Also private companies in China above a certain size are forced to have CPC members in their decision making board and on various levels so if Xi is pushing for more CPC presence and control in big conglomerates that would appear on the surface as conglomerates employing more marxist phds (unsurprisingly also CPC members)
Also maybe it's to get on the good side of the party for some and good pr towards the state or even needing marxist graduates to mediate the back and forth between party and it's control and the private company
Imagine being a member of the most powerful communist party in the world, holding a position of power at the commanding heights of the largest national economy in history, getting to regulate and monitor the actions of some of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. I’m beyond jealous.
CPC members have been hit hard the last couple of years. They're the ones that get tagged to "volunteer" to man all the virus testing centers and stand outside toll booths telling motorists to open their phones and display their green codes. Plus in school you have to attend all sorts of meetings in your nonexistent spare time. It's pretty tough.
Yeah i'd imagine is hard. Pulling of zero Covid required and requires huge grassroots party efforts. And that it succeeded it shows that at least party still can function and mobize at those levels. Sure a lot of members probably are fed up , especially yougner ones, but they have helped save millions of lives and a lot of them along wih a majority probably acknowledges it
By "volunteer" I mean they get kicked out of the Party if they don't. And it's work your regular job and then come out and spend your evenings and weekends away from family and rest doing repetitive jobs they don't like. Nobody wants to be the hall monitor, scanning everyone's health code to see if they're allowed to exit the highway.
Well I understand that but at the end of the day they are grassroots members of a dem Central org at a time of great crisis. If socially necessary mobilization and hard work is dictated it's something you signed up for. And if you didn't and thought those days of having to bust your ass doing mass work through the party are over for China well too bad
This is so true. Have you ever talked to a political staffer or an NGO employee? It’s inside baseball all the way down.
Marxism major needed to work at the Marxism factory, enquire within.
“Private corporations are seeking Marxism experts” is such a bizarre thing is read. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, it’s weird but it works folks.
Private companies in China of a certain size have to legally have party members as part of their decision making and also the workers have to form a labor unit. Companies that get big enough are essentially forced into understanding Marxism or they'll get nationalized.
I cannot ever imagine getting a degree in Marxism let alone it being a requirement for a job.
Entry Level Marxism Position, must have 205 years of Marxism experience.
And I routinely see users here seething about "cheerleading" for China. Okay I'm not going to do a backflip but I'll shake a pom pom.
idk if this was in reference to my comment yesterday where i used the phrase, but i don't at all want to discount good stuff china is doing, i'm sure there's a lot of it. i just meant that especially on genzedong some people seem to insist that everything about china is good and nothing is bad, which seems unlikely to me. its definitely not nearly as bad on here as on some places. Support is good but surely it should be critical support.
in this case though this just seems good. thanks xi.
GenZedong is a lot more dogmatic about China than we are here. I enjoy seeing good faith critiques with the understanding that China is a net good. I think that, internally, all support ought to be critical. Even amongst friends I’m working to radicalize, I find conceding things up front while talking one on one helps them realize I’m not just some zealot who hasn’t thought things through. But when it comes to performing for libs online, uncritical support for all AES projects. I refuse to do their capitalist apologia work for them.
ya i dont talk to libs about that sort of stuff at all. i guess it makes sense to do it that way on reddit. i hadn't really considered that angle, so thanks.
i feel like since leftist criticisms of china are probably almost entirely different from liberal ones it doesnt necessarily have to serve as doing capitalist propaganda for them. maybe it can help redirect the conversation away from bullshit like xinjiang whatever? idk, probably not. i'm not interested in arguing with liberals about china or whatever online so i don't know what the strategems are.
