How does the World view China these days?

[zlemflolia]

7 minutes ago, Braintree said:

That's cool that you like tanks. Tankies are idiots though.

i see this thrown around a lot, i can equally say anarkiddies and liberals are idiots.  seemingly anyone who isn't 100% critical of any revolutions which were successful for more than a few weeks, or which had to do a bit of extreme behavior to counteract extreme bourgeois behavior, is a tankie

[Braintree]

Just now, cyanobacteria said:

i see this thrown around a lot, i can equally say anarkiddies and liberals are idiots.  seemingly anyone who isn't 100% critical of any revolutions which were successful for more than a few weeks, or which had to do a bit of extreme behavior to counteract extreme bourgeois behavior, is a tankie

You are willing to defend anything that calls itself socialist, even if it's not. In this case, you're making the argument that accusations of China hosting a genocide is a CIA psyop. So it's fake news to you even when this news comes from around the world. China is an overtly authoritarian country doing nefarious shit and you're still willing to defend them. That makes you a tankie.

I would suggest you use google to look up the definition but I'm guessing you think that info is fake too.

[chenGOD]

19 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

No communist would ever call China communist since communism is a mode of production no region has ever achieved yet.  They are also not socialist, even by their own admission,

 

16 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

china did not drag anyone out of poverty through capitalism, but by socialism

Choose one. (hint - the answer is capitalist - china is a capitalist state).

Please read anything on Deng Xiaoping's Four Reforms. Anything at all. Even the wikipedia page will quickly show you that the basic ideology driving these reforms were capitalist in nature. As well, one of the main drivers of growth of China's economy was the use of Chinese wage labour by capitalists from outside the country. So it is entirely accurate to say that capitalism was the means by which China dragged hundreds of millions of people out of the abject poverty cause by Mao and his idiotic policies.

Seriously, China is not even on the path to socialism or communism. It may be on the path to a more Corporatist state in terms of its political economy, but other aspects remain firmly capitalist. For example, while China provides basic medical insurance to 95% of the country, this is widely viewed as inadequate for anything except the most basic coverage, and even with the reforms, co-pay payments remain high (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4834764/).  Private health insurance in China is a massive industry, and it is expected to grow even further. The gap in health coverage will only be further exacerbated as income inequality continues to grow (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/).

Finally, that entirely useful idiot of a talking head you posted says absolutely nothing new about the coup, nothing new about the military's role in Myanmar's politics, and nothing useful about the people of Myanmar's desires to express themselves through demonstrations and protests, where they clearly indicate their preference for governance, even if it does drag them more into the US sphere of influence. The comparison with Thailand is likewise idiotic, as Thailand is routinely criticized for human rights abuses (which are plentiful and well documented).

Much like people who claim the US is a third-world country (by which they mean developing as opposed to the original meaning of third-world), people who make statements like yours have no relevant experience in any of the countries they discuss. For example, have you ever been to either China or Myanmar? Studied either country in any depth beyond superficial postings on like-minded Marxist bulletin boards or subreddits or what have you? I can guarantee that if you had, you would post nothing in defense of the Myanmar military and what they are doing, nor anything in defense of China.

 

I told you to look up Alejandro Cao de Benos - for a reason. See if you can figure it out on your own.

 

[chenGOD]

51 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

my memories of the general takes of these people, and I'm making no personal claims here, is that the Uyghur "genocide" is CIA propaganda mostly propagated by some dude named Adrian Zens, surrounding China's method of deradicalizing extremist muslims and giving women free access to birth control technologies to improve their living conditions, as well as providing education to them all, and that some evidence suggesting this is that most muslim majority countries support China's policies whereas those speaking out the most are the very same countries murdering countless muslims in the middle east in their oil wars.  i can't say it doesn't make sense to have such a perspective

This is disgusting, and the use of whataboutism is perfect for the level of argument you present. The muslim countries that have come out in support of China on the issue are highly economically intertwined with China, and in many cases, reliant on their trade with China remaining unaffected. China has shown no hesitation in levying tariffs and blocking trade altogether on countries that criticize China, so it would make sense that place like the UAE, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, and Oman (themselves all such  paragons of  supporting human rights) would back them.

[zlemflolia]

9 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

 

Choose one. (hint - the answer is capitalist - china is a capitalist state).

