When will Westerners realize that the common characture of the brainwashed, thought controlled, information controlled, constantly surveiled citizen that we attribute to China/The USSR/etc... IS US?! You clutch your pearls at people in other countries potentially being treated like that but are inclined to do nothing about OUR OWN countries treating US like that.
A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
You didn't make one you just stated something wildly incorrect so why should I take the time to give you a well thought out response trying to explain how truly idiotic is?
I did make one, that you can oppose two things at the same time.
I could explain, but wait, you already said that authoritarianism was meaningless to you. If it doesn't matter to you, well, seems pointless to try to convince that it is actually fascist.
Sure not what I took issue with. I took issue with you calling China fascist which is just an untrue statement.
Authoritarian is a pejorative. All countries and states in class society are "authoritarian" by necessity. Fascism is a specific thing arising from the tendency for the rate of profit to decline in capitalist society.
You can keep insisting I'm a troll if it helps you deal with not being able to engage with arguments.
China is authoritarian, but authoritarianism doesn't matter to you, so that shouldn't matter to you. Consistency, please.
And no, countries aren't "authoritarian" by necessity. Even if some amount of policies etc that would be considered such exist everywhere, you have countries that are freer and countries that have more political suppression, censorship of media outlets, etc etc.
China does censor it's media—political and entertainment— heavily. Just one small example.
I like it when the working classes in China wield the state against capitalists and fascists, and to ensure that social surplus is directed towards social ends above all else.
In what way is China fascist? It's a socialist country, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state.
China does not violently oppress minorities, and wielding state authority, censorship, and surveilance against capitalists and fascists is necessary for a socialist state, and doesn't make it fascist. Fascism is capitalism violently defending itself from decay and solidifying bourgeois control, not proletarian.
That's not what fascism means, especially when these are used against capitalists most of all, and not against the working classes nearly as much. Fascism is capitalism violently entrenching itself when it finds itself in crisis, it isn't when a socialist state uses state power to keep capitalists under control and expropriate their property.
I wouldn't call china fascist, though doubtlessly authoritarian. But I don't have nearly as much info on china, it seems to me the persecution of minorities is less of a central political scapegoat and more some weird side thing. But without speaking chinese, I might be wrong. The US had plenty of fascist characteristics at this point and is rather open about the persecution.
It doesn't, though. Socialism is not fascism, and all socialist states need to exert authority against capitalists and fascists to continue to exist. Class harmony is a lie.
I mean, that’s also pretty awesome that there’s decent regulations as part of it(at least nominally, I don’t live there so can’t say for certain), but it seems to be primarily a banking/lending thing similar to in the US which is what a lot of jingoistic fearmongering types either completely miss or purposely ignore.
It’s decidedly not a surveillance thing, which is the funny part.
The Misconceptions section of that page is really funny. It just keeps on going with the same thing over and over but with different people and dates, it feels like a bit
I donno anything about China, but whoever made this meme certainly doesn't know anything about the USA. The idea that "liberals" or anyone else (??) are high-fiving themselves over a credit score. lol
First because that's not how Marxist-Leninists use the word 'liberal', that's a definition you just made up while ignoring decades of literature. Second, because it implies that is not what the word actually means to literally everyone, not just Leninists or even just socialists, everywhere on the planet with the exception of the US liberal duopoly.
Third, because it mistakenly assumes people are calling you a liberal because of your instance, and not because of your shit takes.
The ML usage of the term liberal comes from Classical Liberalism, right? Please correct me.
Also I hate how y'all think I'm personally evil because I haven't Read Theory. Y'all are my first exposure to MLs and I don't have any control over what my society has taught me. (I'm not defending what my society has taught me, I've been deconstructing for a long time and not stopping.)
No investigation no right to speak is a core part of MarxistLeninist thought as it has evolved. Naivete is not "a sin" but if you haven't researched a topic you shouldn't speak on it.
As Chairman Mao put it:
Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Isn't that too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem, into the present facts and its past history, and know nothing of its essentials, whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense. Talking nonsense solves no problems, as everyone knows, so why is it unjust to deprive you of the right to speak? Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful. How can a Communist keep his eyes shut and talk nonsense?
"Progressive" doesn't really mean anything beyond "left of establishment democrats." They range from liberal to socialist. Fascists are a twin of liberalism, worse but fundamentally connected.
If you're not anti capitalist and anti bourgeois democracy even if you're "progressive" you're just a flavour of liberal. Fascists are obviously worse than liberals although they tend to agree on a surprising amount of things when push comes to shove unfortunately. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is a widespread phrase for a reason.
I'll stand corrected on the anarchist comment. But if one lives in a capitalist country, one inevitably supports capitalism, right? Even if it's against their will.
This is nonsense. Communism has not been achieved, but socialism absolutely has. Communism has not been achieved not for lack of trying, but because it is a post-socialist system. There's no psyop.
First, let's be precise about terms: capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, profit-driven accumulation, and wage labor; socialism is defined by social ownership (state, collective, or cooperative), planning mechanisms, and the subordination of remaining market forces to developmental and social goals. They are distinct modes of production, not a binary where anything short of stateless communism "counts" as capitalism.
Second, "Western capitalism" isn't a universal default, it specifically describes the Euro-Amerikan core and its integrated vassals (NATO, Five Eyes, dependent economies). That system is hegemonic, but it is not total. Russia, for instance, operates a distinct sovereign-capitalist model: not socialist, but explicitly de-linked from Western financial architecture and actively contesting unipolar dominance.
Third, China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam are explicitly in the early stages of the socialist transitionary period. Their frameworks (especially China's "primary stage of socialism") theorize that underdeveloped socialist states must develop productive forces, utilize regulated markets, and engage globally while maintaining proletarian state power and public ownership of commanding heights. This isn't "capitalism with red flags"; it's a materialist strategy to build the basis for higher-stage socialism. Dismissing these distinctions because communism hasn't been "achieved" yet misunderstands dialectics: transition is a process, not an event. You don't call a bridge under construction meaningless because it has yet to reach the other side.
That's because people confuse nationalism with patriotism. I love my country, which is why I want it to be better. Others love their country because it gives them permission to be worse.
To be clear, it's still not good. I support any kid that wants to sit out for the pledge or sit or kneel for the national anthem. It should always be non-obligatory. In fact, I don't love the word "allegiance" to begin with.
But it would be significantly worse if the pledge of allegiance was to Donal Trump. Ultimately, that's what many people are following, but it's not default in schools to pledge allegiance to him or anything.
I want America to prosper and I want to protect American values from right-wing radicals that are in charge. I'm very passionate about it. In fact, I live in a red state and I want it to just be better and no longer radicalized by lies and hate.
I very passionately want America to heal from this illness of hate and apathy.
If that makes me a bad person, then fuck me I guess.
The values of the US settler-colonial project, are native eviction, and genocide.
The values of the indigenous peoples were not considered worthy to the european settlers, so they did their best to wipe out hundreds of peoples/tribes/cultures. You either don't know that history, or worse, you are proud of it.
I highly suggest reading both An indigenous people's history of the US by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, or her Not a nation of immigrants.
Not necessarily bad, but definitely indoctrinated, as many of us once were. The truth is a series of bitter pills, and the government and media aren’t going to offer them to you; they’re going to distract you from them. Which is easy to do, given how bitter the pills are.
I've been in the process of making a powerpoint-esque presentation to show to my friends who haven't read any theory and the thought of framing and organizing it as "bitter pills" is super exciting to me. Starting out the presentation with definitions and history would've made them fall asleep.
I just cannot understand why somebody living in a colonial country can truly say they love their country unless they're brainwashed or completely ignorant to its history.
I'm from Canada and we are not better, there's just not as much of an issue of rampant nationalism disguised as "patriotism". Our countries were built on the graves of the native inhabitants, by the hands of slaves. At no point in the history did they stop abusing natives and the descendants of slaves, they just found new ways to hide it and new names to call it (how does a prison make a profit, anyway?).
I love and am proud of my community, but that is the extent to which my pride reaches. I cannot feel proud of a country that was built on the blood of the innocent.
Who knows one day you might get it and see they are the same motivators to for gullibles to go to war.
It doesn't matter if it's for their leader or the country.
It's always for the owners of both.
I was in Urumqi recently enough and I can tell you this they are some of the most pro government people I have ever talked with lmao they love that ETIM was kicked out.
You have gusano testimony from the likes of Rushan Abbas (Guantanamo bay torturer) It's not real.
Also tell me about this geographic evidence? Pictures of prisons that you decided are camps because we're evil scary Chinese people?
I never said "you're evil scary Chinese people". The Chinese state however, is another story (authoritarian— but I know you're apathetic towards authoritarianism). I realize now that this may be evoking some sort of nationalistic reaction out of you, though.
I didn't "decide"— like I said, independent journalists and satellite imaging. And no, it's not reducible to "Western evil scary propaganda" like you're making it out to be.
authoritarian— but I know you're apathetic towards authoritarianism
All governments/states are authoritarian. That is their nature. No government is excluded from this.
The difference with some governments over others is who wields that authority: the majority of working class people, or the minority of capitalist class people.
I'd prefer to live in a state that advocates for my best interests as a working class individual rather than submit to capitalists that want to extract everything that I'm worth for themselves and hoard for no good reason.
There is no genocide of Uyghurs. Uyghur genocide atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there's "white genocide" in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of "genocide." Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective's Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn't going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this. Has there been mistreatment? Almost certainly to some degree, in a campaign as large as this. Is it genocide, be it cultural or outright? No, Uyghur culture is preserved and there are no mass killings.
So not accepting exaggerated narratives means China is a utopia? Why do people rarely offer ordinary, policy-level criticism? There is plenty of it, but discussion often defaults to cartoonish claims instead of routine institutional analysis.
Where is the discussion of the hukou household registration system and its trade-offs?
Where is the discussion of local government reliance on land-use financing?
Where is the discussion of provincial policy experimentation and uneven implementation?
Where is the discussion of state-owned enterprises and their structural advantages and drawbacks?
Where is the discussion of demographic policy after the one-child era?
Where is the discussion of regional inequality between coastal and interior provinces?
Where is the discussion of the property sector’s role in household wealth and local budgets?
Where is the discussion of debt accumulation among provincial financing vehicles?
Where is the discussion of administrative campaign-style governance and its policy side effects?
Where is the discussion of bureaucratic incentives within the cadre evaluation system?
Where is the discussion of industrial policy prioritization and capital allocation?
Where is the discussion of urban planning constraints produced by internal migration controls?
Where is the discussion of education access differences tied to household registration?
Where is the discussion of long-term pension sustainability in an aging population?
I know where they are, in China because none of you know enough about China to have a proper discussion on any of these. All you know is spouting ridiculous talking points.
China isn't a utopia, and does have problems. China's problems are real, though, not invented, so discussion of China's issues requires drawing a line between fact and fiction.
Why don't you correct me instead of marking my comment as bigotry and removing it? I said that China's social credit system is just an ordinary credit system much like ours, and that is bigotry how, exactly? Explain it to me.
It's wild, you don't even have to say anything bad about China to piss you off, you just have to talk about it neutrally without constantly praising it as a socialist utopia.
Here's some sources, some even from far-right US journals that have looked into it. It has more to do with regulating businesses and execs found to be in violation anti-trust laws.
It's really just standard anti-trust / financial legislation, IE things the US used to do before 1980s when they let finance capital take over.
I cannot emphasize enough how much air would be sucked out of our propaganda overnight if china just fucking uncensored the internet and truly protected freedom of speech and information.
The PRC would be incredibly naive to let US tech companies in, and take over and hoover up their social media landscape, like so many other countries have done. For example India's most popular communications platform, is facebook. The US effectively controls the social media of a country many times larger than itself, and can influence it whatever way it wants, as well as spy on every person who uses it.
For those who want to view US-run tech sites in the PRC, they can of course via VPNs which are completely legal, but that friction is very worthwhile for encouraging home-run alternatives, and preventing mass surveillance by an evil empire.
I mean judging by how cooked the brains of so many western people are with internet conspiracies like qanon, I'm not sure that would be the result of deregulation
That is pretty wild. I didn't know any of this .. I just thought "communist dystopia is dystopian". The fact that you can take a hit to the credit score for engaging in protests and demonstrations is still scary .... no one show this to Republicans.
The fact that you can take a hit to the credit score for engaging in protests and demonstrations is still scary
I was saying that this sort of thing actually doesn't really happen. The social credit score for the most part is just an ordinary credit score and is only meaningfully affected by finances. Some localities made an attempt at implementing the "social" aspects of the system and subtract small amounts for certain criminal offenses, but it barely makes a difference.
Engaging in protests and demonstrations gets you the same thing it gets you here; tear gas, pepper balls, beatings, and possibly prison time & a criminal record. The hysteria around the social credit system is very silly when the actual dystopian shit is so glaringly obvious, and occurs in both China and the US.
Engaging in protests and demonstrations gets you the same thing it gets you here; tear gas, pepper balls, beatings, and possibly prison time & a criminal record.
You ain't wrong about the social credit thing! There was only one municipality that tried to implement it in any way that even vaguely resembles how mainstream media hysterics portray, and that city's administration was punished for it on the national stage.
The only thing the "social credit" system was meant to do is make major public figures accountable for corruption. It was never aimed at REGULAR people!
But yeah nah fuck anyone and anything that opposed democracy especially the two faced single political party of the United States of America. If they actually gave a shit about democracy for real instead of just consuming lives to pay for their pedophilia addictions, we'd have ranked choice voting by now.
Unfortunately I don't think ranked choice voting will save you. You need to clear the board so to speak and get some options that actually represent people over corporate interests.
You do realize that ranked choice voting is one of the simplest and least violent ways to push forward progressive candidates right? Because it makes people comfortable with voting options that with first past the post would be throw away votes
That makes sense, and then you look at Europe and realise the issues at hand are systemic, caused by material conditions and bourgeois democratic electoralism is never going to fix those issues.
Much of Europe already uses ranked choice or proportional voting, yet remains austerity-ridden and sliding toward the far right because it is still under the dictatorship of capital. The voting mechanism is secondary to the concrete material conditions: capital's imperative to accumulate, the commodification of labor, and the state's role as an instrument of class rule. Until that dictatorship is overthrown, electoral reform is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
The core contradictions at hand are:
Socialized production versus private appropriation:workers collectively create value, but capitalists expropriate the surplus
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall: as organic composition of capital rises, profitability declines, forcing capital to seek new fixes
Overaccumulation and underconsumption: capital produces more than can be profitably sold, leading to crisis, layoffs, and austerity
The contradiction between capital's global mobility and labor's relative immobility, which fuels a race to the bottom in wages and protections.
As imperialism declines (neocolonial extraction becomes costlier, interimperialist rivalry intensifies, and the Global South resists outright plunder) capital can no longer rely on external superprofits to offset domestic falling rates of profit. The response is internal repression: austerity to slash social wages, union-busting to weaken labor power, surveillance to preempt dissent, and the normalization of authoritarian governance. This is capital's logical reaction to crisis.
This dynamic mirrors Weimar Germany: economic crisis, delegitimized liberal parties, and a bourgeoisie that ultimately backed fascism to crush the organized working class and restore "order" for capital. Today's far-right surge is the same phenomenon: capital's emergency management when consent can no longer be manufactured through bourgeois democracy alone.
Voting under these conditions is not a path to liberation; it is a ritual that legitimizes the managers of decline. For voting to matter, you must overthrow the dictatorship of capital and reach the synthesis of these contradictions: a revolutionary transformation that socializes production, abolishes exploitation, and builds a state that serves human need, not profit. Only then does political power and thereby voting become meaningful.
