Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.
(I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).
However, it’s been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they’ve been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I’m wary of calling that Communism).
Are they even left of center nowadays? I don’t know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what’s done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.
I don’t think they’ve yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they’ve kept the Authoritarianism going.
Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.
well i mean, in defense of this statement, mao was literally psychopathic. As far as i’ve read they basically dropped everything including food production to make a nuclear bomb. Coming from that to industrialization is only inevitably going to vastly increase your standard of living. We saw the same thing across the world, even in the soviet union.
also i definitely wouldn’t call china center of left, unless we’re specifically talking about economic policy, as china is extremely noteworthy for being pretty tyrannical in certain cases around certain things. the great firewall being a good example. Unless we’re going with the modern american conservative definition of left, in which case, yeah that would be left.
You’re confusing the authoritarianism-libertarian axis with the left-right axis.
It’s perfectly possible to be authoritarian in genuine pursuit of the “the greatest good for the greatest number” principle (the basis of all left-wing ideals) if one believes that only tight and centralized control can achieve a maximal balance of the welfare of people and the number of people getting the best possible welfare, and that individual freedom is not important enough for people’s welfare compared to other things.
(Personally I don’t agree, but my point is that it’s not incompatible to have left-wing objectives and believe they’re better reached via authoritarian methods).
Totally agree on Mao’s character. IMHO what China achieved, it did in spite of Mao rather than due to him.
Further I would say that their long term strategy of becoming the workshop of the World seems to have worked as they’re well in their way to become the next imperial power. It seems a blindness-driven-by-ideology to dismiss their economic rise and its reasonably even distribution across society as merely “inevitable”, especially when there are countless examples that failed miserably to do so during that time, most notably next door India which did not manage anywhere near the same.
There are plenty of questions about the sustainability of their strategy as they become a medium wealth country, the Ecological consequences of it and of lots of the decisions they’ve made in the last decade or so, none of which deny the uniqueness - and hence merit, given that their only resource was people, not minerals and natural wealth like other countries many of which got nowhere near China in terms of speed of development - of what they did achieve so far.
If one takes off one’s ideological blinkers (and me not being American, I couldn’t care less if China replaces American or not as the top power since neither does anything in my interest or the interest of those I care about, so I have no knee-jerk “China Bad” reaction), China looks like a country which did a bunch of things well for a while but did others wrongly and had problem and isn’t performing as well anymore.
well obviously, authoritarianism is a method of governance, you can have that mixed with literally anything. I just don’t believe that china has generally social left leaning objectives, like i said, unless we’re talking like classical liberalism or something, they’re pretty socially conservative, and they’re not super economically left either.
They’re like a weird mix of ethno nationalist (china is not very diverse) and capitalist-authoritarian, combined with social conservatism.
I think if we’re talking about general social status, china is probably doing something productive, though it’s questionable how much longer that will run on for. But general social status is boring.
economically, china is experiencing quite a lot of pressure, as more authoritarian controlled economies tend to do. And this is historically aligned with how their society has gone throughout the years. Things get unstable, they vie for power as their influence starts to wane, and then it accelerates until social collapse and “rebirth” as is pretty typical for all human society, though most places don’t really have the history to show it, so it’s not unusual.
If they can make it out of this pressure, which is debatable, they’ll do well, currently they’re debt farming smaller countries in the hopes of gaining outside control of them through the debt. That could be a significant liability, they have quite a significant portion of debt wrapped up in simply building wealth, which is sketchy and can implode if not properly controlled, similar to the US, but perhaps without the sheer productive capability of the US.
if they can’t make it out, they die and implode a horrible death rising from the ashes sometime later. Probably through a few rough leaderships along the way.
A big problem with poverty status in china lowering is that wages are rising, so china has to ship to a higher quality production base, which they have the capacity for, but the economic incentive to produce in china compared to somewhere onshore, or near shore drops off a cliff at that point. Especially when you factor in stuff like shipping. Ethical product sourcing, and all kinds of other stuff that’s more socially acceptable now. People are generally willing to pay more for a more local service/good. Especially as economic status increases in the west as well. Though that might also be related to bad financials so.
Yeah the big question really is “were those gains sustainable?” which in turn links with “can they adapt to this new stage of their economic growth cycle?”.
I don’t think things are going anywhere as well now there as they did before (it’s even unclear of the country is growing at all for the many) hence why I kept making an exception for “the last decade” in the comments I’ve been writing here about China.
