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?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who has responded! This thread has been very insightful :)
For the same reason people fall into fascism. Capitalism is putting the screws to people. Rent is too high, food is too expensive, people are on a treadmill, and dissatisfaction hangs in the air like miasma. People are mad, and they don’t know at what. They sense something is rotten, they dont have the words. Fascism co-opts leftist talking points, but pulls a bait and switch with the Jews and migrants and whoever.
Tankies also start from this choking miasma, you look at Tankie propaganda, its compelling. The US commited genocide and war crimes, and is more racist than you know. Capitalists are terrible, yadda yadda you know it. Tankie propaganda also frames politics as a team sport. When you look at the US (or you can look at it as the “Nato Empire,” which can be an interesting way to think about it), as the ultimate evil, can be easy to see anyone opposing them as good or worth supporting.
Personally, I’ve never looked at it like the states that oppose the US are inherently good and worth supporting (sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not). Objectively speaking, our support means nothing. I don’t have any ICBMs to give to those enemy states. So what I do think is that the way we talk about the enemies of the United States can make a difference in terms of providing license for imperialist intervention which is always a bad thing.
Example: whether you believe Nicolas Maduro stole the 2025 elections or not, propagating the narrative that he did makes it easier for Americans to accept Trump invading Venezuela. If no Americans believed that claim to be true, the cost of an invasion would be higher for the ruling class, so it’s materially meaningful to have control over that narrative. This means that, even if the principled thing to do would be to condemn it, an anti-imperialist who believes he stole the election might choose to avoid the subject.
That hypothetical person isn’t supporting an evil dictatorship, because support from private citizens with no capital and no power means nothing. They’re instead just applying a miniscule amount of personal power in the opposite direction of empire’s interests. The same applies for any enemy of the United States. I don’t “support” Iran, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hamas, the PFLP, China, Russia, Cuba, etc. I often deny criticisms aimed at those entities when I hear friends or family make them, with the goal of undoing a bit of the effort that US empire undertakes to villify them and grant itself moral license to slaughter their people.
I feel like your rebuttal is mostly hinging on the definitions of “defend” or “support” are. Look man, I understand that the US is going to invade Venezuela, or least is testing the waters a bit. Aside from military adventurism being what dying empires do to feel young, Trump himself is desperate to do anything from being exposed as part of the “Deep state” his cult was built up to hate (not that anything will then happen).
But when you deny the Uyghur genocide, or say Putin is “de-nazifying” Ukraine, it sure sounds to me like you simping for the imperialist expansionism of other empires, because in the broad strokes, they oppose the one you hate. Which, fuck dude, I hate the empire you hate, and they are the biggest one, but I can also hate more than one thing. You can oppose US imperial interests while understanding that Putin is trying to reclaim Ukraine because it was one of the richest former Soviet Republics. Both are evil, but trust the people of Ukraine to know how to best bet on their own safety. We make the same choices everyday in a dictatorship of capital. Do you buy a product from the company with slaves or the one that poisons water?
Just cause you hate Hershey doesn’t mean you simp Nestle.
We deny it because it simply isn’t true and not for any other reason. We also deny the genocide of white South Africans, as I’m sure you do as well. The “Uyghur genocide” story was fabricated by the US after its attempts to destabilize the Xinjiang region failed[1][2].
Look, I get where you’re coming from, but I think there’s a lot of fundamental issues you’re having with trying to apply a moral framework to an amoral geopolitical process. Sometimes “tankies” make the same mistake but the other way around.
Whether I think Russia invading Ukraine is good or evil (I obviously think it’s evil because a lot of innocent people are dying!) my political analysis can’t stop there. I know that for capitalism to end, NATO has to go, and I know that socialists in the west have no military power and no organization. So if NATO has to go, and Russia is fighting NATO, Russia is doing something that the left in the West would have to do eventually and has nowhere near the capacity to do by itself.
I think your comparison to consumer decisions is pretty inaccurate here. When I buy a water bottle from Nestle, they get more revenue (well, there’s a bunch of middlemen, but roughly speaking). The only way in which my actions affect Russia is the extent to which I oppose the military industrial complex in the West causing reduced NATO support for Ukraine. There’s no direct benefit for them, and generally most people already are critical of having arms manufacturers and American military installations operating where I live (except for the jobs they create). So how exactly is coming to the conclusion that Russia fighting NATO is beneficial to the cause of global socialism like buying something from an evil company? Is that idea gonna change anything about the world?
China and the Uyghurs is a different case because it doesn’t have geopolitical implications anymore, beyond being the last thing a lot of Westerners hold on to as a shorthand way to paint China as being generally worse (again, applying some moral framing to an amoral actor, but there’s more here). Here I think the mistake you’re making is thinking that “tankies” genuinely believe that China is committing genocide but this is some kind of inconvenient truth or exaggerated narrative. Like Holocaust deniers or deniers of the Armenian genocide. The opposite is true: we generally are just not convinced by the evidence presented by the NGOs involved and genuinely believe that China is not committing genocide. And I say that as someone who, in 2018, 100% believed that it was true. Upon further inspection of the evidence some years later, I realized I had been fooled. And for the record, if I was convinced that the evidence was solid I wouldn’t deny it, either. Much like I don’t deny that the Soviet relocation of the Tartars was actually ethnic cleansing. So this isn’t a case of arguing from the conclusion, or already having decided “the good guys don’t commit genocide so it can’t be true.” It’s a genuine position that one can arrive at after investigating the matter. It’s also the position held by pretty much all majority Muslim countries in the world.
TLDR: don’t apply this “good guys vs bad guys” or “simping” framing to geopolitics. Don’t assume your interlocutor sees things that way either.
Edit: I want to add that you didn’t completely fall into a moral analysis either, which is good. You attributed a material reason for why you think Russia is invading Ukraine, that being Ukraine’s resources. I disagree with your analysis: why would Russia invade Ukraine for economic reasons when it would mean getting completely cut off from the global commercial system, mainly their European trading partners? It also has meant the severe reduction of their consumer economy in favor of a massive, cancerous expansion of their military-industrial complex. That’s just not a development that is remotely in the Russian capitalist class interest, so I don’t think that it makes sense as an explanation unless you assume they were acting irrationally and couldn’t foresee these consequences. Security concerns make more sense as a reason than wanting a land grab. But this kind of analysis is a lot better than the moral one.
Agreed. But I think “liberalism” is the underlying problem. Fascism is its extreme.
possibly? Being a liberal is the default where I live. Its generally considered the opposite of “conservative.” I give liberals (in the US politics sense) a bit more grace than most leftists. It is as far left as most people consider “allowable” in the US. They don’t hold very many abhorrent social opinions; they are quite supportive of queer rights, they volunteer at soup kitchens with me, oppose nazis, are environmentally conscious, etc.
Their main issue is that they have never been taught to view the world differently. So they talk about environmentalism, and they get behind bike lanes and electric cars, but they cannot conceive of restructuring cities to make use of more public transportation, or say blowing up fossil fuel infrastructure in minecraft. They want to help the homeless, but they can’t imagine just housing people, they support shelters and clothing drives and the salvation army, and other stop gaps within the system. I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that people who think what I think are rare, and even various other stripes of leftists (anarchists, syndicalists, MLs, etc) are all gonna be a vanishingly tiny minority. I don’t think most liberals are so far gone we can’t reach them.
(Unless you meant like, neo liberalism, with like Thatcherist and Reaganite austerity, in which case yeah, basically fascism).