There are different strong claims based on ideologies while none can be falsified. Let's look at the history:
1.The revolution of 1911 that overthrown the Qing dynasty was based on the idea that a democratic and prosperous new China will be established. It didn't happen. Instead there was tens of years of bloody civil war.
2.In the Culture Revolution between 1966-1976, the grass root democracy was encouraged by Chairman Mao at the beginning for his political purpose. There was a chaos all over the country that every cities/towns/factories/schools there would be (almost) exactly two parties fighting with each other while both claimed to loyal to Chairman Mao.
The Chinese elite already know what's the consequence CCP is gone. Most normal Chinese as well as all Westerners don't know.
While you may be right about the CCP's motives, China has its own long history of political thought, including the correct role of the State and public dissent. Guess what? For the vast majority of Chinese history, rulers viewed public dissent as tantamount to open rebellion and reacted accordingly.
Political systems are in part products of their culture. Free speech is not part of the cultural or political history of China, as it is in the West.
they had perhaps the best teachers in how to do revolutions and propaganda in the world, so they're doing what works. the problem with what you say is that it is not backed up by sources and yeah i don't speak Cantonese nor Mandarin. the CCP doesn't care about their citizens enough to defend them in the way you do, i guess that's because they'd have to admit that there's anything worth talking about going on if they did.
I think you can look at the actions and history of the CCP and be pretty wary of their intent and the methods they will use to get there. China estimates 16.5M died due to the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution brought millions more deaths. Fast forward to more recent events in tiananmen square, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, etc. and one can be easily made skeptical of the motives of the CCP.
I think pointing to different culture and history is a valid point of discussion. The point of view of a lot of the mainland Chinese people I've spoken to is that the post-Mao CCP has done a lot of bad, but also an immense amount of good for China as a whole. Compare the modern CCP with all of China's past governments of the last two centuries, and it's unambiguously better than Mao, the warlords, or the late Quing dynasty. Sure, maybe China would have been better off if the KMT won the civil war, but we can't change history.
The history of what did happen is that after Mao the country went from struggling to feed most of it's people to what is likely the 2nd most powerful country on Earth. It went from GDP per capitalism of $1,000 in 1970 to $8,000 in 2010. China singlehandedly halved global poverty in doing so. While some of it's actions are appalling to foreigners, they are tolerated for historical reasons. E.g. distrust of organized religion stems from repeated religious rebellions that killed tens of millions of people, so many Chinese see the suppression of religion as a necessary measure to ensure social order. In that sense many Chinese have the same underlying ethical framework (don't needlessly cause harm, try to better the lives of everyday people, etc.), but the lessons history taught the country means that they pursue these ideals in a different way, and opt to make different tradeoffs when balancing different needs. While I am indeed apalled by some of the CCP's actions, I can empathize to a degree as to why Chinese people would still have a positive view of it overall.
Of course, this is coming from a Westerner summarizing my interactions so it obviously risks putting words in other people's mouths.
Beautifully written. But you mislead. You start by criticizing the Chinese education system and then you say there is no way to verify the story of CCP, so CCP may not be the bad people. That the impression you provide in this post and in reply post to this one.
Here's another view point. CCP is anti democracy. Any Chinese citizen who oppose the authority of CCP must be encouraged in the interest to promote democracy.
As I understand it, the current CCP is a product of the cultural revolution being widely recognized as a mistake and consequently people with different ideas coming to power after Mao was dead.
It seems too glib to say "oh they're not communist" as it sounds to me like saying they're just not true to the revolution for no particular reason.
You have 2 facts: 1. the CCP made average Chinese citizens 30x richer in 30 years. 2. somehow everybody in the West thinks CCP is bad and believes Chinese people hate their government.
These 2 facts don't match, and you should think why, maybe some propaganda is at work.
Edit: crap I forgot I'm green, which looks so bad when I make this kind of arguments.
They did complain a lot about how the CCP plunged the country into the largest famine in history because of their incompetence. It was this incompetence that led to the rise of Deng Xiaoping. Mao then launched the Cultural Revolution during which different factions in the CCP fought with each other rather than "keep their head down". At Tiananmen Square in 1976 millions of people, peasants and rich, shouted slogans attacking Mao and the Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping then launched the economic miracle by reducing CCP involvement in the economy .
To say that the history of modern China is a long, stable period where the people never spoke up and built a powerhouse economy by listening to the directives of the all knowing CCP is historical revisionism at best.
Also keep in mind that positive views of the CCP are not quite as reliable as the negative ones, given that China is dictatorship actively trying to brainwash people into loving the CCP.
What do you think their views would have been had a free press existed and schools did not engage in indoctrination?
To me what legitimacy the CCP has stems from its ability to maintain stability and foster human happiness. I would argue that the attempt to control history is wrong from a moral framework, but the Communists are unlikely to care, eh? So, from the viewpoint of realpolitik then, they either must control history globally or risk radicalizing any Chinese citizen who e.g. goes on vacation outside the CCP's reality bubble. So we have an inevitable clash of fundamental values.
It's war.
In fact, it's WWIII. Control freaks vs. stability freaks.