We can come up with a thousand reasons why they’ll have problems and a thousand ways in which they can succeed, but those “what ifs” are just a bit of informed fantasism so I’m refraining from such futurism as it’s a practice riddled with wishful thinking, selective picking of what suits one’s theories and building theories based on an information sparse basis that’s somewhat poluted (as in, there’s way more we don’t know than there is that we do know especially at a detail level, and especially here in the West what we do know tends to be mostly the things that certain political forces believe will make us think bad of China).
It’s hard enough to try and form a fair and honest opinion of present day China and doing futurism based on this shitty informational basis would just be building castles in the air, which there is no point in doing.
So I’m just acknowledging their past success, with the caveat that it’s been a while since that achievement and it’s unclear of late if they’re even still going forward and if they’re even still in practice left-of-center in what they’re doing.
it also doesnt help that china hasn’t released bad years of economic performance, so we don’t actually know how they’re doing, unless they’ve recently started reporting those again. But regardless, that still influences the worse times so.
My two bit variable analysis on china tells me they’re likely to have a substantially more volatile economy, in part due to heavier regulations and restrictions, as well as the fact that free market entities are entirely self regulated and tend to balance to equilibrium very aggressively (removing outside influence of course) where as more centrally controlled economies, tend to be more problematic in this regard. China probably has a pretty good balance between the two going on, but it’s questionable what that balance even is. Generally a pretty good indicator for the general productivity of a country is their military and it’s equipment, the more advanced it is, the more money they’re likely to put into it, the more quantity they have, the more manufacturing they dedicate towards it. The USSR primarily known for sheer quantity output, china has also been known for quantity, but it seems they’re pushing for more advanced technology recently. The US, naturally, going for extreme technological advantage, and the potential for massive manufacturing bases, as evidenced by ww2. The sheer productive ability of the US matched with it’s geography and natural resources is a massive benefit to something of that caliber. Especially when we include something like NATO.
Fascism used State Capitalism. Political parties are corporations anyway
If someone questions their religion (like that mma guy who fought the larpers) then they lose their social credit…which leads to loss of income and property
Yea the social score thing seems like a misunderstanding of Chinese culture.
Chinese culture (and other Asian cultures) have a history of shunning people who have committed ‘shameful’ acts out of their communities.
The MMA guy that the previous comment was talking about was shunned out of living a normal life in China for exposing the phony Kung Fu masters in China.
The Chinese government has experimented with different kinds of social score systems, though most didn’t stick. They do have a credit/banking score system just like we have in the US, too. Still, I think most of this blacklisting just comes from their culture, and not from the Chinese government enforcing social scores.
Where are you getting your information from?because it’s all fake.
During the third Reich you needed to buy insurance or to pay a private doctor.
Many industries had to provide health insurance to their workers like in the US, but many people were left uncovered and healthcare professionals did not work for the state, they were mostly self employed or employed by private hospitals.
There was not socialized healthcare like in most modern civilized countries.
I mean you can point out that you’re not a fan of Putin but if you’re for diplomatic solutions instead of total war you’re a fascist. No matter if you try to explain that you’re a pacifist and that war is not acceptable and arming for war just makes war that more likely. As soon as you mention NATO eastward expansion as a problematic policy you’re a tankie. Or if you mention that people saw this war coming before 2022 and it could have been stopped. Or if you point out that calling Russians “orks” is racist. Just massive downvotes and the zerg moves on.
There is zero difference between the MAGAts and the leftists in regards to how brainwashed they are. And no I’m not a centrist either.
The issue with bitching about “NATO expansionism” is that at the end of the day it’s still an alliance that countries ask to be members of due to concerns about being invaded or attacked.
and you forget the border requirements for being a NATO state. IIRC, you cant have any active border conflicts, so it should automatically prevent the whole “unwanted nato expansionism”
Countries like Russia in the 90s, which was denied for some reason
Denied because Russia didn’t want to go through the usual application process. But keep peddling bullshit - it’s the only thing fascists have, after all.
If there is one thing life as a geek in highschool taught me is that the ONLY effective way of stopping the violence when facing a bully is to hurt the bully back, even if you don’t hurt them as much as they do you.
The bully strategy is: violence, followed by concessions from the other side to stop the violence, followed by a period of non-violence, then one of threats of violence to get concessions, then violence again if there are no concessions or the bully finds them insuficient or simply wants more than they demande and then it all repeats.
This is exactly the pattern of behaviour from Russia towards Ukraine, clearly visible since their invasion of Crimea and subsequent events.