Please read anything on Deng Xiaoping's Four Reforms. Anything at all. Even the wikipedia page will quickly show you that the basic ideology driving these reforms were capitalist in nature. As well, one of the main drivers of growth of China's economy was the use of Chinese wage labour by capitalists from outside the country. So it is entirely accurate to say that capitalism was the means by which China dragged hundreds of millions of people out of the abject poverty cause by Mao and his idiotic policies.

Seriously, China is not even on the path to socialism or communism. It may be on the path to a more Corporatist state in terms of its political economy, but other aspects remain firmly capitalist. For example, while China provides basic medical insurance to 95% of the country, this is widely viewed as inadequate for anything except the most basic coverage, and even with the reforms, co-pay payments remain high (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4834764/).  Private health insurance in China is a massive industry, and it is expected to grow even further. The gap in health coverage will only be further exacerbated as income inequality continues to grow (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/).

Finally, that entirely useful idiot of a talking head you posted says absolutely nothing new about the coup, nothing new about the military's role in Myanmar's politics, and nothing useful about the people of Myanmar's desires to express themselves through demonstrations and protests, where they clearly indicate their preference for governance, even if it does drag them more into the US sphere of influence. The comparison with Thailand is likewise idiotic, as Thailand is routinely criticized for human rights abuses (which are plentiful and well documented).

Much like people who claim the US is a third-world country (by which they mean developing as opposed to the original meaning of third-world), people who make statements like yours have no relevant experience in any of the countries they discuss. For example, have you ever been to either China or Myanmar? Studied either country in any depth beyond superficial postings on like-minded Marxist bulletin boards or subreddits or what have you? I can guarantee that if you had, you would post nothing in defense of the Myanmar military and what they are doing, nor anything in defense of China.

 

I told you to look up Alejandro Cao de Benos - for a reason. See if you can figure it out on your own.

 

mao liberating peasants and paving the road for the industrialization of china is what caused china to be capable of engaging in market reforms.  dont know why youre trying to convince me to write some defense of deng in socialist terms.  also interesting how china is simultaneously apparently oppressing the bourgeoisie by silencing Ma but is a capitalist state progressing towards deeper corporatism, despite these being directly contradictory

[prdctvsm]

[chenGOD]

3 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

mao liberating peasants and paving the road for the industrialization of china is what caused china to be capable of engaging in market reforms.

This is definitely, 100%, the most ridiculous thing you've ever written on this site.

 

3 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

china is simultaneously apparently oppressing the bourgeoisie by silencing Ma but is a capitalist state progressing towards deeper corporatism, despite these being directly contradictory

China isn't oppressing the bourgeoisie by silencing Ma, they were keeping them in their place. Capitalism is not corporatism, or at least not the Fascist corporatism that China may be moving toward. The state run capitalism that China has been practicing in their political economy has served its purpose for the CCP, and they are likely to seek to tighten or gain control over the massive corporations that have emerged. Ant Capital and Alibaba are not SOEs, but the CCP is showing that no corporation is bigger than the Party, even private ones.

[zlemflolia]

3 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

This is definitely, 100%, the most ridiculous thing you've ever written on this site.

 

China isn't oppressing the bourgeoisie by silencing Ma, they were keeping them in their place. Capitalism is not corporatism, or at least not the Fascist corporatism that China may be moving toward. The state run capitalism that China has been practicing in their political economy has served its purpose for the CCP, and they are likely to seek to tighten or gain control over the massive corporations that have emerged. Ant Capital and Alibaba are not SOEs, but the CCP is showing that no corporation is bigger than the Party, even private ones.

youre contradicting yourself, they're not oppressing the bourgeoisie, just putting them in their place.  they're fascist, yet theyre oppressing the bourgeoisie and showing that no corporations are above the party.  if they were fascist they would be serving the needs of the bourgeoisie

[zkom]

6 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

not that you claimed Finland is socialist, but it must be pointed out that they're definitely not, and that the Nordic model only arose because of pressure from the USSR on capitalists in the region, and is merely social democracy, which will probably erode in decades to come

This theory is very weird. The Nordic countries had very different relationships with communism and USSR and still all implemented the Nordic model so saying that pressure from USSR somehow contributed to them all implementing well-fare state policies is pretty weird.

