(Preferably with sources)
I’ve overcorrected from “China bad” to “China is infallible.” I know that’s incorrect, but it’s hard to decipher US propaganda from actual issues.
In discussions in the past, providing a positive counterpoint is plenty, but since more folks are already realizing the narrative about China is incorrect I would like to have more nuanced discussions where I can present both praise and criticism. I think it’s also important that we don’t end up in a USSR situation where Communism is synonymous with the actions of a single country.
- I know they’re trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that’s very bad.
- I’m unsure of what the internal restrictions look like in general
- I saw that the “social credit score” was a small experiment in one province that got way overblown
- Great firewall…? I know it’s a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
- Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?
- Are they monitoring everyone? “You can’t monitor 1.5 billion people” idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely
- Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China’s own capacity
Are there others? I’m happy if you also include justification for their policies, but I do want to know where you genuinely think they’re making mistakes.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
i don’t think it would too harsh to point out that China has abandoned the idea of proletarian internationalism. i can see why they did it but i don’t think it should be above criticism
from the sino-soviet split onwards, china has consistently given material support to pretty much every regressive and reactionary force there was during the cold war, including but not limited to khmer rouge, the nicaraguan contras, the laotian anti-communists, the unita puppets of apartheid south africa, the afghan reactionary drug lords, the régime of siaad barre, the pro-israeli forces of the traitor saad haddad in lebanon, the greek military hunta, the dictatorships of augusto pinochet in chile and yahya khan in pakistan and many, many more.
chinese media covering the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the soviet union never misses to highlight the various real and imagined problems within the late soviet system. never does it however lose a word about the fact, that chinese foreign and domestic policy was a major contributing factor to the defeats the communist movement suffered during the late 80s and early 90s
They could show more solidarity with anti-imperialist movements all around the world, stop trading with the zionists for example
Also they need to curb public smoking
2 issues of equal importance
i bet that the soviets set an example that showed the world what happens if you extend significant resources and effort in intervening to help anti-imperialist movements – the epstein oligarchy control global north will spend any amount to draw you in further.
besides fully camptured western media has created brainwormed westerners to the degree such that they will never allow help to come from china; help can only come from within now. either that or climate change kicking our collective asses into accepting help.
Drug policy. The war on drugs is bad. It’s bad when America does it, it’s bad when China does it.
I understand the history, in particular regarding opium. That doesn’t make it acceptable in a modern context, the opium wars don’t justify draconian policies on weed in 2026. Especially given that tobacco use is so prevalent while tobacco is more harmful than many other drugs.
Yeah also alcohol, arguably the most overall destructive drug in human history. Drug prohibition is 99% just cultural brainworms all over the world.
Not sure if it is cultural brainworms as much as it is colonial trauma
Trauma can turn to brainworms too, the material conditions of China today are vastly different than they were during the opium crisis.
I guess but when I think of drug policy brain worms I think of “the US criminalized drugs because of racism” which is much different than “China criminalized drugs because of a widespread colonial campaign to get chinese people addicted to drugs”
They didn’t ban cannabis until 1985.
Sure it’s different and you can (and should) say one is more understandable than the other but neither are really rational. I’m obviously not going to campaign in China for them to legalize weed or whatever but I can’t really say it’s a good idea to be so repressive.
America’s war on drugs was a campaign to imprison and enslave minorities. China’s war on drugs is nowhere as bad. Although they should relax restrictions on less harmful drugs.
Great firewall…? I know it’s a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
I used the same Mullvad VPN I use in the US the whole time I was there, it worked fine. The real purpose of the “great firewall” isn’t keeping people in, it’s keeping western tech companies (facebook, google, etc) out so that Chinese companies can fill those niches.
Also important to note that China is not against these tech companies entering China, they can as long as they comply with Chinese regulation, which these companies often don’t want to do.
It’s telling that Microsoft was willing to play ball, so Bing is allowed. But Google didn’t even try.
I think the comments here have covered the big ones like foreign policy, Sino-Soviet split, etc very well. So I’ll mention that the reform and opening up period has a lot of issues that I personally see as right deviationism, even through the lens of developing productive forces and integrating with the world economy by allowing limited capitalist relations. Specifically, dismantling communal farms, and dismantling welfare systems like the iron rice bowl. The state there does step in to manage things like healthcare costs, housing etc, but frankly a workers’ state should always be able to guarantee the basic needs of life to the workers, and privatizing these resources into the hands of capitalists only restricts access and commodifies them.
As a general response to this, consider that they don’t claim to be infallible. Regarding Xinjiang, for example, the CPC to my knowledge openly acknowledges their part in the development of poor material conditions in the region that ultimately was a major driver in the terrorism problem of the early 21st century.
One child policy was also IMO a pretty appalling piece of legislation, although that’s a situation where I have to concede there really was a problem that needed to be solved and I wasn’t there and am not an expert, so…
The social credit score thing was mostly a way of policing small businesses, not private citizens.
