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damn did they do this shit for free
edit: So I searched into it and yes, it seems they did. They demolished the housing there for it was too dangerous conditions like mold and falling rocks, gave the villagers tents in a safer area and cleared falling rocks and built them communal housing. They decided to not move everyone in the village to a different more suitable location because the village had a unique dialect and they could not currently speak any other language, so it would have been too jarring for them. So they decided to carve a road into a cliff face, give them good running water and electricity, and connect a bus line to the place to help them with education and integration into the rest of the region.
The government seems to think since the place is so beautiful and unique culturally it will pay for itself in tourism, and set up a tourism center as well, though I don't know if its in this particular village or the adjacent cliff villages.
edit2:
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-12/31/c_138669380.htm
They built a cliff car to the main road it seems and it appears to be a popular tourist attraction.
edit3:
https://youtu.be/92QfmjrRCng
In this video one of the village elders is crying of joy
edit4:
Many in the village did not know how to read and are now capable of formal schooling. There is still construction ongoing but things are rapidly advancing. Their work is entirely socialist in nature, everyone in the village is part of the farming cooperative and many resources are communally pooled.
Do you have an article on the first part.
Also imagine what the would have done in America.
Most of it was in that video. Lots of very beautiful landscape shots there. One guy is so happy and he says that Xi Jinping and the engineering corps is full of miracle workers. He said he no longer would have to carry his kid four hours to school up and down a cliff face.
He had to do that to his pregnant wife too.
The Communist Party official there thinks that keeping the village there will be very good in the long term. It will have good tourism and it can cultivate food for itself more easily now, including Yi ethnic minority dishes. He thinks theyre projected to bring around 50-70k RMB in through various means each month but they could easily get by on 10k RMB for the entire village per month.
Things will look up a lot for this village I think, the state media made a huge effort to do wide panning shots of the countryside and mentioned traditional dishes so I'm betting they're going to a get a lot of tourism soon.
Yep. They also mentioned the village had a lot of older pensioners in it so they gonna get that authentic grandma food if you visit lol. That guy who had to carry his wife down the mountain mentioned she opened a grocery store / food court with a handful of other residents for authentic dishes.
Collectivist projects that legitimately improve the lives of people.
In comparison, we're letting our infrastructure fall apart, it's been decades since we've done anything more significant or ambitious than replacing an old bridge with a newer (and one lane wider) bridge, and even that we barely manage. Easy to see who is the ascending power, and who is in terminal decline.
yes and they now are able to cross the ravine to the other cliff village within 20 minutes. that would have been a full days affair before. and there were so many elderly there that physically could not leave without an airlift and probably didnt want to leave because they lived there their whole life. its great they did this
and tbh i sometimes make weird language errors like that because im fluent in both english and czech so things get all jumbled when i type sometimes
If some Appalachian slums were torn down and replaced with public housing, westerners would cream themselves on the spot. but for some peculiar reason, they apply different standards for China. Odd :soviet-hmm:
Smh look at the cruel CCP culturally genociding those straw shacks. Somebody call Amnesty International.
are you seriously comparing genocide to getting a new house with running water and electricity for free?
Really makes me wonder how they came around to communism in the first place, if they are this deeply influenced by propaganda
Can't comment on this specific poster but there's a not insignificant contingent of western "leftists" who just want free health-care.
Looked way more picturesque before though, wish it were possible to integrate quality luxurious housing into the surrounding nature in a seamless way. Hope there's a massive push for arcologies in the future.
I think the idea is to just get as many people out of poverty as fast as possible and deal with the development later. This is an ongoing project.
Don't you understand that modern plumbing and city planning is genocide?
They are, in certain cases, essentially enclosing the commons. There are some villages where people are peasants and when they move they can't go back. Now, it's essentially voluntary and this isn't necessarily a problem in a socialist society where they have a plan to take care of them, provide jobs etc., but its certainly not a process without its pitfalls. It seems to me they are handling it as well as could be hoped for considering the massive scale of the project.