The strategy for dealing with non-bullies was the one tried after the Crimean invasion and the result was a typical bully pattern of behaviour from Russia in response - keep the gains, rebuild military strength, make more and continued demands from Ukraine under thinly veiled threats of violence, eventually initiate more violence with a further invading of Ukraine - which is why any Thinking Pacifist has by now concluded that unfortunatelly a response of “concessions” to Russian agression will result in a temporary pause of Russian agression and even more Russian aggression at a later date, whilst a strategy of responding to Russian aggression with the most hurtfull possible response in all senses (including militarilly) to make it be a negative for Russia to act agressivelly will dissuade Russia from acting aggressivelly for a long, long time, possibly forever.
Unfortunately the most simplistic strategy of Pacifism, which is to find a way to balance the interests of both sides, doesn’t work with actors who purposefully and repeatadly use violence and the threat of violence to extract gains, because their “concerns” are not genuine fixed issues that need addressing, they’re goalposts which they move every time they’re addressed because they’re really a mechanism for extraction of gains from the other side.
they’re really a mechanism for extraction of gains from the other side
I have no problem applying that framework towards Russia. They did this for internal political and for geopolitical reasons. My problem is that people are no longer capable of applying that framework towards the US / Nato. That they too, only did this “hey join nato bro!” to get Russia into this trap and bleed them dry using Ukraine.
There is a sort of black and white / good vs evil thinking now that is uterly naive, dehumanizes the enemy and only allows people to see them as fully evil and absolutely untrustworthy and incapable of rational acts. While your own side is absolutely innocent and blameless.
The amount of double think going on is astonishing, it’s not just ahistoric it’s blatantly false seeing how the US is supplying the weapons for a genocide in Palestine right now. But people seem to be able to completely compartmentalize the role of the US in Palestine vs the role of the US in Ukraine.
And then everyone who doesn’t agree with the dogma and proscribed narrative is your enemy. And like you pointed out, there apparently is only one way to deal with an enemy: Violence.
Not all Authoritarians are Fascists.
That said, I would agree that whomever supports Putin, supports Fascism - there is nothing at all Leftwing in present day Russia, quite the contrary.
China is more complicated.
That’s because they found a way to voor communist thought to the most capitalist industry in the world.
Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.
(I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).
However, it’s been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they’ve been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I’m wary of calling that Communism).
Are they even left of center nowadays? I don’t know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what’s done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.
I don’t think they’ve yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they’ve kept the Authoritarianism going.
well i mean, in defense of this statement, mao was literally psychopathic. As far as i’ve read they basically dropped everything including food production to make a nuclear bomb. Coming from that to industrialization is only inevitably going to vastly increase your standard of living. We saw the same thing across the world, even in the soviet union.
also i definitely wouldn’t call china center of left, unless we’re specifically talking about economic policy, as china is extremely noteworthy for being pretty tyrannical in certain cases around certain things. the great firewall being a good example. Unless we’re going with the modern american conservative definition of left, in which case, yeah that would be left.
Re-read my comments on this thread.
You’re confusing the authoritarianism-libertarian axis with the left-right axis.
It’s perfectly possible to be authoritarian in genuine pursuit of the “the greatest good for the greatest number” principle (the basis of all left-wing ideals) if one believes that only tight and centralized control can achieve a maximal balance of the welfare of people and the number of people getting the best possible welfare, and that individual freedom is not important enough for people’s welfare compared to other things.
(Personally I don’t agree, but my point is that it’s not incompatible to have left-wing objectives and believe they’re better reached via authoritarian methods).
Totally agree on Mao’s character. IMHO what China achieved, it did in spite of Mao rather than due to him.
Further I would say that their long term strategy of becoming the workshop of the World seems to have worked as they’re well in their way to become the next imperial power. It seems a blindness-driven-by-ideology to dismiss their economic rise and its reasonably even distribution across society as merely “inevitable”, especially when there are countless examples that failed miserably to do so during that time, most notably next door India which did not manage anywhere near the same.
There are plenty of questions about the sustainability of their strategy as they become a medium wealth country, the Ecological consequences of it and of lots of the decisions they’ve made in the last decade or so, none of which deny the uniqueness - and hence merit, given that their only resource was people, not minerals and natural wealth like other countries many of which got nowhere near China in terms of speed of development - of what they did achieve so far.
If one takes off one’s ideological blinkers (and me not being American, I couldn’t care less if China replaces American or not as the top power since neither does anything in my interest or the interest of those I care about, so I have no knee-jerk “China Bad” reaction), China looks like a country which did a bunch of things well for a while but did others wrongly and had problem and isn’t performing as well anymore.
well obviously, authoritarianism is a method of governance, you can have that mixed with literally anything. I just don’t believe that china has generally social left leaning objectives, like i said, unless we’re talking like classical liberalism or something, they’re pretty socially conservative, and they’re not super economically left either.
