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1 year ago“Tankie” is a meaningless term. The PRC has a system that is right for China. Attempts to copy-paste a system that was designed for different historical and material conditions than your own will produce suboptimal results. Every country needs to arrive at a solution to the problem of building socialism that is built on a solid dialectical materialist analysis and adapted to their particular circumstances.
I had to consider whether to even bother to respond to this because it contains so many thoroughly debunked anti-China propaganda talking points, including pro-terrorist apologia, that there is a high chance this is just another troll who is trying to throw out as much bullshit as possible and see what sticks. However in the interest of educating newer comrades who have not encountered these vile distortions of reality before and are confused i will say a few things:
China is NOT an ethnostate. It is not a state of and for the Han ethnicity. China is a multi-ethnic, pluralistic nation with many national minorities and religions. China strives for harmony between all ethnic and religious groups within its borders. Tibet is and has been for hundreds of years a historic and integral part of China. The Tibetan people are no less part of the Chinese nation than any other ethnic group in China. The same goes for all of the other regions that were mentioned. The people of these regions see themselves as Chinese. The so-called “independence movements” for these regions exist almost exclusively outside of China and are highly astroturfed and propped up by the West, financed by CIA cutouts like the NED and composed largely of a mix of religious extremists, criminals who were marginalized from Chinese society, and disgruntled anti-communist diaspora (such as former landlords and other such types of people that Cubans would call “gusanos”) that have not lived in China for generations.
There is NO such thing “East Turkestan”, that is a made up name that separatists and terrorists who are seeking the breakup of China use to refer to China’s Xinjiang province. The use of this term is strong indication that one is dealing with a fanatical anti-China ideologue who sympathizes with ETIM terrorists, a group trained by Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria under programs designed by western intelligence agencies to wage a campaign of terror and violent separatism in China. The exact same kind of campaign was waged by the CIA in the 1950s to try and incite violent separatism in Tibet and it too failed.
China does NOT “force minorities to abandon their language and culture”, in fact this lie is so perverse it is a complete inversion of reality. China does the exact opposite, it celebrates and protects BY LAW minority cultures and languages. It has extensive affirmative action programs for national minorities from economic benefits and tax breaks to cheaper or free education and preferential priority in a vast number of economic and social programs (including, when that the policy was still in effect, being exempt from the One Child Policy). Minority provinces in China use at least two official languages, oftentimes even more, and the minority languages are represented even on China’s currency. There is education in minority languages as well as the national language, the latter being highly beneficial for minorities to efficiently integrate into the national economy and have the same opportunities as everyone else.
A country cannot invade itself. China’s Taiwan is an integral part of China. This is internationally recognized by not only the UN but all major nations (including the US), as well as both the government of the PRC and the government of Taiwan province. The existence of an autonomous government in Taiwan is nothing more than an artifact of the civil war, and it has only existed for as long as it has due to malicious US interference. The complete reunification of China, besides being the inevitable trajectory of history, is solely an internal Chinese matter which outside forces have no business interfering in.
There is no such thing as the “CCP”, the official designation of China’s ruling party is the CPC, the Communist Party of China. The erroneous abbreviation is commonly used by racist sinophobes as an insult to the Chinese nation. Conflating China with “the CCP” and attributing the actions of China’s government to the supposed intentions of “the CCP” is part and parcel of the strategy of delegitimizing in the collective consciousness of the victims of the West’s anti-China propaganda the legitimate government of the People’s Republic of China.
The claim that China wants complete control of the South China sea is a baseless lie. China has made no such claims. Whatever minor disputes exist between the nations which border the South China Sea (and these exist also between the other nations there, just as they occasionally appear almost anywhere around the world where different nations border the same body of water) are for these countries to resolve between themselves and are no business of any nations foreign to the region. One thing that must be clear however is that China will not allow the US to militarize the South China Sea and thereby threaten their national security.
Communists support proletarian democracy. We do not believe that we can achieve our goals through bourgeois elections because this is a system designed by and for the bourgeoisie that is intrinsically hostile to the interests of the working class. “Electoralism” is a strategy that has proven to be inadequate and insufficient for advancing and protecting the interests of the working class. However we are not opposed to the concept of elections. Both the PRC and the USSR have/had elections. They are/were proletarian democracies. The problem is that there is a huge amount of ignorance about how these systems actually work/worked.
Communists support national liberation and self-determination. We do not support bourgeois nationalism and astroturfed “independence” movements that are designed to weaken, break up and balkanize the adversaries of imperialism for easier subjugation and plunder. There is strength in the unity of peoples. The imperialists have a vested interest in undermining that unity because divided people are easier to control. By no objective measure can it be claimed that the working class of the former Soviet Socialist Republics or of Yugoslavia, both now divided, are better off today. The only ones who benefited were the national bourgeoisie and the western imperialists who plundered and subjugated the disunited peoples of those former socialist states. The working class of these states instead got fratricidal wars, brutal neoliberal austerity, and comprador puppet regimes.
“Authoritarianism” is a spook. It is a meaningless accusation. All exercise of collective or state power is “authoritarian”. The imposition of the democratic will of the majority over a minority is “authoritarian”. So-called “liberal democracies” are no less and in many cases far more “authoritarian” than socialist states. In this case the authority is that of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie imposed by the violence of the bourgeois state upon the working class. Communists seek to invert this relationship and impose upon the bourgeoisie the authority of the working class - that is the vast majority of the population and the class which actually produces value through its labor as opposed to parasitically stealing it from others - through the instrument of the proletarian state.
We do not oppose the “right to protest”, we oppose the notion that the enemies of the proletariat should have the right to undertake subversive and hostile activities with the purpose of sabotaging or overthrowing socialist societies for the benefit of parasitic capitalists and foreign imperialists seeking to restore the working class to its former subjugation. But tell me, where is the right of the working class to protest its subjugation under capitalism? Only insofar as no real threat is posed is this ever allowed, but when the power and wealth of capital is threatened the working class is immediately faced with brutal repression by police, the guard dogs of capital. And where is the right to protest the warmongering imperialist policies of the West today? Doing so in the West today gets you branded a Russian/Chinese collaborator, and in many European states you can even get sent to prison for merely speaking out against their vile war propaganda. Exposing the lies and crimes of the US war machine oftentimes gets you imprisoned and tortured if not outright killed.
We do not “revere” either the PRC or the USSR, we simply see them as examples of how things can be done better than they are under capitalism and “liberal democracy”. There are always things to improve on and as communists we will always try to engage critically and analyze what can be improved or done better. The CPC is the prime example of this. They have spent a great deal of time learning from the mistakes of the CPSU and have achieved great success as a result. Their historic and undeniable achievements are precisely why the imperialists fear and hate them so much, why they invest so much effort into disseminating and convincing you of these talking points that you parrot here. Because by being a positive role model for others around the world of what a country can build for its people using a model radically different than neo-colonialism and neoliberal parasitism, China, like the USSR before it, poses an existential threat to parasitic capital and the West’s global empire of misery, death and destruction.
Simply repeating the magic words “authoritarian” and “authoritarianism” adds nothing of substance to your argument. There is nothing more inherently “authoritarian” about what socialist states do and have done than what any “liberal democracy” does on a regular basis. Go read Friedrich Engels’ short essay “On Authority”. Socialism is the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing more, nothing less.
And no, we don’t support “the rights of Palestinians” because that is too vague and too liberal a formulation. We support the total and complete liberation of all of Palestine - from the river to the sea! - from the genocidal, racist and illegal settler colonial occupation.