i’m not exactly sure how friendly this community is with potentially controversial opinions on china and the ccp but i really just want to have an open honest conversation on this topic without getting called a dumb ch*nk or cia operative (which i do get a lot on twitter). also this is kinda long and rambly and maybe nobody will read it but if a single person does and is interested in talking more pls hmu.
basics: i think as far as political leanings go, i would label myself a leftist and/or socialist, depending on who i talk to. i have an academic interest in decolonization and police abolition. i’m taiwanese, which comes with a whole host of political implications on its own, but i think it’s necessary to state this given the topic matter. also, i am 21 and still in university and most of the time just kinda a dumbass, so bear with me.
on topical issues: i am part of the diminishingly small community of pro-hk leftists both irl and on twitter. i’ve participated in climate, blm and hk protests in london (go to uni there). i am fairly certain that i can’t travel to hk and china now without getting arrested because of my activities in this community and because of other taiwan related non-profits that i’m involved in. i’ve had the cops called on me at both blm and hk protests and it has cemented my belief that ACAB.
on hk protests: there is a wide, wide range of political opinions in the hk protest scene, and i have been personally disgusted by many hk supporters for also being trump supporters and/or capitalist shills. however, i do believe that the fundamental cause that the protesters are fighting for is just. police action in hk has also been just terrible, and when i say acab i mean All cops. lausan’s publications on the matter generally align with what i personally believe in, as do many prominent pro-hk leftists on twitter.
on uyghurs: it is incredibly hard to discern fact from propaganda and fiction when it comes to this specific issue. i understand the hesitation that many of the left have when it comes to believing the scale of what’s going on in the XUAR - zenz, aspi, and many american/european politicians that have spoken on it are unreliable or downright despicable and have suspicious motives. however, in the same vein, many leftist papers i’ve seen cite sources directly sanctioned by the ccp which i for the life of me cannot take seriously. i have talked personally to uyghur protesters (again in london) who have missing family members. i think it’s important that in our discourse on the subject we don’t speak over uyghurs who are living through real, everyday trauma. my personal position on the issue is that i believe what’s happening in the XUAR amounts to cultural genocide, based on everything i’ve read (pro and against) and personal accounts obtained from people i’ve talked to irl. i find it incredibly difficult to navigate the political discourse surrounding this on twitter bc it often escalates to, well, finger-pointing and personal insults. it’s really soul-sucking to be called a cia operative/bought by the cia when i literally fucking despise american imperialism. also i’m a broke uni student :(
on the ccp: this might be a controversial thing to say here, but the ccp is not the socialist/communist haven that i’ve seen many make it out to be (mostly online, admittedly). on a theoretical level it appears to me to most resemble a state capitalist system, and politically it is most definitely authoritarian. the ccp, however, does not represent all of china and chinese people, who i think are really one of the biggest victims of the regime. the smear campaign against china/chinese people that many us/european news outlets/politicians have adapted is straight up racist and sinophobic. i think at the end of the day, it is possible to criticize the ccp’s actions without demonizing the entire nation.
on twitter leftism: i only started being involved and active in the leftist and hk scene on twitter around autumn last year, but it’s so toxic that i am becoming pretty disheartened and disillusioned. it is an absolute shitshow, for example, to talk about trump being a racist sexist and morally abhorrent asshat in the protest scene because there’s an infuriatingly high number of ‘single-issue trump supporters’ both in hk and taiwan. the backlash you get from criticizing the ccp or suggesting that there is something incredibly wrong going on in the XUAR on leftist twitter is actually eerily similar.
i’m not sure if i’m missing out on some stuff here but these are just the things i’ve been ruminating over since end of last year. i only recently discovered chapochat off the r/wsb fiasco, and found this page, so i just wanted to engage hopefully with reasonable leftists who can talk respectfully and critically on these subjects.
hope y’all have a good day :)
**edit: hello friends thank you all for your replies, some of which have been so detailed and insightful! i would like to continue the conversations with everybody but it’s giving me a bit of anxiety looking at so many responses, so i may take some time off of the thread. however, i have read through every single response here and it has given me a lot to think about! thank you for your contributions! i’m also not quite sure how this platform works or if there’s a DM function, but if there is and any of you would like to chat with me personally on this topic feel free to hmu.
hope y’all have a good day, stay safe and keep cozy!
