Communism looks good on paper

and looks even better in the real world

  • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    When was the last time you visited China? Have you ever lived there?

    Born and raised. You clearly have never been, yet you speak with arrogance as you spout off talking points.

    The government rounds up religious minorities and genocides them

    This claim gets repeated endlessly, but repetition does not turn an allegation into proof. Words like “genocide” get deployed because they carry moral weight, not because the evidence meets the definition. The actual situation is far more mundane and far more complicated. There are policies directed at separatist violence, religious extremism, and regional security. Those policies are harsh in places and worth debating, but transforming them into an industrial genocide narrative is propaganda, not analysis.

    China officially recognizes multiple religions. Mosques, churches, temples, and monasteries operate openly across the country. Anyone who has actually walked through cities in Ningxia, Gansu, Henan, or Zhejiang would know that immediately.

    They once encouraged people to speak up about how they can improve upon society then threw all the people who did in prison for 35 years.

    You are vaguely referencing events without understanding the historical sequence. The campaign encouraging criticism of the party was followed by a backlash when leadership feared that the criticism was destabilizing the state itself. It was a political struggle inside a revolutionary system still trying to define its direction after a civil war and a massive social transformation. That period was chaotic and involved real repression, but your version reduces decades of complex political conflict into a moral fable.

    The Cultural Revolution itself was something entirely different from what you described. It was a moment when ordinary workers and students were mobilized directly into politics at a scale never before seen in modern states. Institutions collapsed, factions formed, and power moved outside bureaucratic structures. The problem was not that “people were punished for speaking.” The problem was that the political struggle escaped all stable mechanisms of coordination. The result was excess, factional violence, and eventually a reassertion of centralized authority. Treating it as a simple story about free speech misses the entire point.

    The one child policy barely was removed recently and there are still abortion clinics on every corner like Starbucks in America

    The one-child policy was relaxed progressively and formally replaced in 2015. Calling that “barely removed” nearly a decade later is a stretch. More importantly, the policy emerged from specific demographic pressures in a poor country attempting to industrialize rapidly with limited resources. Whether one supports it or not, it was not some arbitrary cruelty invented for ideological reasons.

    As for the “Starbucks abortion clinic on every corner” line, that is simply fantasy. Reproductive health clinics exist, as they do in any country with a population exceeding a billion people. But the picture you are painting does not match reality. It reads like something copied from a political meme.

    Maybe they are 66 on your list but the number is 10 million fetuses per year.

    You did not read the source he linked did you? Yes, the absolute number is large. In a country with roughly 1.4 billion people almost every raw number will look enormous. Rates are what matter. Around 28 per 1,000 women places it roughly mid-table globally. That is precisely why the ranking is around 66th. Statistics are meaningless without context.

    Free speech is not available anywhere. That is a criticism for all governments.

    Now the argument shifts. First the claim is that China is uniquely oppressive. When that collapses under scrutiny the claim becomes that no country has free speech anyway. That contradiction should tell you something about the reliability of the earlier claims.

    I could argue at least the US has a path to change through voting and the checks/balances of power

    This is the most revealing sentence in your entire comment because it exposes the mythology underlying the rest of it. The United States presents itself as a system where the population governs through elections, but the material structure of power sits elsewhere. Political campaigns are financed by concentrated wealth. Media systems that shape public opinion are owned by large corporations. Lobbying organizations write legislation. Regulatory agencies rotate personnel with the industries they supposedly regulate.

    Voting occurs, but the range of outcomes permitted by the system remains narrow because the economic foundation never changes. Parties compete over management of the same underlying order. When policies threaten entrenched capital interests they simply do not survive the process. That is why universal healthcare has been debated for generations without implementation. That is why financial institutions responsible for economic crises receive bailouts while ordinary people absorb the consequences.

    “Checks and balances” function primarily as inertia mechanisms. They slow structural change, not empower it. The idea that the population can fundamentally redirect the system through periodic elections ignores how power actually organizes itself in advanced capitalist societies. The state becomes intertwined with the interests of the dominant economic class. Elections then operate more like a controlled feedback loop than a mechanism for transformation.

    So when you claim the United States offers a path to change, what you are really describing is a ritual that produces the appearance of choice while the underlying distribution of power remains intact. If the population truly had the capacity to vote away the interests of the wealthiest sectors of society, those sectors would never have allowed such a mechanism to exist in the first place.

    Just admit you’re a racist who seeks out orientalist and chauvinist narratives about China because it makes you feel better about the decline of your empire.