Calling someone with a Ph.D in political science "not a historian" when referring to the political situation of Tibet/China is... interesting.
The rest of your argument may indeed be persuasive to someone who actually cares about maintaining the dreadful political situation inside of Tibet but that's not me. I dont care that in some rural village there wasnt slavery or whatever. I dont care that the weirdo psycho Lamas lost their power. Fuck all versions of aristocracy, but especially fuck ones that still allowed slavery in the 1950s. A world in which the Chinese dont liberate Tibet is a much worse world.
Does he a PhD in political science in China? I've a PhD in Chinese History. Should I be writing a book about the French Revolution as an expert? Again, Parenti's work isn't bad but it relies on the work other historians did. I say 'did', because the scholarship has evolved a lot since then.
So you basically reveal that you are pretty much a chauvinist - that a backward people should be made to be destroyed and progress regardless of the costs. You would've fit well amongst the progressives of the British Empire, begging to destroy the cruelties of the caste system in India.
Yes, and again...all of Tibet didn't have slavery, and Tibetans themselves were fighting against it before the CCP entered the picture. The logic you are using, and I am sorry if it is rude, is pretty much the same logic of British reformers seeking to civilize the barbarian 'Hindoos'. I don't really see how one can deny that. Would you advocate that the US goes into Mauritania to liberate the pockets of slavery that exist there as well?
Communists can surely do bad things. Unsure how that even remotely relates to what I said though. My example would very explicitly be communists doing a "good thing" (liberating slaves).
The reason I support a communist doing it rather than an imperialist capitalist empire should be pretty self-evident on a leftist board.
I'm against the idea that communists cannot do imperialism. The Lenininst definition that basically excludes communists from doing imperialism is dumb to me.
If overthrowing a monarchist slave state and then investing into it to combat poverty is imperialism then line me up against the wall baby I'm an imperialist.
...And so you wouldn't advocate that the Mauritanians have any say in how it goes? Or that they should do it? Or that, maybe at best, China, Vietnam etc. should just encourage those reformers to do their own work? Why is it that in your mind slavery can only be abolished by an outside progressive force?
If the reformers have not succeeded in abolishing slavery in 2020 then yes absolutely 100% I support someone else (that isnt doing it to steal their oil) doing it for them. I'm sorry if you think this is a controversial take but once again - slavery = bad.
So, should China invade Iran and Saudi Arabia to stop punishing adultery, homosexuality, etc? What is the farthest extent of this logic that you are willing to pursue? Any social change is worth squashing local sovereignty by an outside force?
But not the caste system? What about sweatshops? Persecution of minorities? Slavery in an informal sense existed in China up until 1949; in fact, Japan cited it as one of the reasons China needed to be civilized. Is that okay?
Well, the Soviets actually were in favor of supporting the GMD up until the last years of the civil war, but yes, Mao taking over China was good. But again, the Japanese wanted to modernize the country. Also good? Casteism essentially promotes a slavery system of itself. Should the British have abolished it?
The Empire of Japan wanted to modernize China! Yep, for sure.
The soviets were in favour of supporting anti-empire of japan forces (another good thing) and then when the empire of Japan was defeated, they switched their support to the communists in order to liberate the mainland (also a good thing).
Caste systems are bad yes, an empire is much more likely to leave a caste system in place however as the isolation of the people from one another is actually a bonus to oppressive regimes. What did the brits do again?
Although the varnas and jatis have pre-modern origins, the caste system as it exists today is the result of developments during the post-Mughal period and the British colonial period, which made caste organisation a central mechanism of administration.
The Soviets did not switch their support to the CCP. Initially, in fact, Stalin told the CCP to stand down, and he signed a trade agreement with Chiang Kai-Shek, and "Even as late as 1949, Stalin advised the CCP leaders to avoid provoking US intervention and stop disseminating forces at the Yangtze River, to reach an agreement with the GMD, and perhaps even to accept a partition of the country through a coalition government". Cool story.
Also, yes, obviously the British made caste worst. But they also proclaimed that they were in India to destroy the excesses of the system (for example, attempting to outlaw the practice of Untouchability, destroy the practice of sati) etc. I am not saying that the British were somehow a progressive force. The point is they certainly believed they were, that they were there to civilize.