The great firewall is overwhelmingly justified on the basis that it’s better for China to have its own social media sites, etc. and it’s not like people in China are in any way incapable of accessing the outside internet anyway, and people absolutely do get “illegal” VPNs without punishment.
They are too censorious on their intranet but people overblown it because gommunism 1984.
Do people literally ever get disappeared? Surely so, but every time someone doesn’t appear in public for a few days in China that means they were “disappeared” according to liberal news, the same way people in the DPRK die and come back to life.
They functionally do monitor everyone (sort of), and they do this by basically the same means as any other even semi-advanced country does this.
There are other common complaints that have merit, like repression (not genocide) in Xinjiang, but of course it gets mischaracterized as worse than it was, as genocide, and also isn’t given the context of being in response to a serious terrorism issue that does not justify the repression but makes it more comprehensible as them failing to figure out a better way to fight imported terrorist ideology that was mainly resulting in Uighurs getting massacred rather than the CPC just doing ethnic persecution because idk they were bored and just hate this specific group of Muslims.
You will get endless defenses on here of Deng and subsequent, uh, let’s call them pro-market factions. If you want to get criticisms of this, you can for example read the old posts from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net, who I think has been banned for a while but for unrelated reasons. As they note, China is moving in a relatively more positive direction on this matter under Xi, but that’s relative and the other comparison point was a time where the revisionism was so comically crass that people were trying to figure out how to smuggle Austrian Economics in with Marxist vocabulary.
The social credit score thing was mostly a way of policing small businesses, not private citizens.
in the West, only businesses are considered people.
I know they’re trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that’s very bad.
It is a bad look in the short run yes, in the long run the stability is considered necessary to develop the productive forces and multipolarity. China needs the image of a stable, secure and long-term trading partner. Sabotaging trade or sanctioning others is not consistent with this image, sadly. We must not forget that China is hard-pressed by enemies even at their own doorsteps (US vassal states + US funded terrorists to their east), I have no doubt that as American power projection in the pacific continue to diminish and China reaches higher stages of development, their assessment will be different.
Great firewall…? I know it’s a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
Probably one of the biggest long-term wins of the CPC. They now have an entirely domestic sovereign tech sector and are immune to american-controlled infrastructure and soft power. VPN is officially forbidden I think, but I’ve never talked with a citizen who didn’t use one (apart from some grannies). State VPNs are mostly for international business I think.
Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?
Lol. This is just silly. The ones that are heavily censured are usually spies/billionaires who collude with western powers and try to coup the government (or in some cases travel to the US and practically beg them of nuking their homeland). Whats not allowed is unathorized organizing for systemic changes or attacking the legitimacy of the central CPC. (These systemic changes if valid are perfectly fine to push for internally; relative small fringes of reactionary groups have historically been used extensively by western powers to weaken or coup countries)
Are they monitoring everyone? “You can’t monitor 1.5 billion people” idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely
Somewhat, they prioritize collective public safety and social stability over western individual privacy norms. But I’d say this narrative probably also stems from westerners thinking that “us being heavily monitored in China” = “everyone in China is heavily monitored”, as a Chinese citizen you’ll also probably be monitored but not to the same degree.
In discussions with liberals who are horrified with this “authoritan reality” I have previously proudly exclaimed that I hope for atleast another 100 years where every westerner who sets their foot in Asia is heavily monitored. After what they’ve done in the region they should be happy to be welcomed at all imo.
Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China’s own capacity.
Short semi-answer: https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
Also you might want to look through https://substack.com/@arnaudbertrand/posts and https://nitter.net/RnaudBertrand. Some of your questions are also sourced in the FAQ to the right.
A personal grievance I have is the whole “Three represents” thingy Jiang Zemin was on about – I personally think they could’ve continued their strong development without allowing the national bourgeoisie into the vanguard party. But I am not delusional to think I know better than the Chinese leadership (as some western marxists think of themselves), so this is not really a big issue for me.
everyone in China is heavily monitored
Coming from places like the UK with the most CCTV cameras per square foot, and the US where the PATRIOT Act is more invasive than anything China is proven to do to its citizens
Or flock cameras everywhere just giving cops access so they can stalk you
Ring Cameras making a superbowl commercial bragging about how they can spy on your entire neighbourhood through other people’s cameras
Spy?? how dare you the benevolent Ring corporation would only ever use them for finding lost dogs :)
It is a bad look in the short run
Let’s not minimise complicity in genocide to “a bad look in the short run”. Is china more complicit than most of the rest of the world? No. Are they in fact significantly less complicit than much of the world? Yes. But it’s still an ongoing genocide.
Oh 100%, I wrote this lazily but I didn’t mean that I personally agree with all of these. I am very much for military intervention and the forced destruction of the Zionist state.
