After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
How do people actually fall into the “Tankie” mindset?
The MLs answering in good faith despite the question being framed in bad faith have exceptional grace.
a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […]”
Oh hey I know that guy. If anyone who wants to know more about propaganda & media literacy, please see also: previously.
Imo this has been a good thread with opportunities for large and well thought out posts from marxists who are being responded to with well thought out positions, and responding in kind. There’s a lot of the classic dross, but I like seeing people’s posts appear to be getting up and downvoted based on content.
Not the usual entertaining brigading, but a good read nonetheless.
I just want to point out that there was a time a little over a century ago when anarchists were Public Enemy #1, and there was a huge propaganda campaign to make anarchists look like murderous uncultured savages. Vestiges of this portrayal still remain in the cultures of core capitalist nations.
Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth. That shows you how powerful the propaganda is and how important it is to analyze the power dynamics you find yourself in the middle of and correct your worldview around who’s been deceiving you and how.
A valuable heuristic is to look at specific policies (especially foreign policy) in the present day, and note the times when your stance is on the same side as the neoliberal establishment.
Tribalism
They opposed one tribe so they joined another
They can’t see that any government is going to create corruption so they picked the government they have the least experience with to side with. Of course at the heart of the tankies is a huge amount of fud being generated by russia and the ccp.
There is no one answer. Dr. Bob Altemeyer‘s book “The Authoritarians” sheds some light on the psychology.
Regardless of what you think about vanguardism as a means to leftist ends, they also seem to miss the logical point that vanguardism and the state are meant to wither away. It is a theoretical rightist means to a leftist ends, it is not itself leftist.
But again, if you read The Authoritarians you find that logic and reason do not matter to them. Trying to reason with an authoritarian is pointless.
Tankie brigade incoming in 3… 2… 1…
Some people just have a Right Wing mindset. They’re drawn to concepts like loyalty & obedience to authority and gravitate to political doctrines that stress those values. If Communism makes economic sense to you but you’re politically uncomfortable with shallow/non-existent hierarchies or don’t feel that everyday people can be trusted with political power you gravitate towards being a ML. If you’re willing to force those views on others by threat of state violence you’re now a Tankie.
Do you think your psychological analysis holds up against the people in this thread who are describing why they ended up believing what they believe?
The world is too absurd right now and in order to best fit into it the easiest way possible you must take on the mantle of absurdity yourself. There is not a lot of self-awareness or self-knowledge within these lazy thinkers.
Actually existing socialism actually exists: imperfect, flawed, with tragic excesses and rightist deviations. But it exists.
And I’m interested in the real world, not creating an ideal world in my head that can’t actually become reality.
How socialist is a system that crushes the working class beneath it’s boot heel, though? Is that really the working class seizing the means of production because that just seems like someone else beating us to the punch and becoming our new overlords.
You’re judging them while they have the boot heel of Western imperialism on their necks.
There it is! The goalposts just got kicked into another galaxy.
The working class in China are not being crushed under anyone’s bootheel, though. They really do enjoy a dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, which has been used to great effect to improve working class lives. Yes, a dictatorship of the proletariat as mediated by the party, but vast swathes of the working class people are the party. And those who are not, well, there is a reason the party has an over 90% approval rating and it’s not some disgusting racist trope about Asians being sheep. It is because they’ve watched their quality of life rise by leaps and bounds, repeatedly.
Simple, that shit is fictional
Brother, you’re brainwashed and bigoted.
Hey can you explain to a person who thinks CIA is evil but also think CCP committed atrocities how I am brainwashed? It feels like extremism to believe one atrocity but not the other… in either direction.
Your underlying assumption is that if the US Empire is evil, then any meaningful alternative must be just as evil, or comparably so. This isn’t based on factual analysis so much as it is the baked-in distrust of the idea that others might actually be doing alright.
but there is no “assumption” I am operating under. My default position for any institution is distrust. People as individuals I empathise. People as groups I don’t trust.
I have no illusions that others are doing alright. On the contrary. I think “doing alright” is an insidious way of sweeping your dead bodies under the proverbial rug for the sake of “the greater good”. Easiest way to lose your humanity.
No amount of greater good can justify doing evil.
Factual analysis is a myth. People draw their own conclusions as they see fit, let alone assuming there is no bias or error in the data. Introspection, admitting to failure, looking out for one another are the missing gems to find nowadays.