Also, in regards to Japan and China, AGAIN the point was using the EXCUSE OF MODERNIZATION to invade a fucking country. Again, China got rid of slavery in Tibet. Yes. But slavery was not as widespread as people claim, and they did not invade TIbet TO get rid of slavery. There were geopolitical, cynical interests. Whether you want to condemn those is entirely up to you, but to ignore them is just idiocy.
The Soviets did not switch their support to the CCP. Initially, in fact, Stalin told the CCP to stand down, and he signed a trade agreement with Chiang Kai-Shek, and “Even as late as 1949, Stalin advised the CCP leaders to avoid provoking US intervention and stop disseminating forces at the Yangtze River, to reach an agreement with the GMD, and perhaps even to accept a partition of the country through a coalition government”. Cool story.
Wow weird that the soviets would give all the guns they got in Manchuria from the disarmed Japanese army to the communists then. And that they propped up the Second East Turkestan Republic to specifically target the KMT. And refused KMT forces entrance into occupied Manchuria (having to be air lifted in by the united states lmao) in violation of the surrender terms. Then proceeded to arm Mao with both the guns from the Japanese as well a substantial amount of soviet arms.
In March 1946, despite repeated requests from Chiang, the Soviet Red Army under the command of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky continued to delay pulling out of Manchuria, while Malinovsky secretly told the CPC forces to move in behind them, which led to full-scale war for the control of the Northeast. These favorable conditions also facilitated many changes inside the Communist leadership: the more radical hard-line faction who wanted full military bloodshed and warfare to take-over China finally gained the upper hand and defeated the careful opportunists.[43] Prior to giving control to Communist leaders, on March 27 Soviet diplomats requested a joint venture of industrial development with the Nationalist Party in Manchuria.[44]
The Soviets forced the GMD to make concessions in 45 with their friendship treaty, particularly in Manchuria. They gave weapons to the CCP but then ordered them to retreat because they didn't want rail lines to warm water ports in the region to be damaged.
Again, as I've already quoted, the Soviets discouraged conflict with the GMD, wanted a united front government, and didn't believe Mao could win. The archival evidence is all there.
Regarding the ETR, the Soviets had already been holding sway in Xinjiang before via Sheng Shicai. The ETR was an attempt to perhaps encourage the province to have close relations with Soviet Central Asia. The ccp denounced the ETR and in fact essentially dismantled it. And then designed their whole policy around discouraging any Soviet influence in the region.
GMD and CCP are usually much more common. KMT is generally almost only exclusively used to refer to the party as it exists in Taiwan at the moment, though this is a somewhat recent change. I've actually never read a historian that uses CPC instead of CCP, poli sci people are somewhat different however.
CPC is a relatively more modern standardization as far as I know. My suspicion is CCP is used because it is a more literal translation of the original Chinese. I wouldn't attribute much else to that choice.
Do you think that communists need to somehow hold a referendum before starting a revolution or do you think there's something inherently better about people from the same "nation state" unilaterally making decisions for other people of that nation state than if people from a different nation state did it?
Do you think the Red Army should have pulled all the way back to the borders of the Russian Empire the moment Berlin fell?
Interesting that you say this as Mao argued that vanguardism was somewhat faulty in the sense that it encourages the Party to become separate from the people, thus his railing against bureaucratism in the 60s. The mass line is necessary, and the mass lines also means understanding local sensibilities and needs. The PRC attempting to take former imperial holdings and make them part of a single polity I think was a policy based not on the mass line but a belief that minority regions could not be lost.
I do not necessarily thing the CCP was wrong to take the path it did so but yes I do believe that revolution could have been encouraged in a more grassroots fashion, and that doing so would have meant that separatism would have never really emerged as an actual problem.
For sure, to be clear I don't think Mao was a flawless god made flesh or that the PRC never did anything wrong ever ever.
I think looking back on history you can always see ways things could have gone better, not just with your knowledge of the outcomes of people's actions but with your different definition of "better" than historical actors, even historical actors you think did good things or you agree with more than other historical actors in the same time period.
