A rapist, a snitch, and a colonial cop walk into a bar.

The bartender says, ‘The usual, Mr. Orwell?

That couple in Kunming. No amount of progress erases that. They deserved better.

But, so much has changed since then. Even just since 2021. Housing market cooling down, 996 ruled illegal by the Supreme People’s Court, new protections for delivery riders rolling out in Zhejiang, Guangdong. And the corruption crackdowns, “Tigers and flies” clearly wasn’t just propaganda.

On .ml people seem tired of the constant negative spin on China, so they swing hard the other way. Sometimes too hard (though I’ve yet to see it too many times). And, even folks here can still slip into old “China bad” habits (seen a lot of this recently). Like saying China does nothing for the Global South when you’ve got the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, Gwadar Port, vaccine donations, debt relief and much more showing how patently false that is.

I’ll just say it plain. I think China’s model, the way we do democracy, foreign policy, the whole political economy, is the best working option we’ve got right now. Not because it’s perfect, but because it actually moves the needle for hundreds of millions. It’s not even playing the same game as the Euro-Amerikan hegemony that’s been exporting crisis forever. Why throw out the good, or spend all day demonizing it, when so much worse is happening way closer to home for most people on here. Stick in their eye vs a speck in mine, yknow?

Edit: a graph just to show how much things have changed

China isn’t perfect, none of us pretend it is. I hear and partake in the gossip too, the stories about connections and KTV backrooms (and more you’ve probably yet to even hear of). But here’s the thing I’ve seen firsthand, especially when I visit family in the countryside: the villages that had dirt roads and no running water when I was a kid now have high-speed rail stops, 5G, and clinics that actually stock medicine.

And yeah, people complain, gossip, spread rumours. Of course they do, we’re human too. But the trust isn’t blind. It’s earned. When a pilot program for rural healthcare or poverty alleviation works in one county, they scale it to the province. When something fails, they tweak it or scrap it. You see it in the towns that went from abject poverty to being connected, electrified, and lifted up in a single generation.

Even the sources you’d expect to be critical can’t ignore it. Harvard’s Ash Center ran the longest independent survey of Chinese public opinion, interviewing over 32,000 people between 2003 and 2016. They found satisfaction with the central government at 95.5% in the final wave. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer put China at 91% trust in government, the US at 39%. These aren’t state media. They’re Western institutions. They see the same trend we feel on the ground.

That’s possible because of how our democratic system actually works. Democracy isn’t just about voting for different parties or the spectacle of elections. It’s about whether people are heard and whether their lives get better. If you think Chinese people aren’t being heard, or that the feedback doesn’t translate into action, you’re plainly wrong. The proof isn’t in the theory. It’s in the roads, the rails, and the fact that trust stays high even when the gossip is rampant (who doesn’t love a bit of gossip).

No you’re not understanding what I’m saying. “ML” is not a group in the fashion of Ansar Allah or Hamas or so on. It’s a descriptor applied to an individual who is then a member of a group with others who may or may not also fit that descriptor. That group then does things and takes credit as a group.

An important distinction here is that Ansar Allah is a militant group while “ml” is simply a political descriptor. There is no group or party called ml. ML’s make up a large portion of communist party and other groups membership alongside others who describe themselves with other labels.

I don’t see mls driving out ICE from MN.

Well the server you are on ends in .ml to mean marxist lenninist, so yeah they are kind of labeled.

Didn’t really answer my main question since that doesn’t really apply in the situation described.

Ok just to preface I am not amerikkkan so outside looking on on your many issues.

But genuine question how do you see an ml? Can you read their mind? Or do you expect them to label themselves as such on a name tag or sign? What of the people who are for all intents and purposes ml but simply don’t take on the label for one reason or another? Feels like you’re making a lot of assumptions based on vibes.

Also another question. Voting isn’t just voting under your system as I understand it. It’s a multi year process of canvassing and related work. So if bourgeois-democracy has been shown to be a dead end repeatedly throughout history it feels like wasting the hundreds of hours to prep and do it is a real misallocation of resources no?

Spreading agit-prop, showing up for “protests” (parades in the American case from what I’ve seen (this is a whole separate tangent I could go on)) and generally teaching arming and doing socialist work seems much more valuable use of time. Not hyper familiar with American orgs so I would defer to the likes of cowbee to explain in detail what the orgs are actually doing with the saved resources.

The so-called democratic system in modern states is usually monopolized by the bourgeoisie and has become simply an instrument for oppressing the common people.

Chairman Mao pushing the people to voting the Japanese imperialists and KMT fascists off the mainland:

Political power grows from the ballot box or something

There was a lot of talk of Chinese weapons systems but all we’re seeing is Shaheds and Iranian domestic missiles.