For example Finland was still part of Imperial Russia when the Russian revolution happened, then got independence basically by asking it from Lenin. After that Finland had a bloody civil war between communists and nationalists after which nationalists won and the communist party was banned. Then Finland had two wars with USSR after which the period of Finlandization begun with communist party unbanned, heavy soviet influence on all level of politics, same guy as the president for over two decades, etc. Check for example this treaty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Soviet_Treaty_of_1948 But Finland was never ruled by the communist party but instead mostly by the center right and social democratic parties. And the two decade long president also came from the center right agrarian party.

Meanwhile Norway and Denmark were invaded by Nazi Germany during WW2 and after liberation turned to west and joined NATO and other western organizations. Sweden remained pretty much neutral led by Social Democrats and never officially sided with anyone. All remained constitutional monarchies. Iceland is a western allied island far off the in the middle of Atlantic away from USSR and Russia which also joined NATO.

So saying that all these countries implemented socialist policies due to pressure from USSR boggles the mind. One might think that maybe by this setup the Nordic model would have started from Finland by influence from USSR and unbanning the communist party post-WW2 but that's also wrong because Sweden pretty much implemented everything first and Finland just copied from them.

[Limo]

Saying that Nordic countries implemented their welfare state due to pressure from he USSR is beyond stretching it, agreed, but it’s not entirely untrue that the Cold War didn’t play a role.

The existence of an actual socialist workers paradise right on (or close to) their borders put pressure on governments to make sure their own proletariat would be at least as well off to discourage mass emigration  to the Eastern bloc.

This was especially important in Western Germany as they had a communist country on heir border which was culturally identical, but all the other Western European countries that could afford them implemented welfare states as well, keeping their proletariat at home simply because life was better there.

Of course once the iron curtain came down, there was no longer a need to maintain these costly welfare states so during the past 30 years or so they’ve been quietly stripped down, leading to such wonderful phenomena as the rise of the precariat.

[zkom]

5 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

The existence of an actual socialist workers paradise right on (or close to) their borders put pressure on governments to make sure their own proletariat would be at least as well off to discourage mass emigration  to the Eastern bloc.

As a person who actually lived in Finland during the Cold War mass emigration from Finland, let alone rest of the Nordics, to eastern bloc is the most absurd idea ever.  

Even the fucking hardline communists wouldn't emigrate to USSR after Stalin pretty much purged all of the Finnish immigrants in USSR that had emigrated there to build the "worker's paradise".

[dingformung]

But there was virtually no unemployment! 

 

@cyanobacteria is an American phenomenon.

[Limo]

1 hour ago, zkom said:

As a person who actually lived in Finland during the Cold War mass emigration from Finland, let alone rest of the Nordics, to eastern bloc is the most absurd idea ever.  

Even the fucking hardline communists wouldn't emigrate to USSR after Stalin pretty much purged all of the Finnish immigrants in USSR that had emigrated there to build the "worker's paradise".

Right, because life in Finland, the other Nordics, and Western Europe, was actually better - in no small part because of the welfare state.

But come to think of it, the mechanism I outlined above probably holds true more for Western Europe vs Eastern (now Central) Europe as, say East Germany and West Germany or France and Czechoslovakia (yes, really) had roughly equal standards of living at the end of WWII. This certainly wasn't true for Finland vs Russia. Russia has always been crazy poor, of course. 

Which has been touted as one of the reasons Russian soldiers behaved as harshly as they did during the conquest of Germany: they were shocked to see how wealthy Germans were compared to them and furious that such a wealthy people had deemed it necessary to steal from such a poverty stricken people as themselves.

 

[zkom]

11 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

Right, because life in Finland, the other Nordics, and Western Europe, was actually better - in no small part because of the welfare state.

Finns actually mass emigrated during the Cold War. They mass emigrated mostly to Sweden but also to US and Australia which were not welfare states. Very very marginally would anyone move to USSR. Almost everybody in Finland saw USA as a much better option than USSR.

Finland didn't even have a welfare state until the late 1960s or the early 1970s. Practically nobody moved to Eastern Bloc even before Finland was a welfare state.

21 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

Which has been touted as one of the reasons Russian soldiers behaved as harshly as they did during the conquest of Germany: they were shocked to see how wealthy Germans were compared to them and furious that such a wealthy people had deemed it necessary to steal from such a poverty stricken people as themselves.

