my presence was requested, so i will make a big effortpost here in the declining days of the lockdown:
My girlfriend was born in China and spent the first 15 years of her life there. Her school taught revisionist history and fired teachers who went off-script from the CCP's narrative of Chinese history. Her parents are not party members, so they are occasionally forced to go to Marxist reading sessions to ensure that they are not subversives. When her grandparents were growing up during the Cultural Revolution, they were forced to kill their own teacher. We use WeChat to talk to one another, but I have found my account deactivated whenever I send her something that even vaguely criticizes or makes fun of the CCP. I have to be careful about what I send her because I don't want her to be harassed by government officials when she goes home to visit her parents.
My roommate in my Junior year of college was a Chinese exchange student; he became one of my closest friends and we still keep in contact. Though I liked him a lot, he was completely brainwashed by the CCP and followed the party line lockstep. He genuinely believed that nobody but Xi Jinping could possibly do the job of leading China, and that nobody else wanted the job anyway. He routinely used tired arguments of cultural relativism to explain away the differences between our systems, even as he showed genuine fear when we discussed things that the CCP would rather we didn't talk about. This included Tiananmen Square, the crimes of Mao, and Deng Xiaoping's reforms-- he insisted on calling China's system "Communism with Chinese aspects" despite all evidence to the contrary, because it was what he'd been told from birth. His mixture of blind loyalty and subconscious paranoia is pretty much par for the course for those living in a surveillance state. He, like other victims of authoritarian regimes around the world, is in serious need of psychological help.
My other roommate during Junior year went to Hong Kong during the protests last summer. He saw protesters getting beaten, gassed, and arrested for trying to preserve a semblance of democracy in their city. The Hong Kong police are not officially part of the CCP, but they do its bidding, and they engaged in absolutely brutal tactics to quell the protesters. The extradition law was 100% the product of mainland meddling in Hong Kong, and sadly the strong response to it will probably only end up postponing the inevitable.
So no, I don't know everything about the CCP... but I've heard enough to make a judgement. The Communist Party of China is an evil organization that has subjugated and attempted to brainwash a great nation-- a nation that deserves far, far better than the leaders they have right now. The CCP has tried to keep the populace placated through vague platitudes, historical scrubbing, and GDP growth (the product, of course, of pro-market reforms). However, it will not last forever. The Party has built itself up as a benevolent power that genuinely wants the best for the Chinese people. It has expertly used the humiliations suffered by China in the past as a springboard to create national unity and a sense of collective sacrifice. In doing so, it has assumed paternalistic responsibility over its citizens, claiming credit for their higher standard of living and powerhouse economy. But the good times will have to end someday (they may even be ending now), and when that happens, the veil will be lifted. In a democracy, there are built-in mechanisms to cope with social upheaval and dissatisfaction with the government. In a country like China, the only available mechanism is revolution. I sincerely hope I live to see that day come. The Communist Party must be destroyed if China is to flourish.
Stop playing apologist for a regime that is currently engaged in a literal genocide and start engaging with reality. You might like it.
Okay, so you had/have a Chinese girlfriend and had a Chinese roommate in college. I lived with a bunch of Chinese people and heard varied opinions towards the government. Those are two things we have in common it turns out, and the second, especially, was a big factor in why I originally to China - that roommate (who is now in the US military) really put the thought in my mind. We still talk most days. He generally enjoys the Western way of life, but having experienced a good deal of poverty, sees downsides to it too. He hates the Hong Kong protests with a passion. Why? He sees it as a geopolitical intrusion of the United States into China. He is critical of what he perceives as racism on the part of Hong Kongers towards mainlanders. There is some evidence for that taking place, not enough in my estimation to say it is the primary factor in the protests. That US media attitudes towards China play a big role is undeniable. That Hong Kong has greater freedom of the press, especially for international media outlets is also true. If you genuinely believe that a "free market of ideas" will lead to truth, or even pragmatically beneficial ideas - then I think that's a reasonable reason to be concerned about what's happening in Hong Kong. I don't really believe that. Western media has its biases, it has its own vested interests - and I get why the firewall is in place. That's a very destabilizing factor, especially in countries without much as much media presence. It isn't really possible to go from a free media environment to a controlled one. So I think the HK battle is not good for China regardless of what happens. Integration would probably be a net economic negative for China and I think the government would delay integration another 50 years before considering opening up that issue. The extradition law was not that significant in itself - if a law which was literally just put in place to allow a murderer/rapist to be punished (which it was: and that case took place in Taiwan, ironically enough) was not enough to allow further integration between HK and the mainland, it's hard to imagine that
any kind of political integration beyond what already exists will be possible in the near future. That's unfortunate, because further integration between Hong Kong and Shenzhen is probably the best chance Hong Kongers have of improving their lot in life.