I was mostly trying to convey their current M.O of “working & trading with everyone regardless of where they stand”. Obviously Chinese leadership has a different take than many of us…
It is a bad look in the short run yes, in the long run the stability is considered necessary to develop the productive forces and multipolarity
Yeah no. You are being racist by attempting to legitimize any support for genocide. Honestly self crit.
If anyone really needs to give any support to genocide for their long term goals, humanity doesn’t need them and they can go and die. I’m convinced, that China is making an honest mistake here. If I ever became convinced, they needed to support “Israel”, for real material reasons, I would cease any support of China, critical or other. In fact I would support any reasonable effort against China, just like any effort against the West.
Imagine your family and everyone you love being brutally tortured and murdered and someone telling you they need to make profitable business with the murderer and enable them for some nebulous long term goals. Ever heard of “internationalism”?
Lol. This is just silly.
I mean they appear to have shut up Naomi Wu for example and that wasn’t for instigating regime change exactly. Of course her followers trying to bait her into inflammatory statements didn’t help.
it wasn’t clear to me what level of government that was, and i thought it was somewhat at the behest of some corporation because of product reviews they didn’t like?
Not and better but I think she stopped posting shortly after complaining on twitter to Signal for not informing user about how Android keyboard might spy on them.
I know VPNs are not forbidden because of the user over in .ml from China uses one and taught me about the firewall. Wish I was better at names their avatar looks like someone on a tiny car?
They won’t give me citizenship and this is unforgivable.
Don’t give up, comrade! You, too, can become the next Israel Epstein
that has to be the most unfortunate name in politics
one can only hope
Their support of the Khmer Rouge is a genuine stain on their legacy.
Their immigration policies are way too fucking strict.
I’ve heard homophobia can be issue among Chinese people too.
Their support of the Khmer Rouge is a genuine stain on their legacy.
its telling that the worst thing china ever did was to play along with american foreign policy objectives
the worst thing china ever did was to play along with american foreign policy objectives
Eh, it was a bit more than that considering they invaded Vietnam afterwards. It was more of a play against the Soviet Union’s growing influence in the area than it was playing along with American foreign policy objectives.
My opinion is that China has a history of trouble during quick changes (cultural revolution, great leap forward, dengism) that made the CPC rather slow and momentuous, so it takes longer than it (IMO) should to react to many things.
China should have fully embraced and promoted local development of queer and feminist ideas long ago, through they’re slowly moving in that direction.
China should have realized that the extent to which market socialism is useful is reaching its limits once the west has been made dependent and deindustrialized, and it should transition towards a democratically planned economy and reject neoliberal economic theory. They may be slowly moving towards Modern Monetary Theory but they should be moving much quicker.
China should realize that it’s already in a cold war situation with the US and it needs to rapidly develop and refine its soft and hard power projection to contend against the increasingly hostile NATO, and it’s slowly reacting but should be moving much quicker.
Ultimately, China is a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat and it tends to reach the correct conclusions, but it has a bit too much inertia and could seriously benefit itself and worker internationalism by adopting stronger and faster policy.
I think some of the restrictions on what can be shown in media content are a bit silly. Like depictions of skeletons being off-limits, it’s not “protecting” anything and just adds more fuel to the liberal narrative of “Ebul China 1984 censorship!”
From what I’m aware, the ‘not allowed to depict skeletons’ thing was more of a cultural taboo rather than an actual prohibition? Either way, it’s pretty normalised nowadays to see skeleton characters even in family friendly donghua like “So you’re raising a warrior” (Chinese adaption of a Korean Webtoon about a dragon demon raising a baby human) where one of the characters is a friendly uncle skeleton demon that helps with housework and babysitting, or donghua for older audiences like “A Herbivorous Dragon of 5,000 Years Gets Unfairly Villainized” (Chinese adaption of a Japanese light novel about a friendly vegan dragon who is confused for a terrifying and powerful demon) which has monster corpses rising from the dead to become skeleton monsters.
This is true, but also sometimes misreported. Like with the video game Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, that changed it so the evil and historic Han general bosses in the game can no longer die and instead just faint, wasn’t a change requested by the government. But all of the internet cries “CCP censorship!!” when it comes up. The devs just caved to a weird online niche of nationalists who don’t want their precious dynasty besmirched. So I’m betting there are elements of both in a lot of those situations, where the government has made legitimate requests, but also people just caving to general sensibilities and norms.
i don’t recall all the details but some of it is localizers being overly cautious, and some of it has had restrictions relaxed 10+ years ago. e.g. skeletons, there’s some older magic the gathering cards with modified art for the chinese localization and then by 2010ish they had stopped having to bother.
Gave too much ground to capitalists both internal and external.
China daily just recently posted a video depicting Filipinos as monkey’s getting duped by Japan and the USA.
While the overall idea of the message may or may not hold water, I think it’s an issue to show state owned media (or any media for that matter) to post videos depicting one group of people as monkey’s and having everyone else be people. Suffice to say, they might be pretty chill on racism sometimes.
(I’m not super familiar with this situation and it is developing)
