Struggle session engage. Post your pathetic arguments so that I and the other China Good Posters can dismantle them and you can learn.

Key points:

  • China is a democracy. It is arguably the most functional and responsive democracy in a major country today. Its citizens consider it more democratic than the citizens of almost any other country do their own.

  • China is on a clear path to socialism and economic justice. No nation in history has ever reduced poverty in anything like the way China is doing it.

  • The vast majority of people in the PRC support the CPC. This is not due to being brainwashed. Americans are brainwashed and still hate their government.

  • Almost everything you hear about China in the West sits on a spectrum between malicious misrepresentation to outright fabrication with no basis in reality.

  • China's ascension to the premiere global power is an extremely good thing for world peace and the global socialist movement. While China does not actively support other socialisms (sadly it's not as good as the USSR in this regard) it does not do imperialism. China will allow socialisms around the world to flourish simply by not actively crushing them like the US and Europe.

  • hirsute [comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    So in good faith, how are we measuring "poverty eradication"? Typically this is claimed using GDP, which for me is a non-starter.

    I say this because when I look at the results of the dismantling of the danwei system, what I see is human wreckage among working people without much education. I know people who have become permanently unhoused because they lost their state housing and weren't able to buy a place of their own. I know people who have lost their pensions. The migrant labor phenomenon started because of this, and it is further perpetuating the class divide because children of migrant laborers often cannot go to school in the cities their parents have moved to because they don't have a local hukou ~...thus perpetuating the underclass~. Basically, I'm looking at the material conditions we see anywhere else in the world when we privatise things.

    Conversely, there are lots of people making lots of money, buying apartments and cars and slowly squeezing out what we once would have thought of as the lower middle class in China.

    There are much more important measures that I think we could use - for example health outcomes and educational achievement in rural vs urban areas; I haven't looked at it lately but within the last decade literacy rates were still measured differently depending on whether you live in a city or in the countryside.

    editing for clarity...using strikeouts

    • CommieGirl69 [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      can you give me any numbers for those? genuinely asking, those are flaws that i'm aware exist, but i've never found actual numbers to see how significant they are

      and while per capita gdp is a bad measure, i like looking at tiered per capita disposable income, and it's hard for me to see any class squeezing when this metric has shown an average 8% growth for all tiers for the last 7 years or so

      • hirsute [comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        When I get time I can look, but some of the sources may be in Chinese rather than English. There's been some pretty interesting academic research about it.

        • CommieGirl69 [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          alright i'm cool with them being in chinese since it's mostly numerical data anyway (so the bad translation won't be that much of a problem)