In my experience it’s hard to even discuss leftist critiques of China with a liberal. Like I can talk about how their housing market is stagnating and a liberal will hear “China’s market manipulation has failed” instead of the actual (admittedly mild) critique about enabling excessive financialization. I believe there’s even been progress on that front that I haven’t kept up on. But you get my point. If someone’s not already anticapitalist, framing it in a way that makes sense to them is hard
checks out. people really don't have an easy time accepting new ideas especially ones that go against such ingrained beliefs from propaganda etc. hits bong you just need to open your mind bro (me when a liberal propagates propaganda) (kind of unironically)
do you know what a good place is to learn abt modern china or just keep up with it newswise? i'm not like extremely confident in state media but i guess its surely better than like NYT or fuckin whatever
Something a friend insists works wonders is saying, “I know it’s a lot to ask you to realign your whole world view, but…” Specifically with longer term relationships where you see each other often
lol I did this thing I hate when other people do, yeah I guess I was thinking about that phrase because it was fresh in my mind but not about you specifically.
But yeah there are a lot of things happening in China to celebrate, and relative to the other worlds "super powers" I think focusing on the negatives in China is disingenuous, particularly when sitting in the "imperial core" while doing it. I also think it's important as leftists to defend the progress of China when faced with an endless barrage of anti-China propaganda. So, yeah cheerleading for China is a good thing, when the cheerleading is informed and grounded.
There are levels of critical support, it can't be used as a blanket position, and I believe China is overwhelmingly a force of good, with the "critical" part of my support a sidenote vs a main feature. Ironically one of my main criticisms is they are not offering enough support to AES projects throughout the world, "spreading communism" as it were.
ya i think the first world point is a good one, i feel like people in china do plenty to productively criticize the cpc in a more informed way than most of us could do. to be clear i don't personally have specific criticisms of china or their government or whatever, i don't know anything about it. but that's why i don't want to be exposed to only hardline total support from somewhere like genzedong cause i doubt that's the whole picture. but genzedong is there to annoy people on reddit and that's good, it's not there to inform me specifically lol.
if anything yeah i think the relative isolationism seems non-ideal to me but like, i wouldn't be surprised if there were strong reasons for it that i just don't understand cause obviously i'm not a chinese government official.
i think sports teams should have cheerleaders that like, hurl abuse at the players and just talk shit about them and how bad they are. that could be funny.
Critical support is the party line, there's no one more critical of central planning than the central planners themselves.
What's important is the reaction to and handling of crises and not the crises themselves. If a ruling ideology reacts to a crisis by supporting the interests of the working class over capital, it's net good. If it uses the crises to diminish worker power and institute reforms beneficial to capital then it's net negative. The starting point is just a tiny portion of the whole image.
"unprecendented third term" :citations-needed:
the things they have to say about a guy whos been in power 10 years to make him seem like evil gommunism dictator. literally his last 3 predecessors served longer :lenin-laugh:
I believe this is referring to his third term as president. If Wikipedia is a good source, it looks like the Chinese constitution was amended in 2018 to get rid of the two term limit.
His two predecessors (Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin) both appear to have served for only 10 years.
its true but the emphasis on the specific office when other leaders have been in power longer, just shuffling offices or in different chairs. nevermind 'democratic' leaders serving terms just as long.
shit, :margaret-thatcher: was in office as long
and indirectly elected! literally the same kind of system but :us-foreign-policy:
He's also overstaying the normal retirement age for party leadership of age 70, which honestly kinda worries me. In theory, he should be positioning a new generation of leaders to take up the torch. But a great deal of the Xi-Era has involved rooting out corruption and taming the bitter influence of western capitalism in the national bureaucracy.
I understand the impulse not to let a bunch of Bo Xilai types replace you once you're gone and undo all the work you've done. But you can't live forever, man. I only hope this third term will establish enough of a dedicated cohort of ideological contemporaries to bridge the gap into the next decade.
Both kinda sucked compared to Xi so its only right that he can serve longer
I remember that. People were really pushing the "evil dictator" propaganda when that happened, but I kinda realized that nobody was offering a decent explanation for why an elected office should be subject to a term limit. If the people want you as their leader that should be more than enough of a mandate.
Libs pearl clutching over Morales for the same reason sealed the deal for me. Term limits are antidemocratic.
