There’s something kinda ironic I realized.

You see, the funny thing about being as focused on the lies about China as you are is that you end up not noticing the actual problems China has.

And it shows here when you think about it: how else would you conclude that rejecting those lies is equivalent to saying China is perfect, than if you’re not aware of any other problems China could have beyond what propagandists told you? Assuming you are arguing in good faith that is, which you making straw-mans don’t exactly corroborate ngl.

Of course! That’s totally what the meme say as we can all see and definitely not a straw-man you made up in your head. Clearly the peoples saying that think that China is perfect and can do no wrong as you can see from… erm… from… From somewhere, I don’t have example but I’m sure you can definitely totally undoubtedly find an example somewhere.

It’s so funny how the only way you can think of to defend your ridiculous 1984 tech-dystopia narrative about China from criticism is to make a straw-man so you can pretend that our criticism of your narrative is the more ridiculous and over-the-top of the two.

It’s always nice seeing peoples willing to hear out a different perspective on those controversial issues instead of instantly clutching their pearls and not listening. We don’t see it often but it’s always a pleasure when it happen. All power to you friend .

Redsails is also not a good source, it’s openly from an ML perspective, so it’s not neutral, which you absolutely have to be when discussing history. It’s also under no pretence to be academic or accurate either, Redsails is ideologically driven rather than factually driven - so it won’t ever be critical of the ML perspective. You can use redsails to talk theory, absolutely, but not as a historical or factual source, it’s dishonest.

There is no such thing as a neutral historian. Every human has things they know and things they don’t even on topics they are experts in, every human has opinions on the things they know (or think they know) that will unavoidably taint what they say, even unconsciously, and therefore, everything written or said by a human is necessarily biased. And that’s saying nothing of financial interests, politics and other things that bias things even further.

This is not avoidable, the most you can do is be aware of biases and work with/around them.

If an historian or a journalist tell you that their work is “neutral” or “unbiased”, they are either lying to you or don’t know how biases work, and in either case you should be very skeptical of them because they are clearly not doing their job correctly.

It’s a list of links that you can click on, you should try it.

Chinese citizens have to tow the line. The company I worked for had operations there, when our guys meet with counterparts then and ask probing questions everyone clams up, and one off to the side says we can’t talk about bad things.

If you go against it you have reprogramming training classes.

So your “evidence” for that is a personal anecdote + trust me bro? Assuming you’re not just making shit (it’s not verifiable, as anecdotes tends to be) can you give examples of the kind of “probing questions” your guys asked? Also, did you personally witness the meeting or were you just told about it by your guys afterward?

Looks to me like your little story is full of holes at best.

We even have Chinese police stations here in Canada and they go knocking on doors because a Chinese citizen has said something negative about the homeland. And coerce them into going back to the mainland. This is not me reading it on the web, this is coworkers at the house when it happens to their room mates.

Ah, yes. China totally has a nation spanning network of secret police stations (with all the 10s of 1000s or more personnel and tons of equipment that would imply) in Canada that Canada either somehow didn’t notice or won’t do anything about for some reason. A guy you know told you, so it must be true! Trust me bro!

If your gonna make shit up or repeat shit made up by someone else, you should at least try to make it not completely nonsensical.

Stop trying to make China a utopia it is not. I agree with Socialism, but not a dictatorship.

No one said anything about China being “a utopia” and you know it.

You know how ridiculous your narrative about China being a 1984 tech-dystopia that will track you down to the end of the world sounds and how badly it holds up to scrutiny, so instead of defending your narrative (since you can’t really) you try to flip the table around and pretend that we are the one with a ridiculous narrative by pretending that we consider China “a utopia” when none of what we have said points to that at all.

I see it, and anyone who isn’t already indoctrinated by you narrative can easily see it too.

It woukd seem you are being paid to promote China propaganda, or you are severely deluded to what goes on there.

“If you believe something other that what I believe, you must either have been paid to say you do or be stupid/insane.” A cheap excuse to dismiss criticism without having to think about it or come up with an actual counter-argument.

A survey of citizens that know they cannot speak ll without retribution to them or their family, will always look positive. Please use some critical thinking here.

That, my friend, is what we call an “irrefutable argument”, and it’s a fallacy. “Chinese peoples aren’t happy with their government, and if they say they are it’s because the government forces them to.” It’s a bullshit excuse to immediately reject any evidence that doesn’t agree with your narrative.

