Yeah a lot of the defenses I've seen of their Uyghur stuff from hardcore MLs has been incredibly sus... like "they're not concentration camps but they are doing reeducation because there's a severe threat of radical Islamic terrorism" as if that wasn't the exact same justification neocons used to get us into the war in Iraq and contributed to extreme Islamophobia back home.
Like yeah we both agree it's not concentration camps, China is mostly good, its existence is a net benefit for a multipolar world, and the hype on their misdeeds is overblown to promote Cold War 2.0 but no ML state should be promoting ethno-nationalism. That's fucked up and indefensible any way you choose. Yeah the US is by far even worse on this stuff but that shouldn't be an excuse not to examine China's policies more closely
no ML state should be promoting ethno-nationalism
Ethno-nationalism is when you only let the main ethnic group to have one child while all other ethnic groups can have as many as they want.
they are doing reeducation because there’s a severe threat of radical Islamic terrorism" as if that wasn’t the exact same justification neocons used to get us into the war in Iraq
lol this is choice. drawing equivalence between a murderous invasion based on WMD lies that kills a million plus, and an education-based internal security response to western-backed terror. fucking amazing. yeah we all remember when the USA sent Timothy McVeigh to part-time vocational training right? or when the marines sent everyone in Fallujah to English school?
no ML state should be promoting ethno-nationalism
and they aren't, no part of the program (which ended last December) was doing that.
a murderous invasion based on WMD lies that kills a million plus
More like 2 million plus.
lets not forget dropping a nuclear dirty bomb on them, giving the local population radiation poisoning for generations
idk, i think individual racism is definitely a thing in china, but i kinda doubt things are occurring in any way that the west says it. the uighur autonomous region was once an independent soviet that chose to join with china rather than the USSR. they have their own governing body, are legitimately autonomous, and the police force and facilities are all locals. so, if this is a genocide, its being carried out on uighurs by uighurs.
xinjiang borders afghanistan, which as you know has lots of terrorist groups with american funding in them. its only natural that theyd spill over the border. there were numerous terrorist attacks in xinjiang with casualties in the thousands. idk how youd even go about fixing such a nationalistic threat without improving material conditions, and that would be things like education, jobs, and infrastructure development. china built highspeed rail, much to their detriment, to xinjiang, so i think they're at least giving it a go. in fact i saw a video around 2016 about some american railmakers scoffing at the idea and saying that its so inefficient and unprofitable to do so.
all in all? i'm just glad they aren't full on carpet bombing the region ala the west
I may be a dunce, but from my readings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, I gain no insights on how to navigate the whole Uyghur issue. I mean, clearly the situation is being smeared into an Iraq WMD 2.0 situation, but also it is clear there is more than nothing at the root of it. I'm certainly not the most well-read ML in the world, but from what I've read, it mostly revolves around epistemology and an orthodox application of dialectical materialism. Dogmatism is called out repeatedly throughout the ML literary canon. I think what happens is that online we attach the term "Tankie" to "dogmatist," and then we attach "ML" to "tankie," and from there we make huge generalizations which are easy for people to sockpuppet and reaffirm.
A real mixed bag. I have real problems with the heavy pollution and I can't call a country with billionaires communist, but on the other hand the sheer amount of rail infrastructure is incredible. China basically started a Green New Deal program in 2008 by building their high speed rail network. It is unmatched by any other country. The level of economic development there has been incredible. I am open to new ideas as well, so if someone can link me China Good sources that aren't CGTN or BayArea415. Show me that Daddy Xi can stop funding coal power plants entirely and embrace communism by 2050.
heavy pollution
The air is getting cleaner and cleaner, and they aim to be carbon neutral by 2060. Environmental sustainability is now written into the constitution.
Eric Li has a talk on how China manages its billionaires - but the jist of it is when you can literally just expropriate the wealth of billionaires and their corporations at gunpoint and put them under the management of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
They overproduced that rail network though, people got arrested over it and thousands of miles of track are hardly used. Now we shouldn't build infrastructure for profit, but for use, but still building thousands of miles of unused track and highway is pretty bad for the environment.
wasn't the same criticism shared wrt "ghost cities"? from what i understand, those are now filled? could they be anticipating future needs?
Not really, there's thousands of lines of rail going to areas that the government purposefully resettled in some of those ghost cities. Most of the cities ended up somewhat filled (though still lots of stuff went unfilled especially in the north east). Many places got high speed rail lines that were intentionally depopulated/undergoing resettlement programs only a few years later. The government doesn't approve of it either, local officials get prosecuted for unneeded construction constantly.
It's also not like the depopulated areas are gonna get a population boom any time soon either. Many of the rural residents were resettled because the ground was too poisoned to use for agriculture anymore.
source on any of this? this sounds like typical western concern trolling about planned economies.