Ranked choice and proportional voting are 2 very different concepts. You are falsely pretending they're similar when they're wildly different concepts. Only Ireland presently uses it from the eu, because they as well have an establishment, and ranked choice voting is anti establishment at its core.
Why are you trying to pretend they're the same concept?
How do you expect to have a revolution if 90% of people don't agree with your viewpoint? And I say that as a socialist. Pushing forward the agenda over the course of decades is more likely to be successful than a single revolution, in my opinion.
Yes, they are different, but the point at the core of my argument is that it's irrelevant as they serve the same purpose at their core.
Whether it's s RCV or MMP, the outcome remains austerity, imperialist foreign policy, and rising far-right influence because the state remains an instrument of capital. Ballot mechanics don't override class power. RCV isn't "anti-establishment at its core"; it's a procedural tweak that can just as easily stabilize bourgeois legitimacy.
How do you expect to have a revolution if 90% of people don't agree with your viewpoint?
In my country the revolution has already happened. We now conduct class struggle through party debate and socialist democracy, not bourgeois elections.
Also revolutionary consciousness isn't a precondition you wait for, it is forged through struggle. The 90% figure is wrong for a start, even in the US communist sympathys are quickly growing, you also assumes static opinions under static conditions, but material crises radicalize people faster than decades of electoral gradualism. Reformism doesn't build toward socialism, it manages capitalism more palatably and demobilizes movements by channeling energy into cycles of hope and disappointment.
Pushing forward the agenda over the course of decades is more likely to be successful than a single revolution, in my opinion.
History suggests otherwise. Social democracy produced the welfare state only under the unique pressure of postwar reconstruction and Soviet competition, then dismantled it once those pressures faded (and even that was built off massive exploitation and imperialism in the periphery). Capital concedes reforms only when forced and retracts them the moment profitability demands it. Waiting for electoral consensus while the climate burns, fascism rises, and imperialism massacres isn't a strategy. Bourgeois democracy won't let you vote through its own abolition. The task for those still under bourgeois democracy is to build dual power: organs of working-class authority that can confront and replace the dictatorship of capital. That's how you can make voting matter.
Alas, I fear the US might be too far gone for ranked choice to have an effect.
The problem is quality of candidates. Since Citizen's United opened the door for unlimited corporate money in elections, literally 90% of candidates are on someone's payroll. "Grassroots" is a thing of the past. Mass media and name recognition are everything.
It's quite possible it's too late for the usa, but I still do want other democracies to push for it. Only 4 odd countries have it worldwide.
Worth saying, while grassroots is less common, it is not gone. Kat in il-9 is somewhat a good example of this though she failed community engagement and came from out of town so she's unlikely to win. Though it is arguable how grassroots she is. Of course the top priority is revoking citizens united.
It's one of the simplest ways of helping push countries to the left, because it allows you to have people vote for the leftist politicians without worrying about boosting a right wing politician or party, as first past the post forces, and also not forcing people to vote for parties, which lock out leftist candidates from being able to gain traction as easily such as in proportional voting systems.
Many far right countries (australia, japan, south korea) use ranked choice voting... it doesn't make a bit of difference. If capitalists control the political system, then they will stack candidates and fund the campaigns that support their interests, and the "democracy" there is nothing but political theatre.
Outside of Marxists, even the ancient greeks knew that representative government is just another name for plutocracy, because only wealthy / landed family have the money and prestige to fund campaigns to get themselves elected. Liberals still haven't learned this simple lesson.
How will compulsive voting improve anything? Now you're dragging even more uninformed dopes to vote, a lot of them will vote for spite. Far more than you realize, I think
Trump was 100% the vote-for-spite-burn-it-down candidate. That's how they get you, the old switcheroo
Now you’re dragging even more uninformed dopes to vote, a lot of them will vote for spite.
uninformed defines almost all american voters and the last election showed that 30 million people who voted in 2020, chose not to vote in 2024 instead of spite voting.
"Authoritarianism" is meaningless because all it means is "uses state power." It doesn't acknowledge which class controls the state and who it uses state power against. In China, the working classes control the state, and use state power against bad actors and capitalists more than anything else. China is oppressive to capitalists and liberating to workers.
I haven't much evidence for the claim: "In China, the working classses control the state"
sure you will say that is my western bias from living with china bad propaganda, but you could actually provide something to me read on topic if possible
You can debate whether the system works well, but it isn’t accurate to say there’s no evidence for the claim that the working classes play a central role in the Chinese state.
China’s constitution explicitly defines the PRC as a socialist state “led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants,” with state power exercised through the National People’s Congress (NPC) system. The NPC is the highest organ of state power, with nearly 3,000 deputies drawn from provinces, the PLA, and different social sectors.
The makeup of the NPC is not just party bureaucrats or business elites. In the 14th NPC there are hundreds of deputies from workers and farmers and large numbers of grassroots representatives, along with 442 ethnic minority deputies covering all 55 minority groups. Most deputies in China’s people’s congress system (about 95%) serve at the county and township level, which are directly elected and involve hundreds of millions of voters. Higher congresses are elected from these lower levels. This structure is what China calls “whole-process people’s democracy.”
Sources explaining the system include CGTN’s Who runs the CPC and the State Council white paper China: Democracy That Works.
You can also look at how the state treats capital. China has private capital, but it is clearly subordinated to state goals. When Jack Ma tried to push an aggressive fintech model through Ant Group that would massively expand lightly regulated consumer credit, regulators halted the IPO and forced restructuring under stricter oversight. That is a case of disciplining capital when it conflicts with social stability and the broader economy.
Likewise, China has pursued policies like eliminating extreme poverty and building massive infrastructure networks (including projects that are not monetarily profitable) because they are treated as long-term public development goals. That kind of large-scale, socially oriented investment is difficult to sustain in systems where private capital dominates the state.
So you can disagree with the Chinese model, but there is actually a large amount of Chinese material explaining how their system is supposed to function and why they claim it represents working-class political power.
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people's democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China's success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we've learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
The working classes in socialist countries are the ones dictating the state and its direction.
There is no genocide of Uyghurs. Uyghur genocide atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there's "white genocide" in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of "genocide." Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective's Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn't going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this. Has there been mistreatment? Almost certainly to some degree, in a campaign as large as this. Is it genocide, be it cultural or outright? No, Uyghur culture is preserved and there are no mass killings.
China is a socialist country, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state. Child labor is illegal in China, you may be thinking of the US.
It is possible to oppose all three things. It is possible to simultaneously oppose the Social Credit System in China, the Credit Score system in the United States, and the elites connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
Is it? You need to think more pragmatically, you are a laborer. Your only bargaining chip is your labour, decide who gets it. Personally, I don't want to be part of any helping them live their best life.
No don't, you never will. You'll always contribute what ever system you're a part of. Just choose one and the chienese might do a lot of bad things but they aren't the pedofile baby eating elites.
I am a Chinese minority living in China. You really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to China. You very clearly have done 0 research beyond maybe reading RFA. You should be quiet until you have done some proper research.
It isn't an ad hominem fallacy to point out that doing little research on a topic and repeating easily disproven talking points isn't a sound basis of argument.
The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: "The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a 'jay walker,' in Kansas City."
In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word "jaywalker" to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”
Originally in the US, the legal rule was that "all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way". In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.
Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.
Anything that deals more directly with the issue than the past of the founder of one associated organization? "One of the guys saying it is bad, so it isn't true" doesn't work well on the people I argue with.
It’s very hard to prove a negative, especially to people who want to believe, thanks to over a century of anticommunist propaganda. The burden of proof ought to be on those making claims of secret foreign police stations on their soil, an extraordinary claim. All those articles are trash and have no real evidence. And they don’t need any, because almost no Westerners demand any, because the narrative aligns with their preconception of communist states as cartoonishly evil.
It was my understanding that the existence of police stations in foreign countries is not debated, they have them. The allegation that they are used for repressive purposes beyond their stated aim of providing administrative services to citizens living abroad is what is controversial. It really seems like, when you cut all the baggage away, all we have is testimonials from expats claiming harassment and assurances from the MFA that it never happened, so I struggle to land firmly on one side of belief considering both parties have historically been loose with the truth.
I don’t care what other countries do to a degree where we need to intervene their governance with military or covert actions, I don’t understand their culture, their history, their people, their way of thinking to force democracy across the world. I only care about protecting our country, our people and leaving the world the fuck alone. I feel like that’s how most of the world works.
Im gonna say it, I'm sick and tired of hearing people talk about "evil Chinese authoritarian social credit system" when its inherently a good system that works. In the west when a corporation commits mass fraud and abuse they pay a minimal fine (sometimes they don't even pay) and then they literally just get away with it. Chinas social credit system on the other hand actually holds businesses accountable.
I'm willing to say I'm not happy with either system. Corporations should pay and be held accountable but citizens should have a right to privacy and not have the sum of their actions turned into a number.
citizens should have a right to privacy and not have the sum of their actions turned into a number.
That “number” isn’t real. China does not have a single nationwide “social credit score” that rates every citizen.
What actually exists is a set of legal blacklists, the most famous being the court judgment defaulter list (失信被执行人). It applies to people who refuse to comply with a court decision, usually things like unpaid debts.
If you ignore a court order, the court can place you under a high-consumption restriction (限制高消费). That means you can’t spend money on certain luxury services (first-class train tickets, flights, five-star hotels, or other high-end purchases) until you comply with the judgment.
You can still travel normally, stay in regular hotels, work, shop, and live your life. The restriction is specifically designed to stop people who refuse to obey court rulings from enjoying luxury spending while ignoring their legal obligations.
The popular idea in the west that everyone in China has a constantly changing personal “score” based on everyday behavior is simply western fantasy.
I'm impressed. The US legal system is incredibly anemic when it comes to punishing corporations for violating workers' rights. I hope we really can achieve a multipolar world, one where a standard like this is upheld to emulate, and not the rotten neoliberal legal morass of the West.
That's because the US like pretty much all the western world is a dictatorship of capital why would capital willingly discipline itself. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat hence the constant crackdowns on unruly capital and capitalists that is impossible in the west.
Of course. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I just hope CIA propaganda loses any appeal it may have outside of the imperial core. As for inside the core, it's hard for me not to feel 'doomer' about the state of the working class. I think there would have to be a sudden, extreme change in material conditions before the working class would start to 'wake up' en masse here.
You should be happy to know then that the social credit score only applies to corporations and individuals who do business with the government as contractors, it doesn't apply to private life and doesn't make anything illegal that wasn't already legally punishable (even then minor crimes aren't covered).
Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax are awful entities that I never consented to share my personal financial data with. But one wrong doesn’t justify another. Personally I think a score by private data brokers to judge creditworthiness is less harm than a score by your government to judge social worthiness but both are harm.
The idea of a social worthiness score doesn't exist in China, though. They have a system largely for penalizing corporations and businesses that are caught skirting regulations, and a limited system for catching those who commit tax fraud and other crimes.
They have a system largely for penalizing corporations and businesses that are caught skirting regulations
The core mechanism is the court “judgment defaulter” blacklist (失信被执行人) and related high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), which are imposed when someone refuses to comply with a legally effective court judgment, such as paying a debt or damages ordered by the court. The penalty mainly restricts luxury or non-essential spending (flights, first-class train seats, luxury hotels, tourism, etc.) until the judgment is fulfilled. In law it applies to any individual or company, and if a company is the debtor the restrictions can extend to its legal representative or responsible managers on top of any accounts registered to the company. In practice 99.99% of cases involve businesses because most court enforcement actions arise from commercial disputes (contracts, loans, wages, suppliers, etc.), so the mechanism ends up being an enforcement mechanism against business owners and managers to push them to settle judgments properly, but legally it’s just a court enforcement tool against anyone who refuses to comply with a court ruling.
It's applied to bank accounts. If you owe a debt ordered by the court (99.99% businesses) you can't use your business accounts to buy luxuries, it is often also applied to the individual owner/management of the company as well so they can neither use personal or business accounts to live a life of luxury while owing debts to people.
If you’re in a position to make decisions for a non-compliant corporation, then it does indeed become personal, but you can opt out of the C-suite at any time, or you can get your company in compliance.
This deep into the Gaza genocide, anyone with two neurons to spark together hates liberals. Smug, conspiratorial fascists-in-denial who will spend decades helping to strangle you, then criticize the way you breathe.
An ad hominem is when an argument consists of a personal attack, this is just a personal attack dumbass, you never presented an argument worth rebutting, go back to reddit
I'm aware of liberals throwing the word genocide around in regard to shit that is demonstrably not genocide, and accusing everyone who disagrees of being a bot or a paid enemy agent. This is also projection, you are a morally bankrupt lackey of a dying empire and you are losing and you are coping poorly with it.
Yeah, supporting the country whose fighting the empire, rooting out nazis, and stopping a genocide is being "for genocide". Do you libs ever question your sources or what??
It's like saying, "Invading Iran is okay because their state is bad." It's not okay - look at how much suffering it causes. And for what? Simply replacing one oligarchy with another.
Russia rooting out nazis. Fighting the empire? Wild.
Putin IS a nazi. Russia IS an imperialist regime. Are we not going to talk about Russia's imperialist attacks? Is that all chill? The attacks on Ukraine are equivalent to genocide historically.
Simply because Russia is anti-US, doesn't make it free of guilt for much of the same actions the US takes.
There are no concentration camps? There were prisons where terrorists were rehabilitated and vocational schools. Neither of these are concentration camps. When was the last time you were in Xinjiang? Uyghur is widely spoken and all signs are in Uyghur and Chinese. There were some abuses during the crackdown on ETIM and that was bad but that has already been corrected and abuses are not genocide you should stop trivialising the word genocide.
Yea Russia is really rooting out those Nazis in Ukraine lol, maybe if you simp for Putin harder you won’t get conscripted into the meat grinder. Best of luck to you in your crusade to end genocide by spreading Russian propaganda. 👋
Silly, this is .ml for marxists. We're all pro-China, Russia, and even gasp pro-DPRK because we don't shun from news sources that havent been deemed worthy by the empire
Marxists are certainly critical of Putin and the Russian Federation, and see it as an incredible fall from their proud and progressive soviet past. However, the biggest obstacle to socialism globally is the US Empire, and Russia is presently playing a progressive international role in undermining it, and being a valuable trading partner for countries like China, Venezuela, the DPRK, etc. Further, the biggest opposition faction to the nationalists are the communists, not the liberals, so in time it is likely they will return to socialism.
You're conflating Marxist methodology with liberal moralism. Marxists do not offer abstract "pro/anti" judgments based on a regime's ideology, but analyze states through their structural position in the global system. Contemporary Russia is indeed an oligarchic capitalist state, but its integration into global capitalism is asymmetric and subordinate. Its economy remains heavily dependent on raw material exports rather than high-value capital export, and it lacks the core instruments of modern imperialism: dominance over global financial institutions, reserve currency status, and the ability to enforce structural adjustment. Unlike the U.S., Russia cannot print the world's reserve currency to finance overseas expansion or weaponize SWIFT-level financial infrastructure against rivals.
This material reality limits Russia's capacity for classic imperialist expansion as Lenin defined it, namely, the dominance of finance capital and the export of capital as the primary mechanism of exploitation. Russia's capital accumulation model, centered on resource rents and regional security projection, does not replicate this. It lacks the deep financial markets, technological monopoly rents, and institutional leverage that allow core imperial powers to extract surplus globally through "peaceful"(generally far from peaceful in reality) and economic means. Its military actions, therefore, function more as defensive geopolitics or regional balancing than as instruments of systematic capital expansion.
