China’s Leaders Confront an Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists
26 replies, posted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-xi-protests.html
TLDR: Chinese university students who have been molded by the communist studies in Chinese universities protest against the inequality that Chinese citizens face under the rule of the Communist Party.
I seem to recall this ending very badly the last two times it happened.
It seems to be a habit of communist governments to declare having ended inequality just because they've gained total power in a country, regardless of reality.
IIRC the USSR actually banned labor unions because "what do you need a union for if the workers are already running the nation".
Do as we say not as we do. That's where the US is supposed to be different but with the rich running the government now its become one of hypocrisy
Karl Marx would have been sent to the gulag and/or executed by Stalin and Mao, without a second thought.
Red Guards 2: commie boogaloo?
I hope it has impact at least on some level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_at_Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
Does a five digit number of dead civilians count as impact?
I don't think that's exactly freely available information over there, though.
Makes me wonder if this incident will result in Chinese schools and universities removing Marx from the curriculum.
Absolutely, but let's hope it don't come to that.
Things like this gotta end badly for one side, always
Reminds me of an old joke about the Soviet Union. A newly minted communist party member writes to his mother about all the perks he gets for party membership; a car, a special store to shop at, a dacha in the countryside and so on. His mother writes back: "be careful the Bolsheviks do not take power and redistribute your wealth."
"Trust no one, not even ourselves"
Again, my point stands: China does not exist within our realm
Based on the ratings in this thread, a concerning realisation is that some of you actually think China's government is communist in anything but name.
Everything outside of it's cities are Communist in some ways. China's cities are referred to as "Capitalist cities" because companies are allowed to do whatever the hell they want in them as long as they bring in the dough
For the still-red-scared populace of the US, communism pretty specifically refers to USSR Stalin-era government.
Painting the Chinese government and a collective of college-age students who have actually read theory both as "communists" is doing the latter a disservice.
Calling them communist wouldn't be incorrect, though, as the form of communism adopted by the PRC is merely a subsection of communism. Pretty much just "All Catholics are Christians, but not all Christians are Catholics".
When did college kids come into this lol. You were making the claim that China wasn't commie.
The Chinese government is certainly not commie, which were my original words. The students come from the article, which says
They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism.
Things like the Spiderman meme posted above are evident of what I'm talking about. The humour from that is derived by pointing out that these student groups, who actually studying what Marx wrote, are supposedly the same as the government because they're both "communists".
Governments that put communist ideals into practice don't stop being communist just because those ideals reach a nearly inescapable conclusion. The nature of a communist revolution makes it trivially easy for the revolutionaries to maintain an authoritarian power structure, ostensibly in the interest of constructing the new classless society.
Mao was once an intellectual young student raised on Marx and Lenin, who founded a group to discuss the progress of socialism, too.
This is a valid argument that could totally be made if the Chinese government today was actually still being led by Mao or his beliefs, even outside of the belief that a government, authoritarian in its nature, can actually truly put communist ideals into practice rather than just use them for political popularity. This is what I personally believe and closer to what Marx believed.
And it's not like it's difficult to decry it as "not True Communism". Marx considered communism to be classless, and having an authoritarian ruling party is having a state. The idea of such a party came later, especially under Lenin (thus Marxist-Leninism). How exactly to prevent an authoritarian party from taking everything over is another discussion entirely, and this is where a lot of modern day leftist beliefs diverge.
In any event, equating these student groups to the current government in power is defeatist and stupid.
"We'll teach you to be great Communists!.. Wait no, not like that!"
Did you not read the second half of my post? I went over this. Authoritarian states that claim to be communist are going after what Lenin described as the path to communism, not Marx.
It's also alright for different political ideologies to disagree with eachother. This happens all over the spectrum, not just with the far left.
The Chinese government is a mixture of many things, but what really matters is they are not democratic, not by a long shot.
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