Yep. Local overspending is a big problem. The ground being too poisoned to use comment is on the rural resettlement program. The number one reason for pressuring rural resettlement is environmental degradation of the land. Those rural areas at the same time are also more likely to get local overspending which will never be paid back as the area is never going to grow. If people want a book source on the topic, here's a recent Marxist analysis of the forces driving overproduction and environmental degradation in China, includes lots of translated documents and case studies:
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341576/chinas-engine-of-environmental-collapse/
Here's a source on the railways (this paper is on the potential for abandoned rail lines to be used for urban renewal projects which I'm skeptical of, but it has citations on the amount of abandoned track and the problems it causes): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40864-020-00127-2
Here's another (though Bloomberg yuck) piece on the unneeded development of more high speed rail lines. It makes an interesting suggestion though on how to get the low patronage lines to have higher ridership. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-17/china-doesn-t-need-another-125-000-miles-of-high-speed-rail
If the US built high speed rail to Missoula, along with many other cities, I wouldn't be upset. Train good. Car bad.
Hey me neither, but it'd be more questionable if the train was being built while Missoula was resettled in in Washington at the same time.
I can’t call a country with billionaires communist
Just out of curiosity, what's your take on Vietnam? Is it Socialist or Communist?
Vietnam also has several billionaires.
With that information, would you be willing to state categorically that Vietnam is not Communist or socialist?
Dude, they're literally about to transition to socialism. Any year now.
Real talk: the Chinese people are still being exploited by imperialism due to where they are in the world's chain of production. Xi seems kinda cool, but also it seems like capitalists/free-marketeers still have a lot of political influence? Would love to visit and learn more about what Chinese leftists are up to/thinking about. For the foreseeable future, China and America are yoked together.
ive read through a lot of xi's history and talked with some chinese friends about it. the rub is that xi is more 'left' than his predecessors but theres a ton of dudes underneath him that are very market oriented and right wing in comparison. xi is basically just waiting for these guys to slip up so he can purge them from the party. he has a history of doing that.
I read something about Chinese citizens basically having some kind of super smart phone that has all their information on it (money maybe?). Any word on that?
here are 26 capitalists in the lowest levels of the government but they are vastly and I mean vastly outnumbered by the party members appointed by workers and villages. They have 1 representative for every 15 people in a country of 1.6 billion
Have you got a source for that? Would love to learn more.
I think I cannot possibly have an informed take on China without understanding Chinese. On one hand they are nominally Communist, which is good. On the other hand, they embraced marketization, which is bad. On the other other hand, USSR didn't do that and they collapsed, so which is the greater evil? Survival, or purity?
From my funhouse mirror understanding of China through the language barrier, their political principles at least seem to be in a better condition than the US, where our political establishment is telling us we either elect a septuagenarian segregationist groper or we will lose democracy. That said, there are some questionable choices in their history, and no nation of 1+ billion people will be free of contradictions.
i think most people would understand china a lot better if they just read the german ideology, because without reading that book (or the method outlined/described in the book, though obviously marx uses that method in all his works and you can get there, i just think it would be easier/faster this way), most who call themselves marxists are actually still idealists rather than materialists
what china is doing is to not ignore the necessity of a certain historical process before the next one becomes possible
there's a big amount of materialism in that necessity and that possible and most takes regarding them not applicable words are inherently idealistic/utopian
if i could sum it up: for a materialist, it's not enough to replace capitalism, you need to make it obsolete; this is how every new mode of production came to be, it made the previous one obsolete
so you can't just do a revolution and claim "capitalism is over now guys", unfortunately that doesn't seem to work (remember, the USSR had a huge black market on the side): the role of the revolutionary is to induce and accelerate this historical process, and to keep the conservative forces (such as the bourgeoisie) in check (hence dictatorship of the proletariat) so that they don't get in the way of our progress
More importantly, China is really a continuation of the project that grew from the October Revolution. The survival China is the survival of the Soviet Union, in an indirect way.
The former soviet states comprise a huge portion of Chinese tourism. The people are ready and can see what continued socialism looks like literally right next door. It'll take time, but they'll get there eventually.
It doesn't matter what I think, and I think it's wrong to try and control another country's internal business
(but in my heart China bad)
I love to live and study in this country, I hope I can always stay here. China good.
Hiw is it, can you tell us more about your experience? More like cultural or accademic stuff, not necessarily politics, since i did study abroad for a little but had to quit cos it had a huge effect on my mental health
Sure! I'm actually glad you want to know, China is much more than politics.
Well, as it was to be expected, everything here is different from my country. I could probably write pages and pages of curious cultural differences and so, but I will focus on a few things.
(1) The food: just amazing, I feel like I'm at home. Spain has a great gastronomy, China is no different – we even share similar dishes (pig stomach, 油条, etc). In the West we taste bastardisations of real Chinese food; the food here is different and much more better. I personally really enjoy food from Xinjiang, I often get mistaken for someone from there too.