Precisely because Russia cannot compete with entrenched imperial powers on their terms, its rational strategy is to undermine unipolarity. Supporting multipolar institutions like BRICS and the SCO, opposing NATO expansion, and backing states resisting U.S. pressure are not expressions of socialist solidarity, but materially rational moves for a subordinate capitalist power seeking strategic autonomy. The objective effect (fragmenting U.S. hegemonic control) creates space for anti-imperialist struggles globally, regardless of Putin's subjective intentions.
Our support is therefore entirely critical and conditional. We recognize that Russia's structural position leads it, out of self-interest, to back anti-imperialist struggles, and we support those objective anti-hegemonic actions because they weaken the primary engine of global imperialist exploitation. Simultaneously, we oppose its internal reactionary politics, oligarchic structure, and any chauvinist or expansionist tactics that harm working-class solidarity. This is not a logical contradiction, it is dialectical materialism: judging policies by their concrete role in the global class struggle, not by the ideological labels of leaders. Reducing this analysis to "pro-Putin" ignores Marxism's core method: follow the motion of material forces, not the slogans of statesmen.
They didn't even read the first section of the article they linked.
There have been widespread misconceptions in media reports that China operates a unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low or rewards if the score is high.
Sure, let's say it doesn't since I admittedly haven't looked into this in painful detail. However, this meme seems to suggest that if it did exist, then it would be perfectly fine on the virtue that credit scores exist in America. Aka, whataboutism.
Since Germany made concentration camps under the third reich that it isn't that bad when America does it. At least by this logic. Guess it's impossible to be against two things at once. Though I hope I'm just misinterpreting the point
The meme is pointing out hypocrisy among those in America. Its common to hear them mock China for having a social credit score system, while apparently not realizing they have exactly that with credit monitoring companies.
This is all made more ridiculous by the fact that there is no social credit score in China as Americans understand it.
The joke is that Americans brag and call everyone else barbarians, when they themselves are the barbarians. Its pure projection to inflate the massive American ego.
That's not what "whataboutism" is. This isn't a structured debate where we are limited to one topic, it's a conversation... and we're allowed to use examples and compare like to like, you do it, I do it, every human on Earth does it every day.
Sure, you're allowed to call this and everything else 'whataboutism', I don't think you should be given a "whataboutism score" wherein those with the highest scores are avoided by reasonable people.
No one place, I see the same mainstream western news as everyone, I just also read articles from outside the west as well, and non-mainstream sources too.
CGTN is pretty mainstream for news from China, they have English news. The Cradle is typically decent on reporting from the Middle East. For western and glonal news from a communist angle, BreakThrough News and Geopolitical Economy Report are both good.
I'm not comparing the systems or saying it's better, but you don't need a credit rating to get a mortgage on a home in the US and are doing yourself a disservice repeating that talking point.
If you don't have a credit rating they'll ask for other evidences you are able to pay off a 15-30 year loan like consistent and not missing payments on a phone, rent, utilities, internet, etc steady employment, bigger down payment. it's called manual underwriting or a non traditional mortgage application.
If you treat your credit card like your debit card, you can get 3% off literally everything. As long as you don't spend more than you make, you'll never owe interest.
I have enough credit, I can by a whole car with the swipe of a card. I'll never have to wonder about underwriting or proving myself. I've already done so to my bank. And if I ever decide to do that, I'll have zero down and zero interest for 6 months.
In both USA and china you can't buy a ticket to a fast train if you're credit score is bad. In china there is direct ban, in USA there is no fast Train.
In china, this also applies to flight tickets. Basically if you have bad social credit, you are kinda fucked in almost anything in china including apointment to government services. USA it's mostly tied to taking new loans or getting a new house or renting an
apartment (?). Does not have actual effect on your ability to purchase flight tickets.
In China they can check your phone (for images) and your online activity is quite accessible to the government. The checks can happen not only in international borders but also in inter regional borders. In USA, i know it's a thing for foreigners during entrance to USA, not sure how is it for the citizens.
In China you have to give away all your data (as a company), regardless of where that data is stored, if the government or the communist party requests it. They are technically different entities but practically the same entity. Failure to do so will fuck up your social credit. In USA you also have to hand over all your data (as a company) if the government asks regardless of where it is stored (since the CLOUD act), but hey at least you're not handing over to the commies and it will probably not have any effect on your credit score.
In china there is an app that notifies people of other people with poor social credit so they can generally avoid them. USA hasn't invented that YET, although people from other political party are usually considered subhuman and beneath themselves and someone is [probably] looking [to develop an app so they can actively avoid people supporting the other political party].
I agree, and I would really want to know. The only "news" I found is the tests from Heinan province in 2019 but I couldn't find anything after that. But testing of this system (introduced by the government), where you can see and report debtors itself feels quite scary and authoritarian to me.
I put some links in the comments below. But most of the 'information' I have is from news and documentaries about Xu Xiaodong. You can check the wikpeida article, but it's just wikpedia.
I also know of someone who went to tibet as a tourist through Nepal. Their phone had to be surrendered for thorough checking, they apparently painstakingly checked all images. I don't expect anybody to believe this as I can't provide proof that it did happen.
I concede.
There is no social credit, people not being allowed to travel in trains, rent or buy property, get government appointment is a myth.
The Chinese government cannot compel any company to handover data. There is no censorship on china, no websites are banned there. You can criticize the government as much as you want without repercussions. People from Tibet have equal rights and citizenship of China. Ughyurs are not being oppressed, neither are the fallongongs who are just a cult
If anybody believes otherwise, it's a hoax by the west.
This comparison mixes a few real policies with a lot of exaggeration. For example, the train and flight issue people always bring up is not about having a vague “bad social credit score.” What actually exists is a court enforcement measure. If someone refuses to comply with an effective court judgment (most commonly paying a debt or damages) the court can place them on the judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人) and issue a high-consumption restriction (限制高消费). That mainly blocks luxury consumption like flights, first-class rail seats, and luxury hotels until the court order is fulfilled. The purpose is simply to pressure people to comply with the judgment and protect the creditor’s rights (why should sleazy business people who don't pay their debts get to live lavishly).
Because of that, the claim that “if you have bad social credit you’re basically locked out of everything” is misleading. These restrictions target specific high-end consumption, not normal daily life. Even Chinese legal explanations make clear that they are meant to restrict non-essential spending such as flying, luxury hotels, expensive travel, etc., rather than basic living or ordinary transportation.
The surveillance point is also mixing separate issues. China does have strong state monitoring powers and extensive digital infrastructure, but that is not what the court enforcement blacklist system is. The travel restrictions and blacklists people talk about come from civil enforcement procedures in the courts, not from scanning someone’s phone or some universal personal “score.”
The same confusion shows up in the company data point. China has strict data and cybersecurity laws, but those are regulatory and national security frameworks. They are not the mechanism that puts someone on the judgment-defaulter list. That list exists specifically because someone ignored a legally binding court ruling, not because they refused to hand over corporate data.
And the idea that there is some nationwide app warning citizens about people with low “social credit” is another exaggeration. What actually exists are court databases of judgment defaulters, sometimes publicly searchable, similar to debtor registries in many legal systems. Again, the target is people who lost a case and then refused to comply with the ruling.
So the reality is much more mundane than the viral version. China absolutely has strong enforcement tools, but the famous travel bans people cite are mainly a judicial enforcement mechanism against people who refuse to comply with court judgments, not a universal social-credit score controlling everyone’s daily life.
Ahh I see. I read about and watched few documentaries about Xu Xiadong who criticized kungfu masters and lost social credit (among other things) and couldn't rent, own property, stay in certain hotels, travel on high speed rail, or buy plane tickets. I guess that was not true then.
About the app, BBC is probably where it comes from, it's more for debtors and not with people with bad social credit but I suppose there is an overlap. So this didn't make it pass the trial phase?
The Xu Xiaodong case actually illustrates the exact point I was making. He wasn’t punished for “criticizing kung fu masters” or for having the wrong opinions. What happened is that he lost a defamation lawsuit and the court ordered him to apologize and pay damages. He refused to comply with the ruling, and because of that he was placed on the judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人). Chinese reporting describes the reason as “有履行能力而拒不履行生效法律文书确定义务”, having the ability to comply with a court judgment but refusing to do so. Once someone is on that list, courts can impose high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), which include things like flights, certain high-speed rail tickets, and luxury hotels until the judgment is fulfilled. In other words, the trigger was refusing to carry out a court order, not some general punishment for speech.
On the data issue, you’re citing reports from Western government-linked think tanks and security NGOs, which obviously approach the topic from a national security perspective. China’s cybersecurity and data laws (like the Cybersecurity Law and Data Security Law) exist because the state wants control over critical data flows, infrastructure security, and cross-border data transfer. That approach isn’t unique in principle; governments everywhere are tightening control over data because it has become a strategic resource. But those laws are regulatory frameworks about data governance, not mechanisms that automatically “ruin someone’s social credit.” The think-tank papers you cited are describing geopolitical risk concerns, not explaining how the Chinese court enforcement system actually works.
On the app point, what the BBC article referred to were tools connected to the court defaulter database, sometimes nicknamed things like a “laolai map.” That’s basically a searchable database of people who have lost a case and then refused to comply with the judgment, which courts use to pressure them to comply. Many countries have debtor registries or public enforcement records; the difference here is mostly presentation. Western coverage often framed it as part of a sinister “social credit” ecosystem when in reality it was tied to a specific court enforcement list, not a universal citizen score. It's good to have a database of those who have defrauded people. And to be honest, the BBC has a long history of framing Chinese policy in a particular narrative, so it’s not surprising that nuance tends to disappear.
The reality is that some of these mechanisms absolutely exist, but how they work, who they apply to, and what they actually do is often somewhere between heavy exaggeration and outright fantasy in viral discussions. What exists in practice is a mixture of court enforcement lists, regulatory blacklists, and sector-specific compliance systems. Turning that into a story about every citizen having a constantly changing “social credit score” controlling their life is a much simpler narrative, but it’s not how the underlying policies are actually structured.
I see, that was the result of not following court orders. So not complying with court orders will prevent you from these things (flights, high speed rail tickets, and luxury hotels?). Some institutes also report rent or purchase property, are those also restricted when you don't comply with court order? What if you already own property? I am only asking to know.
I guess this questions are more about authoritarian rather than soical credits.
How about xiaodong's account being wiped 9 times was it (?) for having a viewpoint against the government. Is that somehow illegal and hence banned?
There is also one funny things that maybe you can shed some light on. There was this joke that if you get spam call from china, you can text them "Tiananmen Square and June 4, 1989 (1989年6月天安门广场屠杀)" or something about Taiwan being a country and their internet will be cut and they will be arrest or something x'D. I suppose it's only a meme but is there some truth to it, memes do come from somewhere right?
On the property point, it’s the same principle as the other restrictions. When someone refuses to comply with a court judgment and is placed under high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), the court can restrict certain forms of luxury spending, which can include purchasing additional real estate or carrying out non-essential renovations until the debt or judgment is fulfilled. The idea is that if someone owes money according to a court ruling, they should not be spending large amounts on luxury consumption before complying. Existing property is not automatically taken just because someone is on the list, although assets can be enforced as part of normal debt collection(just as in every other country).
As for Xu Xiaodong’s accounts being wiped, that situation was tied to the series of lawsuits and disputes he became involved in, along with platform moderation rules. That falls under content moderation and legal disputes on private platforms, not the court enforcement mechanism we were discussing earlier.
The blocked-website lists you see online are a very mixed bag. Some sites are inaccessible because of political or regulatory issues, but many cases come down to compliance requirements, such as rules around data protection, licensing, and the requirement for companies handling Chinese user data to host or manage that data within China’s regulatory framework. When companies choose not to comply with those requirements, their services often simply do not operate in the mainland market.
And that meme about texting someone “Tiananmen 1989” to get them arrested is honestly pretty ugly. It basically jokes about condemning random Chinese people to some vague punishment for the sake of a punchline, which is a pretty dehumanizing way to talk about an entire population. Fortunately it’s also just a meme, sending a phrase like that to someone does not magically cut their internet or get them arrested.
One additional question; what do you mean by political or regulatory issue? You mean that is a grounds for something to be banned?
Also who dictates that certain thing is ban-able from political or regulatory issue and what is the threshold?
I meant that internet content in China is governed by formal laws and regulations, mainly enforced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) and related regulators. Chinese rules such as the 《网络信息内容生态治理规定》 classify online information and require platforms to prohibit illegal content and prevent harmful content, including material that endangers national security, spreads rumors that disrupt social order, promotes extremism or violence, or infringes on others’ rights. Platforms are legally required to monitor and remove such content and regulators can order services restricted or removed if they violate these rules.
Wrong. It was never the norm across China's economy. It was concentrated in roughly forty large tech firms during the 2016-2019 boom cycle. In August 2021 the Supreme People's Court explicitly ruled 996 illegal, stating it violates statutory working hour limits and mandatory rest periods. The 2025 Consumption Boost Plan tightens this further with concrete measures against invisible overtime and stronger rest-time guarantees.
capitalists maliciously withholding wages is commonplace
Wage arrears will persist so long as capital exists. That is the unfortunate material reality of the world we live in. What distinguishes China is the enforcement architecture built to counter it. The judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人) publicly names individuals and companies that fail to comply with court orders on wage payments and debts. Once listed, they face high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费): no business-class travel, no luxury hotels, limits on real estate and vehicle purchases. Combined with the blacklist for owed migrant worker wages and criminal prosecution for willful arrears, this creates real pressure on employers. It is not a perfect system but it is institutional recourse. Compare that to the procedural maze workers navigate in many Western systems when chasing unpaid wages
even establishing a union is treated as a crime
China's labor framework operates through the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. This isn't about silencing workers. It is about preventing fragmentation, foreign interference, and ensuring disputes resolve through arbitration and courts rather than adversarial chaos. Enterprise unions under this system negotiate contracts, handle grievances, and oversee safety. The ban on independent unions reflects a choice for unified, state-coordinated representation. That is a policy position. Debate it if you want. But calling it criminalization of worker advocacy is dishonest at best.
those aiding workers in defending their rights are arrested
Vigilante action undermines rule of law anywhere. China channels labor disputes through arbitration committees and courts that handle millions of cases annually. When people bypass legal channels to organize unsanctioned actions, it is the method that triggers enforcement.
Then is the broader picture you ignored. The CPC maintains over 95 percent public approval according to long-term Harvard Kennedy School surveys. Most mainlanders view China's system as highly democratic because it delivers accountability through performance: poverty alleviation that lifted nearly one billion people, infrastructure built for public benefit not shareholder profit, and anti-corruption enforcement that reaches from village cadres to top generals. The National People's Congress includes nearly 3,000 deputies with hundreds of farmers, frontline workers, and representatives from all 55 ethnic minorities. That is structural inclusion. When platform capitalists like Jack Ma pushed financialization models that threatened household debt burdens, regulators restructured those businesses toward consumer protection. Similar scrutiny has applied to ed-tech, gaming, and real estate speculation. Public hospitals, high-speed rail, rural broadband. These are not profit centers. They are working-class infrastructure. If your analysis starts from Western media caricatures instead of documented policy and measurable outcomes, you are not critiquing China. You are performing ideology (and poorly at that I might add).