I'd say this was a retaliation to atrocities committed by the nazis more than anything else.

[zkom]

 

45 minutes ago, dingformung said:

But there was virtually no unemployment! 

It was actually illegal to be unemployed in USSR. If you were not at employed at a government assigned job you were deemed as a parasite. Nice way to also silence anyone who might be otherwise doing some art or literature that would be against the party's interests.

[dingformung]

6 minutes ago, zkom said:

It was actually illegal to be unemployed in USSR. If you were not at employed at a government assigned job you were deemed as a parasite. Nice way to also silence anyone who might be otherwise doing some art or literature that would be against the party's interests.

Sounds quite paradisiac to me.  What would Karl Marx have thunk about that?

[zkom]

Just now, dingformung said:

Sounds quite paradisiac to me.  What would Karl Marx have thunk about that?

I generally like when I can have some say where I work and live 

[dingformung]

4 minutes ago, zkom said:

I generally like when I can have some say where I work and live 

Such gross individualism.

[Limo]

23 minutes ago, zkom said:

I'd say this was a retaliation to atrocities committed by the nazis more than anything else.

I would say so too but anger at wealthy Germans stealing from poor Russians was specifically cited as a motivation by soldiers interviewed at the time.

 

20 minutes ago, zkom said:

It was actually illegal to be unemployed in USSR. If you were not at employed at a government assigned job you were deemed as a parasite. Nice way to also silence anyone who might be otherwise doing some art or literature that would be against the party's interests.

True, which is why there were all sorts of nonsense jobs that people nominally fulfilled. You could do art or literature as much as you wanted as long as you clocked in at your state provided job ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" sort of thing).

Notice how this situation isn't all that different from the current situation in capitalism (the very real and very degrading "bullshit jobs" phenomenon).

[zkom]

3 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

True, which is why there were all sorts of nonsense jobs that people nominally fulfilled. You could do art or literature as much as you wanted as long as you clocked in at your state provided job ("they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" sort of thing).

Notice how this situation isn't all that different from the current situation in capitalism (the very real and very degrading "bullshit jobs" phenomenon).

I'm not sure if this is meant to be an endorsement for communism or not? How are you going to create music if you don't have the government permission to get any instruments? You just get an answer that "what does a waitress do with a synth?" Good luck also getting anything published with anything you do when government owns all media, printing houses, galleries etc.

[chenGOD]

24 minutes ago, dingformung said:

Such gross individualism.

Disgustipating.

[Limo]

4 minutes ago, zkom said:

I'm not sure if this is meant to be an endorsement for communism or not? How are you going to create music if you don't have the government permission to get any instruments? You just get an answer that "what does a waitress do with a synth?" Good luck also getting anything published with anything you do when government owns all media, printing houses, galleries etc.

The Soviet Union was full of amateur musicians, many of them quite good, so I'm not so sure this was actually a problem.

 

[chenGOD]

4 hours ago, cyanobacteria said:

youre contradicting yourself, they're not oppressing the bourgeoisie, just putting them in their place.  they're fascist, yet theyre oppressing the bourgeoisie and showing that no corporations are above the party.  if they were fascist they would be serving the needs of the bourgeoisie

You know that putting someone in their place does not equal oppression, right?

Also, you literally, not figuratively, have no idea what you're talking about with respect to fascism. Basic tenets of fascism economic policy include: the state intervening in class struggle to mediate relations, the idea that productive profit is to be made in support of national interest (as opposed to private profit), and a condemnation of materialism.

[chenGOD]

29 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

Notice how this situation isn't all that different from the current situation in capitalism (the very real and very degrading "bullshit jobs" phenomenon).

The big difference being of course that, it's not illegal to be unemployed (in Canada, I speak for nowhere else). Also many of those "bullshit jobs" are actually mid-level managers who get paid rather handsomely to do nothing of importance, so it's hard to argue that they are degrading. Excepting perhaps in a spiritual sense, but then one imagines that people who take those jobs are, by and large, devoid of spirituality or a sense of dignity.

[zkom]

17 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

The Soviet Union was full of amateur musicians, many of them quite good, so I'm not so sure this was actually a problem.

 

Are you advocating that musicians should do their art for free as a hobby besides their daily work and not distribute it through any channels?