Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/30/qui-zhanxuan.html
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So they actually have a pro-corruption party? Kind of like the US.
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It seems like the Communist Party of China is afraid of a communist revolution.
If that were to happen, it would be… interesting.
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I wonder if there are Chinese podcasters and online vloggers who’ve made careers complaining about Marxist college students and their useless majors…
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Young people: this corrupt system of crony capitalism needs to be reformed!
Establishment party of the “left”: You have to compromise with big corporations to get things done. Don’t be so idealistic.
The Chinese version of the story involves state violence and prisons and lacks an official establishment party of the right, but the underlying narrative is the same generational one playing out in the West. The kids know that they’re being screwed over.
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The CCP’s current ideology includes nationalism, irredentism, Han Chinese chauvinism and social conservatism, all with the goal of making China the new global superpower, so one could argue that it is now a party of the right.
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Cultural marxism of the Gamscian branch of the School of Frankfurt sponsored by rich globalists.
Agreed, hence my scare quotes around “left”. The same can be said about the various Third Way parties in the West that are characterised as being of the left when they’re centre-right at best.
In China, the party of the “left” just eliminated the ostensible parties of the right and then, in practise, became the party of the right (with policies and philosophies not much different from the GOP or the Tories). The same transformation is in-process in Nicaragua.
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Try telling that to the insufferable and unironic western self-proclaimed totalitarian communists. Epic levels of self-delusion about China, and for that matter, Stalin, Assad, and pretty much every tin pot dictator who ever ran a small country where the One True Socialism briefly flourished.
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" The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
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The government should have seen this coming, you can’t call yourself communist, promote the teaching of communist ideas, and at the same time be very obviously capitalist.
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The Chinese government remembers how Marxist students were used by Mao to unleash the Cultural Revolution, with an appalling death toll in the millions, the persecution of tens of millions, and wholesale destruction of millennia of Chinese cultural heritage.
I suspect that is also why the Tienanmen protests of 1989 did not find an echo in the general population. The CCP’s oligarchic hereditary aristocracy may not be a particularly good form of government, but Marxism in China was infinitely worse, and killed more people than Stalin and Hitler combined.
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Weren’t they Maoist students?
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Maoism is a subset of Marxism-Leninism
Marxism-Leninism is a subset of Marxism
Marxism is a subset of communism
Communism is a subset of socialism
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As does the American version.
Etc.
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The situation is somewhat like the US, in that they have had their revolution and the state is set up to prevent another one from ever occurring. What is happening in China is that the Party - the one and only Party - is utterly centrist - Read: It all swings around Secretary Xi. The Party has a finger in every pie and no matter what the organization is, they are represented. They call it “Party building”. Which is to say all organizations are neutralized and must and do show piety to Xi. Or to put it another way dissent is stifled. The university students represent free thought - which by its nature deviates from the current Party line - and that can’t be allowed to happen. Could be contagious.
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Do you mean centrist by definition?
Deng Xiaoping called it “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Xi Jinping took the same idea even further. The beauty of ideology is that it’s so malleable. It’s only words and slogans.
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That jibes somewhat with my experience there in the '90s. People wouldn’t talk about Tiananmen, but they still shook their heads and clucked over the Cultural Revolution. I’m sure that was partly because the CR was safely in the past. But they also were pretty dubious about Mao’s achievements, and this was in Hubei province, a Maoist stronghold from way back.
Things have changed really fast there though. I doubt I’d recognize it. The oligarchs and various arrivistes have consolidated their power and transformed the place. That at least is the picture I get from the literature coming out of China, at least the stuff that doesn’t have creepy nationalist (Rong Jiang) or xenophobic (Liu Cixin) themes. I’m thinking of people like Yan Lianke.
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