I’m currently halfway through this book and I would highly recommend it.

Hours later, once they confirmed the pair were Ukrainian, they treated the injured troop’s crushed leg, provided him with food and cigarettes, and helped him evacuate.

Implying they would have withheld care if they were Russian

It loosely reminds me of the Foundation Sci Fi series. In the novel, a Mathematician creates a new field he calls psychohistory, basically a mathematics of sociology, vaguely dialectic materialism. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations, and the first thing he sees is the inevitable collapse of empire.

I think your 95% is probably too generous. Westerners are intensely chauvinistic, “why learn from China’s struggles when I already know they’re completely wrong” is the starting position, from there you don’t have much room for understanding and growth. Whether that’s from boilerplate libs, Ultra’s, Maoists, or even ML’s.

There are a lot of deeply unserious people who call themselves Marxist-Leninists but it becomes pretty apparent that they have a fragile grasp on theory and are just as reliant on being spoon fed narratives as the libs, probably why they uncritically parrot NATO propaganda. And that’s the most generous I can be, I think there’s also a strong component of racism baked in there when it comes from the global western left.

From this excellent essay

These myopic and short-sighted “left com”, “ultra-left”, or modern “Maoist” types love to denounce modern China as a betrayal of socialism, without considering that it is the failure of the Western left to do successful revolutions in their countries which made it necessary for existing socialist states to adapt to the global conditions of entrenched neo-liberal capitalism.