Which is why you should support China, as a recent Harvard Kennedy School survey found that over 93% of the Chinese people are satisfied with their central government.
https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7.6.2020.pdf See page 3
Facts don't care about your feelings
I support China but the principle of “listen to the people” is fucking terrible. Propaganda exists, people express beliefs directly against their own interests all the time.
To be fair... The same study conducted by Harvard that OP is citing also states that they do not consider propaganda to be the reason for the massive popular support the party has, they state very clearly that the people's opinions change with actual material outcomes and that ultimately the fact they have such massive support is that they have only ever consistently seen an improvement in their material conditions year after year. They believe that if citizens experience a lowering of their conditions they will turn against the government.
Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread, our survey reveals that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. For government leaders, this is a double-edged sword, as citizens who have grown accustomed to increases in living standards will expect such improvements to continue, and citizens who praise government officials for effective policies may indeed blame them when such policy failures affect them or their family members directly. While our survey reinforces narratives of CCP resilience, our data also point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.
The thing is that people are satisfied because of economic growth. Ronald Reagan won the vast majority of states both times he ran, Bill Clinton was very popular too, the James Carville "it's the economy stupid" line is accurate everywhere in the world.
The real question is that should their economic growth level off to a level comparable to more developed countries would people be this satisfied with their government, and I'm unsure if this would be the case. Everything about this is based on how there's never been a real financial downturns there nation wide in decades.
No. It's not "the economy". It's real material changes in their lives. This is strictly stated, and something Harvard has been keen to say does not occur in the American population -- for example the rust belt are not voting based on rational assessments of their material conditions.
There is a massive difference between voting for the line and voting for actual material change in your life. The Chinese people's support is driven by absolutely consistent improvement in their lives, nationwide, year on year, for multiple decades in a row with almost no slowing. It is exceptionally consistent and has been since the 50s.
Everything about this is based on how there’s never been a real financial downturns there nation wide in decades.
There's a difference between a financial downturn and a change in the actual material effect on a population. If people have houses, food, entertainment and work the same hours their lives have not actually deteriorated, they've just stayed the same. A financial downturn may affect investment and thus the continued development and improvement of conditions for people but unless the government severely mismanages it there is no reason it should result in a backwards step in the material lived conditions of the people -- any private business that is necessary to maintain the conditions of the people can simply be pulled into national ownership and operated at no profit until such a time as things change or have been adapted to suit the changing situation.
Labour is what matters to the continued survival of communities, not financial growth. If you ensure labour is protected in a crisis you do not have a collapse of anyone's living conditions. Massive setbacks in living conditions of a population is a distinctly capitalist phenomenon and is driven by governments allowing the "free markets" to collapse industries in various local areas and have the communities that depended upon those industries rot as a result, followed by doing absolutely nothing to help those rotting communities.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you've said. I'm talking about metrics like unemployment, housing stability and ownership, ect.
China is deeply integrated into the global market place, should there be a major sudden demand drop for things like say, electronics, people in China would be put into a bad spot and that could very meaningfully hurt the approval of their party.
As I said before, they will protect the labour in the short term and adapt industry into other things to maintain people's ability to have those three things -- food, housing and entertainment.
Should their manufacturing-based electronics industry ever be threatened as you fear there is absolutely nothing stopping them retooling local economies into more service related things or changing from electronics manufacturing to something else.
If push really comes to shove and you can't fix local conditions through such adaptation or retooling of the local economy they aren't averse to simply having entire towns relocated somewhere else. Remember all those "ghost cities" that the west propagandised about for years? What happened to all the talk about those? They aren't ghost cities anymore. Massive populations were relocated into them out of other areas in order to improve people's conditions. The problems you're raising are things capitalist countries are terrible at handling but they simply won't sit there and allow communities to collapse the way you're envisioning if key businesses suddenly struggle. They will prop up the conditions of the people while they find alternative solutions to ensure conditions don't go down, failing that they will simply take drastic measures to move entire communities.
Drastic measures don't always work, they have very significant side effects on the way people act and feel about the state of things.
To suggest that there isn't something that could happen within the country that results in a decline in material conditions is incredibly foolish, just look at what happened in the USSR. Economic stagnation that didn't even result in a meaningful decline in the standard of living played a role in what caused them to make the many strategic errors that eventually resulted in their downfall.
The, "it's the economy stupid" line is about metrics that do directly relate to the material conditions of working people, not just financial markets.