I don’t agree with everything you say, but you have some reasonable takes. Have you read Blackshirts and Reds? It focuses on the Soviet Union, but a lot of its content about U.S. claims of authoritarianism could easily be applied to China. In particular:
We have heard much about the ruthless Reds, beginning with the reign of terror and repression perpetrated during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin ( 1929-1 953). Estimates of those who perished under Stalin’s rule-based principally on speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures-vary wildly. Thus, Roy Medvedev puts Stalin’s victims at 5 to 7 million; Robert Conquest decided on 7 to 8 million; Olga Shatunovskaia claims 19.8 million just for the 1935-40 period; Stephen Cohen says 9 million by 1 939, with 3 million executed or dying from mistreatment during the 1936-39 period; and Arthur Koestler tells us it was 20 to 25 million. More recently, William Rusher, of the Claremont Institute, refers to the " 100 million people wantonly murdered by Communist dictators since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917" ( Oakland Tribune, 1 /22/96) and Richard Lourie blames the Stalin era for “the slaughter of millions” (New York Times, 8/4/96)…
To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist countries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered. But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976.
We’ve seen big, bold claims of authoritarian excess before, and they turned out to be exaggerated by an order of magnitude. We’re in a new Cold War; we should look to the first Cold War to see the type of propaganda we can expect.
Additionally, when one compares the treatment of Uyghurs in China (or the treatment of Hong Kong protesters) to the treatment of black people in the U.S., or compares the Chinese approach to extremist violence to the American one, it puts things in a much different perspective. This doesn’t mean China’s approach is perfect, but it says something about how upset we should be with each situation, and it says something about how honest people are being when they’re foaming at the mouth over China but apologetic about the U.S.
Finally, there’s the question of whether a better (but still realistic) solution exists. The second link in the above paragraph touches on this, but what would a better solution to extremist violence look like? If that’s hard to articulate – and it is – perhaps that explains in part why the existing solution leaves something to be desired.
hi, thanks for sharing! no i haven’t read that, but i’ll take a look when i have time. funny thing is my degree is actually eastern europe and russia focused, so that should be an interesting read.
i do question the numbers you get in the current literature regarding the situation in the XUAR, and i don’t doubt they’re inflated, but i do think the fact remains that there is something very wrong happening there, and it’s distressing to me that it’s nigh impossible to figure out what the hell is going on because of the censorship and propaganda, in china and in the west. if i could fly there and verify for myself what’s going on i would, but again, that’s impossible.
Additionally, when one compares the treatment of Uyghurs in China (or the treatment of Hong Kong protesters) to the treatment of black people in the U.S., or compares the Chinese approach to extremist violence to the American one, it puts things in a much different perspective. This doesn’t mean China’s approach is perfect, but it says something about how upset we should be with each situation, and it says something about how honest people are being when they’re foaming at the mouth over China but apologetic about the U.S.
i agree with this completely, and unfortunately i have witnessed firsthand how pro-hk people in online spaces can be around the blm movement - that is to say, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and anti-black racism going on. i personally think that it is ideologically inconsistent to support hk but not blm, and vice versa. also pro-hk trump supporters are cancerous and i hold no sympathy for them.
it’s distressing to me that it’s nigh impossible to figure out what the hell is going on because of the censorship and propaganda, in china and in the west. if i could fly there and verify for myself what’s going on i would, but again, that’s impossible.
Consider that China invited diplomats from Muslim countries to visit, they did visit, and those countries found no significant issues. I think there’s still room for skepticism – big economies talk, and there are plenty of reasons for countries to soft-pedal other countries’ treatment of people – but this is pretty strong evidence against any sort of mass concentration camp narrative.
One story to watch on Hong Kong is a new visa program in the U.K. that would allow 70% of the territory’s residents to move to the U.K. and eventually become citizens. If there’s a mass exodus when that program starts, that’s a sign that tons of people in HK believe they’re experiencing serious oppression. But if most people stay put? That would suggest the protests weren’t widely popular, or the protesters don’t view their situation as dire, or both. It will be interesting either way.
Impossible? If you have the economic means it’s perfectly possible (at least when the pandemic is over and China issues visas again)
my parents believe that it is unsafe for me to visit hk or china due to the national security law, which i have violated many times. i on a personal level would love to visit again but i wouldn’t risk it.
hi, thank you for your detailed response, i would like to reply to it in detail as well but it’s a bit late so i might follow up tomorrow!
Follow https://twitter.com/RodericDay on twitter. He’s a really smart and principled marxist-leninist with very good threads on China and the Uyghurs. TLDR: China good, Genocide is CIA lies like WMD in Iraq.
oh i’ve actually talked to him directly before! he’s one of the few ppl i’ve found in the twitter leftist sphere who i can disagree with but still chat amiably with.
He’s really fucking nice and a really principled leftist. He’s someone we should all strive to be.