The OG Maoists did seem to have some nationalist/"natural borders"/manifest destiny style brainworms and the PRC still uses some uncomfortably reactionary nationalist rhetoric to justify things today. I don't agree that Tibetan seperatism/anti-communism was never going to be a problem if the PRC took a more grassroots approach,. I think it would have came from different places but the CIA wasn't going to not agitate and any of the Tibetan ruling class that survived or escaped weren't going to not be mad about losing their slaves. I also think the CPC would have to be comprised of quite different people to value Tibetan national self determination over spreading communism to a feudal theocracy/restoring Chinese pride and well and truly ending the century of humiliation.
I'm not much one for going deeply into alternate histories. I don't think it was ever really possible for the CPC to have a different approach to Tibet (after all, they didn't have a different approach to Tibet, they had the one they had). I'm a little interested in examining why they had the approach they had and how it worked out, I think that can teach us things, but I don't think there's any way of really knowing, or even of productively discussing, if things would have been better or worse if they'd taken a more "grassroots" approach to fostering communism in Tibet. I'm tempted to say it would have at least been slower and less likely to succeed, but I have no real way to back that up and it's neither here nor there.
What I am very interested in are more abstract questions of morality (should we value the consent of the governed over spreading communism) and what may or may not work in our current situations.
The things in this I'm very much down to talk about (or as the case may be massive walls of text on a 10000 member commie shitposting forum about 😜) are if wars of communist states against other non-communist states are a thing that's desirable or effective and if revolutionaries have a right/imperative to try to implement communism without the initial (explicit?) consent of the majority of the people they're trying to do a communism for/with and whether nation states and national sovereignty should be respected or if they're just reactionary garbage.
I'm currently of the opinion that wars are good if winnable, explicit consent is impractical but consent of the governed is important, not sure how important compared to the suffering that can be stopped without, and nation states/ national sovereignty are entirely reactionary garbage except in that the consent of the governed is important.
Happy to elaborate/open to being informed persuaded on any of those :)
My view of history as someone who practices and cares deeply about it is that history is meaningless without also thinking about the potential paths that were lost. The CCP actively debated, molded, and changed its minority policy. They themselves admit it was not inevitable and was a conscious decision that they took. Just studying other comparative revolutions tells us that yes, other policies could have been taken and that yes we can and should be able to make judgement calls.
National sovereignty is reactionary, but it is also the only route that polities have in the face of imperialism. This is why national liberation movements often had a combination of socialist and progressive nationalist forces. Similarly in Tibet following the end of the Qing, there were struggles between different factions of 'nationalists' but also a reluctant acceptance that China is big enough tha Tibet would also be tied to it somehow. The 'somehow' in that story is important. China made the call ultimately not to pursue Soviet autonomous policies (which, to be fair, very rarely actually produced real meaningful autonomy ie look at Soviet Kazakhstan) because they considered Tibet too important due to its water resources and its sheer size. Without its minority areas, China would be 40% smaller. So national defense made annexations necessary, and perhaps I don't even disagree but it does mean we have to reckon with the fact that this was not really about spreading communism. The early CCP said as much - revolution was the thing that the Han would do, and if necessary they would do it to others. And as Zhou Enlai himself noted, much of that chauvinism had its roots in Soviet and British ethnic studies. I wouldn't call it imperialist, yes, but there was a certain imperious attitude to it that we do have to have a little introspection about. Similarly, peasants would complain about this all the time - that Party cadres would never try to understand them. This is something that the mass line corrects, imo, and without it I am very unsure as to what revolution would really look like in the long term.
Furthermore, if you spread revolution without any sort of mass support in the country you invade, you will defang any potential for local progressive forces and empower the reactionaries, thus you get Afghanistan. In the fight against reactionary tendencies, conflict itself will never be enough and I frankly do not think interventionism will ever beget lasting change. America certainly has proven that and even if you believe a communist country would act differently (though we must note that it has been rare for existing communist parties to take over an entirely different country and actually create a lasting new regime), I think we must genuinely try and understand what we want revolution to be. Does revolution mean one vision of progress that is imposed on all? Or does it mean creating novel paths for people depending on their socioeconomic and cultural structures? To me the answer is clear.
If you would be open to it an AMA regarding your thoughts and knowledge on Chinese history, especially post communist revolution, would be super interesting.
I took one history course during my B.A Chinese poetry studies but it was long ago.
I would be open to it, but tbh I sometimes find talking about it here a little exhausting. It is not that I think people have bad intentions, but there is often just a lot of bad faith interpretations of China from both demsoc AND tankie positions that navigating all the fraught politics of all and arguing with everyone becomes really tiring. But I'll think about it!