First and foremost, I think people should consume media that is not from the West. You really can’t claim to be an internationalist if your media bubble (I’m including social media as well) is entirely situated within the West. To be an internationalist means recognizing that Western thought isn’t the end all of human civilization. What constitutes the West is actually pretty small. It’s only through imperialism that the West has a very oversized presence. But the West is only one of many viewpoints. At a bare minimum, you have to read what non-Westerners say.
But it’s not just a case of picking any random non-Western country since many of their news media has been captured by the West through NGOs. Personally, I find news from Anglophone non-Western countries (India, Nigeria, and so on) to be bad overall as far as echoing what has already been said on Reuters and the BBC. The easiest way is to get out of the bubble is to pick news media from countries that are hostile to the West. That’s one of the reasons why you see Russian/Chinese/Iranian/Venezuelan news media cited in ML circles. It’s an easy way to pierce through the Western bubble even if you must be cognizant of the geopolitics at play. It’s not the only way by any means. In many ways, social media by non-Westerners can be superior even when accounting for botting and censorship. There’s a reason why the US wanted to get rid of Tiktok and I strongly suspect they will move to do the same with XHS, which actually has authentic Chinese people (of a certain demographic) on social media.
When you step outside the Western bubble, it’s very obvious that the vast majority of criticism of China comes from a broader Cold War 2.0 strategy by the US to attack China. Whatever is not wholly made up is put an exorbitant emphasis on. There are numerous problems with Chinese society, of course. Many of them are actually pretty apparent if you consume Chinese social media made by Chinese people in China. However, you’re not going to find this in any article by the BBC unless it’s to push some ridiculous narrative about how Taiwan is going to be invaded or Tokyo is going to be nuked by China. You have to step outside the Western bubble.
Cand you be my introductory news and let me know what you know about China? How is the standard of living there ACTUALLY? Right now it seems the consensus in the west is that life in China is horrible unless you’re well off or know a guy who knows a guy.
I know I could read online but I’d rather trust you than some article by Bloomberg… Or a chinese media outlet…
I mean, in terms of social media, there’s XHS like I said earlier. There’s also Bilibili, which is Chinese Youtube. You could also find Chinese people posting videos on Youtube for that matter. Besides Chinese people just posting about their daily lives on social media like every other person who use social media, there’s also domestic tourism. So you could find videos of someone who’s from Wuhan visiting Guangzhou. Stats and charts are one thing, but as they say, seeing is believing.
Front page of Bilibili has this video: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1pevzBKEBx/ You don’t have to understand Chinese to see that the person is filming at a small village and that it’s a rural environment because she’s seen feeding vegetables to calves on top of just seeing fields of crops in the video. In terms of infrastructure, it’s obviously less developed than somewhere like Shanghai, but nothing’s particularly rundown. Some of the buildings look like they’ve been recently painted. The road is old with some cracks, but it doesn’t have any potholes, which is more than what I can say about the roads I have to drive through on my way to work. And those residential roads are through suburbs with nary a cow to be seen.
Here’s another interesting video I found on the front page: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1tBvsBTEdc/ I have no fucking idea why Katy Perry is on Chinese social media, and she’s apparently on Chinese social media enough that she has a Chinese nickname 水果姐, which literally means “Fruit Sister” and this nickname is apparently well known enough that there’s even a Wiktionary entry of her nickname on Chinese social media: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/水果姐
Standard of living is quite high and rapidly rising. For example, purchasing Power in 2022 was 25 times higher than 1978. The gap between rural and urban development has long been acknowledged and is already something worked on. The famous poverty eraducation campaign was focused on just that. Read The Metamorphosis of Yuangudui to see what that looks like in practice.
Another consistent metric is perceptions of democracy and support for the CPC. Over 90% of Chinese citizens support the central government, and ranks far higher than western countries on perceptions of democracy:
For more reading, The East is Still Red, Socialism in Power: On the Theory and History of Socialist Governance, and Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners are all great for understanding how the PRC works. ProleWiki’s page on the People’s Republic of China is also good if you just want an in-depth summary.
Not OP, but you can easily find statistics on public transportation, wages, healthcare/life expectancy, government approval, ecological policies, technological development, energy use and so on.
Collecting these statistics takes too much time for a single comment, but you can find statistics from a wide variety of sources such as the world bank, imf, rand (western sources), or Chinese sources like Chinese government data (like from the national burea of statistics).
