Struggle session engage. Post your pathetic arguments so that I and the other China Good Posters can dismantle them and you can learn.

Key points:

  • China is a democracy. It is arguably the most functional and responsive democracy in a major country today. Its citizens consider it more democratic than the citizens of almost any other country do their own.

  • China is on a clear path to socialism and economic justice. No nation in history has ever reduced poverty in anything like the way China is doing it.

  • The vast majority of people in the PRC support the CPC. This is not due to being brainwashed. Americans are brainwashed and still hate their government.

  • Almost everything you hear about China in the West sits on a spectrum between malicious misrepresentation to outright fabrication with no basis in reality.

  • China's ascension to the premiere global power is an extremely good thing for world peace and the global socialist movement. While China does not actively support other socialisms (sadly it's not as good as the USSR in this regard) it does not do imperialism. China will allow socialisms around the world to flourish simply by not actively crushing them like the US and Europe.

  • hirsute [comrade/them]
    2·
    4 years ago

    Real talk, this is totally a capitalist talking point about China. The "poverty eradication" has come in many cases at the expense of the working class. If you've been in China at all and talked to people, you'll have met folks who lost their iron rice bowl jobs (and housing) as a result of privitisation and have never recovered. Pension plans are also being phased out, retirement ages raised, etc. Go talk to some Chinese Maoists or hard-core Marxists; many are pessimistic about the changes.

    This isn't to downplay China's successes, which I could go on about at length. It just rubs me wrong when we talk about China's successes through a western, capitalist lens. It's the wrong way to do it and it puts emphasis on the wrong topics. When we discuss the success of communist or socialist governments it makes no sense to apply capitalist metrics.

    • CommieGirl69 [he/him]
      1·
      4 years ago

      When we discuss the success of communist or socialist governments it makes no sense to apply capitalist metrics.

      you're mistaking a materialist metric for a capitalist metric

      from marx himself:

      [...] it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse.

      the whole thing about marxism/materialism is that you cannot will capitalism away, you have to develop away from it (it's the main difference between idealist and materialist interpretations of history)

      feudalism didn't replace roman slavery because some people decided to, and capitalism didn't replace feudalism because some people decided to; both happened because the newer system proved to be better at producing and distributing whatever it is that we use in our lives

      • hirsute [comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        So in good faith, how are we measuring "poverty eradication"? Typically this is claimed using GDP, which for me is a non-starter.

        I say this because when I look at the results of the dismantling of the danwei system, what I see is human wreckage among working people without much education. I know people who have become permanently unhoused because they lost their state housing and weren't able to buy a place of their own. I know people who have lost their pensions. The migrant labor phenomenon started because of this, and it is further perpetuating the class divide because children of migrant laborers often cannot go to school in the cities their parents have moved to because they don't have a local hukou ~...thus perpetuating the underclass~. Basically, I'm looking at the material conditions we see anywhere else in the world when we privatise things.

        Conversely, there are lots of people making lots of money, buying apartments and cars and slowly squeezing out what we once would have thought of as the lower middle class in China.

        There are much more important measures that I think we could use - for example health outcomes and educational achievement in rural vs urban areas; I haven't looked at it lately but within the last decade literacy rates were still measured differently depending on whether you live in a city or in the countryside.

        editing for clarity...using strikeouts

        • CommieGirl69 [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          can you give me any numbers for those? genuinely asking, those are flaws that i'm aware exist, but i've never found actual numbers to see how significant they are

          and while per capita gdp is a bad measure, i like looking at tiered per capita disposable income, and it's hard for me to see any class squeezing when this metric has shown an average 8% growth for all tiers for the last 7 years or so

          • hirsute [comrade/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            When I get time I can look, but some of the sources may be in Chinese rather than English. There's been some pretty interesting academic research about it.

            • CommieGirl69 [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              alright i'm cool with them being in chinese since it's mostly numerical data anyway (so the bad translation won't be that much of a problem)