Adding an edit paragraph because I didn't catch that last bit on my first read of the comment:
On the specific claim about Marxist study groups in schools, let me be precise. I hold a Master's in Marxist Theory from a Chinese university. Marxism is compulsory coursework from middle school through postgraduate education. The state funds research institutes, journals, and conferences dedicated to this exact subject. What got disbanded were student groups operating outside legal registration requirements, refusing coordination with official university party branches, and using Marxist language to organize unsanctioned actions under the guise of study. That is not a crackdown on theory. It is enforcement of organizational discipline. Socialist democracy operates through democratic centralism: open debate within recognized structures, unified action once decisions are made. When students form parallel groups that reject institutional channels, they are not advancing Marxist practice. They are fracturing the very mechanisms that deliver working-class gains. This is not abstract. Foreign-funded NGOs have a documented history of instrumentalizing campus activism in developing states to destabilize socialist governance. Allowing unregistered groups to mobilize under Marxist rhetoric while bypassing party oversight creates openings for exactly that kind of interference. The result is not worker empowerment. It is system fragmentation that ultimately serves capital and foreign imperialist interests by weakening the coordinated capacity of the socialist state. If you genuinely understood Marxism as taught in China, you would know that the point is not performative dissent. It is building durable working-class power through institutions that can win material concessions. Disbanding unregistered campus groups is not anti-Marxist. It is pro-working-class unity. Your framing assumes that any restriction on organizing is inherently reactionary. That is a liberal assumption, not a socialist one.
Can you explain exactly what you mean? It's a mixture of half-truths and outright lies, and the half-truths deliberately leave out context and reasoning, such as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions existing as a sort of union of unions, China hasn't made unions illegal. Your entire comment was unsourced, too.
Lmao at you linking chuang. They wouldn't know good analysis if it punched them in the face. Their characterization of China as state capitalist for example rests on a series of fundamental theoretical errors that constitute a systematic departure from the methodological foundations of scientific socialism. Their analysis proceeds deductively from abstract definitions rather than inductively from concrete investigation, which represents a categorical rejection of the Marxist method as articulated in Marx's own preface to the second edition of Capital, where he insists that the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the human mind and translated into forms of thought.
Their primary methodological failure consists in the mechanical application of categories developed for the analysis of mature capitalist formations to a society undergoing socialist transition. They identify the presence of wage labor, commodity exchange, and market mechanisms and conclude that these phenomena constitute definitive proof of capitalist relations of production. This reasoning ignores the dialectical distinction between form and content that is central to Marxist political economy. Under socialism, wage forms may persist while the social content of labor relations undergoes qualitative transformation through the social appropriation of surplus, the subordination of production to planned social objectives, and the institutional mechanisms of workers' participation in management. Chuang's refusal to analyze these mediations renders their categorization analytically empty.
Their treatment of political power demonstrates a further departure from historical materialism. Lenin's decisive contribution to Marxist theory consisted in establishing that the class character of a state is determined not by the legal form of property or the presence of market mechanisms but by which class exercises political command and directs the development of productive forces. Chuang inverts this priority by treating the state as an epiphenomenal expression of economic relations rather than as the concentrated instrument of class power. This theoretical error leads them to dismiss the substantive significance of the Communist Party of China's strategic control over finance, land, energy, telecommunications, and heavy industry, as well as its capacity to direct investment toward socially determined priorities such as poverty alleviation, regional development, and technological sovereignty.
Their analysis of China's integration into the world economy exhibits a crude economic determinism that Marx explicitly criticized in his polemics against the vulgar materialists. They assert that participation in global markets necessarily entails subordination to the law of value on a world scale, thereby erasing the mediating role of state capacity, capital controls, industrial policy, and strategic planning. This position ignores the extensive theoretical and practical work of Marxist-Leninist movements on the question of socialist engagement with imperialist economies. Lenin's writings on the NEP, Mao's analyses of New Democracy, and subsequent CPC theoretical developments all recognize that tactical engagement with market mechanisms and international trade can serve socialist construction when subordinated to proletarian political leadership and long-term planning objectives. Chuang's categorical rejection of this strategic framework reflects not theoretical rigor but sectarian dogmatism.
Their conception of transition reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dialectical character of socialist development. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all theorized socialism as a prolonged historical process characterized by the coexistence and struggle of old and new relations of production. The presence of contradictory elements does not constitute evidence of capitalist restoration but rather reflects the uneven and contested character of revolutionary transformation. Chuang's binary framework, which demands either pure socialism or explicit capitalism, rejects this core insight and substitutes utopian abstraction for concrete analysis. Their method cannot account for the actual trajectory of China's development, including the expansion of public ownership, the strengthening of social welfare systems, the reduction of inequality, and the advancement of technological capacity under conditions of imperialist encirclement.
Their analytical framework also fails to engage with the concrete mechanisms through which surplus is appropriated and allocated in China. Scientific socialism requires investigation of the actual flows of value, the institutional structures of planning and distribution, and the social outcomes of economic policy. Chuang bypasses this empirical work in favor of categorical assertion. They do not demonstrate that surplus value in China is privately appropriated in the manner characteristic of capitalist exploitation. They do not establish that investment decisions are governed by profit maximization rather than social planning criteria. They do not analyze the role of mass organizations, workplace democracy, or community participation in shaping economic outcomes. Their conclusion rests not on material investigation but on definitional fiat.
The political consequence of Chuang's theoretical errors is a politics of sectarian negation that substitutes moral condemnation for strategic analysis. Scientific socialism is not concerned with issuing abstract verdicts on historical processes but with identifying contradictions, assessing balances of forces, and advancing class struggle through concrete practice. Chuang's refusal to engage with the actual gains achieved by China's development model, including the lifting of hundreds of millions from poverty, the expansion of public infrastructure, and the strengthening of national sovereignty against imperialist pressure, reveals a politics disconnected from the material interests of the international working class. Their analysis serves not to advance socialist theory but to reinforce the ideological boundaries of a particular academic-leftist milieu that prioritizes theoretical purity over revolutionary effectiveness.
In sum, Chuang's characterization of China as state capitalist is not a contribution to Marxist analysis but a deviation from its foundational method. Their deductive formalism, their erasure of political power as a determinant of social relations, their mechanical application of categories, and their rejection of transitional dialectics collectively constitute a systematic departure from scientific socialism. The result is not sharper critique but theoretical error that obscures rather than clarifies the actual character of contemporary socialist construction. If one seeks to understand China's development, one must begin with concrete investigation of its material practices, institutional structures, and historical trajectory, not with predefined definitions imposed from without. Anything less is not Marxist analysis but its caricature.
If chuang is the basis of your political thoughts on China it is no wonder you have also arrived at the wrong conclusions.
There's a massive difference between the claim that "996 is the norm" and the reality that this was largely restricted to large tech companies, is acknowledged as a real problem by the government, and that said government has taken concrete steps towards eliminating this entirely. Of course, reality is not black and white, just because something is formally illegal does not mean that it has been eliminated entirely, but this is a universe apart from the claim that "996 is the norm."
Regarding the question of whether trade unions should be independent or incorporated and federated, historical practice proves the necessity of unity over fragmentation. The Jasic incident actually demonstrates this quite well, as western organizations such as BBC, Amnesty International, and Radio Free Asia got involved in the incident and tried to spin it. Preventing western influence over soveriegn structures is critical to the longevity of the socialist peoject, and the fact that unions must work within the existing socialist system is miles apart from the claim that "unions are illegal."
As for students discarding what of Marxism they learn, this isn't unexpected. No socialist country can manage to make all students interested in Marxism. Your claim, however, made it appear that Marxism itself is discouraged. Regarding the Peking University Marxist Society, the students had this to say:
As one of the students told The Washington Post, they believe "Once you study Marxism, you know real socialism and China's so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics are two different things. They sell fascism as socialism as a street vendor passes off dog meat as lamb."
This is not Marxist analysis, this is left-dogmatism. In the PRC, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes have political control of the state, not capitalists. The accusation of fascism is coated in Marxist analysis, but is ultimately left-deviationism and counter-revolutionary. Their accusation is ironic, and just like the Jasic incident, it is the exact type of fragmentation that undermines socialist construction through left phrasemongering and coating.
The claim that western orgs are reluctant to cover China's working conditions is utter fantasy. In the west, we are drilled with propaganda about conditions in China daily. There is a real information war against China waged daily in the west. I'm aware that China is rife with contradictions, such is the result of a rapidly developing country trying to navigate ongoing class warfare, urban/rural mismatched development, problems arising from the existence of liberals and capitalists in China empowered by Reform and Opening Up, and more. However, the PRC is constantly and regularly improving, the state enjoys approval rates exceding 90%, and the CPC is regularly addressing the real issues in China.
Overall, your framing is highly deceptive. Rather than discussing real problems honestly, you try to hide their context, complexity, and nuance. This isn't a Marxist method of problem solving and discussion, there's no adherance to unity-struggle-unity. A discussion base built on deception is pointless, theory and practice must be united to be accurate and effective.
It’s important to understand that everything you know about China comes from capitalist states, corporations, and NGOs (which are funded by those states & corporations) that have a vested interest in you believing that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. That’s why the lie to us about China and lied to us about the USSR.
When your socialist / communist group arms and starts defending themselves and their class interests, what prevents someone labeling them as authoritarian for doing so?
Socialist countries like the PRC lived through a hundred years of imperial exploitation by foreign powers (Britain, the US, and Japan), and fought a decades-long civil war against feudal reactionaries to finally liberate themselves from these oppressions. Do you know something they don't, about how to establish socialism, "non-authoritarianly"?
Bullshit. Used car market exists since the invention of a car. If you need a vehicle that will drive your ass from point A to the point B you absolutely have no need to buy a brand new one.
The used car market is volitile, regional, and often close to new in price. Stop blaming systemic issues on actions of individuals. I'm not saying that it's impossible for one to make poor financial decisions, but instead that the very system is designed around maximizing profits squeezed from the working classes.
When will Westerners realize that the common characture of the brainwashed, thought controlled, information controlled, constantly surveiled citizen that we attribute to China/The USSR/etc... IS US?! You clutch your pearls at people in other countries potentially being treated like that but are inclined to do nothing about OUR OWN countries treating US like that.
Snowden showed they realized but didn't care
and the epstien files have shown us how little americans care about anything besides themselves.
You can be against US and Chinese fascism simultaneously.
Just say you don't know what you're talking about.
Nice argument.
You didn't make one you just stated something wildly incorrect so why should I take the time to give you a well thought out response trying to explain how truly idiotic is?
I did make one, that you can oppose two things at the same time.
I could explain, but wait, you already said that authoritarianism was meaningless to you. If it doesn't matter to you, well, seems pointless to try to convince that it is actually fascist.
You have to be a troll.
Sure not what I took issue with. I took issue with you calling China fascist which is just an untrue statement.
Authoritarian is a pejorative. All countries and states in class society are "authoritarian" by necessity. Fascism is a specific thing arising from the tendency for the rate of profit to decline in capitalist society.
You can keep insisting I'm a troll if it helps you deal with not being able to engage with arguments.
China is authoritarian, but authoritarianism doesn't matter to you, so that shouldn't matter to you. Consistency, please.
And no, countries aren't "authoritarian" by necessity. Even if some amount of policies etc that would be considered such exist everywhere, you have countries that are freer and countries that have more political suppression, censorship of media outlets, etc etc.
China does censor it's media—political and entertainment— heavily. Just one small example.
What do you actually know about China?
"authoritarian oppression" entirely meaningless when stripped of context.
I like it when the working classes in China wield the state against capitalists and fascists, and to ensure that social surplus is directed towards social ends above all else.
In what way is China fascist? It's a socialist country, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state.
Authoritarianism, violent oppression of minorites and dissenting movements, deeply ingrained surveillance state with state censorship.
China does not violently oppress minorities, and wielding state authority, censorship, and surveilance against capitalists and fascists is necessary for a socialist state, and doesn't make it fascist. Fascism is capitalism violently defending itself from decay and solidifying bourgeois control, not proletarian.
But enough about the US.
Surveillance and political suppression for one. Media, journalism, etc.
That's not what fascism means, especially when these are used against capitalists most of all, and not against the working classes nearly as much. Fascism is capitalism violently entrenching itself when it finds itself in crisis, it isn't when a socialist state uses state power to keep capitalists under control and expropriate their property.
That's not what fascism is either lol
I wouldn't call china fascist, though doubtlessly authoritarian. But I don't have nearly as much info on china, it seems to me the persecution of minorities is less of a central political scapegoat and more some weird side thing. But without speaking chinese, I might be wrong. The US had plenty of fascist characteristics at this point and is rather open about the persecution.
The US is fascist because it's in crisis. Imperialism is decaying and austerity is being brought inward.
I'm not trying to fuss over what to call something. My intended point stands.
It doesn't, though. Socialism is not fascism, and all socialist states need to exert authority against capitalists and fascists to continue to exist. Class harmony is a lie.
My point is that the forms of oppression that occur in China aren't exclusive to the capitalist class, and remain something I oppose.
Which stands.
Per Wikipedia:
It’s almost the same thing but a different name, and is nationalized to a state system instead of like 3 or 4 companies lmao
Right wingers fear the word “social” for some reason ig
It's also not applied at a national level, but in some areas, from what I've read, and is used largely against companies that try to skirt the law.
I mean, that’s also pretty awesome that there’s decent regulations as part of it(at least nominally, I don’t live there so can’t say for certain), but it seems to be primarily a banking/lending thing similar to in the US which is what a lot of jingoistic fearmongering types either completely miss or purposely ignore.
It’s decidedly not a surveillance thing, which is the funny part.
The Misconceptions section of that page is really funny. It just keeps on going with the same thing over and over but with different people and dates, it feels like a bit
also
I donno anything about China, but whoever made this meme certainly doesn't know anything about the USA. The idea that "liberals" or anyone else (??) are high-fiving themselves over a credit score. lol
People like thay exist. In the same way that 40 year olds high five themselves for still fitting into the pants they wore in hs.
OK but I would hi-five those people. It's harder to fight capitalism if you're also fighting health problems!
WOOOSH!
They're high-fiving themselves about being able to buy a house. DUR.
Under capitalism basic human needs are allocated only to the most privileged.
Many many libs celebrate their participation in this privilege, especially in terms of housing.
State-enforced privilege is basically the entire goal of liberalism.
Profoundly wrong statement.
First because that's not how Marxist-Leninists use the word 'liberal', that's a definition you just made up while ignoring decades of literature. Second, because it implies that is not what the word actually means to literally everyone, not just Leninists or even just socialists, everywhere on the planet with the exception of the US liberal duopoly.
Third, because it mistakenly assumes people are calling you a liberal because of your instance, and not because of your shit takes.
The ML usage of the term liberal comes from Classical Liberalism, right? Please correct me.
Also I hate how y'all think I'm personally evil because I haven't Read Theory. Y'all are my first exposure to MLs and I don't have any control over what my society has taught me. (I'm not defending what my society has taught me, I've been deconstructing for a long time and not stopping.)
Is naivete a sin?
No investigation no right to speak is a core part of MarxistLeninist thought as it has evolved. Naivete is not "a sin" but if you haven't researched a topic you shouldn't speak on it.
As Chairman Mao put it:
No? I'm an ML and I live in a capitalist country. Further, liberals are absolutely worse than anarchists.
Where are progressives on that scale? Oh, and do fascists, I definitely want to know how a fascist stacks up against a liberal!
"Progressive" doesn't really mean anything beyond "left of establishment democrats." They range from liberal to socialist. Fascists are a twin of liberalism, worse but fundamentally connected.
If you're not anti capitalist and anti bourgeois democracy even if you're "progressive" you're just a flavour of liberal. Fascists are obviously worse than liberals although they tend to agree on a surprising amount of things when push comes to shove unfortunately. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is a widespread phrase for a reason.
