Chinese people get their information about western countries from anglophone pop-culture, which is why they are repeatedly shocked that the western political class acts like brats. Also scandies and dutch people like to act canadian and project the „nice liberal utopia“ outwards
There's an interesting part in Gao's "Battle for China's Past" in which he convincingly argues that positive portrayals of the west are mostly the result of the CPC directly promoting these stories and cultivating a positive image of foreign life in general. This was largely the result of the liberalization of the economy, so leaders wanted positive views of the "international community" they were trying to enter.
no,china has great firewall,most of people can’t access to the the western pop culture.but billions of travelers overseas especially in us,who can confirm US is not paradise.i still receives larger shootings that happened in US in bilibili and weibo.
I wouldn‘t know. I mean maybe chinese people would be influenced by visiting europe? Eurolibs still have great public relations.
those chinese students overseas have great expectation to europe and US before they go to there,but most of them went back to china with discouragement,and became a patriot except for some mind colonized persons who get down on their knees to the west.
2049: a new generation of "lie flat" communists take control of the CPC
2050: China presses the communism button
china has lots of liberalism brainworms after their dengism stint
Gotta pass through a period of capitalist industrialization before you can get to socialist surplus sharing. That's not Deng's fault. Marx spelled it out pretty clearly in Das Kapital.
Past that....
Wang began following a few Chinese influencers living in Sweden, and she was captivated by what she saw. Last year, the Jiangsu province native took the plunge: She quit her job, moved her life to Stockholm, and began studying for a second master’s degree in the city.
Right off the bat, taking advice from Social Media Influencers is going to be both bad and bad for you.
Even if necessary, liberal influence is going to be deep and damaging. They're doing pretty nicely trying to root it out, but it still clings to life.
Also deng had some issues in over-privatizing, there was no need to break the communes, and the massive poverty came from disruption of the delicate planned economy in the first place. It was good to fully industrialize like its going, but that doesn't mean everything was positive.
No one will deny that Deng was a right-deviationist as Mao was a left-deviationist, merely that characterizing him as a neoliberal or as employing "shock therapy" or whatever is not accurate and he, like Mao, was still a Marxist.
It's a shorthand for someone who isn't opposition but made error that can be described in terms of other political alignments. Elsewhere I call the CR "utopian" not because Mao wasn't a Marxist socialist but because in his particular implementations there and sometimes elsewhere he made the same errors that utopians make. Deng likewise was too right wing in his approach, but not to the point of being an anti-Marxist.
Deng followed a heresy that Mao long warned against: he hijacked the People's Revolution onto the capitalist road. Cf.: "to get rich is glorious" "it doesn't matter if the cat is white or black as long as it catches mice"
Marx's Morginian, unilineal cultural evolution of feudalism -> capitalism -> communism is genuinely what he got wrong and Sylvia Federici does a great critique of it in Caliban and the Witch
It isn't simply cultural. At some point you need efficient engines of Capital to juice productivity and raise living standards.
But efficient capital necessarily displaces labor and results in a lumpen residual for some amount of time. A socialist government can stack the deck in favor of leftist ideological goals by deciding who gets promoted and who faces early retirement. But when capital comes online faster than workers reach retirement age, some amount of PMC / Lumpen population split is going to occur.
CatW addresses how European women were treated unfavorably during their transition. But it doesn't seem to explain how you simply avoid the problem of surplus labor.
Even Deng himself was aware he'd be opening up the country to this kind of lib shit. Tends to happen as Capital, whether managed by the Communist Party or not, has the tendency of reproducing itself via worming its way into local culture. The question is whether or not they can eventually transition into a actual socialist economy eventually.
The cultural revolution was good and necessary and needed to be reformed and expanded.
true that, a cultural revolution must happen in every socialist country to solidify the dictatorship of the proletariat and the power of the Communist Party
A cultural revolution, yes, but the Cultural Revolution, no. It was at best a deeply utopian project and thereby bound to end in catastrophe. More pessimistic interpretations are that ideology not grounded in any material analysis of how enduring change arises lead to young Han Chinese in their little Red Guard cliques to enact terroristic acts of chauvinism (though they also nailed some people who had it coming).