Just popping in to say this is 100% exactly the type of content I want to see on here, good-faith open-minded discussions from people who think differently. If anything, this should be this website’s primary goal. I’m happy to see you’re being well received!
hi yes thank you for the nice comment! this was what i was hoping for actually, to be able to talk to leftists who are able to see the nuance in contentious political issues and talk abt it without being rude or disrespectful :D
And just to be clear, some of us on here share the same dilemma as you. The “hivemind” is super pro-CCP, anti-HK, often disregards uyghur testimonies. I’m more somewhere in the middle, propaganda is coming from all sides and truthfully I’m not smart enough to discern it. So I’m kind of agnostic to the question “support CCP or not support.” That said, I’m fervently anti-interventionist. Bad shit is happening in China, to an unknown extent by me - but as an individual, it matters much more what you think of your own country. And in the past 20 years, the US & western democracies have far more blood on their hands than China does. Half a million dead in the middle east, countries economies entirely destroyed. China hasn’t done anything nearly as bad as this.
I want to ask in earnest regarding all your concerns, and I want you answer me as honestly as possible: what can you as a civilian activist in a country that is not China do about anything that is happening in China?
i don’t believe an individual activist has the power to do much about what’s happening anywhere, but we have a community spearheaded by actors who have real political power to effect change bit by bit. keeping the protests relevant online is i think base level involvement. on a personal level, being as i am taiwanese, i put my efforts into doing what i can: spreading awareness about global and domestic issues within taiwan, and donating to organizations i think are working to a valid cause when i can. i’m part of/founded student run non-profits based on these principles.
Thank you for your honest reply. When I say “you” I of course don’t mean you as an individual, so much as the collective of activists who take an agressive anti-CPC stance. I appreciate that as you are Taiwanese, you perhaps have a more personal stake in the issue than some Western-born activist who has been informed solely by mainstream western media.
For Western leftists and activists who take this stance, however, I cannot possibly understand:
- A) who or what they can influence into doing anything about it; China isn’t going to listen, and even if they can influence their own government, simple denoucement does nothing and China will carry on regardless with its own national projects. Any political action done against China in retaliation for its own internal affairs generally results in mutually destructive trade wars, sanctions, diplomatic breakdowns, and military escalation. China has rarely ever backed down from its stances and it’s more than happy to play the very long game.
and
- B ) Why they would waste their activist energy focusing on the actions of China, when they are far more likely to clean up house in what their own governments are doing in their own borders and the massacres and horrific human rights crimes their close, personal, freedom-loving allies like Israel, Saudia Arabia (and assorted other Gulf oil States), Indonesia, Brasil, et al are committing in regards to Palestinians, Yemenis, and their indigenous populations, using western sold hardware and direct participation. They claim “we can do both!” No, you literally can’t. Every second you spend writing a screed or attending a protest condemning China, you give western imperialists and their allies a free pass on their own crimes which you can actually influence. You take a bullet for your own imperialists while denouncing the actions of another nation.
I appreciate that as a Taiwanese your own relationships regarding China are complex and very dependent on both the PRC and the western imperialists, and that you have a mutually strained diplomatic relation with the PRC going back decades. May I ask, what is your stance on the territorial claims of the RoC and the KMT constitution in relation to the PRC’s own claims and current holdings which have been stable for decades? Do you believe that the RoC should control Xinjiang, Tibet, all of Mongolia, Hong Kong, and the entire South China Sea (which coincidentally the western imperialists roundly condemn the PRC for)?
thank you for your very thorough and thoughtful reply!
Every second you spend writing a screed or attend a protest condemning China, you give western imperialists and their allies a free pass on their own crimes which you can actually influence. You take a bullet for your own imperialists while denouncing the actions of another nation.
i understand this of course, and being american and british educated i do care a lot about what’s going on the us and the uk, but at this point in time i’m choosing my battles, and of course respect leftists who choose theirs. the toxic community i refer to on twitter is more specifically a reactionary group of leftists who for the most aren’t chinese/hkers/taiwanese/from any other country or social group related to the chinese diaspora, who use their platform to amplify the chinese government’s voice and positions.
May I ask, what is your stance on the territorial claims of the RoC and the KMT constitution in relation to the PRC’s own claims and current holdings which have been stable for decades? Do you believe that the RoC should control Xinjiang, Tibet, all of Mongolia, Hong Kong, and theentire South China Sea (which coincidentally the western imperialists roundly condemn the PRC for)?
i view the roc as a settler colonial state on the island of taiwan, though this is a more radical position i think than the average liberal/left-leaning taiwanese. i think the roc should be abolished, but as of now that’s probably not happening any time soon. i think the claims are antiquated and imperialist, and the only reason that the roc government officially maintains it is probably more due to the 1992 consensus than anything else.