A degree in Marxism sounds like something I'd be keen on if it was available here
It exists at the graduate level. Amber advertised a master's program at one point on chapo.
Are there any contemporary Chinese textbooks on Marxism that have been translated into English? Would be interesting to read.
I've had to translate some of the rhetoric into English and it is incomprehensible. Not only does it rely on concepts deeply embedded in the CPC's custom philosophy that make sense in no other context, the sentences run on and on, with commas, going into culs-de-sac and generally continuing to exist, way past the point at which a sentence should end, making it even more difficult to translate, and resulting in stilted, overlong sentences that keep going on, a dictionary doesn't help because of the highly idiomatic text, they love using words that translate as "rectification", it's one of their favorites, it means no dissent from the orders handed down from on top, and the sentences just keep on truckin'.
Are these texts required reading for all party members? Do they actually read them if so?
Oh yeah. There are exams and everything. The Party doesn't just accept anyone. You have to be sharp, and smart, and get good grades at school. And do a whole ton of extra work that doesn't receive a jiao of payment. China's government is made up of scientists and engineers (because those are the only brain types that can pass such grueling endurance tests).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_with_Chinese_characteristics
I dont think I understand the context here or I am just a smooth brain. Is this a good thing? I thought china was just another dictatorship?
Im bad at picking up on context Im sorry :(
Edit: Thank you for responses. Once again I am left perplexed by my lack of knowledge. A meme text to summarize my existence:
"When do I start to fully understand topic xyz?" "That's the neat part, you don't."
Here on Hexbear, most of us are fans of AES (actually-existing socialist) countries, China included. China is actually much more democratic than Western sources tend to imply, and despite the best efforts of the Western media, it is quite clear that China is an exemplar of good governance, particularly with regard to covid-19.
Dictatorship of the proletariat. Policies are driven by public demand and the greater good rather than the whims of old rich people. China is the only country on earth where billionaires who break the law go to jail and stay there.
It's extremely good. Chinese students can major in being based, and it's actually an in-demand degree
Death to America
I thought china was just another dictatorship?
Not true at all. I recommend learning how China's system of democracy is actually structured, you will have heard the mindless repetition of "it's a dictatorship" by liberals and the media forever but absolutely none of them will have taught you how any of China's system is actually structured.
China's system was fundamentally inherited from the Soviet Union and then adapted with further changes. It is very similar to soviet democracy.
In essence, elections are held at a local level for a worker's council. The members of that worker's council then elect a candidate to represent the council at the next tier up, and then the members of that council elect a candidate to represent them at the next tier up. This continues for many tiers all the way up to the national congress and are highly meritocratic based on the actual results that representatives produce. Every person at the top has climbed through these tiers from the very bottom working at the local level to improve the people's lives.
All of this is fundamentally kept from people when anything about China is brought up because any actual understanding of the system and how it functions cuts through the ability to frame it as evil.
Ye, that particular article is useful but has been getting progressively worse over the last couple years. In particular it's useful as it dispels the myth many seem to believe that there's no elections at all. People have fundamentally NO knowledge whatsoever what the system is and getting your foot in the door of these people often involves using something that they trust already, for a lot of them that's libpedia.
You never responded to me the other day in our fascism discussion btw :<
Most people don't even know how their local township is run, let alone a foreign government.
edit: lol damn, Awoo ninja'd me by 40 minutes
The Chinese government system is, very roughly, that you elect the city counselors for your district, then all the city counselors elect your mayor. Every five years, all the city counselors in your province elect delegates to the national convention, then the delegates elect congress, and finally congress elects the president. There are a ton of edge cases to this, where what I referred to as "city counselor" and "province" could be all sorts of other things if you don't live in a large city in a standard province.
There's plenty of room to argue about whether this is more or less democratic than any other system, but ultimately it is considered authoritarian because the people who own western newspapers don't get to vote.
Are there any contemporary Chinese textbooks on Marxism that have been translated into English? Would be interesting to read.