Both of these are made using materials from China. Rocket fuel precursor and duel use drone components (also SAM components which seem to have had some luck downing Israeli drones).

Or those hypersonic anti ship missiles.

Iran are using their old stock they haven’t even started using their own hypersonic FATTAH-1s what makes you think they’d bring out the even more advanced Chinese stock they might have?

Meanwhile NATO is sending troops and weapons from every country including the European ones. And they even participate in intercepting Iranian missiles. Looks like Capitalist international solidarity is far superior.

Almost like when the current hegemon and it’s vassal’s have nuclear weapons and they decide to take direct action against non nuclear powers MAD makes it near impossible for rival nuclear powers to step in personally.

Please don’t take this the wrong way I’m not trying to call you out or any of that nonsense, but from the 2 of your posts where we’ve had brief interactions it feels like you have a set outcome in mind (China bad) and are twisting yourself in knots to to reach that point irrespective of facts or material reality.

I believe we didn’t invade Iraq until 2003.

I think they meant Afghanistan in 2001.

The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems.

Chairman Mao’s 红宝书 Chapter 33 on Study

Nope, just makes it even more hilarious because you’re still here in the west when it sounds like you can naturally move back to the warm welcome of the CCP.

I’m in China dipshit what part of Chinese made house did you not understand.

I’m not the one who spouts bullshit propaganda all day long.

Actually lmao one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a while.

Yep, kinda sounds like your utopia abuses it’s people…

It was so abusive when the government eradicated poverty, invested hugely in a world class public transport system, electrified and modernised rural villages.

You don’t know shit and should shut the fuck up. Chauvinist ass crackkker. Can’t wait to piss on your empires grave when you return to being a serf to your pedo overlords. 🤣 👉

western tech

Made in China

You criticise society yet you participate in it curious

Was your brain surgically removed as a child?

Ruzzia

Why did you pick Russia over China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK? Russia isn’t socialist and there is critical support for them at best.

Also preempting this I am Chinese, I live in a Chinese built house, typing on a Chinese phone, does that make my criticism of the genocidal imperialist Euro-Amerikan empire more valid?

I appreciate the clarification, but the framing still conflates two distinct phases of struggle. My original point wasn’t that anti-imperialism exists outside class analysis, but that in neo-colonial conditions, the form class struggle takes must be strategically sequenced. The slogan “eat the rich” implies an immediate, undifferentiated domestic class war, which in practice fractures the broad coalition needed to first break imperialist domination. When foreign capital, military bases, and debt traps dictate a nation’s political economy, the principal contradiction lies between the oppressed nation and international imperialism, not yet between the domestic proletariat and the national bourgeoisie who may also be constrained by that same imperialist structure.

“In any complex process there are many contradictions, and of necessity one of them is the principal contradiction which plays the leading and decisive role, while the rest occupy a secondary and subordinate position.”

This is why popular fronts with patriotic sections of the national bourgeoisie are a, but a materialist application of class politics. As Chairman Mao argued in On the Policy of the Chinese Communist Party in the Anti-Japanese United Front,

“We must unite with all the classes, strata, political parties, groups and individuals that can possibly be united in the anti-imperialist struggle.”

This is a tactical necessity to isolate the primary enemy. To elevate the domestic “rich” as the immediate target while imperialist powers actively undermine sovereignty is to misidentify the principal contradiction and risk strengthening the external oppressor.

The enemy of our enemy is our friend, the national bourgeoisie, when objectively opposed to imperialist control, can be a conditional ally in the first stage of revolution.

Only after national liberation is secured (when the external fetters are broken and the people control their own state apparatus) can the internal class struggle proceed to its decisive phase. At that point, the proletariat, having built its strength and consciousness through the anti-imperialist struggle, can confront domestic exploiting classes without the distortion of foreign interference. As Chairman Mao put it in On New Democracy,

“The Chinese revolution must be divided into two steps: the first is to change the colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal society into an independent, democratic society; the second is to carry the revolution forward to establish a socialist society.”

Great slogan unfortunately not how it works in the modern reality of imperialism and neocolonialism, the class struggle can only truly begin after the premier contradiction of national liberation has been resolved.

One of the very few true things he’s said.

20 a day become one of the good ones

Yeah I was joking about you being one hundred obviously, you are like 30 max, you lived through shock therapy and blame communism for it for some reason. Prisons do tend to suck but I’m not particularly interested in hearing your gulag archipelago tier “recalling” of those events.

Stalin was definitionally not a dictator

I am just telling you how things were from the perspective of someone that lived those times

You both were talking about Stalin and living through his dictatorial times? He died 76 years ago and if you lived through it I assumed you were an adult by the time he died.

I am just telling you how things were from the perspective of someone that lived those times

First 100 year old Lemmy user?