Either way, the data is quite favorable for China and Chinese citizen’s quality of life. They have a higher life expectancy than Americans, world class public transport, the world’s best green energy industrial complex (by such a huge margin that in comparison, the rest of the world might as well not try). It is quite a decent place to live in, baring the issues with low wages, youth unemployment and high working hours (compared to western nations, as least until the fascists de-develop the west enough).
Edit: The amount of conjecture and thought terminating cliches in this thread is through the fucking roof lmfao. Peak reddit.
A lot of tankies are actually posting how and why they believe what they believe. If anyone’s seriously interested in an answer look at this thread from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60633370?scrollToComments=true
There are 206 comments in total at this time.
My journey started here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871How they piqued my interest:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5606499The reason I switched:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5355388It was a combination of them just not being horrible “redfash” monster everyone says they are, them being able to consistently back up their seemingly “obviously wrong” takes and me and seemingly no one else being able to come up with better answers.
In discussions tankies were the only ones who had good faith discussions, obviously they didn’t always, but if it wasn’t just an internet slapfight the tankies were the ones citing sources and having incredibly nuanced understandings while me and the other libs didn’t really. All I ever saw was a “nuh-uh” backed up by “obvious” claims that “everybody” knows like your “mao zedong was the worst mass murderer”.
There is a post I could make about this “black book of communism” statistic now, having read about these sorts of claims, but not on my phone.
I don’t think they’re redfash monsters, I just know most historians disagree with what they say, and as someone who is not an expert, I will trust the experts over the people I see post 18 paragraphs that the one time I looked into was not very relevant and often just cause more confusion. An easy example is china’s treatment of the uyghurs, I have yet to see a response that isn’t, as you say, a thought terminating cliché.
I just know most historians disagree with what they say
Serious contemporary historians, not airport bookstore historians, do agree with much of what we say, because after the fall of the USSR, they got access to troves of Soviet government documents spanning decades, which dispelled much Western Cold War propaganda.
See that for me was quite the opposite. The people everyone was piling on as tankies had demonstrably better knowledge of not just both history and current events but could trace a lot of the claims levied against them, like the uyghur genocide hoax, to their source, in this case Adrian Zenz, and really completely decimate them.
Those contradictions kept piling on, tankies were rebutting “common knowledge” and backing up seemingly ludicrous claims in depth and clearly previously researched. Whereas the libs were just consistently out of their depth, either insulting, claiming without anything to back it up or in the best case throwing around tangentially related articles or wikipedia entries that were obviously just the first results from an ad hoc google search. Until just sort of all came crashing down and sent me reeling, my whole worldview coming undone. My family and especially my wife got really worried even, but it kind of tapered away and settled into a new approach to things that feels like I am actually able to take at all these complex and finally have the tools necessary to understand them if I invest the time to do so.
me and the other libs
Is this a parody?
At the time I was a lib even if I didn’t identify as such
Hello. I am baby! :D why are tankie evil?
A lot of people get fed up with slow or no progress, so they fall for supporting approaches that “get things done.” Even though they go very wrong, and by that point, some are too lost in the sauce to admit it’s wrong or severely off-base.
Being involved in anarchist and decentralized leftist orgs, it’s very discouraging how few people care and how little power we have.
Often times it takes weeks of planning and everybody’s collective effort and spare resources to provide meals to a few dozen people, or to host a single information booth or class at a larger leftist meet up.
After years of that, the temptations of centralized power to just dictate to the masses what will happen is very strong. The justification goes something like, “yeah there are a ton of problems with XYZ, but at least they are accomplishing ABC!”
I feel it too when I look around my country of the USA. Sure China is State-capitalist, authoritarian, pseudo-dystopian police state, and super politically repressive. But god damn it, they have some of the best public transport in the world, a kickass tech and manufacturing sector, solid public healthcare, and the actually imprison and even execute billionaire scumbags…
When I have to encounter the level of American idiocy on a weekly basis, listen to the most asinine politicians and talking heads, and endure capitalist bootlicking propaganda everywhere, I start to get really tempted to advocate for the China way…
So it boils down to “at least the trains run on time”?
They are also ignoring that the USA had those things when it was the most repressive to the populace in the 1950-1970’s .
Foreign investment money is a powerful steroid for governments ability to make life better and control the population at the same time.
No it boils down to “we kicked the Japanese fascists out and have a pretty decent standard of living now compared to the rest of the world”
Not OP but I think they are sold on the “consequences for billionaires” part
Wumao shills are everywhere now.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt and lying” lol cope
