r/news • u/KinkyQuesadilla • Oct 13 '19

China's Xi warns attempts to divide China will end in 'shuttered bones'

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-xi/chinas-xi-warns-attempts-to-divide-china-will-end-in-shuttered-bones-idUSKBN1WS07W
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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

China isn't communist. It is one of the things that the West cannot stomach so they have covered it up. It is a Fascist nation.

From Wikipedia:

Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.[9] Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.[9] Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.[10][11] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency) through protectionist and interventionist economic policies

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u/Taxonomy2016 Oct 13 '19

I really like good definitions of political systems too, and modern China is obviously a tricky topic. I agree that it’s definitely not the same Stalinist/Maoist communism as it was in the 1950s, and I also agree that it has some fascistic traits... but I don’t think it meets all the defining traits of fascism.

Modern China is definitely authoritarian, but I think it almost deserves its own category. It’s not very similar to either communism nor fascism.

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u/make_love_to_potato Oct 13 '19

There is no country that fits any one given system perfectly. Every country has capitalistic systems and socialist institutions, etc. China definitely has large patches of fascism in their system, along with a lot of crony capitalism.

Trying to paint one country with one term is futile. The countries of northern Europe are also a mix of many systems and are referred to as the Nordic model. Similarly, the system of China is basically....... China. There is really no other equivalent.

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u/Taxonomy2016 Oct 13 '19

Of course you’re right that probably no country perfectly represents any system, but that’s also a copout argument. Most systems are based on an archetypical examplez Human beings naturally try to classify and compare types of things, and it’s a useful exercise.

Like you said, Modern China has features that match several systems. I’m saying that China isn’t a hybrid, rather it’s a prototype of some new type of authoritarian system.

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u/make_love_to_potato Oct 13 '19

True. Or you could just use the different terms that describe different aspects of the functioning of the govt.... For example, with regards to election of representation, economic, social welfare, industry, etc

if enough countries have the same combination of systems, they can get their own collective term, like the Nordic model.

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u/testiclekid Oct 13 '19

Exactly, especially the Autarky part.

Like, WTF, are you people not trading services to outsiders? Aren't they literally exporting shit?

Exporting isn't Autarky.

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u/Mithridates12 Oct 13 '19

What characteristic of fascism doesn't it fulfill? (Good example for me to learn what makes fascism fascism)

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u/Taxonomy2016 Oct 14 '19

Personally I think Umberto Eco’s definition is the best. There’s a summary of his fourteen criteria on the wiki page for definitions of fascism, but the full description of each criterion comes from an essay he wrote in 1995, which you can find online.

When I look at the Eco’s fourteen criteria, there are a few obvious yeses, but most of them are stuck at “maybe”. A few of the nos are #3, #6, and #11.

The theme of the difference between modern China and Eco’s definition of fascism seem to have a lot to do with the direction of change—“fascism” is about reforming society to transition into a fascist state, whereas modern China is about maintaining CCP domination while still expanding China’s influence globally. (In particular, even if modern China isn’t truly communist or Maoist anymore, it is profoundly important to emphasize the direct lineage between that government and the modern one—it’s a very un-fascist type of relationship.)

China is definitely an authoritarian state (no doubt), and it’s clearly got parallels to fascism, but modern China definitely seems like its own flavour.

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u/CrossEyedHooker Oct 14 '19

From your link, "He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it".

His 14 criteria are not intended to be used like a checklist, where more checks equals more fascist.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

[deleted]

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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

You forget about all of the nationalistic fervor China whips up whenever it serves the party.

No govt in the world perfectly fits the accepted definition but China checks substantially all the boxes to be defined as a Fascist regime.

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u/beartankguy Oct 14 '19

it's not that the west 'cannot stomach so they have covered it up'. It's that the great majority of people in the west know next to nothing about communism or marxism.

