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  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    So, instead of rehashing the same old talking points for the upteenth time, would anyone be interested in discussing China’s political project in a broader and more mature way? Like for example:

    • Who do you think should’ve come to power following the fall of the Qing, through to the civil war (if not the CPC)?

    • Do you agree with the direction of Deng’s economic reforms and opening up to foreign investment? If not, should he have stayed closer to Mao’s policies, or should he have gone further towards liberalization, or something else?

    • What aspects or projects of the CPC have been good or successful?

    • What aspects or projects of the CPC have been flawed or unsuccessful?

    • What lessons can be learned from the successes and failures of the CPC?

    Ngl I don’t have high hopes for this comment but I’m tryin’ over here.

    • meth_dragon [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      i am once again relieved that cracker libs are too lazy and ignorant to investigate anything beyond the ccp bad that msm tells them, and that chinese libs hate themselves too much to think themselves worthy of educating their cracker lib betters about cpc atrocity conspiracy theories.

      though tbf at least shit like tiananmen is falsifiable, i think i’d have an aneurysm if white people on the internet started telling me that mao never left his palanquin and ate the PLA’s entire stock of chicken over the course of the long march. like big spoon stalin but in earnest mao-wtf

      • Parent [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I have a friend from China who’s a lib and he’s probably one of the most racist people I know (specifically against Chinese people). Just the other day he said Chinese people have never invented anything and that good inventions can only come from the US or Europe. He also wants to look, sound, and dress like an Ivy-league country club dude. Dude regularly reminds me of a Chinese Uncle Ruckus. Is that kind of self-hating common or is it mostly because he’s from a rich family?

        • meth_dragon [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          in parlance, he’s called an uncle chan.

          it’s an interesting exercise to map racism and self hatred against class interests, particularly in the context of america and china’s antagonistic relationship. mao’s perenially applicable class analysis has changed somewhat over the years, but the gist remains the same: the big bourgeois landlords/compradors have morphed into corrupt officials and bureaucratic monopolists, the middle bourgeois are now real estate/insurance/finance goons or factory owners and right wing petty bourgeois have added techbros to their ranks.

          in my experience, the big bourgeois are largely past this level of ingroup status signalling, they’re too busy hustling their stolen capital out of china and race for them only matters insofar as who lets them stash their cash where. meanwhile, the middle bourgeois and the upper rungs of the petty bourgeois are likely most prone to this sort of behavior. they don’t have enough cash or clout to feel like they’re above the party, but they have a big enough amount of ill gotten goods/chips on their shoulder to make them feel like they might be arbitrarily targeted (or maybe they feel like they deserve more but for the intervention of the party), and so they channel that resentment into hating other chinese people.

          less rich people also ape western affectations for a wider variety of reasons, but i will say that western media penetration into china is very deep and pervasive and that the 90s/chimerica years resulted in at least a generation of thought leaders and public intellectuals that are extremely ideologically compromised and it is unclear how fast their influence might be dissipated, if ever.

      • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yeah it’s like, typing this out really drew my attention to how much conversations about China are dominated by random noise that’s largely insignificant or bullshit. It’s always this 24 hour news coverage level of analysis, with no actual study of history or major trends and themes. Hell I realized myself the other day that there were two leaders between Deng and Xi who I couldn’t name and know basically nothing about.

        I think that most people fall into certain ideological traps that allow them to simplify narratives to the point of never really feeling the need to study anything, in part because the world is just so big that it’s hard to actually be informed about things. You never have to decide how you feel about specific events in China’s history if you just scream “CHINA BAD” every time it comes up, and that’s a whole lot of history you never have to bother learning now.

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago
      I'll offer my own answers as well.
      1. The CPC

      2. I agree, though I think it may have gone too far. Allowing billionaires is a dangerous gambit due to the possibility of them gaining political influence, and allowing landlords was a mistake. However, these reforms have helped lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty and were necessary at the time.

      3. Land reform, the Barefoot Doctors program, Deng’s reforms, and the Belt and Road initiative have all been very successful and increased the standards of living for an enormous number of people. The CPC has had a focus on improving the economic conditions of their poorest people, and in that regard they’ve done a very good job.

      4. The Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution, LGBT rights, and past China’s foreign policy such as supporting Pol Pot/the Khemer Rouge and invading Vietnam. A lot of the blame for the Sino-Soviet split lies with Khrushchev, but I think there’s enough blame to go around. I think the Soviet policy of “peaceful co-existence” was more correct, and more in line with what China ended up doing anyway (libs will roast me for that, I’m sure). Some positive things did happen during the Cultural Revolution (such as the above-mentioned Barefoot Doctors program), but generally it was a chaotic mess and I’m not sure it accomplished very much. The GLF had a lot of factors, including the Sino-Soviet split, but there’s plenty of blame to ascribe to Mao (the sparrows did not, in fact, deserve it)

      5. Kind of trite but one take-away is “seek truth from facts.” When Mao was successful, it was because of his experience living among rural Chinese, and looking at what they needed. Where he was unsuccessful was when he got too caught up in theory, sometimes assuming something would work without paying close enough attention to whether it actually was. I consider the overall political project successful due to the improvements made in people’s lives, but how the devil’s bargain with the capitalists will ultimately play out remains to be seen.

