The horse is dead
Lol yeah go ahead and try when the vast majority of people just hate China and the other ones don’t know shit about it and they’re gonna start hating too if they Google about it. Even if they were mostly neutral they just wouldn’t give a shit. Like, what part of China’s program would you even be willing to implement? Trains? Wait until they hit you with any more specific questions. Most people don’t even want to implement anything resembling China’s program, so what is the point? A huge point of contention in the US was universal healthcare, except China doesn’t have that. Strong labour unions? Nope, they don’t have that either, they have a single massive labour union which is largely controlled by the state and collaborates with employers. There is absolutely no good propaganda except maybe idk, urban planning or something? Unless you think having to argue with everyone about whether or not the Uighurs are being genocided is good propaganda (it isn’t).
Dissociating communism from poverty, rebuking the primacy of free markets, openly using the state as a tool of class warfare, Huawei as an example of a worker co-op surpassing private enterprises like Apple, pointing to the successes of both their nationalized heavy industry, state champions and SOEs to disprove the idea that the private sector is more efficient (or the only efficient form of organization) and pointing to China’s massive economic growth as an example of what the Soviet Union could have replicated if it wasn’t isolated from world markets.
People are tired of stagnant wages, even just pointing out how much wages in China have grown builds resentment toward Capitalism.
I am not American, I focus on radicalizing disillusioned young people and people of color. Capitalism is going to kill us all -> Planned economies are the only alternative -> China is a surviving example of a planned economy and transitionary state with heavy state intervention in the economy.
It doesn’t matter so much what you think China is but rather what they want China to be and therefore what the Soviet Union could have been. That is the strategy I use to radicalize young people concerned about the climate and disillusioned with capitalism. It doesn’t have to be 100% coherent as in a debate club or research paper, people are emotional, the point is to wear down faith in capitalism and getting them to come around to the viability of socialism as an alternative.
The Uyghur conversation doesn’t have to be bad either if you have the credibility can turn it into a discussion about imperialism and the false pretenses of American interventionism.
What do you use to win people over? I don’t think there’s any better tools that the successes and victories of existing or formerly existing socialist projects.
People are tired of stagnant wages, even just pointing out how much wages in China have grown builds resentment toward Capitalism.
China literally did capitalism to achieve that growth. Not exactly the neoliberal conception of capitalism but capitalism nevertheless. If that’s what you want to advocate for, there is plenty more examples to pick from than just China.
China is a surviving example of a planned economy
China is not a planned economy and hasn’t been for a long time. China is just more interventionist than most western countries.
I have no idea why someone would chose the most controversial country possible that isn’t even doing what you are advocating for for your propaganda.
The Uyghur conversation doesn’t have to be bad either if you have the credibility can turn it into a discussion about imperialism and the false pretenses of American interventionism.
Yeah totally, it’s definitely not like it’s gonna end up with you looking like a creepy genocide denier or whatever. Look, I’ve seen people try that stuff. I’ve seen the kinds of people who go around campus telling people how cool and misunderstood Stalin was and I’ve seen how badly it goes. If you wanna talk about some of the good aspects of China specifically, go ahead but if your propaganda is “haha hey I’m a socialist and China is also cool socialists, look how cool they are”, it’s gonna maybe work on 5 people and the rest are just gonna think you’re a bunch of creeps.
The growth is occurring under a dictatorship of the proletariat, wherein 70% of all heavy industry was nationalized and the state exerts a level of control, intervention and open class warfare far beyond Keynesian capitalist states.
Sure they have that large state union but laborers are still conducting strikes and wildcat strikes at a significantly higher rate than in union strongholds, and those radicals are much more likely to be literal Maoists than limp social democrats.
They are explicitly attempting to correct for the pitfalls of the Soviet Union, namely capitalist encirclement, autarky, and the overwhelming of the planning apparatus for as long as possible. They are also adapting to the reality of the world without the Soviet Union, wherein socialism is no longer a world power and concessions must be made to avoid being destroyed in the same manner.
On your last point that isn’t what I do. At least 40% of young people identify as socialists and I go based on their concerns. China is one of the best propaganda tools if you know how and when to use it. It’s an existing socialist project that is wildly successful. It’s not in second place like the Soviet Union was.
If you want to see what a state capitalist nation looks like when the Bourgeoise are in control, you can look at Russia.
you could make an eco-accelerationist argument that the maturation of capitalism in densely populated developing nations on a resource limited planet will much more quickly expose its inherent contradictions and is going to get us all killed decades ahead of schedule. but i’d imagine the easiest answer from most people would be to just kill all the poors, capitalism in one country, etc.
70% of the population working outside of the conditions of wage labor.
That… That’s not happening in China.
They don’t even have universal healthcare? Can somebody remind me why we like them so much?
Wages rising 12% every year from the CPC throwing their weight around in the economy, income tripling or more in the poorer regions across the board, a highly effective dictatorship of the proletariat, massive infrastructure projects designed to uplift the poorest regions of China and poorest nations in the world, and being overtaking the USA as the most successful and prosperous nation while broadcasting communist ideology and disassociating communism from poverty and stagnation.
They’re also the primary trading partner for both the remaining orthodox socialist nations and those under siege by American imperialism.
Because anti imperialism/antiamericanism, greater degree of interventionism in the economy and the possibility of them supporting leftists in other countries. I kinda understand it, these are legitimate in general. But I don’t understand why someone would use them for propaganda.
Also some people hold the hope that since nothing else works China will come in and press the socialism button one day for everyone.
Also it’s not just that they don’t have universal healthcare, their healthcare is actually significantly worse than the US. Which is somewhat understandable since they are very poor comparatively, however even poorer countries do better a lot of the time.
in china, patients murder doctors instead of the other way around
generally, issues that can be solved by going to the ER in the US are much cheaper in china. it’s when you get into more capital intensive illnesses that you become just as fucked as an american (if not more so). the systemic problem is that doctors are generally less motivated to provide quality service since their salaries are so incredibly low that they get more returns on being good paper pushers and taking bribes than being good doctors. increased rule of law (read: actual consequences) has the bribery on a steady downward trend.
the government has been unwilling to further subsidize doctor salaries (they’ve actually been on a downward trend for a while now), and the ‘solution’ in recent years has been to promote public/private partnerships in the various departments in order to indirectly offload the cost on to the consumer in the form of diagnostics and other consumable tech, of which the doctors can get a cut. this has created a situation in which quality coverage has become more concentrated in capital-dense areas and people only ever go to the big name hospitals for anything. the government’s response to this has been to throw money at the smaller public clinics to entice people coming in with easy fixes away from the bigger hospitals so that the specialists there can do specialist things instead of spending 90% of their time treating stubbed toes.
tldr; complicated
