cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35822445
my family are Taiwanese-Americans. I was born in the US, but I grew up in a Taiwanese/Chinese household. I write both Taiwanese and Chinese because my grandparents were Chinese nationalists (KMT) who fought and lost to the communists and left China with Chiang Kaishek when he retreated to Taiwan. We’re from Guangdong.
Even though my grandparents spent most of their adult life in Taiwan and America, they still identify as Chinese. They still vote for the KMT and consider Taiwan a part of a democratic China, not the PRC but the ROC.
I don’t identify with an authoritarian China that suppresses freedom of speech, press and religion, commits cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, dilutes Tibetan culture and wants to annex democratic Taiwan. I wouldn’t like living in a country like that.
But that’s exactly what an uncle proposed me: some months ago he bought a house in Guangdong, a house he offers to our whole family. If I want, he says, I can live with him for free, he’s even offering me to let me live at his condo when he’s not in China (travels to America and Taiwan a lot).
I don’t see it: I’m politically active, actually support Taiwanese independence and I don’t believe I could keep my mouth shut if a Chinese starts telling me that Taiwan is a part of China every time I tell them I an actually Taiwanese. The conversation could go south really fast if they start to repeat communist propaganda about helping Uyghurs escape poverty (just an example out of several). I could land in jail.
My uncle says I should forget about politics and enjoy the scenery and local food. I still don’t see it.
Am I a moron? I’d only have to pay for the flight and food for as long as I live in China, a country cheaper than both Taiwan and the US
Harsh no, give me liberty.
Safety must necessitate a non-authoritarian society.
All states are authoritarian, what matters is which class is exerting its authority. The state is an instrument of class oppression, no more than that, and no less. In the US, the ruling class is the bourgeoisie. In the PRC, the ruling class is the proletariat. Since we can only move beyond concepts like authoritarianism once we abolish the state, and we can only abolish the state by eliminating class, which gives rise to it, we must support the working class being in charge.
Visit China, it will do you good to broaden your horizons. Talk to Chinese citizens, see what they think. China is a democratic country. Even the people of Taiwan want, above all, to maintain the status quo, not seeking full independence. All in all, you’re deeply ill-informed on what China is actually like, and are framing everything through an explicitly US-focused narrative. I recommend you focus on listening more than anything else if you do decide to visit.
Your grandparents were on the side of the owning class. Now it depends. Are you working class or owning class? If you’re owning class, don’t go. If you’re working class, go (and question what the owning class told you).
The authoritarian uniparty is the new owning class, functionally you still don’t have a say, just a different mouth telling you “they’re making decision in your interest”.
It’s the biggest false dichotomy on this planet statist capitalist and statis communism and the same as religious schisms, a disagreement over which elite should be deciding everything and which is going to face the wall.
Do that hardcore enough and you’ll get an elite which has decided to put all the other ones against the wall (pol pot).
You’re hastily jumping to the conclusion that the new thing is the same as the old thing just because it has some similarities.
Your example of religious schisms gives the game away, really, because every major religious schism I can think of did bring significant qualitative changes in the social organization of the societies that underwent them. For example, the ideological and philosophical basis of settlement in the United States was founded on the new sects of Protestantism that followed Calvinist influences. Their attitudes toward labor, property, the question of slavery, and many other political matters was distinct from the results you’d expect out of Catholic settlers, or any other religion. And that’s a difference in religion which, from a materialist perspective, is not even the primary thing that makes history move, but part of the ideological superstructure that serves to maintain the economic relations in a given society.
In the case of China: no, the “authoritarian uniparty” is not simply the new owning class. That’s not how the party works and it’s also not how class works. In fact, the statement “functionally you don’t have a say” is probably the most incorrect statement you can make about SWCC, because it’s a very practical system that, while it made a lot of compromises for the sake of reforms and opening up, it has always listened to input from the people. The way the entire CPC is structured is designed for that purpose and it gives its members ample room to have a say over the way things are run.
To think that the “authoritarian uniparty” was truly some kind of new owning class, you’d have to first explain how a political party that has its origins (and present support) in the peasantry and workers, comes to become the opposite thing entirely, a group that controls capital for the sake of producing more capital. That isn’t even a plausible statement to make of the ruling parties in Western imperialist countries: their ruling parties are organs of their respective ruling classes, international imperialist capitalists who use their states to increase their profits.
Is Xi Jinping answering to Chinese billionaires, structuring policy to serve their interests? And if he is, why do the billionaires allow the CPC to make each 5 year plan and the policies chosen to implement them based on the input from millions of party members, instead of receiving a policy plan from a billionaire operated think tank like they do in the West? Is it really all a big conspiracy?
Some resources:
You’re hastily jumping to the conclusion that the new thing is the same as the old thing just because it has some similarities.
Capitalist realism & imperialist realism and their consequences.
You’re not Taiwanese-American you’re Chinese-American. Taiwan is a rogue state created by US imperialists to assault China and it’s working considering how well it worked on you (the fact you consider yourself “Taiwanese” is insulting considering the history of the White Terror and the fact you were born and raised in a capitalist empire that treated Chinese as subhuman for centuries).
If you want to see the result of your anti-communist internalized racism you should look at the fate of Ukraine. The real world doesn’t work on your feelings.
I don’t know if you mean all that sincerely or you’re parodying people too far to the left…
if this first is true, it’s worrying people upvote you
guess there is a bubble for everything
Democracy can’t exist under capitalism, capitalism is inherently authoritarian. Sorry, you think all the news, media, housing, industry, and literally every scrap of economic power can be held in individual hands without that affecting the political system? Ive got a fuckin bridge to sell you
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
Albert Einstein
I fully agree. At this point I’d take my TARDIS back to Berlin in the summer of 1940 if I could get a free, all expenses trip.