Key metrics like home ownership (but really housing stability), low unemployment, and so on are what I'm referring too. China is not the same as Cuba or DPRK or how the USSR was, they are deeply engrained into global markets, a real slowdown for them is possible in ways that can cause significant spikes in unemployment. Additionally housing costs in China can be insanely high depending on where you are, it's just that this problem hasn't hit them especially hard yet.
93% is absolutely phenomenal for the second most populous country in the world.
America, for all its propaganda, doesn’t even come close.
America, for all its propaganda, doesn’t even come close.
That’s in part because hating the government is part of the propaganda. ‘Government is not the solution’. The US gov isn’t the true ruling class.
That is a good point, and I'd be interested to see the "approval rating" of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
Quite literally everyone from engineering majors to mega-chuds loves Elon. Americans just have a different mythology
Eh I always take approval ratings with grain of salt
Not because “muh commies faked it” or “muh people brainwashed, but someone saying they APPROVE of their government does say much. What “approve” means varies and for a lot of people it could just mean “generically low key patriotic” like most people in most not totally dysfunctional governments are.
In North Korea it hovers at 98%. Clearly it's the most persuasive point to be made.
Speaking of which, there's been a boon in 2% of the hard labor workforce, completely unrelated.
true but listening to people doesn't mean you automatically adopt their beliefs, that would be dumb. it's about getting primary sources about the way that society is and building your world view on that
like I seriously doubt most chinese people have strong opinions about communism or socialism or capitalism or whatever (they care about their families and jobs and their own future, etc.). They have opinions about their government based on how they've interacted with it and how it affects them like everyone else.
I listen to the people in my community, and frankly we need to #savethechildren from under the Getty Museum NOW.
51% isnt exactly a great stat. good for russia, mixed for other soviet states
This is 29 years after the final end of the Soviet Union, during which time there has been no mainstream communist propaganda or viewpoints and constant anti-Soviet anti-communist propaganda. And still 51% of people aren't believing the BS and know they had or could have had better lives during the Soviet era.
i still think the difference of opinion between russians and other former soviet states is significant
The Brezhnev thing is not true though, the party was very meticulous about having the leaders of the SSRs belong to the dominant ethnicity of the SSR in question. What you might mean is that the 2nd secretary of an SSR was usually Russian and oftentimes sent over directly from Moscow. The Soviet Union was an incredibly multicultural nation in terms of its ruling circle make-up right up to the dismantling. Which does speak to a good popular representation among the delegates. The discrepancy in the levels of Soviet nostalgia has mostly to do with a post-Soviet revision of history and nationalist propaganda that ascribes all the "good" aka imperial attributes of the USSR to Russian national superiority and all the "bad" aka "the darn communist bureaucracy" to Communists and "internationalist degeneracy".
yeah i think most of chapo is on the same page here, to differing degrees
To put things in perspective a good chunk of those 51% are ethnic Russians who'd rather enjoy the cultural/linguistic status the would have had in the USSR as opposed to the marginalisation they feel now. Very little to do with communism.
I think it's unfair to assume that's the biggest reason. I think there's a survey that's done every year or so that shows a lot of people liked the economic system better.
Hadusinthefirsthalf.jpg
Really thought I was gonna have to deal with some expat-posting cringe
expat-posting cringe
I always thought that calling Westerners in Asia "expats" validates their self-important exceptionalism.
Most of them are just immigrants or migrant workers, like any non-western person.
I'm a centrist, I think we should listen to both Chinese people and first world tankies.
I agree. I conducted my research from surveying select members of the Chinese population.
An upvote for this post is confirmation of my research, confirmed.
I mean, sure, but let us be realistic about this: The moment you bring up this study and they cannot refute it on the basis of its being CPC propaganda, since it was done by Harvard, they will instead simply shift the goals and claim—in a totally not racist way, of course—that everyone in China is just a drone dancing to the tune of the CPC and thus their opinion cannot be trusted. I am sure you must have seen the screenshot of the post from r/China that did exactly that in the front-page just yesterday.
It's wonderful too. In order to answer the survey, all the respondents who came through our Great Firewall knew their answers were being monitored. They knew to answer appropriately to raise their social credit score.
It always works out to mutual benefit.
Just ban this lib already, every single take of theirs is bad
TLDR for people who didn't read the PDF:
Central government enjoy consistently high approval rating (86% in 2003 to 93% in 2016), while local government on the lowest level (township) saw massive increase in approval (44% in 2003 to 70% in 2016) in the past decade.