They’re like a weird mix of ethno nationalist (china is not very diverse) and capitalist-authoritarian, combined with social conservatism.
I think if we’re talking about general social status, china is probably doing something productive, though it’s questionable how much longer that will run on for. But general social status is boring.
economically, china is experiencing quite a lot of pressure, as more authoritarian controlled economies tend to do. And this is historically aligned with how their society has gone throughout the years. Things get unstable, they vie for power as their influence starts to wane, and then it accelerates until social collapse and “rebirth” as is pretty typical for all human society, though most places don’t really have the history to show it, so it’s not unusual.
If they can make it out of this pressure, which is debatable, they’ll do well, currently they’re debt farming smaller countries in the hopes of gaining outside control of them through the debt. That could be a significant liability, they have quite a significant portion of debt wrapped up in simply building wealth, which is sketchy and can implode if not properly controlled, similar to the US, but perhaps without the sheer productive capability of the US.
if they can’t make it out, they die and implode a horrible death rising from the ashes sometime later. Probably through a few rough leaderships along the way.
A big problem with poverty status in china lowering is that wages are rising, so china has to ship to a higher quality production base, which they have the capacity for, but the economic incentive to produce in china compared to somewhere onshore, or near shore drops off a cliff at that point. Especially when you factor in stuff like shipping. Ethical product sourcing, and all kinds of other stuff that’s more socially acceptable now. People are generally willing to pay more for a more local service/good. Especially as economic status increases in the west as well. Though that might also be related to bad financials so.
Yeah the big question really is “were those gains sustainable?” which in turn links with “can they adapt to this new stage of their economic growth cycle?”.
I don’t think things are going anywhere as well now there as they did before (it’s even unclear of the country is growing at all for the many) hence why I kept making an exception for “the last decade” in the comments I’ve been writing here about China.
We can come up with a thousand reasons why they’ll have problems and a thousand ways in which they can succeed, but those “what ifs” are just a bit of informed fantasism so I’m refraining from such futurism as it’s a practice riddled with wishful thinking, selective picking of what suits one’s theories and building theories based on an information sparse basis that’s somewhat poluted (as in, there’s way more we don’t know than there is that we do know especially at a detail level, and especially here in the West what we do know tends to be mostly the things that certain political forces believe will make us think bad of China).
It’s hard enough to try and form a fair and honest opinion of present day China and doing futurism based on this shitty informational basis would just be building castles in the air, which there is no point in doing.
So I’m just acknowledging their past success, with the caveat that it’s been a while since that achievement and it’s unclear of late if they’re even still going forward and if they’re even still in practice left-of-center in what they’re doing.
it also doesnt help that china hasn’t released bad years of economic performance, so we don’t actually know how they’re doing, unless they’ve recently started reporting those again. But regardless, that still influences the worse times so.
My two bit variable analysis on china tells me they’re likely to have a substantially more volatile economy, in part due to heavier regulations and restrictions, as well as the fact that free market entities are entirely self regulated and tend to balance to equilibrium very aggressively (removing outside influence of course) where as more centrally controlled economies, tend to be more problematic in this regard. China probably has a pretty good balance between the two going on, but it’s questionable what that balance even is. Generally a pretty good indicator for the general productivity of a country is their military and it’s equipment, the more advanced it is, the more money they’re likely to put into it, the more quantity they have, the more manufacturing they dedicate towards it. The USSR primarily known for sheer quantity output, china has also been known for quantity, but it seems they’re pushing for more advanced technology recently. The US, naturally, going for extreme technological advantage, and the potential for massive manufacturing bases, as evidenced by ww2. The sheer productive ability of the US matched with it’s geography and natural resources is a massive benefit to something of that caliber. Especially when we include something like NATO.
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China isn’t more complicated
Fascism used State Capitalism. Political parties are corporations anyway
If someone questions their religion (like that mma guy who fought the larpers) then they lose their social credit…which leads to loss of income and property
I do think china is a capitalist hell hole that doesn’t even have universal healthcare.
But social credit thing is not real afaik. I personally asked several chinese people and they all laugh at it.
They of course can and will prosecute “enemies of the state”. But social credit is not the way they tend to do it.
Meanwhile the US literally have credit score or something like that, don’t they?
Yea the social score thing seems like a misunderstanding of Chinese culture.
Chinese culture (and other Asian cultures) have a history of shunning people who have committed ‘shameful’ acts out of their communities.
