After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
The Party controls production and workers control the party. In capitalist countries, markets control the parties. In socialist countries, the Party controls the markets.
Politics are in command.
You aren’t interested in the real world. You’re only interested in the perfect socialism that exists in your imagination and no where else.
If workers control production, then all are free to dissociate from the Party at will, to form a new party, or have no association with any party.
The facts are that the Party controls the state, and the state controls workers. Therefore, all workers are bound involuntary to one party that determines their fate.
Denying that Chinese workers are subordinated under state power is sophistry and apologetics.
The fact of the matter is that over 90% of Chinese citizens support the CPC. You’re confusing individualist tendencies with socialism. The citizens of the PRC don’t have to join the party, they have 100 million members but 1.4 billion citizens. The party is supported because it consistently improves the quality of life of the working classes of China in a regular and planned fashion. Whole Process People’s Democracy is core to the idea of the PRC’s consensus-building and direction.
Standard of living is quite high and rapidly rising. For example, purchasing Power in 2022 was 25 times higher than 1978. The gap between rural and urban development has long been acknowledged and is already something worked on. The famous poverty eraducation campaign was focused on just that. Read The Metamorphosis of Yuangudui to see what that looks like in practice.
Another consistent metric is perceptions of democracy:
For more reading, The East is Still Red, Socialism in Power: On the Theory and History of Socialist Governance, and Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners are all great for understanding how the PRC works. ProleWiki’s page on the People’s Republic of China is also good if you just want an in-depth summary.
Support is not control.
The state is run democratically, both within the party and outside of it, by the working classes. You’re drawing a line between the state and the rest of society as something outside of class struggle, not within it.