russia are usually nationalists or national leftists.
I wonder if the differences between the left-wing in Europe and America and the left-wing in China are really that significant?


There are those who claim to be pro-palestinian and then say the israeli proleteriat and the gazan proleteriat should get together overthrow their bourgoisie together. They say in doing so they are centring class dynamics over ethnic lines.
The above paradigm is a load of nonsense. In doing the above they are not centring class dynamics but flattening them instead. The israeli proleteriat collaborate with the bourgoisie against palestinians of various classes; the class dynamics and relations of settler colonialism shouldn’t be erased in favour of some idealised form of class. This serves noone except the genocidaires.
Another example of this was noted by Marx and Lenin on how the English proleteriat has been “bourgeoisified”. Remember, class is primarily a relation to property. It is explored further in Lenin’s labour aristocracy and we have a century of marxist science thereafter examining imperialism and nations as classes.
Western proleteriat are effectively a class of labour aristicrats in relation to the global south and it is partly why true international solaridity has been difficult to develop in the west - western proleteriat benefit from a slice of imperialist profit superexploited from the global south.
If one then flattens this difference between Western and Global South proleteriat we then erase the class dynamics of imperialism! Imperialism is not just the relations between elite bourgoisie but all the cogs in the system that make it happen.
When we zoom out we understand the primary global contradiction is imperialism of which the height of capital control sits in the US. Every example you gave has western involvement in destablisation, why would we equalise Russia and US here?
Marxism is not workerism. The proleterian are considered the most revolutionary because they were considered propertyless but as dialectics teaches us a group’s characteristics are not immutable, we have to understand any given group’s relations to property in the concrete form not just an abstract generalised way.
Going back to Russia, the Western bourgoisie want to balkanise and extract superprofits in labour and resources from Russia - it is an extension of Hitler’s Lebensraum, which itself was directly inspired from the US Manifest Destiny. It is in that context the west is funding, arming and giving political cover for Ukrainian Nazis against Russia. When one chastises Russia in this context then one needs to give a concrete alternative on how the ethnic cleansing in East Ukraine was to be stopped. Remember the West broke two Minsk agreements before the war broke out.