I mean come on, there's a reason that China was left in chaos and everyone leading the CR after Mao's death was put in jail, and it's not that Deng was a liberal. There are ideas within the project that have reason, and the desire to destroy "the Four Olds" comes mostly from a good place, but you can't just invent such a completely new society by burning the old one down. You need to understand why these things persist -- what real problems they ameliorate that caused them to come into existence in the first place -- and then build superior solutions to those problems, not just burn down temples and call monks reactionaries.
I really sympathize with Mao as I understand him (less so with some of the Red Guard), but over time as he was Chairman he seemed to forget how long some things take to do well.
Mao did specifically call china's cultural revolution a failure, so yeah.
The idea that the CR was a total era of chaos with young red guard indiscriminately destroying everything is highly exaggerated.
During this time, food production increased (after the drought of the first two years), and industrial infrastructure was built at a level not yet seen in Chinese history. Rural people built machines and factories and schools. It increased the quality of life for the majority of people in China in nearly every way. Food consumption only went down for city dwellers, and they didn't lower to poverty levels. When the time came, Deng gave the rural people shock therapy, selling off the factories they built with their own labor largely without party support, and then he claimed the economic miracle that ensued.
Characterizing the red guard as Han terrorists also isn't fair, especially in light of the Tibetan red guards and their role in the revolution.
Overall, the CR was an incredibly creative moment. These people were not locusts descending on the country, destroying things. They were revitalizing the country both materially and spiritually.
I'm perfectly fine with critiques calling the project utopian or unsustainable, but the project could have been redirected, reformed, worked with, etc. It could have taken a very different form. I disagree that the only way forward was to completely throw the model out.
Rural people built machines and factories and schools
By a conscription characterized (not disingenuously) as re-education, including having children as factory workers.
It increased the quality of life for the majority of people in China in nearly every way.
On average and over time, yes, but see the previous point (along with the more frivolous purges). It's rather impressive how the net growth remained positive, since there were several negative vectors added at the same time.
When the time came, Deng gave the rural people shock therapy, selling off the factories they built with their own labor largely without party support, and then he claimed the economic miracle that ensued.
I'm not familiar with the level of party support he had and it certainly is true that he sold off factories (and occupation of land, etc.), including to foreign capital, but I don't think it's proper to call it "shock therapy" -- or if you insist on doing so, then it is difficult to call what happened in Yugoslavia and the USSR "shock therapy", since they have points of comparison but are plainly not the same thing. Deng (not entirely unlike Lenin and co. with the NEP) was seeking to make use of predictable elements of market dynamics and the desire of foreign capital to get cheap manufacturing to develop the domestic forces of production rather than merely gut the country's wealth by selling everything off at gutter prices.
I repeat, thanks to our correct policy, the people allowed us a deferment of payment and credit, and this, to put it in terms of NEP, is a promissory note. But this promissory note is undated, and you cannot learn from the wording when it will be presented for redemption. Therein lies the danger; this is the specific feature that distinguishes these political promissory notes from ordinary, commercial promissory notes. We must concentrate all our attention on this, and not rest content with the fact that there are responsible and good Communists in all the state trusts and mixed companies. That is of no use, because these Communists do not know how to run the economy and, in that respect, are inferior to the ordinary capitalist salesmen, who have received their training in big factorics and big firms. But we refuse to admit this; in this field communist conceit—komchvanstvo,* * Literally, “comconceit”. —Ed to use the great Russian language again—still persists. The whole point is that the responsible Communists, even the best of them, who are unquestionably honest and loyal, who in the old days suffered penal servitude and did not fear death, do not know how to trade, because they are not businessmen, they have not learnt to trade, do not want to learn and do not understand that they must start learning from the beginning. Communists, revolutionaries who have accomplished the greatest revolution in the world, on whom the eyes of, if not forty pyramids, then, at all events, forty European countries are turned in the hope of emancipation from capitalism, must learn from ordinary salesmen. But these ordinary salesmen have had ten years’ warehouse experience and know the business, whereas the responsible Communists and devoted revolutionaries do not know the business, and do not even realise that they do not know it.
Of course, this isn't how it ended up going; Lenin's health put him to retirement and then death soon after and Stalin pretty quickly changed plans (not without his own reasons). My point is that I think Deng wasn't engaging in roaderism despite what you seem to suggest with "shock therapy" and Deng himself of course reviled the idea of being compared to Khrushchev :
Fallaci: In short, anyway, you prefer Stalin to Khrushchev.
Deng: I just told you that the Chinese people would never do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin!