I'm also surprised about how underrated and unknown Chinese food is. South American countries are famous for having the spiciest food in the world, but I'm sure Chinese beat them at it.
(2) Education system: my teachers are just great. I don't know how it is in other countries, but in Spain teachers treat students like shit and want to make their lives a living hell (I'm not kidding, most of them are there for the power). Teachers in China treat us like equals or like parents: they care about us, they want us to learn, they are helpful and they want us to achieve our objectives. You can feel they like to teach and see their students improve.
I also found Chinese books are more "straight forward" – at least when it comes to mathematics. No wonder why China beats records in the Mathematical Olympiad, they know how to teach them.
(3) Peculiar things: there a lot of interesting differences, for example: you have to bring toilet paper with you because toilets tend to not have it; most toilets are squat toilets; old people dance and do exercise on squares and parks at day and night (I personally love it); a lot of neon and leds everywhere; etc.
(4) Safety: I lived in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of my country, but anyways, the level of safety in China is incredible.
(5) The people: polite and respectful when you don't know them – friendly and nice when you do get to know them. Also they returned my phone on multiple occasions when they could have stole it, haha.
To sum up: my experience has been good and I'm really enjoying the cultural differences. The only thing that has been a bit shocking and hard to watch was how wasteful some people are with plastics and so. Anyways, as Communists we have to understand that material conditions shape societal and personal priorities. Besides, certain changes take generations. No doubt the government is doing/will do something about it.
Feel free to ask about anything else, especially if you want to know about something in particular.
Ok im gonna go on a tangent too even tho noone asked.
I went to study in the netherlands when i was 16. It was supposed to be a year long thing but it ended up lasting 10 weeks for various reasons.
A lot of ppl here praise northern europe and the NL for the great city planning. Personally i hated it, im sorry to say it. I was in a somewhat bourgie suburb town in limburg. Im from an old sea town in southern europe. It felt lifeless, without a history, and incredibly dull. I suppose i could go fast with a bike to school but it really couldnt bother me at this point.
Going around in a bike isnt at all pleasurable. I used to take a school bus back at home, but here i had to take a bike to go around. Everyone assumed i had a driving licence for bikes (which i think is only a thing there since in most places in the world tyere are barely any bike lanes) and were kinda shocked when they found out i dibt know how to drive safely etc. Plus, in october it was already getting unreasobably cold, and i needed gloves to no get hand cramps, but i never figured out how to use an umbrella on a bike.
Food was trash. I was hosted by a family and they sometimes did some rice and it was the only good thing they did. I cant cook, idk if thats weird for a 16 yo, so i couldnt show anything from my country. We litterally had one day a week where they only did fries. I didnt have lunch with them, only dinner. Breakfast and lunch had to be made by me and consumed at school, so i had brown bread sandwiches for two months straight twice a day. I think i lost around 10-15 pounds.
The family was very liberal but in the bad sense of the word. I barely fekt any connection with them. Being around them alwats felt like a chore i had to put up with. My abroad study system didnt give us therapists or psycologists to talk to, which is a thing they grant you in other programs. So most of the stuff that happened to me had to stay within me. When they forcibly ended the program for me i got to talk to them about the stuff that i had enduring (some bullying here and there, people wanting me to stay away from them) they actually got angruer at me. They really wanted me to speak dutch, but i always felt too embarassed to try.
The organizers and coordinators for this were such bitches, im sorry to say it. Other students agreed, they were really annoying and non-understanding. Everytime mine came to visit was only ever for bad behavior complains. Which mostly meant not being as sociable and more reclusive than theyd like.
Now for some good stuff. Teachers were great, mostly young, mostly fun to talk to, mostly understanding of my situation.i say mostly cos there was this one litterature teacher who didnt have compassion for my non understanding of dutch and wanted her homework in dutch only, even tho she spoke english.
I had two friends, one who was a texan also studying abroad, another one was a dutchie with vietnamese origins, they were the only reliably cool ones. All the white dutch people were always somewhat opposed to me, especially girls (Guys, whats wrong with your women).
Lotsa muslim people which i all found interesting to talk to and compassionate, more so than the other ones. In my country there really arent culturally different people, they are all the same brand of european.