Who said anything about revolution? Mainland Chinese hold unnatural views on many issues that are shared essentially nowhere else in the world and are easily traceable back to the CCP's interests and propaganda.
China's claim to Taiwan is the same claim that the UK has to Australia. Most mainland Chinese still think Falun Gong was a bunch of crazies and are unaware of the government crackdown of them. The details of the Tienamen Square Massacre are not well known. Mao is still a hero in the eyes of hundreds of millions. Mainland Chinese are mostly unaware of the human rights abuses occurring among Tibetans and Uighurs. The continuing extreme mistrust of the Japanese hard to explain in a world where Israel is friendly with German--unless you have an authoritarian power seeking to whip up nationalistic support to maintain its control over society.
These views (literally forced upon them, in a collective sense) result them condoning massive human rights violations, mercantilist trade policies, increased risks of war and conflict with major powers, and other societal negatives.
Those risks are exclusively attributable to the CCP, whereas economic growth in a country like China likely does not exclusively require said rulers.
I would suspect what you said is true, but that wasn't my point.
My point was simply that the CCP != China.
They've put a huge amount of propaganda work into trying to conflate criticism of the party with hatred of the country (and by extension, the people in it), to the point where even foreigners start to drink the Kool-Aid.
I agree that the CCP is, on balance, worse (e.g. more socially repressive) today than in the 90s but I don't think it's about to return to the bad old days of Red Guards and struggle sessions, or the really bad old days of farm collectivization and mass famine. I also don't think comparisons to Weimar or Nazi Germany are remotely appropriate. The state nutures nationalism, but so do most others. (B2 bombers flying over sports games? Subtle!) The major difference is many Chinese have experienced a sharp increase in standard of living within their lifetimes, so they are more likely to be nationalistic true believers.
Ordinarily, this would subside in later generations, but my fear is that western jingoism and igorance about China is delaying or even reversing this process. There is a recent research paper which presents data showing Chinese international students were less likely to adopt liberal positions when confronted with anti-China attitudes. This matches my anecdotal experiences where people proselytizing the superiority of western systems of government (and/or the evils of the Chinese one) get basic facts wrong and completely alienate their targets.
This is a lot of good information you provided and makes a good case for the CCP perhaps being legitimate, or perhaps least-illegitimate govt available given Chinese realities. I'll read up on the references you provided. Like anything, it is not universally bad, and there are many good things it does, and the meritocracy sounds great as you describe it. And the cooperation between the bureaucracy and politicians also sounds way more effective than things are often done in the west.
Yet the 8 parties with a non-adversarial relationship sounds like standard authoritarian controlled opposition.
Plus, there remain many problems both internally and on the international stage.
Internally, you make clear that the goal isn't 100% censorship, but only suppressing anything that might become a movement of it's own, even if apparently favorable to the CCP. And suppressing news that might turn to racist acts against Uyghurs is not a bad thing to do. Yet we still have 'forced reeducation' of a million of them. We still have the 6 year-old Panchin Lama and his family being disappeared 3 days after being recognized by Buddhist religious authorities, and a new CCP-appointed person announced, along with many actions to dilute Tibetean Buddhism. This is straight-up cultural genocide, designed to wipe out a culture in a generation.
We also have many wholly unjustified claims of sovereignity in international waters, islands, and Taiwan, for example. They blatantly violate the Hong Kong transfer agreements only a few years after they start.
You need only skim the Human Rights Watch reports [1] to see a litany of problems, all systematic, and not one-offs. Not to mention efforts to silence people abroad [2].
They say "don't interfere in our internal affairs" which sounds fine, except that they are actively attempting to annex and eliminate their neighbors.
And sure, if they've done so many good works, maybe they could win an election. But since they never put it to the test, I'm still not sure I could call it legitimate.
If they didn't have the systematic internal human rights oppression, and systematic international expansionism, I could see it as a legit alternative... but there are these core systematic problems underlying all the good stuff.
Anecdote (not data, not agreeing or disagreeing, just one point):
I have good mainland Chinese friends who are members of the CCP. They don't believe in communism, they're members of the CCP because 'it looks good to have the CCP on your CV'. They know the government killed people in Tiananmen square.
They do link the CCP to the fact they're richer than their parents (I see this as the US deciding to 'open China' back in the 70s). And they value stability more than the individual.
In other words: arc of history nonsense. What should have been clear and is clear if you think about human nature for two seconds or that CCP interests do not represent Chinese interests.
Why?
Because it’s a single-party dictatorship and because the interests of the State are subordinate to the interests of the people who control the State. That’s true in America too, which is why we have elections and transfers of power, and though our elections are fair and free by a reasonable metric, the deck is still stacked in favor of those who already have power. The PRC has nothing resembling the peaceful transfer of power and therefore the only means of transferring power within the PRC as it is constituted today are less than peaceful.
It's an absurd analogy only if you're in denial about the horrors of extreme nationalism or ideologies coupled with authoritarianism.
You even seem to deny that today's CCP is the same CCP as the one that cause the Great Leap Forward. In many ways, the CCP of today is more like the CCP of the 50s than the 90s.
The Chinese elite already know what's the consequence CCP is gone. Most normal Chinese as well as all Westerners don't know.
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