Fallaci: What if I told you that in the West they call you the Chinese Khrushchev?
Deng: [He laughs]. Listen, they can call me anything they like in the West, but I know Khrushchev well; I dealt with him personally for ten years, and I can assure you that comparing me to Khrushchev is insulting.
Perhaps Deng made errors. Perhaps his judgement was skewed by chauvinism or greed or something else, but he was no Khrushchev or Gorbachev or Yeltsin or Ante Marković or whoever you like. He was interested in advancing the national sovereignty of the PRC and clearly did more good than harm, though he wasn't infallible.
Characterizing the red guard as Han terrorists also isn’t fair, especially in light of the Tibetan red guards and their role in the revolution.
At that point one needs to talk about the CR in different places, since obviously Tibetan Red Guards were very important in Tibet, but they were a tiny minority in "China proper" and the PRC overall. Then again, I wonder what things looked like in Xinjiang, since there certainly was destruction of mosques, but that could have been done by Uighur chauvinists just as the destruction of Mahayana Buddhist temples was usually done by Han chauvinists.
I think this is a reasonable line.
Despite all by bitching about Deng, I don't think his path was an unreasonable plan for transition. Although, I think there were many excesses and problems that came with it.
The only thing I want to push back on here is the idea of conscription and child labor. The education system was explicitly meant to graft on to the material conditions of the villages in which it was located. This meant adding engineering and farming into the curriculum. Most people found the traditional education curriculum to favor theoretical over practical knowledge. Socialist education in general has an emphasis on practical application, so this naturally involved students spending time in factories and in fields, but this was not how the majority of their time was spent. This experience gave them technical know how and real world knowledge that they could leverage in their university courses (which also had technical work as a prerequisite for admission). Connecting students to their community also had the effect that students would return to their rural hometowns after university to help develop the area with their new skills. This is a stark contrast to the brain drain happening in rural areas now.
It was really closer to public schooling with vocational elements that ensures students actually knew how to do the jobs they would eventually enter.
Ironically I'd say that's the part I'm the most confident on, since I'm going off of the direct testimony of a Marxist who lived through the period and was one of those children -- along with his siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc. He mostly views it like the stereotypical sort of trauma rationalization "it fucking sucked, but I like to think that I got something out of it anyway". He thinks the principal made sense but perhaps there was a better way to approach it, probably including by lightening the workload of children a bit.
Of course, if I remember your username, you probably also know people who experienced it, so perhaps you have contrary testimony.
He thinks the principal made sense but perhaps there was a better way to approach it, probably including by lightening the workload of children a bit.
Sure, I'm not dogmatic. I'm always down to change approaches.
since I’m going off of the direct testimony of a Marxist who lived through the period and was one of those children
My source is Dongping Han. He lived through the CR himself, and his book compiled hundreds of testimonies from rural people and their feelings at the time. He argues that the time is remembered overwhelmingly positively, and people felt excited and politically empowered in a way thay never felt and haven't since.
He even provides a neat "where are they now" segment for the young red guards who went through the school system and how they feel about it.
rationalization “it fucking sucked, but I like to think that I got something out of it anyway"
Despite that fact that this person may not have seen the benefit, it really did go a long way in combating brain drain and developing the countryside. Education jumped from 30% to 90%. Without this school / work program, the poor kids would just end up working 100% of the time like they did before and after the CR. I'm not saying this person's experience doesn't matter. I'm just saying that the benefits may not have been personally apparent.
you probably also know people who experienced it, so perhaps you have contrary testimony.
No, actually. I don't know anyone who experienced it themselves (I know someone who participated in the tiannamen protests tho). I have met many of the children of people who lived through the CR. They tend to argue that the CR was a complete disaster. However, it's worth pointing out that the people I come into contact with are of an educated intellectual class who were the direct target of the CR. They tend to have a big time "egg monopoly" bias when speaking of the time. I can't ask how rural people felt because I can't meet them, and they often speak different dialects. However, I have visited the city that is the subject of Han's book, and they are still living in poverty there.
Anyway, I'd love to hear more about that testimony or others you've collected if you want to DM me sometime. I think that stuff and era are super interesting.
My source is Dongping Han. He lived through the CR himself, and his book compiled hundreds of testimonies from rural people and their feelings at the time. He argues that the time is remembered overwhelmingly positively, and people felt excited and politically empowered in a way thay never felt and haven’t since.