Look, I understand that many of you want a savior out there that might be able to salvage the world from American-led capitalist ruins, but the Chinese state definitely ain't it. I totally sympathize with you. I wish things were different. As hard as it may be to accept, however, the Chinese state is a *capitalist * state of a particular form. It is deeply tied, along with the United States, in the continued functioning of the capitalist world-system. The current standoff is only a contest between who will become more hegemonic within the world-system. The two countries are very much symbiotic. Xi Jinping's daughter went to Harvard; Betsy Devos's brother is involved in logistics and security operations in Xinjiang; Mitch McConnell and the Bidens are both deeply financially implicated in Chinese state owned enterprises.
This doesn't mean that the Chinese state doesn't attend to the "well-being" of its citizens, or "alleviating poverty" (however dubiously defined) for biopolitical reasons. They do this better than the United States in many aspects, to be sure. But so do Scandinavian welfare states, and many, many others too. Is anyone here against eventually overthrowing these other states? Lol. Once again, i totally understand why folks out here romanticize China, especially with the insane volume of propaganda pumped from Western mainstream media and government outlets.
But it's obscenely insulting to our comrades who are fighting against Chinese capitalist class domination, including young Marxist students, who are getting arrested for trying to organize factory workers. It's insulting to the hundreds of millions of migrant workers who are forced to eke out a bare living, and to whom the recent economic "recovery" means absolutely nothing. You folks most likely have never seen the skyscrapers carved out of the rural landscape, dispossessed from farmers, furnished by speculation from the new Chinese bourgeoisie, who are buying 2nd and 3rd homes. You folks probably haven't seen the pollution, the pillage of our ecological commons, and fellow living beings, in many cases worse than the US. You haven't seen the smog poisoning the lungs of workers and the unhoused who are forced to breathe it in all day, while the Chinese bourgeoisie lounge in their filtered high-rises. You haven't seen the rivers, lakes, and streams swollen with trash, filled with pesticides and herbicides, coated with oil films, poisoning the bodies of peasant farmers and wiping out ancient giants like the Yangze dolphin, the paddlefish, the Chinese sturgeon, and many more.
Please, look beyond the shiny lights and gleaming bullet trains, into the masses occupying the Chinese undercommons. The class struggle is global, ongoing, everywhere.
I'm tired and wired as fuck, and I can't get too in depth into this in a single post, and I'm guessing nobody's gonna read this, so I'll just leave off with this article on urbanization through dispossession in China: https://sci-hub.st/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2014.990446?needAccess=true&journalCode=fjps20
as well as a link to a wonderful Chinese Marxist collective, Chuangcn, who can explain things better. http://chuangcn.org/journal/
Don't know about other folks but I'm rather optimistic about China not because I think its current conditions are good or anywhere close to ideal, but because they appear to be making astronomically more progress, faster and at a larger scale than anywhere else. You mention Scandinavian welfare states. How many millions of people do they lift out of poverty every year?
Like I do get that China has a massive inequality problem (addressing poverty seems to me like a more important issue though). Also I don't doubt conditions for workers are still quite bad there with 996 etc.,
But when I look at surveys like this, where 93% polled said they were very happy or rather happy, up 11% since 2019, and this, where satisfaction with the government went up at all levels from 2003-2016, with the 2016 numbers being 93.1% (Central), 81.7% (Provincial), 73.9% (County), and 70.2% (Township), I find it hard to believe they aren't going in the right direction.
I mean it seems a bit more than just a few tech companies: https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/tree/master/blacklist
but yeah just like so many other aspects of the country, I do get the general impression that things are improving on the working conditions front
yeah, the above post seems to be a huge nitpick on a post that has nothing to do with them. Nobody thinks China is currently a socialist or communist country, people just recognize the vestiges of left-wing policy and practices from the Mao era.
I think the concept of false consciousness in Marxist terminology should prove useful. The shared stake in Chinese nationhood, especially among those who have been designated as part of the Han ethnicity, serves to reinforce bourgeois hegemony. It's designed to snuff out any hint of class consciousness and class conflict between the proletarianized peasant underbelly, and the new (post 70s) bourgeoisie and ruling class. The Netherlands and Saudi Arabia both have extremely high percentages of "happy" people too, lol. Should we accept ruling class domination in these places, too? Should these states not be overthrown, and replaced with a genuinely working-class-controlled socialist regime?