Calling someone with a Ph.D in political science "not a historian" when referring to the political situation of Tibet/China is... interesting.
The rest of your argument may indeed be persuasive to someone who actually cares about maintaining the dreadful political situation inside of Tibet but that's not me. I dont care that in some rural village there wasnt slavery or whatever. I dont care that the weirdo psycho Lamas lost their power. Fuck all versions of aristocracy, but especially fuck ones that still allowed slavery in the 1950s. A world in which the Chinese dont liberate Tibet is a much worse world.
Does he a PhD in political science in China? I've a PhD in Chinese History. Should I be writing a book about the French Revolution as an expert? Again, Parenti's work isn't bad but it relies on the work other historians did. I say 'did', because the scholarship has evolved a lot since then.
So you basically reveal that you are pretty much a chauvinist - that a backward people should be made to be destroyed and progress regardless of the costs. You would've fit well amongst the progressives of the British Empire, begging to destroy the cruelties of the caste system in India.
sorry bud but slavery is bad.
calling me british (extremely rude) will not change this fact.
Yes, and again...all of Tibet didn't have slavery, and Tibetans themselves were fighting against it before the CCP entered the picture. The logic you are using, and I am sorry if it is rude, is pretty much the same logic of British reformers seeking to civilize the barbarian 'Hindoos'. I don't really see how one can deny that. Would you advocate that the US goes into Mauritania to liberate the pockets of slavery that exist there as well?
no, I advocate that the american empire explode into a million pieces.
I would advocate the Chinese do it though. Same with Vietnamese or Cubans.
This "communists cannot do bad things" mentality is starting to seem a bit cultish to me.
Communists can surely do bad things. Unsure how that even remotely relates to what I said though. My example would very explicitly be communists doing a "good thing" (liberating slaves).
The reason I support a communist doing it rather than an imperialist capitalist empire should be pretty self-evident on a leftist board.
I'm against the idea that communists cannot do imperialism. The Lenininst definition that basically excludes communists from doing imperialism is dumb to me.
If overthrowing a monarchist slave state and then investing into it to combat poverty is imperialism then line me up against the wall baby I'm an imperialist.
...And so you wouldn't advocate that the Mauritanians have any say in how it goes? Or that they should do it? Or that, maybe at best, China, Vietnam etc. should just encourage those reformers to do their own work? Why is it that in your mind slavery can only be abolished by an outside progressive force?
If the reformers have not succeeded in abolishing slavery in 2020 then yes absolutely 100% I support someone else (that isnt doing it to steal their oil) doing it for them. I'm sorry if you think this is a controversial take but once again - slavery = bad.
So, should China invade Iran and Saudi Arabia to stop punishing adultery, homosexuality, etc? What is the farthest extent of this logic that you are willing to pursue? Any social change is worth squashing local sovereignty by an outside force?
slavery = BAD
But not the caste system? What about sweatshops? Persecution of minorities? Slavery in an informal sense existed in China up until 1949; in fact, Japan cited it as one of the reasons China needed to be civilized. Is that okay?
This may also be a controversial take here but the Soviets helping Mao take over China was also good.
Those other things are bad too but legalized slavery is worse, imo. (hot take!)
Well, the Soviets actually were in favor of supporting the GMD up until the last years of the civil war, but yes, Mao taking over China was good. But again, the Japanese wanted to modernize the country. Also good? Casteism essentially promotes a slavery system of itself. Should the British have abolished it?
The Empire of Japan wanted to modernize China! Yep, for sure.
The soviets were in favour of supporting anti-empire of japan forces (another good thing) and then when the empire of Japan was defeated, they switched their support to the communists in order to liberate the mainland (also a good thing).
Caste systems are bad yes, an empire is much more likely to leave a caste system in place however as the isolation of the people from one another is actually a bonus to oppressive regimes. What did the brits do again?
o yea lol
The Soviets did not switch their support to the CCP. Initially, in fact, Stalin told the CCP to stand down, and he signed a trade agreement with Chiang Kai-Shek, and "Even as late as 1949, Stalin advised the CCP leaders to avoid provoking US intervention and stop disseminating forces at the Yangtze River, to reach an agreement with the GMD, and perhaps even to accept a partition of the country through a coalition government". Cool story.