The formula for a fascist is liberal plus time, multiplied by war
I'll stand corrected on the anarchist comment. But if one lives in a capitalist country, one inevitably supports capitalism, right? Even if it's against their will.
This sounds more and more like Original Sin.
Existing within capitalism does not mean you cannot work to overthrow it and must ideologically support it by espousing liberal talking points.
"liberal" denotes adherence to bourgeois democracy and capitalist property relations, (pro bourgeois democracy and private property)
The critique of certain "anarchists" is that they guise reactionary politics in radical language, which aids capitalism.
This is nonsense. Communism has not been achieved, but socialism absolutely has. Communism has not been achieved not for lack of trying, but because it is a post-socialist system. There's no psyop.
First, let's be precise about terms: capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, profit-driven accumulation, and wage labor; socialism is defined by social ownership (state, collective, or cooperative), planning mechanisms, and the subordination of remaining market forces to developmental and social goals. They are distinct modes of production, not a binary where anything short of stateless communism "counts" as capitalism.
Second, "Western capitalism" isn't a universal default, it specifically describes the Euro-Amerikan core and its integrated vassals (NATO, Five Eyes, dependent economies). That system is hegemonic, but it is not total. Russia, for instance, operates a distinct sovereign-capitalist model: not socialist, but explicitly de-linked from Western financial architecture and actively contesting unipolar dominance.
Third, China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam are explicitly in the early stages of the socialist transitionary period. Their frameworks (especially China's "primary stage of socialism") theorize that underdeveloped socialist states must develop productive forces, utilize regulated markets, and engage globally while maintaining proletarian state power and public ownership of commanding heights. This isn't "capitalism with red flags"; it's a materialist strategy to build the basis for higher-stage socialism. Dismissing these distinctions because communism hasn't been "achieved" yet misunderstands dialectics: transition is a process, not an event. You don't call a bridge under construction meaningless because it has yet to reach the other side.
Americans:
"praise the supreme leader!" - wow, brainwashing much?
"I pledge allegiance to the flag..." - Yup, this is fine.
nowadays it's more accurately the same statement for both
people are praising the supreme leader in america
Okay, but tbf, pledging allegiance to the flag/country is much better than to the self alleged dictator.
Is it though? We are currently seeing the forced nationalism be weaponized.
That's because people confuse nationalism with patriotism. I love my country, which is why I want it to be better. Others love their country because it gives them permission to be worse.
To be clear, it's still not good. I support any kid that wants to sit out for the pledge or sit or kneel for the national anthem. It should always be non-obligatory. In fact, I don't love the word "allegiance" to begin with.
But it would be significantly worse if the pledge of allegiance was to Donal Trump. Ultimately, that's what many people are following, but it's not default in schools to pledge allegiance to him or anything.
Not even sure how to respond to this kind of vague emotional ideology. When people say this kinda stuff to me in person, I back away slowly.
I want America to prosper and I want to protect American values from right-wing radicals that are in charge. I'm very passionate about it. In fact, I live in a red state and I want it to just be better and no longer radicalized by lies and hate.
I very passionately want America to heal from this illness of hate and apathy.
If that makes me a bad person, then fuck me I guess.
The US Empire is a genocidal settler-colony. It cannot be rescued from itself, it needs to be overthrown.
I don't think it can be overthrown today; surveillance of means of communication is now total; their only restriction is the massive amount of data.
It CAN collapse in on itself, that is inevitable.
I would be delighted if I was proved wrong.
The values of the US settler-colonial project, are native eviction, and genocide.
The values of the indigenous peoples were not considered worthy to the european settlers, so they did their best to wipe out hundreds of peoples/tribes/cultures. You either don't know that history, or worse, you are proud of it.
I highly suggest reading both An indigenous people's history of the US by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, or her Not a nation of immigrants.
"American values" are freedom for a few selected individuals, this shit is ass.
The values that you probably want is incompatible with capitalism and never truly existed in America, you love the idea of it not the reality.
Not necessarily bad, but definitely indoctrinated, as many of us once were. The truth is a series of bitter pills, and the government and media aren’t going to offer them to you; they’re going to distract you from them. Which is easy to do, given how bitter the pills are.
I've been in the process of making a powerpoint-esque presentation to show to my friends who haven't read any theory and the thought of framing and organizing it as "bitter pills" is super exciting to me. Starting out the presentation with definitions and history would've made them fall asleep.
I just cannot understand why somebody living in a colonial country can truly say they love their country unless they're brainwashed or completely ignorant to its history.
I'm from Canada and we are not better, there's just not as much of an issue of rampant nationalism disguised as "patriotism". Our countries were built on the graves of the native inhabitants, by the hands of slaves. At no point in the history did they stop abusing natives and the descendants of slaves, they just found new ways to hide it and new names to call it (how does a prison make a profit, anyway?).
I love and am proud of my community, but that is the extent to which my pride reaches. I cannot feel proud of a country that was built on the blood of the innocent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBmk5N5aDPA
Who knows one day you might get it and see they are the same motivators to for gullibles to go to war.
It doesn't matter if it's for their leader or the country.
It's always for the owners of both.
Absolutely!
Ummm....how though?
Some gringo in the comments: "Something something Uyghurs, something something mass surveillance, winnie poo"
Liberals and real actual gaza genocide: 🥱
Liberals and fake Uyghur genocide: Real shit
"fake" Uyghur genocide, wow.
It is? Their is no evidence. It's a fabrication invented by a German evangelical on a self proclaimed "mission from god" to destroy communism.
No, it isnt. We have geographic evidence as well as countless testimonies of the Uyghur people.
For some reason when it comes to China/Uyghur muslims, people have no issue dismissing their genocide and thinking it's okay.
I was in Urumqi recently enough and I can tell you this they are some of the most pro government people I have ever talked with lmao they love that ETIM was kicked out.
You have gusano testimony from the likes of Rushan Abbas (Guantanamo bay torturer) It's not real.
Also tell me about this geographic evidence? Pictures of prisons that you decided are camps because we're evil scary Chinese people?
I never said "you're evil scary Chinese people". The Chinese state however, is another story (authoritarian— but I know you're apathetic towards authoritarianism). I realize now that this may be evoking some sort of nationalistic reaction out of you, though.
I didn't "decide"— like I said, independent journalists and satellite imaging. And no, it's not reducible to "Western evil scary propaganda" like you're making it out to be.
All governments/states are authoritarian. That is their nature. No government is excluded from this.
The difference with some governments over others is who wields that authority: the majority of working class people, or the minority of capitalist class people.
I'd prefer to live in a state that advocates for my best interests as a working class individual rather than submit to capitalists that want to extract everything that I'm worth for themselves and hoard for no good reason.
The Chinese state that has 95+% support from the population and is made up of a representative of Chinese people.
White people decided we're evil and you just go along with it without any investigation because you're racist and it confirms your biases
There is no genocide of Uyghurs. Uyghur genocide atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there's "white genocide" in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of "genocide." Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective's Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
I also recommend reading the UN report as well as (especially) China's response to it, which eclipses it in size and detail.These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, Christian nationalist and professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does. Zenz' work has been thoroughly discredited, yet is supported by western media for its utility in fearmongering. An example is lying about 8.7% of new IUDs as 80%, to back up claims of "forced sterilization," from this chart:
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn't going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this. Has there been mistreatment? Almost certainly to some degree, in a campaign as large as this. Is it genocide, be it cultural or outright? No, Uyghur culture is preserved and there are no mass killings.
So not accepting exaggerated narratives means China is a utopia? Why do people rarely offer ordinary, policy-level criticism? There is plenty of it, but discussion often defaults to cartoonish claims instead of routine institutional analysis.
Where is the discussion of the hukou household registration system and its trade-offs?
Where is the discussion of local government reliance on land-use financing?
Where is the discussion of provincial policy experimentation and uneven implementation?
Where is the discussion of state-owned enterprises and their structural advantages and drawbacks?
Where is the discussion of demographic policy after the one-child era?
Where is the discussion of regional inequality between coastal and interior provinces?
Where is the discussion of the property sector’s role in household wealth and local budgets?
Where is the discussion of debt accumulation among provincial financing vehicles?
Where is the discussion of administrative campaign-style governance and its policy side effects?
Where is the discussion of bureaucratic incentives within the cadre evaluation system?
Where is the discussion of industrial policy prioritization and capital allocation?
Where is the discussion of urban planning constraints produced by internal migration controls?
Where is the discussion of education access differences tied to household registration?
Where is the discussion of long-term pension sustainability in an aging population?
I know where they are, in China because none of you know enough about China to have a proper discussion on any of these. All you know is spouting ridiculous talking points.
China isn't a utopia, and does have problems. China's problems are real, though, not invented, so discussion of China's issues requires drawing a line between fact and fiction.
The only muslim people they suddenly "pretend" to care about because their media hides the fact that they are muslim.
Muslims everywhere else are fair game.
Just orientalist vibes, no sources in sight.
Why don't you correct me instead of marking my comment as bigotry and removing it? I said that China's social credit system is just an ordinary credit system much like ours, and that is bigotry how, exactly? Explain it to me.
It's wild, you don't even have to say anything bad about China to piss you off, you just have to talk about it neutrally without constantly praising it as a socialist utopia.
Here's some sources, some even from far-right US journals that have looked into it. It has more to do with regulating businesses and execs found to be in violation anti-trust laws.
It's really just standard anti-trust / financial legislation, IE things the US used to do before 1980s when they let finance capital take over.
If you're going to mischaracterize it in the future, at least post some sources.
I cannot emphasize enough how much air would be sucked out of our propaganda overnight if china just fucking uncensored the internet and truly protected freedom of speech and information.
The PRC would be incredibly naive to let US tech companies in, and take over and hoover up their social media landscape, like so many other countries have done. For example India's most popular communications platform, is facebook. The US effectively controls the social media of a country many times larger than itself, and can influence it whatever way it wants, as well as spy on every person who uses it.
For those who want to view US-run tech sites in the PRC, they can of course via VPNs which are completely legal, but that friction is very worthwhile for encouraging home-run alternatives, and preventing mass surveillance by an evil empire.
I mean judging by how cooked the brains of so many western people are with internet conspiracies like qanon, I'm not sure that would be the result of deregulation
That is pretty wild. I didn't know any of this .. I just thought "communist dystopia is dystopian". The fact that you can take a hit to the credit score for engaging in protests and demonstrations is still scary .... no one show this to Republicans.
I was saying that this sort of thing actually doesn't really happen. The social credit score for the most part is just an ordinary credit score and is only meaningfully affected by finances. Some localities made an attempt at implementing the "social" aspects of the system and subtract small amounts for certain criminal offenses, but it barely makes a difference.
Engaging in protests and demonstrations gets you the same thing it gets you here; tear gas, pepper balls, beatings, and possibly prison time & a criminal record. The hysteria around the social credit system is very silly when the actual dystopian shit is so glaringly obvious, and occurs in both China and the US.
Not entirely false, but the scale & severity is much worse in the US, and they’re ramping up for more.
Not to mention that western countries are the ones going towards 1984 with thier fucking age verification
Not an American or a liberal, and yes, china is authoritarian. Is america better? No. The credit score system in the US is also bad.
Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative.
The social credit score isn't real.
You ain't wrong about the social credit thing! There was only one municipality that tried to implement it in any way that even vaguely resembles how mainstream media hysterics portray, and that city's administration was punished for it on the national stage.
The only thing the "social credit" system was meant to do is make major public figures accountable for corruption. It was never aimed at REGULAR people!
But yeah nah fuck anyone and anything that opposed democracy especially the two faced single political party of the United States of America. If they actually gave a shit about democracy for real instead of just consuming lives to pay for their pedophilia addictions, we'd have ranked choice voting by now.
Unfortunately I don't think ranked choice voting will save you. You need to clear the board so to speak and get some options that actually represent people over corporate interests.
You do realize that ranked choice voting is one of the simplest and least violent ways to push forward progressive candidates right? Because it makes people comfortable with voting options that with first past the post would be throw away votes
That makes sense, and then you look at Europe and realise the issues at hand are systemic, caused by material conditions and bourgeois democratic electoralism is never going to fix those issues.
Much of Europe already uses ranked choice or proportional voting, yet remains austerity-ridden and sliding toward the far right because it is still under the dictatorship of capital. The voting mechanism is secondary to the concrete material conditions: capital's imperative to accumulate, the commodification of labor, and the state's role as an instrument of class rule. Until that dictatorship is overthrown, electoral reform is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
The core contradictions at hand are:
Socialized production versus private appropriation:workers collectively create value, but capitalists expropriate the surplus
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall: as organic composition of capital rises, profitability declines, forcing capital to seek new fixes
Overaccumulation and underconsumption: capital produces more than can be profitably sold, leading to crisis, layoffs, and austerity
The contradiction between capital's global mobility and labor's relative immobility, which fuels a race to the bottom in wages and protections.
As imperialism declines (neocolonial extraction becomes costlier, interimperialist rivalry intensifies, and the Global South resists outright plunder) capital can no longer rely on external superprofits to offset domestic falling rates of profit. The response is internal repression: austerity to slash social wages, union-busting to weaken labor power, surveillance to preempt dissent, and the normalization of authoritarian governance. This is capital's logical reaction to crisis.
This dynamic mirrors Weimar Germany: economic crisis, delegitimized liberal parties, and a bourgeoisie that ultimately backed fascism to crush the organized working class and restore "order" for capital. Today's far-right surge is the same phenomenon: capital's emergency management when consent can no longer be manufactured through bourgeois democracy alone.
Voting under these conditions is not a path to liberation; it is a ritual that legitimizes the managers of decline. For voting to matter, you must overthrow the dictatorship of capital and reach the synthesis of these contradictions: a revolutionary transformation that socializes production, abolishes exploitation, and builds a state that serves human need, not profit. Only then does political power and thereby voting become meaningful.
Ranked choice and proportional voting are 2 very different concepts. You are falsely pretending they're similar when they're wildly different concepts. Only Ireland presently uses it from the eu, because they as well have an establishment, and ranked choice voting is anti establishment at its core.
Why are you trying to pretend they're the same concept?
How do you expect to have a revolution if 90% of people don't agree with your viewpoint? And I say that as a socialist. Pushing forward the agenda over the course of decades is more likely to be successful than a single revolution, in my opinion.
Yes, they are different, but the point at the core of my argument is that it's irrelevant as they serve the same purpose at their core.
Whether it's s RCV or MMP, the outcome remains austerity, imperialist foreign policy, and rising far-right influence because the state remains an instrument of capital. Ballot mechanics don't override class power. RCV isn't "anti-establishment at its core"; it's a procedural tweak that can just as easily stabilize bourgeois legitimacy.
In my country the revolution has already happened. We now conduct class struggle through party debate and socialist democracy, not bourgeois elections.
Also revolutionary consciousness isn't a precondition you wait for, it is forged through struggle. The 90% figure is wrong for a start, even in the US communist sympathys are quickly growing, you also assumes static opinions under static conditions, but material crises radicalize people faster than decades of electoral gradualism. Reformism doesn't build toward socialism, it manages capitalism more palatably and demobilizes movements by channeling energy into cycles of hope and disappointment.
History suggests otherwise. Social democracy produced the welfare state only under the unique pressure of postwar reconstruction and Soviet competition, then dismantled it once those pressures faded (and even that was built off massive exploitation and imperialism in the periphery). Capital concedes reforms only when forced and retracts them the moment profitability demands it. Waiting for electoral consensus while the climate burns, fascism rises, and imperialism massacres isn't a strategy. Bourgeois democracy won't let you vote through its own abolition. The task for those still under bourgeois democracy is to build dual power: organs of working-class authority that can confront and replace the dictatorship of capital. That's how you can make voting matter.