The MMA guy that the previous comment was talking about was shunned out of living a normal life in China for exposing the phony Kung Fu masters in China.
The Chinese government has experimented with different kinds of social score systems, though most didn’t stick. They do have a credit/banking score system just like we have in the US, too. Still, I think most of this blacklisting just comes from their culture, and not from the Chinese government enforcing social scores.
Nazi Germany had healthcare…as far as fascist states go it has to be up there
Edit: Well mods deleted my response to the post below so I will just leave it with this
Wut?
Where are you getting your information from?because it’s all fake.
During the third Reich you needed to buy insurance or to pay a private doctor. Many industries had to provide health insurance to their workers like in the US, but many people were left uncovered and healthcare professionals did not work for the state, they were mostly self employed or employed by private hospitals.
There was not socialized healthcare like in most modern civilized countries.
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they didnt say it was publicized or socialized. They just said it was healthcare.
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Fascism = far RIGHT ideology; communism = far LEFT ideology
I mean you can point out that you’re not a fan of Putin but if you’re for diplomatic solutions instead of total war you’re a fascist. No matter if you try to explain that you’re a pacifist and that war is not acceptable and arming for war just makes war that more likely. As soon as you mention NATO eastward expansion as a problematic policy you’re a tankie. Or if you mention that people saw this war coming before 2022 and it could have been stopped. Or if you point out that calling Russians “orks” is racist. Just massive downvotes and the zerg moves on.
There is zero difference between the MAGAts and the leftists in regards to how brainwashed they are. And no I’m not a centrist either.
The issue with bitching about “NATO expansionism” is that at the end of the day it’s still an alliance that countries ask to be members of due to concerns about being invaded or attacked.
and you forget the border requirements for being a NATO state. IIRC, you cant have any active border conflicts, so it should automatically prevent the whole “unwanted nato expansionism”
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Denied because Russia didn’t want to go through the usual application process. But keep peddling bullshit - it’s the only thing fascists have, after all.
If there is one thing life as a geek in highschool taught me is that the ONLY effective way of stopping the violence when facing a bully is to hurt the bully back, even if you don’t hurt them as much as they do you.
The bully strategy is: violence, followed by concessions from the other side to stop the violence, followed by a period of non-violence, then one of threats of violence to get concessions, then violence again if there are no concessions or the bully finds them insuficient or simply wants more than they demande and then it all repeats.
This is exactly the pattern of behaviour from Russia towards Ukraine, clearly visible since their invasion of Crimea and subsequent events.
The strategy for dealing with non-bullies was the one tried after the Crimean invasion and the result was a typical bully pattern of behaviour from Russia in response - keep the gains, rebuild military strength, make more and continued demands from Ukraine under thinly veiled threats of violence, eventually initiate more violence with a further invading of Ukraine - which is why any Thinking Pacifist has by now concluded that unfortunatelly a response of “concessions” to Russian agression will result in a temporary pause of Russian agression and even more Russian aggression at a later date, whilst a strategy of responding to Russian aggression with the most hurtfull possible response in all senses (including militarilly) to make it be a negative for Russia to act agressivelly will dissuade Russia from acting aggressivelly for a long, long time, possibly forever.
Unfortunately the most simplistic strategy of Pacifism, which is to find a way to balance the interests of both sides, doesn’t work with actors who purposefully and repeatadly use violence and the threat of violence to extract gains, because their “concerns” are not genuine fixed issues that need addressing, they’re goalposts which they move every time they’re addressed because they’re really a mechanism for extraction of gains from the other side.
I have no problem applying that framework towards Russia. They did this for internal political and for geopolitical reasons. My problem is that people are no longer capable of applying that framework towards the US / Nato. That they too, only did this “hey join nato bro!” to get Russia into this trap and bleed them dry using Ukraine.
There is a sort of black and white / good vs evil thinking now that is uterly naive, dehumanizes the enemy and only allows people to see them as fully evil and absolutely untrustworthy and incapable of rational acts. While your own side is absolutely innocent and blameless.
The amount of double think going on is astonishing, it’s not just ahistoric it’s blatantly false seeing how the US is supplying the weapons for a genocide in Palestine right now. But people seem to be able to completely compartmentalize the role of the US in Palestine vs the role of the US in Ukraine.
And then everyone who doesn’t agree with the dogma and proscribed narrative is your enemy. And like you pointed out, there apparently is only one way to deal with an enemy: Violence.
Diplomatic solutions to an invasion that violates treaties?
the Russians also called the Ukrainians nazis, so…
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this entire thread is fucking bait bro what the hell is going on with the internet lately.