this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I think this flies a bit too far in the other direction. China is totalitarian. It is not a democracy. It is also increasingly antagonizing nations abroad. I think it is valid to consider it a threat if you are any other nation, period.
Edit: Kinda like Russia
How many seats are in the highest legislative body?
What rights and responsibilities do autonomous regions within China have?
What is the most distributed government legislative committee type and what is their role in the government?
1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn't matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.
In the end they all answer to the whims of the central government, which can change or remove and rights and responsibilities autonomous regions within China have.
See answer one.
Do you know what a legislative body is? Anglophones are almost all educated on "executive, legislative, judicial" aren't they? Xi is the leader of the Executive branch in China, not the Legislative or Judicial.
You do know what a dictator is right? You can call yourself the head of this and that and have cronies technically control the rest, but it's not fooling anyone slightly smarter than the average microwave. It's inherently evident you do Xi Xinpings bidding no matter where you are placed or you will be replaced. Not a hard concept, even someone like you can understand.
Such fierce condescension and yet you're the one pushing a children's story. All these hundreds and thousands of representatives, all the millions of Party members, are just puppets under the Bad Guy's control. There was no violence to install him, the existing government put him there (since I assume you don't endorse Chinese elections) and then he played an Uno Reverse and now they are all an extension of him, with all of Chinese politics then becoming merely being a matter of how much people chaff under the collars and fetters he fixes to them. When politicians fight each other? When journalists fire back and forth in the papers? When policy goes one way and then pivots? It's all just a Potemkin Village with a few hundred million people as the staff.
So no, "someone like me" cannot understand how such a thing could exist outside of a children's cartoon or a similar sort of story told to an audience that is very much suspending its disbelief.
How in went way is that a children's story. It's incredibly easy to understand like a children's story but is very real, so real you can see it happening in real time. Your idea of China is more like a children's fairytale rather than the reality it currently is.
I do not support Chinese elections, same way I do not support Russian or North Korean elections. These are also similar to children's stories.
On your next point, politicians can argue all they want but in the end they will fall in line. Similar to journalists, who may I remind you are often targeted as political prisoners to be sent to reeducation camps. Also, yes, policy changes, people change their minds or gain retrospection on what doesn't work and pivot, it happens often. For example, China's Great Leap Forward, which really lead to mass starvation and steel barely useable. Then Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi reversed these policies and ended the great Chinese famine. Then Mao changing his mind again and having both of them thrown into reeducation camps, Shaoqi would die.
Your "no u" line about how actually I am telling children's stories doesn't work as well as you think it does. The crux of my case is that these states aren't monoliths and potemkin villages but actually have complex internal politics where people of varying viewpoints are able to openly disagree and protest, as is observably true in these countries! Not everyone in the Russian legislature supports the war, and they generally did okay with this position. There are all sorts of left/right debates in China among various politicians and journalists and so on. To call this kabuki theater or totally inconsequential without any actual evidence is silly.
Also your timeline is bad. The Great Famine ended circa '61 and the Cultural Revolution began in '66. The Cultural Revolution certainly had its issues, but it didn't cause a famine. Deng did end the Cultural Revolution, sort of, but only after Mao's death and the purging of the Gang of Four (prior to Deng's re-ascent).
As an aside, I don't think Deng was ever imprisoned in connection to the Cultural Revolution, though he was half-purged and assigned to menial duties in one case and basically paid leave in another. It's quite interesting how pissed Mao and his clique were at Deng and yet they held their hand, relatively speaking. Wasn't it supposed to be a death sentence to oppose Mao, as the liberals tell it? Of course, Mao took pride in trying to rehabilitate people (even the last Chinese Emperor and captured Japanese soldiers!), so he would in almost all cases resist having someone killed or left to rot in prison.
There's a wild bias in western media in trying to make a Khrushchev out of Deng, but Deng himself vociferously refuted those comparisons while in office, calling Khrushchev a fool, a traitor, and so on, and saying that being compared to Khrushchev was an insult (which is true).
So what I'm hearing is it doesn't matter if you're ignorant about the way China works because the US media told you Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything and you believed them. Got it.
No, Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything he wants to. It doesn't matter if you technically control something you will always end up doing the bidding of Xi or you will disappear. From reading your replies, it's evident you have fallen for Chinese propaganda and now simp for an evil dictator and totalitarian regimes. Got it.
So... No, it's not like Russia at all. But that nuance is too long for me to explain right now. Short answer is that Russia is capitalist, and China is 50/50 capitalist/socialist, depending on definitions, and yeah a lot of nuance.
But China is run by the people, their authoritarian politics keeps their billionaires and induatry in check. Their local politics is a negotiation with the national politics.
And... How exactly is China antagonizing nations abroad? Because a lot of countries are choosing to work with China because they AREN'T antagonizing them as much as America and Europe. So... The reality is the opposite.
I mean, if you haven't been there or don't know anyone from there you could pretend they are a democracy, but they are authoritarian like Russia is authoritarian. Long term they will seek a wider swath to be authoritarian over.
And the argument from ignorance continues.
All I have to say is read more and be online less.
It's not from ignorance. It's based on the people I know from China.
Quick tip, arguing with tankies gets you nowhere, let them waddle in their own filth and move on with your life.
the less dronies I have to interact with the better
Taiwan, a nation and country, is antagonized by China regularly.
If Taiwan is its own nation, they should really specify that in their constitution instead of claiming to be the rightful government of all of China and Mongolia.
That still makes it a nation... That claims to be the rightful government. These are not mutually exclusive haha
That claim is mutually exclusive with Taiwan being "its own nation" distinct from China. It is definitionally its own government, but it claims to be a superset of the nation of China (because of also claiming Mongolia and some smaller territories). Nations are a social construct based on historical group identities, so the PRC is the same nation as the ROC was back when the ROC controlled the mainland. The ROC claims to still be that nation (plus Mongolia) which the PRC currently administers.