Haha, you think the epstein class will allow you to vote away their fascism
It's an important reform no matter what, even if we have to resort to other methods to take out the class first.
Alas, I fear the US might be too far gone for ranked choice to have an effect.
The problem is quality of candidates. Since Citizen's United opened the door for unlimited corporate money in elections, literally 90% of candidates are on someone's payroll. "Grassroots" is a thing of the past. Mass media and name recognition are everything.
It's quite possible it's too late for the usa, but I still do want other democracies to push for it. Only 4 odd countries have it worldwide.
Worth saying, while grassroots is less common, it is not gone. Kat in il-9 is somewhat a good example of this though she failed community engagement and came from out of town so she's unlikely to win. Though it is arguable how grassroots she is. Of course the top priority is revoking citizens united.
It's one of the simplest ways of helping push countries to the left, because it allows you to have people vote for the leftist politicians without worrying about boosting a right wing politician or party, as first past the post forces, and also not forcing people to vote for parties, which lock out leftist candidates from being able to gain traction as easily such as in proportional voting systems.
As good as preferential/ranked voting is. Compulsory voting would have a much larger positive impact on US' democracy
Ideally both
Neither can fix the systemic problems caused by capitalism though, democracy in capitalism is democracy for capitalists.
Well then use that amendment that children keep dying for or stop complaining. So pathetic
I already organize with a communist party, I have no intention of simply complaining alone.
What good is complaining amongst a communist org, if your democracy and elections a rlcapitalist?
Please stop financing and enabling the USA, also, and stop using the US dollar for international trade. So lame that you haven't done that
I actively steal from the USA
Many far right countries (australia, japan, south korea) use ranked choice voting... it doesn't make a bit of difference. If capitalists control the political system, then they will stack candidates and fund the campaigns that support their interests, and the "democracy" there is nothing but political theatre.
Outside of Marxists, even the ancient greeks knew that representative government is just another name for plutocracy, because only wealthy / landed family have the money and prestige to fund campaigns to get themselves elected. Liberals still haven't learned this simple lesson.
In what world is Australia far right? Center right/neoliberal today maybe. But not far fight, especially compared to other countries
Also I recommend compulsory voting.
In this world, the world where open support for genocide is bipartisan in Australian politics
I do not and will not dispute that either.
How will compulsive voting improve anything? Now you're dragging even more uninformed dopes to vote, a lot of them will vote for spite. Far more than you realize, I think
Trump was 100% the vote-for-spite-burn-it-down candidate. That's how they get you, the old switcheroo
uninformed defines almost all american voters and the last election showed that 30 million people who voted in 2020, chose not to vote in 2024 instead of spite voting.
That doesn't happen in reality
Everybody disliked that
You can dislike it all you want doesn't make it less true.
Go back to 4chan obergruppenfuhrer. Or provide some evidence/analysis but I doubt you have that capability.
Re: authoritarianism— your opinion.
Some of us aren't in favour of oppressive regimes that aren't transparent, surveil, and censor.
"Authoritarianism" is meaningless because all it means is "uses state power." It doesn't acknowledge which class controls the state and who it uses state power against. In China, the working classes control the state, and use state power against bad actors and capitalists more than anything else. China is oppressive to capitalists and liberating to workers.
I haven't much evidence for the claim: "In China, the working classses control the state"
sure you will say that is my western bias from living with china bad propaganda, but you could actually provide something to me read on topic if possible
You can debate whether the system works well, but it isn’t accurate to say there’s no evidence for the claim that the working classes play a central role in the Chinese state.
China’s constitution explicitly defines the PRC as a socialist state “led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants,” with state power exercised through the National People’s Congress (NPC) system. The NPC is the highest organ of state power, with nearly 3,000 deputies drawn from provinces, the PLA, and different social sectors.
The makeup of the NPC is not just party bureaucrats or business elites. In the 14th NPC there are hundreds of deputies from workers and farmers and large numbers of grassroots representatives, along with 442 ethnic minority deputies covering all 55 minority groups. Most deputies in China’s people’s congress system (about 95%) serve at the county and township level, which are directly elected and involve hundreds of millions of voters. Higher congresses are elected from these lower levels. This structure is what China calls “whole-process people’s democracy.” Sources explaining the system include CGTN’s Who runs the CPC and the State Council white paper China: Democracy That Works.
You can also look at how the state treats capital. China has private capital, but it is clearly subordinated to state goals. When Jack Ma tried to push an aggressive fintech model through Ant Group that would massively expand lightly regulated consumer credit, regulators halted the IPO and forced restructuring under stricter oversight. That is a case of disciplining capital when it conflicts with social stability and the broader economy.
Likewise, China has pursued policies like eliminating extreme poverty and building massive infrastructure networks (including projects that are not monetarily profitable) because they are treated as long-term public development goals. That kind of large-scale, socially oriented investment is difficult to sustain in systems where private capital dominates the state.
So you can disagree with the Chinese model, but there is actually a large amount of Chinese material explaining how their system is supposed to function and why they claim it represents working-class political power.
Sure!
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people's democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China's success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we've learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
The working classes in socialist countries are the ones dictating the state and its direction.
There is no genocide of Uyghurs. Uyghur genocide atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there's "white genocide" in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of "genocide." Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective's Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
I also recommend reading the UN report as well as (especially) China's response to it, which eclipses it in size and detail.These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, Christian nationalist and professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does. Zenz' work has been thoroughly discredited, yet is supported by western media for its utility in fearmongering. An example is lying about 8.7% of new IUDs as 80%, to back up claims of "forced sterilization," from this chart:
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn't going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this. Has there been mistreatment? Almost certainly to some degree, in a campaign as large as this. Is it genocide, be it cultural or outright? No, Uyghur culture is preserved and there are no mass killings.
"the world"
Do you have any proof? The OISC disagree with you. And even the UN doesn't call it a genocide because that's not what happened.
Please explain how what I said is "bullshit," I even included the UN report. Why do you like Adrian Zenz?
I'm using the term to refer to suppression of people (which isn't restricted to workers) in politics, media, etc.
Except by "the people" you seem to mean capitalists and fascists, not the broad majority of society that are uplifted and support the system.
China is a socialist country, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state. Child labor is illegal in China, you may be thinking of the US.
Still better then the baby eating pedo elite
It is possible to oppose all three things. It is possible to simultaneously oppose the Social Credit System in China, the Credit Score system in the United States, and the elites connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
The social credit system that you know of doesn't exist.
Interesting phrasing. A phrasing that assumes assumptions on my part. So ... what social credit system DOES exist.
My previous comment on it. Mostly there is no "score" it's a binary list of businesses and business people (some individuals may end up on the list if they lose a defemation suit for example) who owe debts/damages and refuse to pay. It's not automatic, it's not affected by your day to day life and you are put on the list only after a court hearing
Is it? You need to think more pragmatically, you are a laborer. Your only bargaining chip is your labour, decide who gets it. Personally, I don't want to be part of any helping them live their best life.
I am curious, who is "them" in your statement and how does opposing all three of those things inherently cause me to give up my bargaining power?
No don't, you never will. You'll always contribute what ever system you're a part of. Just choose one and the chienese might do a lot of bad things but they aren't the pedofile baby eating elites.
I am a Chinese minority living in China. You really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to China. You very clearly have done 0 research beyond maybe reading RFA. You should be quiet until you have done some proper research.
You can’t possibly be a minority in China, what with all those intact organs.
Ad hominem, ad hominem, and mmm, ad hominem. Yeah, nothing to see here.
Least insufferable redditer
It isn't an ad hominem fallacy to point out that doing little research on a topic and repeating easily disproven talking points isn't a sound basis of argument.
And I have, and my responses were given little in return from them.
You have not, considering everything you've said has been easily debunked, and when encountering hard numbers you reflect to dogmatism.
Not an adhominem. You're not wrong because you're stupid you just happen to be both wrong and stupid.
Well in the comment I said that you didn't explain why I was wrong and simply resorted to making a string of ad hominems.
So I'll reiterate: ad hominem, ad hominem, ad hominem.
Saying you should shut up if you haven't researched a topic isn't an adhominem.
The Chinese credit system is western propaganda there is nothing like it as described in western media.
Silly proletarian, that's not even the credit score they use for home loans
In a world where credit is allocated on the basis of trust, all credit is social credit
Yea, China monitors a billion people in their country and assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly /s
Funny story about Jaywalking
Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.
Correct, and those abroad too.
I know this because a US government-funded "independent" think tank told me so.
You know the stories of secret overseas Chinese police stations were fake news, right?
I was hoping this had been debunked, any (non-CCP affiliated) sources for this?
False Witnesses and Sinister Plots: Exposing the CIA Connection in the ‘Chinese Police Station’ Narrative
Inb4 they drop the zionist media bias fact "checker" link 😂
Anything that deals more directly with the issue than the past of the founder of one associated organization? "One of the guys saying it is bad, so it isn't true" doesn't work well on the people I argue with.
It’s very hard to prove a negative, especially to people who want to believe, thanks to over a century of anticommunist propaganda. The burden of proof ought to be on those making claims of secret foreign police stations on their soil, an extraordinary claim. All those articles are trash and have no real evidence. And they don’t need any, because almost no Westerners demand any, because the narrative aligns with their preconception of communist states as cartoonishly evil.
Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”
It was my understanding that the existence of police stations in foreign countries is not debated, they have them. The allegation that they are used for repressive purposes beyond their stated aim of providing administrative services to citizens living abroad is what is controversial. It really seems like, when you cut all the baggage away, all we have is testimonials from expats claiming harassment and assurances from the MFA that it never happened, so I struggle to land firmly on one side of belief considering both parties have historically been loose with the truth.
All of the ID verification, posing as age verification, legislation is for better thought monitoring of social credit too.
I don’t care what other countries do to a degree where we need to intervene their governance with military or covert actions, I don’t understand their culture, their history, their people, their way of thinking to force democracy across the world. I only care about protecting our country, our people and leaving the world the fuck alone. I feel like that’s how most of the world works.
There is no social credit system
Im gonna say it, I'm sick and tired of hearing people talk about "evil Chinese authoritarian social credit system" when its inherently a good system that works. In the west when a corporation commits mass fraud and abuse they pay a minimal fine (sometimes they don't even pay) and then they literally just get away with it. Chinas social credit system on the other hand actually holds businesses accountable.
I'm willing to say I'm not happy with either system. Corporations should pay and be held accountable but citizens should have a right to privacy and not have the sum of their actions turned into a number.
That “number” isn’t real. China does not have a single nationwide “social credit score” that rates every citizen.
What actually exists is a set of legal blacklists, the most famous being the court judgment defaulter list (失信被执行人). It applies to people who refuse to comply with a court decision, usually things like unpaid debts.
If you ignore a court order, the court can place you under a high-consumption restriction (限制高消费). That means you can’t spend money on certain luxury services (first-class train tickets, flights, five-star hotels, or other high-end purchases) until you comply with the judgment.
You can still travel normally, stay in regular hotels, work, shop, and live your life. The restriction is specifically designed to stop people who refuse to obey court rulings from enjoying luxury spending while ignoring their legal obligations.
The popular idea in the west that everyone in China has a constantly changing personal “score” based on everyday behavior is simply western fantasy.
God the more and more I hear about China the more based it is.
President Xi Jinping save us all
I'm impressed. The US legal system is incredibly anemic when it comes to punishing corporations for violating workers' rights. I hope we really can achieve a multipolar world, one where a standard like this is upheld to emulate, and not the rotten neoliberal legal morass of the West.
That's because the US like pretty much all the western world is a dictatorship of capital why would capital willingly discipline itself. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat hence the constant crackdowns on unruly capital and capitalists that is impossible in the west.
Of course. I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I just hope CIA propaganda loses any appeal it may have outside of the imperial core. As for inside the core, it's hard for me not to feel 'doomer' about the state of the working class. I think there would have to be a sudden, extreme change in material conditions before the working class would start to 'wake up' en masse here.
You should be happy to know then that the social credit score only applies to corporations and individuals who do business with the government as contractors, it doesn't apply to private life and doesn't make anything illegal that wasn't already legally punishable (even then minor crimes aren't covered).
No. The board and the directors should be personally responsible, and should be punished in addition to the corporation paying money at the minimum.
Yeah the made up system that doesn't exist in the real world is really fucking scary OMG.
Reminds me of the anime PsychoPass.
False dichotomy. Both of these things suck.
China institutionalized what USA prefers to make private.
Two kinds of people in the comments: those who think credit scores are bad, and those who think social credit systems are good
Lmao Chinese can't even move to the other cities of their own country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax are awful entities that I never consented to share my personal financial data with. But one wrong doesn’t justify another. Personally I think a score by private data brokers to judge creditworthiness is less harm than a score by your government to judge social worthiness but both are harm.
The idea of a social worthiness score doesn't exist in China, though. They have a system largely for penalizing corporations and businesses that are caught skirting regulations, and a limited system for catching those who commit tax fraud and other crimes.
The core mechanism is the court “judgment defaulter” blacklist (失信被执行人) and related high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), which are imposed when someone refuses to comply with a legally effective court judgment, such as paying a debt or damages ordered by the court. The penalty mainly restricts luxury or non-essential spending (flights, first-class train seats, luxury hotels, tourism, etc.) until the judgment is fulfilled. In law it applies to any individual or company, and if a company is the debtor the restrictions can extend to its legal representative or responsible managers on top of any accounts registered to the company. In practice 99.99% of cases involve businesses because most court enforcement actions arise from commercial disputes (contracts, loans, wages, suppliers, etc.), so the mechanism ends up being an enforcement mechanism against business owners and managers to push them to settle judgments properly, but legally it’s just a court enforcement tool against anyone who refuses to comply with a court ruling.
Ah, gotcha, thanks for the clarification!
How do you make businesses (i.e. the corporations) unable to access luxury? Sounds like an individual-level policy being applied to the organization.
It's applied to bank accounts. If you owe a debt ordered by the court (99.99% businesses) you can't use your business accounts to buy luxuries, it is often also applied to the individual owner/management of the company as well so they can neither use personal or business accounts to live a life of luxury while owing debts to people.
If you’re in a position to make decisions for a non-compliant corporation, then it does indeed become personal, but you can opt out of the C-suite at any time, or you can get your company in compliance.
Edit to add: You may not like it, but this is what peak dictatorship of the proletariat looks like.
This deep into the Gaza genocide, anyone with two neurons to spark together hates liberals. Smug, conspiratorial fascists-in-denial who will spend decades helping to strangle you, then criticize the way you breathe.
If you’re pro Russia, you’re pro-genocide.
Pure projection
1- Provided with reasoning/analogy 2- "Projection".
Smh.
"Reasoning" lol try harder halfwit
We call that an ad hominem, sire.
An ad hominem is when an argument consists of a personal attack, this is just a personal attack dumbass, you never presented an argument worth rebutting, go back to reddit
Lmao
-You don't even know what ad hominem means, dumbass
-This isn't the high school debate club you peaked in
I’m well aware of the USA’s complicity in genocide. You seem to be unaware of Russia’s.
It’s really bizarre to be against genocide and unabashedly pro-Russia while spreading their insane genocidal propaganda.
I think you don’t really care about genocide, I think you’d rather just see more of it from the Republican Party because you’re a paid Russian asset.