I think there's a big difference between people looking back in retrospect and what people on the ground thought in 1976. I would argue that by 1976, the Chinese masses were largely sick and tired of the Cultural Revolution. One major sign would be the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, where there were massive protests because the Gang of Four tried to ban public mourning of Zhou Enlai. 1976 was when Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao died as well as a giant earthquake where more than 300000 people died. A conservative reversal was inevitable, which was why there were massive parades when the Gang of Four were arrested and the Cultural Revolution is over. The Cultural Revolution more or less ended when it was supposed to.
In many ways, I see similarities between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the end of zero-Covid in China. They might look back at it decades later and say to themselves, "Damn, we really had something good going," but at the very moment, enough of Chinese society supported the end. You can't plan society exclusively in a paternal "you hate this now, but you'll thank us decades from now." That shit doesn't even work for raising a child, so how would it work for the masses?
Dongping Han's "The Unknown Cultural Revolution." I really highly recommend it. Way better than Gao's in my opinion. Gives a great look at what life on the ground was like.
Also, the cultural revolution is the basis for a lot of the really generative ideas in the New Left, stuff like progressive education, radical democratic controll of the economy, etc.
You need to understand why these things persist – what real problems they ameliorate that caused them to come into existence in the first place – and then build superior solutions to those problems, not just burn down temples and call monks reactionaries.
:this: :this: :this:
History is impossible to change overnight. The vestigial remnants of society, no matter how much we want to change it, will still be around for a while. Note that I say a while and not forever. It is possible to change history, even for the better, but it takes a very long time and a concerted effort over several generations.
There have been some beneficial effects of the CR (gender equality initiatives, local power mobilization, strengthening ideological commitment within the party and scaring the actual capitalist roaders and wannabe Yeltsins/Gorbachevs into compliance, yada yada) but yeah, the idea that it could have ultimately ended any other way is silly.
You are right but, by the same token, we can say the CR hurt some of those apparent strengths because the CR needed to be dismantled, so gender equality for example made progress that was founded on the CR but when the CR was ended and most of its policy reversed, gender equality suffered a backslide. A project that was less utopian could have preserved those gains by virtue of not half-destroying the country and needing to be combated.
True. If anything, it empowered some rightist elements who associated the positive social aspects of the CR with... everything else.
the idea that it could have ultimately ended any other way is silly.
There were massive parades when the Gang of Four got arrested. This is what happens when you unironically call funerals "bourgeois decadence.".
It's true. Most nationals that I've talked to believe socialism is when the government does things. Also, capitalism is when democracy.
Many people I worked with didn't know what a strike or labor union is.
Edit: I would like to add that the average Chinese national's baseline politics are far less repugnant than a Westerner's despite being lib
we more care about how to make money,less talking about how the politicia goes.as long as china government make us wealthy,we support them
And us China? We are still a socialist country, and we hope to achieve communism like the Northern European countries one day too.”
This is something :funny-clown-hammer: would tweet out as a joke. :kermit-pain:
WTF is the party doing over there. Get some Mao and Lenin in the classroom.
there is mao thought in our class and more in university if you want to be cadre i guess.compared to mao,i love deng for what he brought china out of mire
Yeah, my partner went to SFU (Shanghai Finance University) and it would have been during Deng's reforms, and even her understanding of Marxism when we met was like... :lenin-confused:
:xi-reactionary-spotted: Xi please just press the Mao button already
i am chinese,i can see most of chinese idealize sweden,because of its better rich life,not its so called communism.china is large and billion people,so we have diverse opinions.by the way,china is not communism but socialism with chinese characteristic.we still are still developing country and need to raise the standard of living.sorry for my bad english.
I think people here understand that China is a country still transitioning towards Socialism, let alone Communism. It's not surprising that during this process Chinese people will look at a functioning Social Democracy like Sweden and see echoes of the goals their society is working towards. They don't see the imperial exploitation propping it up in cheap resources. Because working conditions are relatively better, they don't see that at the foundation, it's still a system ruled by Capitalists rather than the workers, who are still exploited.
The difference with China is that, for all the criticisms I could make, it has a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and can tell the Capitalists that their games are over. This means that China can roll out Socialism and build it out as they develop. In Sweden, the Left has to fight without state power just to keep what they have. Even if a government wanted to expand worker rights and move towards communism, they'd be blocked by national and international capitalism.