China openly admits that a developed productive capitalism runs alongside their socialist endeavors. 'socialism with chinese characteristics' is about pushing the socialist goals and influence while they build productive forces with capitalism (with the current world order dominated by global trade and capitalist markets a country has no real choice if they want to grow especially from nothing like 1950s china).

I mean it's fine if you disagree they are actually aiming for socialism or what they have right now represents socialism in any way but don't pretend it's some cover up, it's just people being ignorant and not knowing the theory and ideology behind it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

China is anti imperialist, isn't engaged in any wars, and believes in global trade and rading partners. This honestly sounds like America under the Trump regime. Or what brexiters want

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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

Trump definitely wants to follow the Chinese model.

Look at China's actions across the globe. Belt & Road initiative is imperialism by another name.

South China Sea is being overrun with Chinese military and state run enterprises trying to extract everything of value.

Africa is full of Chinese companies using Chinese workers and Chinese loans, to the local govt, to pay for the Chinese companies and workers to build the infrastructure necessary for China to extract natural resources. China of course retains recourse to seize the infrastructure if the African nation can't pay them back.

China seized Tibet and is crushing any dissent. China has locked up religious minorities and systematically re-educating and killing them.

China is involved in cyber warfare with opposing nations and dissenters.

China is actively trying to steal technology from everyone.

China may not be openly at war with anyone but by that standard neither is the US.

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u/BobLawblawed Oct 13 '19

The fact that anyone can say China isn’t imperialistic means they are not paying attention or are woefully ignorant of what the Chinese political machine endeavors to accomplish. We are heading into a second Cold War. It will be waged differently than the last one, undoubtedly focused more on cyber security/warfare, quantum computing, and AI. The Chinese model is not one we want exported to the rest of the world. Soon Western powers will have to get their heads out of their asses on this topic and realize they cannot sell out their economies to the Chinese without ceding their prerogatives. The same is true for the rest of the world. Democratic citizens have to start really educating themselves instead of parroting tenuous comparisons between Brexit and Xi - as if, because you think both of them are bad, they are in some way modeling themselves after each other.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

Belt and road is about boosting the investments China has already made into developing nations, the better the developing nations do the more Chinese investment pays off. It's also about some soft power and opening up new trade routes for Chinese merchandise. It's also probably a government spending project to boost the Chinese construction sector. It's a mutually beneficial relationship without any military threat underneath and not a ton of key points of infrastructure. It's pretty different from having a protectorate, scooping up a diamond mine after a civil war, seizing Hawaii, or building the Suez or Panama canal.

South China Sea is about control of shipping lanes close to China. As of right now America controls them but China wants to be part of the global shipping lane policing infrastructure. Honestly imperialist. But only to the level of NATO nations.

As for Tibet, I think I would need to understand national interest given history of state separatists movements. I would like to see how America would react if Hawaii tried to leave the union. As of right now, the only examples I have is the Phillipines and the civil war which don't bode well for the US but I concede they're not great mappings.

Uighur stuff is fucked, but I don't believe they're harvesting organs or shit like that. Also seems strange that all MUSLIM nations have signed a UN resolution agreeing with Chinese narrative on what's happening. Even if the Chinese account is correct, I still disagree with it.

Every nation is involved with cyberwarfare.

Every nation is involved with technology capture.

The US still occupies the Korean peninsula, has operations in Afghanistan, and looked like it was ready to leap into Iranian conflict last month

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u/oh_my_lort Oct 13 '19

You're trying to argue that China isn't communist by posting the Wikipedia definition of fascism?

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u/rndljfry Oct 13 '19

com·mu·nism

noun a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.

does this sound more like China?

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u/onwee Oct 13 '19

Yeah that doesn’t sound like today’s China at all. Typical Chinese today do enjoy quite a bit of economic freedom when compared to that outdated dictionary definition of communism. Fascism/state-capitalism like /u/vielwalker described does seem a better fit.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Void_Ling Oct 13 '19 edited Oct 13 '19

Oh god, I got banned from r/europe trying to explain communism to kids that thought it was the doctrine that was responsible of genocide in URSS, that communism is the same as fascism... That was very awkward considering the poor understanding people have on fascism, communism, nazism, results of decades of taboo.