Yes, there has been an increase in the availability of certain commodities and services, to a large number of people, that's defined as "poverty alleviation" by the state. Western European welfare states aren't doing this at China's magnitude every year because they, uh, don't have 1.3 billion people under their governance.
I really want to emphasize how much China's proletarianized masses are struggling, and will continue to struggle, against their capitalist oppressors, under the aegis of "progress", even if they themselves have not completely realized their class consciousness. I also want to emphasize that there are plenty who *have * realized this, including the Marxist students and unionizing workers I mentioned in my previous post, who have been crushed by Chinese capitalist forces. I want to emphasize how much non-human life, China's ecological base, has been completely terminated. It's a tragedy that you'll only only really be able to comprehend once you become familiar with the Chinese language, and visit and see the ravaged landscape in person.
Once again, I totally sympathize with you. You're my comrade, and we probably agree on much more than we disagree on. I really, really wish that China was a truly revolutionary force that could lead the way in saving humanity and our ecological base. But I think it's really important to make clear that that's not happening. Impoverished masses in the U.S., China, and all over the world cannot afford to rely on currently established regimes, because currently established regimes (once again, especially the US and China) are all deeply implicated in the continued functioning of the capitalist world system.
I highly, highly, highly recommend http://chuangcn.org/ for starters, in order to learn more about current political circumstances in China from a critical Marxist perspective. They're doing amazing work. If you have the means at all, or the interest at all, i also think it absolutely would be worth learning Chinese so that you could approach these things without relying on English sources.
here's a specific article from Chuangcn they released recently about Chinese delivery workers' struggles against capitalist logistics that I think would provide a good entry point: http://chuangcn.org/2020/11/delivery-renwu-translation/
Cheers to our struggles ahead.
http://chuangcn.org/ for starters, in order to learn more about current political circumstances in China from a critical Marxist perspective. They’re doing amazing work. If you have the means at all, or the interest at all, i also think it absolutely would be worth learning Chinese so that you could approach these things without relying on English sources.
Having checked them out before, I get the general impression that they do good work on exposing the various struggles that Chinese citizens are faced with, but do they also provide a compelling argument that shows that in the grand scheme of things, the country is not in fact generally moving in the right direction after all the positives and negatives are accounted for? Like given that their goal for 2021 of eliminating absolute poverty seems to have been met, is there anything to suggest that conditions won't continue to improve? Granted they've done nothing about inequality/made it worse over the years, but I always just assumed that was mostly because it wasn't a priority while absolute poverty was still a thing. Now that they're next milestone is to achieve a socialist society by 2049 though, I guess we'll see what happens in the next couple of years one way or another.
Yeah I have been meaning to learn Chinese. Would probably be a more productive use of my time than browsing social media websites lol.
At the end of the day though, whether my optimism is misguided or not, as a citizen of a different country whose time/effort would probably be most effectively spent on issues here and not there, I don't really see the harm in celebrating/being inspired by what appears to be significant tangible progress being made elsewhere currently.
Full disclosure, I'm very much a baby leftist so I do apologize if I'm misunderstanding/missing something here.
Cheers
This is also a good article on another similar project in one of the poorest villages.
https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/articles/the-metamorphosis-of-yuangudui
Downvotes lmao? By who? Are there lots of Aussies on this board or something?
Yeah for sure, the first image is a nice wallpaper but I’d assume the inhabitants are pretty sick of carrying water up hills for cooking and sewage, no heating, etc.
yes they had to walk four hours as healthy young people, the elderly would sometimes take 8 hours to get to the closest medical center. the slope was so steep that they couldnt ride on the backs of horses, theyd have to get the horse to walk up the cliff face and hold onto its tail. theyd pack stuff on the horses back because itd be impossible to go up the cliff with luggage without a horse. it is also very dangerous to go up the cliff face because of falling rocks, which is common for cliffside villages throughout the region, but it was particularly bad here because there was a river blocking a lot of good entrypoints.
honestly the party guy for the village sounds awesome. he could have bailed on his birthplace upon travelling to a city to get an education, but instead he came back, got connected with the party, and argued their plight to the regional committee so well that it got national attention and now its on a sustainable development path. good guy
She's from Szechuan right? Looks like a great place to live and farm too.