Like I said to your partner in crime, I wish you the best in avoiding conscription into your own country’s genocide by sucking Putin’s cock. 👋
I'm aware of liberals throwing the word genocide around in regard to shit that is demonstrably not genocide, and accusing everyone who disagrees of being a bot or a paid enemy agent. This is also projection, you are a morally bankrupt lackey of a dying empire and you are losing and you are coping poorly with it.
I wouldn't make said accusations—and I'm not a liberal— but Russia is involved in genocide.
You did, you are, and no lol
*pro Trolley Problem
Fixed.
Yeah, supporting the country whose fighting the empire, rooting out nazis, and stopping a genocide is being "for genocide". Do you libs ever question your sources or what??
makes sense, thats probably a no then?
It's like saying, "Invading Iran is okay because their state is bad." It's not okay - look at how much suffering it causes. And for what? Simply replacing one oligarchy with another.
Russia rooting out nazis. Fighting the empire? Wild.
Putin IS a nazi. Russia IS an imperialist regime. Are we not going to talk about Russia's imperialist attacks? Is that all chill? The attacks on Ukraine are equivalent to genocide historically.
Simply because Russia is anti-US, doesn't make it free of guilt for much of the same actions the US takes.
You should stop trivialising the word genocide.
Trivializing? They have literal concentration camps for Uyghurs. You know, the things used for the Jewish genocide/holocaust by Hitler.
Stop defending china and call it out for its unethical actions.
There are no concentration camps? There were prisons where terrorists were rehabilitated and vocational schools. Neither of these are concentration camps. When was the last time you were in Xinjiang? Uyghur is widely spoken and all signs are in Uyghur and Chinese. There were some abuses during the crackdown on ETIM and that was bad but that has already been corrected and abuses are not genocide you should stop trivialising the word genocide.
Yea Russia is really rooting out those Nazis in Ukraine lol, maybe if you simp for Putin harder you won’t get conscripted into the meat grinder. Best of luck to you in your crusade to end genocide by spreading Russian propaganda. 👋
I know liberals struggle with this concept, but saying true things sarcastically actually does not make them less true
Cope
One of us may not be coping very well.
Some folks need to hear the same thing 50 times before they fuck off
Yeah, I guess thats what you've been conditioned to spout when encountering non-empire-sanctioned news sources ha ha!
Silly, this is .ml for marxists. We're all pro-China, Russia, and even gasp pro-DPRK because we don't shun from news sources that havent been deemed worthy by the empire
I never understood how being a marxist has anything to do with being pro-putin, who is obviously the exact opposite of a marxist.
Marxists are certainly critical of Putin and the Russian Federation, and see it as an incredible fall from their proud and progressive soviet past. However, the biggest obstacle to socialism globally is the US Empire, and Russia is presently playing a progressive international role in undermining it, and being a valuable trading partner for countries like China, Venezuela, the DPRK, etc. Further, the biggest opposition faction to the nationalists are the communists, not the liberals, so in time it is likely they will return to socialism.
You're conflating Marxist methodology with liberal moralism. Marxists do not offer abstract "pro/anti" judgments based on a regime's ideology, but analyze states through their structural position in the global system. Contemporary Russia is indeed an oligarchic capitalist state, but its integration into global capitalism is asymmetric and subordinate. Its economy remains heavily dependent on raw material exports rather than high-value capital export, and it lacks the core instruments of modern imperialism: dominance over global financial institutions, reserve currency status, and the ability to enforce structural adjustment. Unlike the U.S., Russia cannot print the world's reserve currency to finance overseas expansion or weaponize SWIFT-level financial infrastructure against rivals.
This material reality limits Russia's capacity for classic imperialist expansion as Lenin defined it, namely, the dominance of finance capital and the export of capital as the primary mechanism of exploitation. Russia's capital accumulation model, centered on resource rents and regional security projection, does not replicate this. It lacks the deep financial markets, technological monopoly rents, and institutional leverage that allow core imperial powers to extract surplus globally through "peaceful"(generally far from peaceful in reality) and economic means. Its military actions, therefore, function more as defensive geopolitics or regional balancing than as instruments of systematic capital expansion.
Precisely because Russia cannot compete with entrenched imperial powers on their terms, its rational strategy is to undermine unipolarity. Supporting multipolar institutions like BRICS and the SCO, opposing NATO expansion, and backing states resisting U.S. pressure are not expressions of socialist solidarity, but materially rational moves for a subordinate capitalist power seeking strategic autonomy. The objective effect (fragmenting U.S. hegemonic control) creates space for anti-imperialist struggles globally, regardless of Putin's subjective intentions.
Our support is therefore entirely critical and conditional. We recognize that Russia's structural position leads it, out of self-interest, to back anti-imperialist struggles, and we support those objective anti-hegemonic actions because they weaken the primary engine of global imperialist exploitation. Simultaneously, we oppose its internal reactionary politics, oligarchic structure, and any chauvinist or expansionist tactics that harm working-class solidarity. This is not a logical contradiction, it is dialectical materialism: judging policies by their concrete role in the global class struggle, not by the ideological labels of leaders. Reducing this analysis to "pro-Putin" ignores Marxism's core method: follow the motion of material forces, not the slogans of statesmen.
Very fair question. We’re not pro-Putin. We’re not even Pro-Russia. We’re pro-a few, specific actions that Russia has taken and is taking. Previously.
Both are bad???
one of them doesn't even fucking exist
Start editing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system
citing the natopedia article as if it's an actual source lol
i've lived in china; i don't need to edit shit.
They didn't even read the first section of the article they linked.
Sure, let's say it doesn't since I admittedly haven't looked into this in painful detail. However, this meme seems to suggest that if it did exist, then it would be perfectly fine on the virtue that credit scores exist in America. Aka, whataboutism.
Since Germany made concentration camps under the third reich that it isn't that bad when America does it. At least by this logic. Guess it's impossible to be against two things at once. Though I hope I'm just misinterpreting the point
The meme is pointing out hypocrisy among those in America. Its common to hear them mock China for having a social credit score system, while apparently not realizing they have exactly that with credit monitoring companies.
This is all made more ridiculous by the fact that there is no social credit score in China as Americans understand it.
The joke is that Americans brag and call everyone else barbarians, when they themselves are the barbarians. Its pure projection to inflate the massive American ego.
That's not what "whataboutism" is. This isn't a structured debate where we are limited to one topic, it's a conversation... and we're allowed to use examples and compare like to like, you do it, I do it, every human on Earth does it every day.
Sure, you're allowed to call this and everything else 'whataboutism', I don't think you should be given a "whataboutism score" wherein those with the highest scores are avoided by reasonable people.
I await your charge of gaslighting eagerly
Exactly my thoughts. People just mass downvote into oblivion, no reasoning provided.
Reasoning has been provided all over this thread, including by users from instances you cannot see because Lemmy.world censored them from your view.
Where do you get your news from? Not going to continue to argue, but I'm just curious
No one place, I see the same mainstream western news as everyone, I just also read articles from outside the west as well, and non-mainstream sources too.
Yeah, I just wonder which sources are "from outside the west" since I'm trying my best to break my echo chamber
CGTN is pretty mainstream for news from China, they have English news. The Cradle is typically decent on reporting from the Middle East. For western and glonal news from a communist angle, BreakThrough News and Geopolitical Economy Report are both good.
I'm not comparing the systems or saying it's better, but you don't need a credit rating to get a mortgage on a home in the US and are doing yourself a disservice repeating that talking point.
If you don't have a credit rating they'll ask for other evidences you are able to pay off a 15-30 year loan like consistent and not missing payments on a phone, rent, utilities, internet, etc steady employment, bigger down payment. it's called manual underwriting or a non traditional mortgage application.
Man, what world you live in?
Have fun with the interest rate you'll get. You'll inherently be a higher risk than someone with a good credit score.
If you treat your credit card like your debit card, you can get 3% off literally everything. As long as you don't spend more than you make, you'll never owe interest.
I have enough credit, I can by a whole car with the swipe of a card. I'll never have to wonder about underwriting or proving myself. I've already done so to my bank. And if I ever decide to do that, I'll have zero down and zero interest for 6 months.
Here's some comparison:
The existence of this infamous app should be easy to prove. I have never seen anything but armchair reddit-tier experts making bold claims about.
I agree, and I would really want to know. The only "news" I found is the tests from Heinan province in 2019 but I couldn't find anything after that. But testing of this system (introduced by the government), where you can see and report debtors itself feels quite scary and authoritarian to me.
Do you have sources for any of these claims?
I put some links in the comments below. But most of the 'information' I have is from news and documentaries about Xu Xiaodong. You can check the wikpeida article, but it's just wikpedia.
I also know of someone who went to tibet as a tourist through Nepal. Their phone had to be surrendered for thorough checking, they apparently painstakingly checked all images. I don't expect anybody to believe this as I can't provide proof that it did happen.
Your main source is ASPI, a far right war-hawk australian defense industry think tank.
And your source is mintpressnews.
Also it's not my main source. You just cherry picked one. Ok sure mybad on that, lets diregard that one. What about CIS, DHS, and NCSC?
Also BBC. Let's also add wikipedia [1] [2] because why not.
And do we want to talk about censorship? Sounds like something an authoritarian regime does.
You've got nothing and you know it
I concede. There is no social credit, people not being allowed to travel in trains, rent or buy property, get government appointment is a myth. The Chinese government cannot compel any company to handover data. There is no censorship on china, no websites are banned there. You can criticize the government as much as you want without repercussions. People from Tibet have equal rights and citizenship of China. Ughyurs are not being oppressed, neither are the fallongongs who are just a cult
If anybody believes otherwise, it's a hoax by the west.
Cheap sarcasm won’t bolster your case.
I am once again begging liberals to learn how sources work
This comparison mixes a few real policies with a lot of exaggeration. For example, the train and flight issue people always bring up is not about having a vague “bad social credit score.” What actually exists is a court enforcement measure. If someone refuses to comply with an effective court judgment (most commonly paying a debt or damages) the court can place them on the judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人) and issue a high-consumption restriction (限制高消费). That mainly blocks luxury consumption like flights, first-class rail seats, and luxury hotels until the court order is fulfilled. The purpose is simply to pressure people to comply with the judgment and protect the creditor’s rights (why should sleazy business people who don't pay their debts get to live lavishly).
Because of that, the claim that “if you have bad social credit you’re basically locked out of everything” is misleading. These restrictions target specific high-end consumption, not normal daily life. Even Chinese legal explanations make clear that they are meant to restrict non-essential spending such as flying, luxury hotels, expensive travel, etc., rather than basic living or ordinary transportation.
The surveillance point is also mixing separate issues. China does have strong state monitoring powers and extensive digital infrastructure, but that is not what the court enforcement blacklist system is. The travel restrictions and blacklists people talk about come from civil enforcement procedures in the courts, not from scanning someone’s phone or some universal personal “score.”
The same confusion shows up in the company data point. China has strict data and cybersecurity laws, but those are regulatory and national security frameworks. They are not the mechanism that puts someone on the judgment-defaulter list. That list exists specifically because someone ignored a legally binding court ruling, not because they refused to hand over corporate data.
And the idea that there is some nationwide app warning citizens about people with low “social credit” is another exaggeration. What actually exists are court databases of judgment defaulters, sometimes publicly searchable, similar to debtor registries in many legal systems. Again, the target is people who lost a case and then refused to comply with the ruling.
So the reality is much more mundane than the viral version. China absolutely has strong enforcement tools, but the famous travel bans people cite are mainly a judicial enforcement mechanism against people who refuse to comply with court judgments, not a universal social-credit score controlling everyone’s daily life.
Ahh I see. I read about and watched few documentaries about Xu Xiadong who criticized kungfu masters and lost social credit (among other things) and couldn't rent, own property, stay in certain hotels, travel on high speed rail, or buy plane tickets. I guess that was not true then.
The bit about data handover. I guess the center for internet security is misinformed so is the australian strategic policy institute, department of homeland security, and NCSC.
About the app, BBC is probably where it comes from, it's more for debtors and not with people with bad social credit but I suppose there is an overlap. So this didn't make it pass the trial phase?
The Xu Xiaodong case actually illustrates the exact point I was making. He wasn’t punished for “criticizing kung fu masters” or for having the wrong opinions. What happened is that he lost a defamation lawsuit and the court ordered him to apologize and pay damages. He refused to comply with the ruling, and because of that he was placed on the judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人). Chinese reporting describes the reason as “有履行能力而拒不履行生效法律文书确定义务”, having the ability to comply with a court judgment but refusing to do so. Once someone is on that list, courts can impose high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), which include things like flights, certain high-speed rail tickets, and luxury hotels until the judgment is fulfilled. In other words, the trigger was refusing to carry out a court order, not some general punishment for speech.
On the data issue, you’re citing reports from Western government-linked think tanks and security NGOs, which obviously approach the topic from a national security perspective. China’s cybersecurity and data laws (like the Cybersecurity Law and Data Security Law) exist because the state wants control over critical data flows, infrastructure security, and cross-border data transfer. That approach isn’t unique in principle; governments everywhere are tightening control over data because it has become a strategic resource. But those laws are regulatory frameworks about data governance, not mechanisms that automatically “ruin someone’s social credit.” The think-tank papers you cited are describing geopolitical risk concerns, not explaining how the Chinese court enforcement system actually works.
On the app point, what the BBC article referred to were tools connected to the court defaulter database, sometimes nicknamed things like a “laolai map.” That’s basically a searchable database of people who have lost a case and then refused to comply with the judgment, which courts use to pressure them to comply. Many countries have debtor registries or public enforcement records; the difference here is mostly presentation. Western coverage often framed it as part of a sinister “social credit” ecosystem when in reality it was tied to a specific court enforcement list, not a universal citizen score. It's good to have a database of those who have defrauded people. And to be honest, the BBC has a long history of framing Chinese policy in a particular narrative, so it’s not surprising that nuance tends to disappear.
The reality is that some of these mechanisms absolutely exist, but how they work, who they apply to, and what they actually do is often somewhere between heavy exaggeration and outright fantasy in viral discussions. What exists in practice is a mixture of court enforcement lists, regulatory blacklists, and sector-specific compliance systems. Turning that into a story about every citizen having a constantly changing “social credit score” controlling their life is a much simpler narrative, but it’s not how the underlying policies are actually structured.
I see, that was the result of not following court orders. So not complying with court orders will prevent you from these things (flights, high speed rail tickets, and luxury hotels?). Some institutes also report rent or purchase property, are those also restricted when you don't comply with court order? What if you already own property? I am only asking to know.
I guess this questions are more about authoritarian rather than soical credits. How about xiaodong's account being wiped 9 times was it (?) for having a viewpoint against the government. Is that somehow illegal and hence banned?
And about censorship. Wikipedia has a list of things that is banned from china including the marxist internet archive and Kanzhongguo, how much of that is true?
There is also one funny things that maybe you can shed some light on. There was this joke that if you get spam call from china, you can text them "Tiananmen Square and June 4, 1989 (1989年6月天安门广场屠杀)" or something about Taiwan being a country and their internet will be cut and they will be arrest or something x'D. I suppose it's only a meme but is there some truth to it, memes do come from somewhere right?
On the property point, it’s the same principle as the other restrictions. When someone refuses to comply with a court judgment and is placed under high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费), the court can restrict certain forms of luxury spending, which can include purchasing additional real estate or carrying out non-essential renovations until the debt or judgment is fulfilled. The idea is that if someone owes money according to a court ruling, they should not be spending large amounts on luxury consumption before complying. Existing property is not automatically taken just because someone is on the list, although assets can be enforced as part of normal debt collection(just as in every other country).