Also, yes, obviously the British made caste worst. But they also proclaimed that they were in India to destroy the excesses of the system (for example, attempting to outlaw the practice of Untouchability, destroy the practice of sati) etc. I am not saying that the British were somehow a progressive force. The point is they certainly believed they were, that they were there to civilize.
Also, in regards to Japan and China, AGAIN the point was using the EXCUSE OF MODERNIZATION to invade a fucking country. Again, China got rid of slavery in Tibet. Yes. But slavery was not as widespread as people claim, and they did not invade TIbet TO get rid of slavery. There were geopolitical, cynical interests. Whether you want to condemn those is entirely up to you, but to ignore them is just idiocy.
Wow weird that the soviets would give all the guns they got in Manchuria from the disarmed Japanese army to the communists then. And that they propped up the Second East Turkestan Republic to specifically target the KMT. And refused KMT forces entrance into occupied Manchuria (having to be air lifted in by the united states lmao) in violation of the surrender terms. Then proceeded to arm Mao with both the guns from the Japanese as well a substantial amount of soviet arms.
:thinkin-lenin: :thinkin-lenin: :thinkin-lenin:
The Soviets forced the GMD to make concessions in 45 with their friendship treaty, particularly in Manchuria. They gave weapons to the CCP but then ordered them to retreat because they didn't want rail lines to warm water ports in the region to be damaged.
Again, as I've already quoted, the Soviets discouraged conflict with the GMD, wanted a united front government, and didn't believe Mao could win. The archival evidence is all there.
Regarding the ETR, the Soviets had already been holding sway in Xinjiang before via Sheng Shicai. The ETR was an attempt to perhaps encourage the province to have close relations with Soviet Central Asia. The ccp denounced the ETR and in fact essentially dismantled it. And then designed their whole policy around discouraging any Soviet influence in the region.
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GMD and CCP are usually much more common. KMT is generally almost only exclusively used to refer to the party as it exists in Taiwan at the moment, though this is a somewhat recent change. I've actually never read a historian that uses CPC instead of CCP, poli sci people are somewhat different however.
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CPC is a relatively more modern standardization as far as I know. My suspicion is CCP is used because it is a more literal translation of the original Chinese. I wouldn't attribute much else to that choice.
Yes :yes-chad:
Are you coming out against vanguardism here?
Do you think that communists need to somehow hold a referendum before starting a revolution or do you think there's something inherently better about people from the same "nation state" unilaterally making decisions for other people of that nation state than if people from a different nation state did it?
Do you think the Red Army should have pulled all the way back to the borders of the Russian Empire the moment Berlin fell?
Interesting that you say this as Mao argued that vanguardism was somewhat faulty in the sense that it encourages the Party to become separate from the people, thus his railing against bureaucratism in the 60s. The mass line is necessary, and the mass lines also means understanding local sensibilities and needs. The PRC attempting to take former imperial holdings and make them part of a single polity I think was a policy based not on the mass line but a belief that minority regions could not be lost.
I do not necessarily thing the CCP was wrong to take the path it did so but yes I do believe that revolution could have been encouraged in a more grassroots fashion, and that doing so would have meant that separatism would have never really emerged as an actual problem.
For sure, to be clear I don't think Mao was a flawless god made flesh or that the PRC never did anything wrong ever ever.
I think looking back on history you can always see ways things could have gone better, not just with your knowledge of the outcomes of people's actions but with your different definition of "better" than historical actors, even historical actors you think did good things or you agree with more than other historical actors in the same time period.
The OG Maoists did seem to have some nationalist/"natural borders"/manifest destiny style brainworms and the PRC still uses some uncomfortably reactionary nationalist rhetoric to justify things today. I don't agree that Tibetan seperatism/anti-communism was never going to be a problem if the PRC took a more grassroots approach,. I think it would have came from different places but the CIA wasn't going to not agitate and any of the Tibetan ruling class that survived or escaped weren't going to not be mad about losing their slaves. I also think the CPC would have to be comprised of quite different people to value Tibetan national self determination over spreading communism to a feudal theocracy/restoring Chinese pride and well and truly ending the century of humiliation.