Local government approval is also that level in the US. Federal though is trash, both due to trump and generally people in the us blame the fed instead of local officials. See also the high approval of local congress people but dogshit approvals of congress. Interesting inverse of China where local is lower than federal. Propaganda and reaction, as well as old remanents of republicanism that can't deal with wage labor drives it in the US imo, like 61 percent of the country wanted more deregulation in 2012, fuck 41 percent want it now.
we should seek to make it better in the ways it is not good while preserving the things that are good about it
Who is we? Me, an those around me? Yes. A bunch of western leftists on an internet forum? Go away. Your voices mean nothing in China and do not improve anything.
If you aren't in China then your efforts have no impact beyond whatever taste they leave in the mouths of your fellows.
Whatever about criticism, that's fine. Just don't act like your criticism is changing anything or has the power to do so. It doesn't and we don't need or like the paternalistic attitude westerners have about us. I do some LGBT activism and don't like people on the English internet steamrolling over what I say with uninformed declarations and erase our efforts and then act like they're saving us by just talking.
I am sorry if I seem prickly, I'm just very used to that kind of attitude and see it too easily. Informed discussion and criticism on these topics is valuable and gives good perspective, especially on international strategy. I definitely think that as things advance, more openly and loudly opposing the Washington Consensus will need to be high priority. In my mind it was probably better to gain a reputation on these efforts before announcing them, if only to not scare anyone early, but other cases could be made contrary. In all of these threads people should remind themselves though: any socialist project is bound to meet challenges against material reality and will not always be perfect even in the best of times. Denying these problems outright is opportunism. Rejecting the project as a whole for being imperfect is utopianism.
How about we ask the Maoists in Nepal and the Philippines what they think of the CCP
Here's an English language Nepalese communist newspage If you're interested in seeing their views with regard to China.
https://leftreviewonline.com/english/
They're overwhelmingly supportive of the PRC, and their lead editor is a former Committee member in the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal.
https://www.facebook.com/nahendra
Thanks seems like a good resource
I especially liked these left boomer comics https://leftreviewonline.com/english/cartoon/distracting-attention.html/attachment/us-election-poll-leftreviewonline
We love our Boomer Commie comics don't we folks?
https://leftreviewonline.com/english/cartoon/rip-freedom-press.html/attachment/rip-freedom-of-press-leftreviewonline-cartoon
They merged with the ML party in 2018, but I was more referencing the civil war where China supported the monarchy over the Maoists
Ok and?
Support for a government tells us nothing about what class it serves or about the material conditions of society.
Conversely does that mean we should stop supporting a state when its population is opposed to it? Even when it is socialist?
ok so the material conditions are: massive wage growth and severe poverty has almost been eliminated while being the only country with extensive high speed rail.
considering the fact that 100 years ago china was being pillaged by warlords, civil war, the japanese, global imperialism, and had a similar development index to africa, they're doing quite good for themselves.
Then why not support them base off of that rather than one statistic that by itself tells us absolutely nothing.
This isn't an effort post where I'm trying to compile every possible reason for why you should support China. It's just an easy counter to the prevailing perception of China within the West (and among many western leftists) that China is a hellstate where everybody lives in daily fear of their repressive government.
I'm mostly making fun of the tendency of liberals to respond to any solidarity of Communists in the Global North with the Global South by saying "Oh, only privileged white leftists could possibly support the evil Maduoro/Xi/Morales/etc. regime, the real people of those countries YEARN to be free".
And it's wrong to say that public approval in their government tells us nothing, propaganda exists, but it can't make people not recognize if their lives are shit, and staying shit. After all the U.S has the most sophisticated propaganda structure, and yet public faith in Government is consistently low, and most Americans surveyed have little hope in the future.
its why i support them, idk about op. my opinion is that china had the best possible outcome they could get due to all the fucked shit that got forced upon them. all the other options are very bad for who else could be ruling china.
Great point, the literacy acquisition and retention is amazing as well as the afforeststion of the Loess Plateau. Many great achievements!
read chuang, read chuang, read chuang, read chuang. It's a mixed, messy bag of mainland Chinese voices and it rocks.
read qiao collective, read qiao collective, read qiao collective, read qiao collective.
Yep, agreed.
And also, the "CCP shills" are not saying you should copy China, nor are they saying China is perfect. All they are trying to do is deprogramme you, so that you can see the world in a clearer light.
Yesterday I googled """"""""""China is good"""""""""", with that many quotes as it is supposed to force Google to look for the exact phrase. It didn't fucking work and I still only got article saying China is bad. Thanks Google, very cool.