  • AlpineSteakHouse [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I wonder what happened to MLK and all the people who started the BLM protests in America which guarantees freedom of protest and speech. It really sucks that they all were either murdered or committed suicide and the police were never able to do anything about it.

    Oh well, gotta let go and let god. Btw, did you hear that the evil Chinese Government sent someone who threw a firebomb to jail? Nasty stuff, glad I live somewhere civilized.

  • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Liberals be like: Yeah I love democracy.

    The thing I love most about democracy is that I get zero choice or control over who represents me in government at all and I let them make decisions for me that hurt me. In fact I celebrate it when they make decisions that hurt me

  • radiofreeval [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Not the same event. It’s rather like if someone was talking about the migration in response to the Homestead Act and you mention the Donner party as though it was part of that.

        • fuckahaha [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Not related to what you are responding to but just as an interesting symbolic link between the two things you mentioned, iirc the first people killed, butchered and eaten by the Donner party were their native scouts, afterwards mostly erased from the story in popular telling. Just as the homesteaders first ethnically cleansed the native Americans before hunger for more land turned them cannibalistically against each other

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            That is interesting! I didn’t know they had native guides, though I suppose of course they would and of course those guides were the first sacrificed by colonizers.

            • fuckahaha [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Looked a little more into it, they weren’t actually the very first eaten but were the first (and by some accounts only) to be murdered for the purpose of eating. They both refused to eat human meat before fleeing (they’d been warned their murder was being planned), but were caught up with down the trail a few days later. Shortly after they were butchered the group (a segment of the party that had been sent ahead) that did it were harboured and fed in a Miwok village (the guides having also been Miwok I think). A grizzly tale.

          • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I am pretty sure they mean the revolts from right at the start of the PRC. Wikipedia is a hostile source and I don’t endorse it, but it explains well enough that the Land Reform Movement started before the end of the Civil War and mostly ended by 1953. Because the CPC/PLA only had so much manpower and China is huge, they had very little direct involvement, and instead just said in so many words “we aren’t protecting the landlords’ claim to their property, do what you will”. The peasants then independently seized the land, usually either killing or driving out the landlord, and distributed it among themselves or sometimes held it in common.

            There’s an interesting relation between this approach and Mao’s observations of peasant movements a few decades prior.

  • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I lost a parent to antvaxx stuff. A drop of her blood is on the hands on of every free speech absolutist who pushes that garbage and creates space for the worst people possible.

  • Flyberius [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    They do actually allow protests. Western media was having a fucking field day earlier this year talking about how China had bowed to pressure from protests regarding their covid policy.

    Jesus titty fucking H Christ…

  • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Obviously the Chinese protesting continued Covid lockdowns last year were all sent to organ harvesting camps because those asians are different and probably evil not like us good heckin anglorinos that know how to do socialism properly where we vote for the same right wing party to keep the even farther right wing party from power for another four years.

    • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Actually the Chinese government ending the lockdown after all of these large demonstrations were purely coincidence. See in my democracy I protest and my government does literally nothing to address why I protested. That’s how you know democracy is working, when the government hears my concerns and completely ignores them. Unlike that authoritarian sissypee where the people protested and the government listened to them and changed course based on their demands. Listening to your people and making policy based on their concerns is authoritarian. Ignoring your people and making policy based on corporate donors is democracy.

    • ruination@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I mean as someone of Chinese descent who is repulsed by the Chinese government’s actions despite them looking like me, I think my existence alone disproves your argument. I don’t doubt that there are some people who do think like that, but I do doubt that they make up anywhere near a majority.

      • You can internalize racism you know? And even if not, you can still be convinced that a group is bad by shitty American propaganda even if you look like those people. You’re not unique in that way, but it’s just not really relevant to the situation

        • ruination@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Okay, fair point, the argument I made wasn’t exactly a good one. I do still think that hating authoritarianism isn’t exactly xenophobia.

          • They are super related though. Only non-white places are called authoritarian and based on just vibes (usually supported by racism and internalized racism). There is not a definition of authoritarian that encompasses china and doesn’t encompass most of Europe and America also. If you have one, hit me up because I’ve heard a billion and the only way I’ve ever been able to understand it is either “yeah but they’re bad so when they do it it’s authoritarian” or “they are naturally more authoritarian [because of their race]”

            • ruination@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              Isn’t Russia being criticised for similar authoritarian practices despite them being white (at least the people in power, anyways)?

              • Russia is an interesting case, and most scholars of race do not think that Russians are white in any sociological sense, because white supremacists don’t consider them white and they aren’t treated as “white people” by white people. They are “asiatic” to racists. Their skin is, on average, fairly white. But that was never what being white meant, or at least people who claimed so were never consistent about it in history (people whiter than many white people but with black ancestors weren’t white for example, and fair skinned Asian people also aren’t white despite being lighter in skin tone). Whiteness is a category of exclusion

      • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        “as someone of Chinese descent” hitting with that stretch from half court on this one. There have been people of Chinese decent in America longer than most white people.

  • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Is this trying to say people who support the most successful AES state and largest democracy in the world are not real marxists, but people who just believe western propoganda with rascist characteristics are the true marxists?