I'm not much one for going deeply into alternate histories. I don't think it was ever really possible for the CPC to have a different approach to Tibet (after all, they didn't have a different approach to Tibet, they had the one they had). I'm a little interested in examining why they had the approach they had and how it worked out, I think that can teach us things, but I don't think there's any way of really knowing, or even of productively discussing, if things would have been better or worse if they'd taken a more "grassroots" approach to fostering communism in Tibet. I'm tempted to say it would have at least been slower and less likely to succeed, but I have no real way to back that up and it's neither here nor there.
What I am very interested in are more abstract questions of morality (should we value the consent of the governed over spreading communism) and what may or may not work in our current situations.
The things in this I'm very much down to talk about (or as the case may be massive walls of text on a 10000 member commie shitposting forum about 😜) are if wars of communist states against other non-communist states are a thing that's desirable or effective and if revolutionaries have a right/imperative to try to implement communism without the initial (explicit?) consent of the majority of the people they're trying to do a communism for/with and whether nation states and national sovereignty should be respected or if they're just reactionary garbage.
I'm currently of the opinion that wars are good if winnable, explicit consent is impractical but consent of the governed is important, not sure how important compared to the suffering that can be stopped without, and nation states/ national sovereignty are entirely reactionary garbage except in that the consent of the governed is important.
Happy to elaborate/open to being informed persuaded on any of those :)
My view of history as someone who practices and cares deeply about it is that history is meaningless without also thinking about the potential paths that were lost. The CCP actively debated, molded, and changed its minority policy. They themselves admit it was not inevitable and was a conscious decision that they took. Just studying other comparative revolutions tells us that yes, other policies could have been taken and that yes we can and should be able to make judgement calls.
National sovereignty is reactionary, but it is also the only route that polities have in the face of imperialism. This is why national liberation movements often had a combination of socialist and progressive nationalist forces. Similarly in Tibet following the end of the Qing, there were struggles between different factions of 'nationalists' but also a reluctant acceptance that China is big enough tha Tibet would also be tied to it somehow. The 'somehow' in that story is important. China made the call ultimately not to pursue Soviet autonomous policies (which, to be fair, very rarely actually produced real meaningful autonomy ie look at Soviet Kazakhstan) because they considered Tibet too important due to its water resources and its sheer size. Without its minority areas, China would be 40% smaller. So national defense made annexations necessary, and perhaps I don't even disagree but it does mean we have to reckon with the fact that this was not really about spreading communism. The early CCP said as much - revolution was the thing that the Han would do, and if necessary they would do it to others. And as Zhou Enlai himself noted, much of that chauvinism had its roots in Soviet and British ethnic studies. I wouldn't call it imperialist, yes, but there was a certain imperious attitude to it that we do have to have a little introspection about. Similarly, peasants would complain about this all the time - that Party cadres would never try to understand them. This is something that the mass line corrects, imo, and without it I am very unsure as to what revolution would really look like in the long term.
Furthermore, if you spread revolution without any sort of mass support in the country you invade, you will defang any potential for local progressive forces and empower the reactionaries, thus you get Afghanistan. In the fight against reactionary tendencies, conflict itself will never be enough and I frankly do not think interventionism will ever beget lasting change. America certainly has proven that and even if you believe a communist country would act differently (though we must note that it has been rare for existing communist parties to take over an entirely different country and actually create a lasting new regime), I think we must genuinely try and understand what we want revolution to be. Does revolution mean one vision of progress that is imposed on all? Or does it mean creating novel paths for people depending on their socioeconomic and cultural structures? To me the answer is clear.
"Wars are good"
Well that's not a very civil thing to say at all.
😔
Don't let my shit posting ruin a good dialogue though - I was learning a lot, thanks to all involved.
:yes-chad:
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My apologies. I was just somewhat taken aback.
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If you would be open to it an AMA regarding your thoughts and knowledge on Chinese history, especially post communist revolution, would be super interesting.
I took one history course during my B.A Chinese poetry studies but it was long ago.
I would be open to it, but tbh I sometimes find talking about it here a little exhausting. It is not that I think people have bad intentions, but there is often just a lot of bad faith interpretations of China from both demsoc AND tankie positions that navigating all the fraught politics of all and arguing with everyone becomes really tiring. But I'll think about it!
Yea for sure you gotta prioritize your emotional/mental energy, I just like learning and appretiate your perspective.