You’re not refuting our point, you’re just coming up with excuses to dismiss it without having to think about an actual reason it might be wrong (because you can’t, and until you do I’ll continue to affirm that you can’t).

Tibet, South China Sea

These are ‘in and around China’ whether you like it or not.

As a European, I can promise you the the EU isn’t good.

It’s a neoliberal cult that purposefully keep its poor eastern members down for the benefit of its wealthy western members; continues to meddle in and exploit Africa by any means at their disposal, including coups, invasions, funding and arming of death-squads and assassinations, even decades after so called “decolonization”; cultivate an attitude of horrific and bloodthirsty racism among their population, especially against migrants despite being the cause of most mass migrations in the first place, in order to keep migrants miserable and their labor cheap; fund and arms a genocide as we speak; has purposefully let overt and covert neo-Nazi factions gain power in every of its member states; stabbed their own economy for the benefit of the US, multiple times; and so on and so forth.

On the scale of “badness” the EU is right behind the US, they’re just more subtle and quiet about their evil than the US is.

Your car could potentially be used to run over 100s of pedestrian and commit manslaughter! THAT MAKES YOU A TERRORIST!!!

Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, genuinely helping poor countries develop is a pretty good way to gain soft power.

No one here, and I do mean no one, is saying that China isn’t gaining anything from doing that. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the other party or hides some nefarious secret purpose either. Diplomacy isn’t a zero sum gain where if China gain from a deal therefore the other party has to lose to compensate, that’s not how international relations work.

And yet you accept anti-communist slander as true without question.

Have you ever, even just once, asked yourself where those accusations come from? Who made them? Who propagated them? Why they did?

No sources for that claim of course, as usual.

To my knowledge the only military base China has in Africa is the one in Djibouti, and literally every country who can afford to have a base there has a base there.

If that isn’t the definition of imperialism, I don’t know what is.

Indeed, you don’t have a clue what it is. Try looking up “unequal exchange”, or better yet reading a book on the subject. Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism and Fanon’s How Europe underdeveloped Africa are good reads on the subject.

Okay, what proof is there China has been making progress on the transition?

There are several. The private sector has never dominated the economy, the public sector always kept a firm hold on banking, raw materials, energy production and infrastructure that the private sector is dependent on to make and deliver what they sell, in other word, a massive leverage the state can use to pressure the private sector.

They can literally starve private companies of financing if they want, which they did when they let real estate speculators go bankrupt after the state voluntarily burst the real estate bubble. Something a bourgeois ruled capitalist country would have never done.

Moreover since a few years ago, the proportion of the economy that is privately owned has been decreasing while the state’s control over them has increased.

Here is a video explaining China’s socialist system in which some such evidences are presented.

That’s approximately the time Xi has been president. Since 2012. I’m not going to place blame on him for regimes before him.

That’s still very arbitrary.

When Lenin attempted to implement this transition he eventually fell ill and was unable to prevent Stalin’s authoritarian takeover.

I’ll let answering this one to someone with more more knowledge on 1922-1925 period. I’ll only say that Lenin never tried to prevent Stalin from taking power. The Lenin testament, assuming you are at least partially referring to that, is most likely forged. We know from Lenin’s numerous letters and other writing that Lenin had an extremely poor opinion of Trotsky and his politics, and as such would have never recommended Trotsky as a potential general secretary of the party. Furthermore, Lenin and Stalin were close friends.

It seems as though there needs to be some time limit on having full state power consolidated in one place because every regime change risks the goals being changed.

If a leader gets in who realizes that having a board seat on powerful companies can benefit them personally, and they decide not to transition, what can be done at that point?

They can be voted out of their position. Literally.

The political system in China, to put it very simply, is a bottom up elected council system. The peoples vote for local administrators like mayors and such, these local administrator vote to elect the rank above them, who themselves vote in the ranks above them and so on all the way up to the congress general secretary (side note: Xi is both the president and the general secretary, but the president is a largely ceremonial role and doesn’t have that much power, Xi’s real political power comes from him being the general secretary, no from him being the president).

And for each rank, the elected officials can be un-elected by the ranks bellow. Even Xi could be un-elected, he won’t because he is very popular among both the peoples and the party members, but he could be. This is one of the rational behind why they removed the terms limit by the way, why have a time limit that automatically end the general secretary’s term when he can be un-elected at any time?