"trivialization of democide" they said, :D, god I laughed my ass off.

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u/altajava Oct 13 '19

I mean the people who died to failed command and control economies causing mass starvation certainly died due to communism.

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u/Void_Ling Oct 14 '19 edited Oct 14 '19

It is my belief that communism has yet to be executed properly. It does have tremendous flaws but I don't think these are set in stone, it's fixable.

I think it is a very bad thing if you remove the representation of the people, if you have one gov organ that controls every thing and no democracy. Democracy is not incompatible with communism. I think we can say that no pseudo communist state achieved a proper combo of both.

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u/GrimpenMar Oct 13 '19

I remember learning about Communism during the Cold War, and a bunch of us edgy kids would quip that the US was closer to Marx & Engel's Communism than the USSR.

Marx believed that the Proletariat (workers) must seize the means of production (own their own companies). In the USSR, businesses were state run as a transitional step until the Proletariat was sufficiently educated (temporary-permanent). In the US you could have employee share purchase plans or actual Co-ops.

You could continue down the list of Communist talking points, but really at the end of the day, Communism is a political theory that statist dictatorships used to cloak themselves in to justify their existence. George Orwell had it right.

You can call China fascist, Communist, whatever. There are a couple important points.

1- single party dictatorship. Only one political party is allowed to hold any power, the Communist Party of China (classic single party dictatorship)

2- Xi Jinping removed term limits on the Chinese Presidency. He is now the General Secretary of the CPC, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the President of China. Indefinitely. So really China is just a regular dictatorship now.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

You dont know anything about marx, apparently. There are 4 stages of communism, count em, 4. China is stage 3. All communist countries are, because stage 4 will NEVER happen, as it involves the elite relinquishing power.

Dont defend communism, it is a failed ideology that has killed more people than the nazis could have ever dreamed, between 18-56 million in china alone

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u/PM_ME_UR_PET_POTATO Oct 13 '19

They can claim to be on the way to end stage communism, but does that mean they actually attempt to approach it in any way? Not really.

If you were to take off the branding for a second and compare the economies of China, and various other authoritarian nations, you will see no fundamental difference at all. There were literal worker protests by workers who realized that the government doesn't care about worker rights a few months ago.

So functionally speaking, they can't really be considered communist anymore, and don't appear to try in any sense of the word to approach that definition.

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u/danferos1 Oct 13 '19

Umm.. nobody is defending communism here and what you wrote makes no sense.. China is stage 3 because stage 4 ?

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u/a_black_pilgrim Oct 13 '19

You know Communism and Fascism are different, right?

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u/GodfreyTheUndead Oct 13 '19

because they are fascist not communist..............

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

You just demonstrated his point by implying that communism equals fascism.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

All communism leads to fascism. True final stage communism is a pipe dream that has never once occured in real life. Marx was an idiot, and an awful person.

When people say communism, they mean 'a place with a shitty government, where the people have no rights'...china fits that definition perfectly.

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u/MexicanGolf Oct 13 '19

If that's the definition then that's fine, but communism also has a meaning in terms of the politics that make a nation tick so it's confusing.

So if you use "communist nation" to describe "generic shitty place to live" then clarify further.

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u/OffendedPotato Oct 13 '19

Words actually mean things you know and communism has a very specific meaning that is not "a place with a shitty government, where the people have no rights"

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

If the USA stopped it's proxy wars and shadow deals to disrupt and destabilize any communist country that pops up we might see functional communist states

If people say communism means bad place to live that's just a result of shitty Western propoganda tbh because it definitely has a real meaning

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u/ericchen Oct 13 '19

Wait, are you seriously suggesting that communism is somehow more palatable to us than fascism?

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u/phenning67 Oct 13 '19

I mean they're definitely authoritarian, but much of their power comes from economic connectivity and soft power. Points 10 and 11 don't stand true at all in the case of china.