I know a lot of people in China are annoyed by the CPC, as any person is with the mistakes of their country's government, and I myself wish they'd move back towards Planned Economies and have a more pro-Socialist foreign policy. But whatever it's flaws it's a beacon of hope for the world.
China is what China is...projecting your hopes onto it is guaranteed to result in disillusionment. Like the Chinese who moved to Sweden thinking it would solve all their problems, only to find an alien country with weird food and uncomfortable culture. They end up learning more about their own country than their new one.
It's like that all over the world.
A theoretical actual Maoist would probably tell us to cease the idol worship and try to make that better world ourselves while paying attention to the lessons taught by generations before us. No need to hope if we are making our own luck.
Vloggers living in the region often present northern Europe as a haven from the frustrations of life in modern China: its unaffordable housing (...)
China should put out warrants for these bloggers, they clearly are in the pay of the Swedish state to produce brain drain propaganda, the housing situation here is fucking dire.
Don’t need too. The situation in Sweden right now aren’t too good with run away inflation and shite economy. The profit (loot) gonna dried up soon thanks to usg. Let’s see if they could maintain this privileges
TLDR, everything is expensive, the food sucks, and the weather is worse than mongolia
Its just kind of a savory loaf thing, it really doesn't taste much of iron or blood at all.
You put bacon and/or lingonberry jam on it.
If you're gonna make fun of Swedish food at least go after the really gross and niche stuff, like Kalvsylta(Veal boiled in stock until it falls apart, then solidified with the stock into a jelly form) or our version of cheesecake, which is made by mixing flour and milk, heating it up, curdling the whole thing with rennet, mixing in eggs, cream, and sugar as well as flavoring stuff like almonds, then baking it and eaten warm.
That latter one I actually got sick from myself the one time it was served in school.
The photo for kalvsylta on the wikipedia page as well is, completely unironically, very photogenic compared to some alternatives.
Whatever recipe my grandparents make turns out a perfect concrete gray, I cant even find a photo on google that would illustrate it.
Its edible, but thats about it. I can only imagine its comparable to jellied eels in being designed out of desperation to save every single bit of nutrient possible with no regard for anything else.
I mean I'll be perfectly honest the kalvsylta just looks like headcheese which isn't that bad. The cheesecake thing sounds like an attrocity though
I never got sick from eating it at least, but it is a cold jelly of meat, salt, pepper, onions and maybe some other minor seasonings, so its definitely the kind of thing that might be a textural atrocity for some and generally kind of bland, particularly if you wont eat beets like me, so its just the jelly.
I'd assume making it from an actual head might have some stronger or more interesting flavors, but generally I think its made with just plain veal so that isnt gonna be much of a help here.
Pretty sure that is mostly a meat loaf if it's anything like a Danish farsbrød.
Swedish cuisine has lots of weird stuff like hotdogs topped with shrimp salad or black pudding (which is rare today and actually not that bad) and many Swedish foods are sweeter than what European palates are normally used to but they have tons of good stuff as well. They have a large variety of cakes, they eat lots of seafood and their mix and match candy is really good.
Some able to cope with it, and some not. Just depend on perspective.
I would not be able to handle the winter. But some of he people interviewed seem pretty happy
How much does food and coffee and such cost in China?
Ah ok. I wonder if it's cheaper because of the price of the food itself or the price of the labor. Food seems really expensive in the US when moving from India ( for the kind of person that can move) but that's because laborers make very little money
check the data or statistics,china is not in hyperinflation mode right now
Coffee is ¥12 (ordinary) or ¥28 (a ripoff joint). Food is ¥40-60 for a single meal for one person.
Yeah, critical support for China for sure. But they really, really need another rectification campaign or something.
Dude, they’re in a Cold War with the US right now. It’s gonna take time for it to improve. Remember, cpc rule is just 60 years odd, this is not the peak of modern China, especially with the multipolar World emerging
New Cold War is just an additional reason for the improvement of society.
I get that, but if they want to win that Cold War, or improve society, continue to build socialism and not sink into liberalism, then the one thing they can't compromise on is an actual understanding of Marxism.
Which they’re trying to improve. The purge of youth league, which Hu Jin Tao and Jiang Zhemin were from, which full of liberal is the first step toward that.
Too many communists I know have bad opinions because "that's what they do on Sweden." Case in point, their reactionary fallback in trans health care.