It sounds like your roommate was a massive Wumao. I cannot say I am friends with any serious Wumaos. One of my coworkers lived in a Western country for several years and was anti-CCP for most of his life, coming from a background of dissidents. He is still a very Western guy in his attitudes and ardently dislikes communism - but, to paraphrase a long discussion of his journey: "I was very anti-CCP for most of my life, but they've brought results. Things are better than they ever have been. People are economically secure and have a good amount of autonomy in their personal lives." That is largely the result of pro-market reforms (which, it's worth mentioning, were opposed by many of the TS protesters. It wasn't a pro-liberal democracy movement, in general, nor a peaceful time on either side.), but China is still a country with a massive state sector, and especially in recent years under Xi a huge focus on poverty alleviation programs. It is a fairly pragmatic state. I wouldn't call it a socialist ate, but some form of authoritarian form of "social democracy" fits the bill. People of various viewpoints towards economics within China are still somehow able to get behind it on the basis of results.
I don't understand why you are so willing to dismiss any support for the Chinese government by Chinese people, even with a relativistic understanding, as "brainwashing." Yes, I get it, we all get it - there is a kind of political correctness here that prevents people from saying things which contradict the rule of the CCP. There's a point of political dissent which is not tolerated within the West either. There are many theoretical issues with this system, but it's a fact, and
even the journal "American Affairs" is willing to concede that people have trust in government in China that is
not just the result of brainwashing or something like that. It is genuinely the result of governmental responsiveness. How is governmental responsiveness even a factor in the Chinese system, which is not institutionally democratic? There was an immigration law recently which people reacted to strongly, against the government, on Weibo. There was some censorship of more extreme opinions, but people submitted their opinions to the government through official means, and the law was not passed in the form it was presented. There are ways for the public to participate in the legal process, and people are getting more and more aware of this. It is an active form of civil participation, and while it has its limits, it's generating a lot more identification with the state in average Chinese people than liberal democratic elections presently are. Protests against local governments happen a lot more frequently. The central government is well-aware of the fact that allowing protests against local governments allows for a form of political competition as would exist in a liberal democracy, and will often side with local protesters as a means of righting wrongs while saving face.
China is about the last country a revolution is going to take place in. By pretty much any measure of optimism or trust in government, it's doing better than the Western world. This is not from a lack of knowledge. People know full well that there is more political freedom in the West. There is an interesting fact of how authoritarian states work - which is that they don't really care that much what
you, personally, are doing. Yes, dissidents get heavy-handed treatment sometimes. That's only
likely to affect you if what you're doing is somehow significant, if you're a journalist or some other big shot with a stake in the dirty game of politics. The average person could not care less about this. And why should they? It genuinely is a dirty game, and often one with Western money involved. If you look at, say, Russia (another country I spent some time in), a country with institutional democracy and an authoritarian culture - where the modus operandi is just to extrajudicially assassinate the sorts of people who are believed to be caught up with foreign powers - China's approach is probably a lot less bloody. But in both cases it is reasonable to be weary of American influence, and many people are aware of that. Many people who might genuinely want a change in government, in either country, are dissuaded from joining the dissident movement by the fact that it is transparently compromised by Western interests. But far fewer people want a dissident movement in China, because the government has genuinely done a better job of maintaining favor with with people than any other major power.
As for the WeChat stuff... foreign accounts get closed a lot. They don't generally monitor private chats, only group ones, and group chats do sometimes get shut down when there is a lot of anti-government sentiment. I've had many very... open... conversations about issues with Chinese people. There are just a few subjects which I wouldn't touch on over text, and there are subjects I wouldn't touch in with my name attached to them in the West either, if I wanted to feel safe in my job. Much of the difference in political systems that Westerners would take to demonstrate "tyranny," conjuring images of a state where people genuinely don't experience personal freedom and autonomy, are basically just abstract formalities, removed from the direct lived experience of the vast majority of people.
I don't really think the firewall, or anything like that, can or should last forever. A big purpose of it initially was to allow Chinese tech startups to develop to such a level as to be able to withstand Western competition. I think if the firewall came down tomorrow, it wouldn't make a big difference. People post things from the other side on every major Chinese site and anyone who cares enough can already access Western media easily enough. But China is a huge country, it has its own media, and its own narrative. Compare Quora, which is not blocked in China (neither is this site, actually), to Reddit - and you see a vast difference in opinions towards China. Educated Chinese people are far, far more aware of the Western narrative towards China than any Westerner is of the Chinese narrative. If you saw an influx of Chinese users on every Western site, you'd see a massive cultural conflict in values, and you'd see a massive backlash from Chinese people against precisely the dismissal of "relativistic" justifications of the Chinese system that Westerners tend to make. Liberal democracy isn't "the end of history" that it is believed to be in much of the West. My issue with threads like this is precisely that. This absolutist feeling of superiority, belief in some unrealistic concept of "totalitarianism" that is believed to exist in places you don't
know. I want to tie that to a concrete reality. The concrete reality is that if you want Plague Inc in China, you have to download the APK online or pay a few bucks a month for a VPN to download a foreign app store. Pointing to that as some kind of hellish totalitarian reality is deflection from the massive issues growing in the West. Concretely, Chinese people are more content with the situation here than Westerners are, and for good reason - and no Orientalist caricature of the country and all its issues is more worth talking about than that concrete reality.