China was the second-largest supplier of the US in 2024, with goods valued at $462.62 billion.

Capitalism will remain the dominant mode of production as long as China continues to play a key role in funding of the American economy and continuing to loan them increasingly more money.

Yes, as I said, in a capitalist world exchanges between countries are done mostly through businesses. So in order to have exchanges of resources and technology and not be cut of and starved like the USSR was, having businesses selling to other countries and businesses coming to sell in yours is a necessary evil.

Although, China has been reducing their exchanges with the US for almost a decade now, and it is only accelerating with Trump’s lunacy. Right now, Chinese money is overall leaving the US, not entering it. China is now a net seller of US treasury bonds instead of a net buyer like it still was until relatively recently. China also banned the export of a lot of dual use metals, especially rare earths, to the US. And since China controls between 30 to 90% of production depending on the specific mineral, the US can’t really get those from anywhere else.

The fact that the transition takes a very long time isn’t proof that it isn’t transitioning. What even is this assumption that transitional periods must last less than a decade? Seriously, where the heck does that even come from?

To answer your question, this transitional state is necessary as long as capitalism remains the overwhelmingly dominant mode of production on the planet because in a mainly capitalist world, transfer of technology and resources mostly happen between businesses doing business.

If you try to go to a higher stage of socialism while the world is still almost only capitalist you’ll end up with all the problems that plagued the soviet union, with the capitalist countries able to very easily sanction and isolate you since they can’t get access to your markets even if they don’t anyway and with you having to re-invent every new technology the rest of the capitalist world create just to keep up since there is no way the capitalists would give you the blueprints among other problems.

Cubans are more satisfied with their political system than americans

According to a bunch of polls, in the majority of former eastern block countries most of the population (as high as 70% and no lower than 40%) think life under socialism was better. Also, you were literally given a big list of sources for the USSR example. But clearly didn’t bother reading any.

What no theory does to you.

No seriously, you need to read on this, you clearly have at best a very simplistic understanding of the subject.

Private property and markets can’t just be abolished immediately after a revolution, it’s not magic. Young socialist systems have to go through a transitional phase during which private property and markets are still allowed under strict oversight of the state.

His does not make them capitalist as the proletariat still has control over this private sector via the socialist state, such as in China where all of the essential industry that is necessary for every other, known as the commanding heights, are fully state owned and the enterprises that are private are required by law to have a party member on their board as well as a “golden share” owned by the state that allow it unchallenged veto power over the board’s decisions among other means of authority over the private sector.

The reason why this “colloquial definition” is this way is so that capitalists can convince the masses that capitalism is natural “because it has always existed” by claiming that antique slave society, feudalism and even late hunter gatherer society were actually capitalist. This isn’t a neutral definition that is as valid as the other, it is a lie crafted for propaganda purposes and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Most books by Ha-joon Chang, especially 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism. Fun fact, Ha-joon Chang isn’t a Marxist, he’s a liberal, but his writing is still critical enough of capitalism that South Korea banned his books.

Anything on prolewiki’s library are good reads as well.

For a broad look at the evolution modes of productions and how capitalism came to be there is this 60s textbook from the soviet academy of science, there even are a series of videos following the textbook by the finish bolshevik that is pretty good.

Yeah, we can tell

Every death by Dutch capitalism (death from the slave trade, Colonialism/Colonial wars (Oceania, Africa, …), …)

plus

Every death by British empire’s capitalism (Irish genocide, Bengal famine, Slave trade, Colonialism/Colonial wars (India, Africa, North America, South east Asia, Oceania, Middle east, …) , Opium wars, Massacres against independence movements (India, …), …)

plus

Every death by French capitalism (Colonialism/colonial wars (North America, Caribbeans, Africa, South east Asia, …), Slave trade, Massacres against independence movements (Algeria, Haiti, …), …)

plus

Every death by Belgian capitalism (Colonialism/Colonial wars (Congo, …), Slave trade, Massacres against independence movements, …)

plus

Every death by United States’ capitalism (Colonialism/Colonial wars (Cuba, Hawaii, Philipines, North America, …), Massacres against independence movements (South east Asia, Oceania, Cuba, …), Slave trade, …)

plus

Every death by German capitalism (Nama and Herero genocide, Holocaust, Slave trade, …)

plus

Every death caused by preventable starvation, lack of access to water, healthcare.

List very much non-exhaustive.

If you add it all up you easily get over 1 Billion.