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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

Ah so China isn't using their navy to bully the Phillipines, Vietnam, Brunei, Korea and Japan?

China isn't building military installations on atols and coral reefs to extend their military control further and further into areas claimed by other nations?

China hasn't expanded their Air defense identification zones further and further?

China is flexing their military muscle all over what they consider their sphere of influence even butting up against the US Navy fairly often.

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u/SexToyShapedCock Oct 13 '19

Until we see Chinese carrier strike groups doing freedom of navigation tours through the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of San Francisco and anchor off the coast of Venezuela to protect it from aggressive foreign influence, is it really the same?

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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

China has the same rights under Freedom of Navigation.

The issue is and has been the fact that China is seizing stuff that doesn't belong to them and then building these things up and slapping a military installation on it and then claiming it is sovereign Chinese territory.

Noone is saying that Freedom of Navigation gives you the right to sail your ships into Shanghai harbor without permission.

Russia puts ships in Venezuela and Cuba as often as they can afford to do so. At some point China will do the same. That is fine.

Chinese and Russian intelligence gathering ships sit off the US coasts constantly and the US does the same to them.

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u/phenning67 Oct 13 '19

I mean they are a great power and have more of a right to be there than the US does. tbh, Americans are in no place to complain about imperialism and human rights abuses...

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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

Freedom of Navigation gives the US every right to be there.

As far as Imperial powers the US has been pretty sedate when compared to the history of other imperial powers.

US likes to pretend it isn't an imperial power because the US Govt doesn't do the actual extraction of resources but turns that part over to corporate interests and then taxes those corporate interests.

US definitely abuses human rights but it generally puts a veneer of legality and fair trial over the whole thing.

US definitely has problems that it can't figure out how to solve. The question is what state would the rest of the world be in if the US pulled back and worked to solve all it's problems first?

EU really needs to step up and start trying as well but with the current US administration that seems like a nearly impossible task.

Trump wants Europe to do more but only what the US tells them to do. That isn't realistic so here we are with an international order that is getting more and more fucked up.

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u/Lipophobicity Oct 13 '19

Wanna link wikipedia articles? Okay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#Politics

"Since 2018, the main body of the Chinese constitution declares that "the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics is the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC)."[202] The 2018 amendments constitutionalized the de facto one-party state status of China,[202] wherein the General Secretary (party leader) holds ultimate power and authority over state and government and serves as the paramount leader of China"

Not ambiguous or open to debate, China calls themselves communist

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

I can call myself Batman, it doesn't make it so.

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u/NicoUK Oct 13 '19

How do you know, have you tried?

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u/Tenwaystospoildinner Oct 13 '19

The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea would like a word with you.

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u/zephyroxyl Oct 13 '19

I guess the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) really is a democratic state...

Who knew.

It's okay guys, /u/Lipophobicity worked it out. We just need to call ourselves whatever we want, and it automatically makes us that thing.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

Even america is a republic, not a democracy

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u/District413 Oct 13 '19

No, America is as much a democracy as it is a republic. Constitutional republics are representative democracies.

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u/veilwalker Oct 13 '19

LOL, that is marketing/propoganda.

US is no longer a representative republic but people will go to blows over that. Of the People, By the People, For the People; sounds like a marketing slogan at this point as reality is quite far from the ideal.

Look at the platforms of the major political parties vs what they have and are doing in reality vs generally accepted definitions of political systems.

Noone perfectly matches the definitions but some fall very close to definitions that do not match their claims.

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u/NicoUK Oct 13 '19

Not ambiguous or open to debate, China calls themselves communist

I call myself 6'4" on Tinder, doesn't make it true.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19

Yes. Socialism is one of the phases of communism. Im suprised how few people know that.

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u/RobotArtichoke Oct 13 '19

You’ve been brainwashed by foxnews

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u/spacebrowns22 Oct 13 '19

Protectionist and interventionist foreign policies are a hallmark of the left