Almost everyone spoke English. That was cool.
i don't understand this "dengist" stuff
there are 5 stars in the chinese flag. the big one is for the CPC, then you get 1 for the proletariat and 1 for the peasantry, 2 are left, can you guess what the other 2 are? the petty bourgeoisie and the industrial (nationalist) bourgeoisie
it's the same flag from 1949, so was mao a dengist then? no, he was just a marxist - he never wanted to destroy the bourgeoisie, as he thought they still had a historical role to play, he just wanted them to be under the control of the CPC as that historical role was fulfilled
this historical role thing comes from an actual materialist interpretation of history: if i could sum it up, for a materialist, it’s not enough to replace capitalism, you need to make it obsolete this is how every new mode of production came to be, it made the previous one obsolete, and any attempt to replace them without this particular condition failed
so (for a marxist) you can’t just do a revolution and claim “capitalism is over now guys”, unfortunately that doesn’t seem to work (remember, the USSR had a huge black market on the side): the role of the revolutionary is to induce and accelerate this historical process, to smooth it out, and to keep the conservative forces (such as the bourgeoisie) in check (hence dictatorship of the proletariat) so that they don’t get in the way of our progress
so there's no such thing as "dengism", it's just marxism applied to the chinese material conditions
So essentially the concept of Dengism is "we have to do state capitalism until we make it obsolete"? Not arguing in bad faith, just trying to understand it.
it has to be a somewhat long explanation because calling it dengism is kind of a misunderstanding of marxism
first let me note that marxism (historical/dialectical materialism) is a methodology, a set of tools for understanding reality, not a set of prescriptions - marx repeatedly insisted on this
and reality is different from country to country, so whatever solutions we find from using those analytical tools must also be different for each of them
marx developed those tools by first analyzing how western european society developed, and he noticed that it transformed alongside the mode of production; and everything, including social relations, seemed to sort of "emanate" from the system we used to produce and distribute resources, instead of the other way around (or at least this system expresses itself in all of these aspects; it doesn't explain everything, it structures the whole)
this is the biggest difference between idealist conceptions of history and a materialist one: idealists think society changes itself through changes in ideas, materialists think society changes itself from changes in the mode of production
in this process, marx also realized a new system to produce and distribute resources only took over once it made the previous one obsolete, almost in a sort of "evolutionary" way
and by making it obsolete i mean it's more efficient at producing and distributing things
so feudalism was replaced by capitalism not because a group of people decided it was time to do so, but because of stuff like "focusing on producing surplus to sell it and accumulate capital" (an aspect that wasn't dominant in feudal society) making everything more easily available for everyone
this is why even in the communist manifesto he was already railing on conservative/reactionary conceptions of socialism - for him, you could only overcome capitalism by developing further
and you could only develop further if you took advantage of its contradictions to form a new system which didn't suffer from the same issues while still being in a high stage of development
lenin, mao, deng, all of these people were actual marxists and all of them reached similar conclusions about their own country, which were behind in terms of development: lenin concluded the USSR still needed the NEP; mao saw their country still had almost 90% of its population in the countryside, and china was extremely poor and unproductive, so he concluded they still needed the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie - as long as they were under the control of the CPC; deng saw it was still taking too long (in 1978, $156 per capita gdp, 82% rural population, etc) and decided to allow foreign capital (the international bourgeoisie) in to accelerate development (because they would bring industries, and also technical knowledge and intellectual property for the chinese to uh... steal (based))
so, again, calling it dengism is a mistake, it's just marxism; not only that, this didn't come from deng himself, this was the result of huge, long ass debates between party theoreticians that happened throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, especially later on discussing the reasons behind the failures of the cultural revolution and the great leap forward
to sum it up and answer your question:
a) the idea behind marxism, not dengism, is that you can't "will" capitalism away, you need to develop away from it
b) this means that, specifically for china (and the USSR), given their backwardness, they had to accept state capitalism¹ as a way to induce and accelerate this process while keeping conservative forces in check² so they can't do shit once we start moving ahead
¹ some supporters of the CPC's conclusions/actions don't like calling it state capitalism, i have no issue with this - lenin himself called the NEP state capitalism
² it's so weird to me that some self-styled marxists are fine with the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat for the transition from socialism to communism, but not for the transition from capitalism to socialism - it's all part of a historical process, and the steps we must take are supposed to be based on our actual material starting point, not our wishes
of all the marxist parties that succeeded, the CPC is the one that best understood what marx wrote and put that understanding into practice
to be fair to the other ones though, this is partially because they had access to texts the soviets didn't early on (the german ideology was written in ~1845 but only published in 1932, for instance), in fact i have no idea how lenin actually managed to understand the historical necessity of the NEP... that's a hell of a reverse engineering of marx's works, dude was a genius
anyway, they're doing what they have to do under a materialist (as opposed to idealist) understanding of history: you can't replace capitalism, you need to overcome it, and you can't overcome it unless you make it obsolete, and to make it obsolete - meaning, to reach the next stage of development - you can't just skip the capitalist phase
Also they have the lessons of the failures of the Soviet Union to learn from. That leads to a lot of unpleasantness in terms of cozying up to capital and even the US in a lot of foreign policy. That sucks ass. But it's a practical decision based on the failures of the USSR always taking on more foreign engagements than it was prepared to handle economically.