As for Xu Xiaodong’s accounts being wiped, that situation was tied to the series of lawsuits and disputes he became involved in, along with platform moderation rules. That falls under content moderation and legal disputes on private platforms, not the court enforcement mechanism we were discussing earlier.
The blocked-website lists you see online are a very mixed bag. Some sites are inaccessible because of political or regulatory issues, but many cases come down to compliance requirements, such as rules around data protection, licensing, and the requirement for companies handling Chinese user data to host or manage that data within China’s regulatory framework. When companies choose not to comply with those requirements, their services often simply do not operate in the mainland market.
And that meme about texting someone “Tiananmen 1989” to get them arrested is honestly pretty ugly. It basically jokes about condemning random Chinese people to some vague punishment for the sake of a punchline, which is a pretty dehumanizing way to talk about an entire population. Fortunately it’s also just a meme, sending a phrase like that to someone does not magically cut their internet or get them arrested.
Thank you for taking time to answer.
One additional question; what do you mean by political or regulatory issue? You mean that is a grounds for something to be banned? Also who dictates that certain thing is ban-able from political or regulatory issue and what is the threshold?
I meant that internet content in China is governed by formal laws and regulations, mainly enforced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (国家网信办) and related regulators. Chinese rules such as the 《网络信息内容生态治理规定》 classify online information and require platforms to prohibit illegal content and prevent harmful content, including material that endangers national security, spreads rumors that disrupt social order, promotes extremism or violence, or infringes on others’ rights. Platforms are legally required to monitor and remove such content and regulators can order services restricted or removed if they violate these rules.
Thanks for your post, your explanations are appreciated!
Don't answer if annoying, sorry for rudeness, but do Chinese high-level officials openly live lavishly and flaunt their wealth like US leadership?
How many Chinese high-level officials have you seen on yachts?
The real leadership in the US isn’t the politicians; it’s the capitalists who own them.
China IS authoritarian.
I'm not a liberal, I'm a libertarian socialist/communist.
It's a good thing for the working classes to wield state authority against capitalists. Not sure what you mean by "libertarian socialist/communist."
Wrong. It was never the norm across China's economy. It was concentrated in roughly forty large tech firms during the 2016-2019 boom cycle. In August 2021 the Supreme People's Court explicitly ruled 996 illegal, stating it violates statutory working hour limits and mandatory rest periods. The 2025 Consumption Boost Plan tightens this further with concrete measures against invisible overtime and stronger rest-time guarantees.
Wage arrears will persist so long as capital exists. That is the unfortunate material reality of the world we live in. What distinguishes China is the enforcement architecture built to counter it. The judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人) publicly names individuals and companies that fail to comply with court orders on wage payments and debts. Once listed, they face high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费): no business-class travel, no luxury hotels, limits on real estate and vehicle purchases. Combined with the blacklist for owed migrant worker wages and criminal prosecution for willful arrears, this creates real pressure on employers. It is not a perfect system but it is institutional recourse. Compare that to the procedural maze workers navigate in many Western systems when chasing unpaid wages
China's labor framework operates through the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. This isn't about silencing workers. It is about preventing fragmentation, foreign interference, and ensuring disputes resolve through arbitration and courts rather than adversarial chaos. Enterprise unions under this system negotiate contracts, handle grievances, and oversee safety. The ban on independent unions reflects a choice for unified, state-coordinated representation. That is a policy position. Debate it if you want. But calling it criminalization of worker advocacy is dishonest at best.
Vigilante action undermines rule of law anywhere. China channels labor disputes through arbitration committees and courts that handle millions of cases annually. When people bypass legal channels to organize unsanctioned actions, it is the method that triggers enforcement.
Then is the broader picture you ignored. The CPC maintains over 95 percent public approval according to long-term Harvard Kennedy School surveys. Most mainlanders view China's system as highly democratic because it delivers accountability through performance: poverty alleviation that lifted nearly one billion people, infrastructure built for public benefit not shareholder profit, and anti-corruption enforcement that reaches from village cadres to top generals. The National People's Congress includes nearly 3,000 deputies with hundreds of farmers, frontline workers, and representatives from all 55 ethnic minorities. That is structural inclusion. When platform capitalists like Jack Ma pushed financialization models that threatened household debt burdens, regulators restructured those businesses toward consumer protection. Similar scrutiny has applied to ed-tech, gaming, and real estate speculation. Public hospitals, high-speed rail, rural broadband. These are not profit centers. They are working-class infrastructure. If your analysis starts from Western media caricatures instead of documented policy and measurable outcomes, you are not critiquing China. You are performing ideology (and poorly at that I might add).
Adding an edit paragraph because I didn't catch that last bit on my first read of the comment:
On the specific claim about Marxist study groups in schools, let me be precise. I hold a Master's in Marxist Theory from a Chinese university. Marxism is compulsory coursework from middle school through postgraduate education. The state funds research institutes, journals, and conferences dedicated to this exact subject. What got disbanded were student groups operating outside legal registration requirements, refusing coordination with official university party branches, and using Marxist language to organize unsanctioned actions under the guise of study. That is not a crackdown on theory. It is enforcement of organizational discipline. Socialist democracy operates through democratic centralism: open debate within recognized structures, unified action once decisions are made. When students form parallel groups that reject institutional channels, they are not advancing Marxist practice. They are fracturing the very mechanisms that deliver working-class gains. This is not abstract. Foreign-funded NGOs have a documented history of instrumentalizing campus activism in developing states to destabilize socialist governance. Allowing unregistered groups to mobilize under Marxist rhetoric while bypassing party oversight creates openings for exactly that kind of interference. The result is not worker empowerment. It is system fragmentation that ultimately serves capital and foreign imperialist interests by weakening the coordinated capacity of the socialist state. If you genuinely understood Marxism as taught in China, you would know that the point is not performative dissent. It is building durable working-class power through institutions that can win material concessions. Disbanding unregistered campus groups is not anti-Marxist. It is pro-working-class unity. Your framing assumes that any restriction on organizing is inherently reactionary. That is a liberal assumption, not a socialist one.
Yea you completely blew my comment away, lol. Great info, thanks for writing this up! 🫡
I wouldn't say that I think it's a great strength for you to be able to be as concise as you were while still hitting the key points.
Thank you!
996 was declared illegal in 2021, and was mainly in large tech companies, certainly not the norm even before 2021. Meanwhile, the state executes billionaires and capitalists found guilty of corruption. Unions are entirely legal, they just have to be a part of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, and not rogue. Marxism is studied in China, you can even get a college degree in it. Workers and students and their rights are defended and protected by the socialist system.
Can you explain exactly what you mean? It's a mixture of half-truths and outright lies, and the half-truths deliberately leave out context and reasoning, such as the All-China Federation of Trade Unions existing as a sort of union of unions, China hasn't made unions illegal. Your entire comment was unsourced, too.
Lmao at you linking chuang. They wouldn't know good analysis if it punched them in the face. Their characterization of China as state capitalist for example rests on a series of fundamental theoretical errors that constitute a systematic departure from the methodological foundations of scientific socialism. Their analysis proceeds deductively from abstract definitions rather than inductively from concrete investigation, which represents a categorical rejection of the Marxist method as articulated in Marx's own preface to the second edition of Capital, where he insists that the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the human mind and translated into forms of thought.
Their primary methodological failure consists in the mechanical application of categories developed for the analysis of mature capitalist formations to a society undergoing socialist transition. They identify the presence of wage labor, commodity exchange, and market mechanisms and conclude that these phenomena constitute definitive proof of capitalist relations of production. This reasoning ignores the dialectical distinction between form and content that is central to Marxist political economy. Under socialism, wage forms may persist while the social content of labor relations undergoes qualitative transformation through the social appropriation of surplus, the subordination of production to planned social objectives, and the institutional mechanisms of workers' participation in management. Chuang's refusal to analyze these mediations renders their categorization analytically empty.
Their treatment of political power demonstrates a further departure from historical materialism. Lenin's decisive contribution to Marxist theory consisted in establishing that the class character of a state is determined not by the legal form of property or the presence of market mechanisms but by which class exercises political command and directs the development of productive forces. Chuang inverts this priority by treating the state as an epiphenomenal expression of economic relations rather than as the concentrated instrument of class power. This theoretical error leads them to dismiss the substantive significance of the Communist Party of China's strategic control over finance, land, energy, telecommunications, and heavy industry, as well as its capacity to direct investment toward socially determined priorities such as poverty alleviation, regional development, and technological sovereignty.
Their analysis of China's integration into the world economy exhibits a crude economic determinism that Marx explicitly criticized in his polemics against the vulgar materialists. They assert that participation in global markets necessarily entails subordination to the law of value on a world scale, thereby erasing the mediating role of state capacity, capital controls, industrial policy, and strategic planning. This position ignores the extensive theoretical and practical work of Marxist-Leninist movements on the question of socialist engagement with imperialist economies. Lenin's writings on the NEP, Mao's analyses of New Democracy, and subsequent CPC theoretical developments all recognize that tactical engagement with market mechanisms and international trade can serve socialist construction when subordinated to proletarian political leadership and long-term planning objectives. Chuang's categorical rejection of this strategic framework reflects not theoretical rigor but sectarian dogmatism.
Their conception of transition reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dialectical character of socialist development. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all theorized socialism as a prolonged historical process characterized by the coexistence and struggle of old and new relations of production. The presence of contradictory elements does not constitute evidence of capitalist restoration but rather reflects the uneven and contested character of revolutionary transformation. Chuang's binary framework, which demands either pure socialism or explicit capitalism, rejects this core insight and substitutes utopian abstraction for concrete analysis. Their method cannot account for the actual trajectory of China's development, including the expansion of public ownership, the strengthening of social welfare systems, the reduction of inequality, and the advancement of technological capacity under conditions of imperialist encirclement.
Their analytical framework also fails to engage with the concrete mechanisms through which surplus is appropriated and allocated in China. Scientific socialism requires investigation of the actual flows of value, the institutional structures of planning and distribution, and the social outcomes of economic policy. Chuang bypasses this empirical work in favor of categorical assertion. They do not demonstrate that surplus value in China is privately appropriated in the manner characteristic of capitalist exploitation. They do not establish that investment decisions are governed by profit maximization rather than social planning criteria. They do not analyze the role of mass organizations, workplace democracy, or community participation in shaping economic outcomes. Their conclusion rests not on material investigation but on definitional fiat.
The political consequence of Chuang's theoretical errors is a politics of sectarian negation that substitutes moral condemnation for strategic analysis. Scientific socialism is not concerned with issuing abstract verdicts on historical processes but with identifying contradictions, assessing balances of forces, and advancing class struggle through concrete practice. Chuang's refusal to engage with the actual gains achieved by China's development model, including the lifting of hundreds of millions from poverty, the expansion of public infrastructure, and the strengthening of national sovereignty against imperialist pressure, reveals a politics disconnected from the material interests of the international working class. Their analysis serves not to advance socialist theory but to reinforce the ideological boundaries of a particular academic-leftist milieu that prioritizes theoretical purity over revolutionary effectiveness.
In sum, Chuang's characterization of China as state capitalist is not a contribution to Marxist analysis but a deviation from its foundational method. Their deductive formalism, their erasure of political power as a determinant of social relations, their mechanical application of categories, and their rejection of transitional dialectics collectively constitute a systematic departure from scientific socialism. The result is not sharper critique but theoretical error that obscures rather than clarifies the actual character of contemporary socialist construction. If one seeks to understand China's development, one must begin with concrete investigation of its material practices, institutional structures, and historical trajectory, not with predefined definitions imposed from without. Anything less is not Marxist analysis but its caricature.
If chuang is the basis of your political thoughts on China it is no wonder you have also arrived at the wrong conclusions.
There's a massive difference between the claim that "996 is the norm" and the reality that this was largely restricted to large tech companies, is acknowledged as a real problem by the government, and that said government has taken concrete steps towards eliminating this entirely. Of course, reality is not black and white, just because something is formally illegal does not mean that it has been eliminated entirely, but this is a universe apart from the claim that "996 is the norm."
Regarding the question of whether trade unions should be independent or incorporated and federated, historical practice proves the necessity of unity over fragmentation. The Jasic incident actually demonstrates this quite well, as western organizations such as BBC, Amnesty International, and Radio Free Asia got involved in the incident and tried to spin it. Preventing western influence over soveriegn structures is critical to the longevity of the socialist peoject, and the fact that unions must work within the existing socialist system is miles apart from the claim that "unions are illegal."
As for students discarding what of Marxism they learn, this isn't unexpected. No socialist country can manage to make all students interested in Marxism. Your claim, however, made it appear that Marxism itself is discouraged. Regarding the Peking University Marxist Society, the students had this to say:
This is not Marxist analysis, this is left-dogmatism. In the PRC, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes have political control of the state, not capitalists. The accusation of fascism is coated in Marxist analysis, but is ultimately left-deviationism and counter-revolutionary. Their accusation is ironic, and just like the Jasic incident, it is the exact type of fragmentation that undermines socialist construction through left phrasemongering and coating.
The claim that western orgs are reluctant to cover China's working conditions is utter fantasy. In the west, we are drilled with propaganda about conditions in China daily. There is a real information war against China waged daily in the west. I'm aware that China is rife with contradictions, such is the result of a rapidly developing country trying to navigate ongoing class warfare, urban/rural mismatched development, problems arising from the existence of liberals and capitalists in China empowered by Reform and Opening Up, and more. However, the PRC is constantly and regularly improving, the state enjoys approval rates exceding 90%, and the CPC is regularly addressing the real issues in China.
Overall, your framing is highly deceptive. Rather than discussing real problems honestly, you try to hide their context, complexity, and nuance. This isn't a Marxist method of problem solving and discussion, there's no adherance to unity-struggle-unity. A discussion base built on deception is pointless, theory and practice must be united to be accurate and effective.
You lived in China for 28 years and claim that ”the 996 work schedule is the norm”?
Yeah, you’re an op. GTFO.
It’s important to understand that everything you know about China comes from capitalist states, corporations, and NGOs (which are funded by those states & corporations) that have a vested interest in you believing that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. That’s why the lie to us about China and lied to us about the USSR.
Lol this is like ngo concern troll bingo. Be specific, name the marginalized communities
When your socialist / communist group arms and starts defending themselves and their class interests, what prevents someone labeling them as authoritarian for doing so?
Socialist countries like the PRC lived through a hundred years of imperial exploitation by foreign powers (Britain, the US, and Japan), and fought a decades-long civil war against feudal reactionaries to finally liberate themselves from these oppressions. Do you know something they don't, about how to establish socialism, "non-authoritarianly"?
Noone actually forces you to live in debt. It should be last resort, but people in US finance everything
Oh damn I didn't know they made housing and healthcare free, that's dope as fuck
No you don't understand you can just become homeless and then let yourself die of preventable causes.
Isn't that illegal in the US
I wouldn't be surprised but I am neither amerikkkan nor have I looked into that.
Only if you insist on sleeping.
Sleeping is authoritarian
Come on like half of car sales in US are financed.
You know that Healthcare and housing is the last resort I'm talking about - where you have no other option.
The US is reliant on cars, but many people cannot afford buying them outright or low-interest loans. This is by design, not choice.
Bullshit. Used car market exists since the invention of a car. If you need a vehicle that will drive your ass from point A to the point B you absolutely have no need to buy a brand new one.
The used car market is volitile, regional, and often close to new in price. Stop blaming systemic issues on actions of individuals. I'm not saying that it's impossible for one to make poor financial decisions, but instead that the very system is designed around maximizing profits squeezed from the working classes.
Damn I wonder why they do that. Must have nothing to do poverty. /s