China is not communist. But we should talk about different economic systems because that’s the ultimate goal.
Communism in itself is a true ideal as long as output exceeds intake and satisfaction is high. It’s also possible on a global scale, if not designed for it.
Capitalism is also a true ideal as long as it’s built on an immovable foundation of human rights paid for by centralized non profit corporations.
The issue has nothing to do with the ideas themselves. The issue is and always has been the concentration of power.
It is the ideas of the few which can never properly represent the masses. Even with the best intentions. The only true ideal for power is that there is none except when handled by all. The US Constitution seemed to have this idea in mind with its intent, though it’s evolved into the same old concentration of power over time. Doesn’t matter which party either. The reality is power is so concentrated now that there are no true parties anymore. This is a mafia that transcends both sides.
So no China is no proof of anything except improper concentration of power. Mostly capitalist by the way. And totally tyrannical in their wielding of power against free thought, sex, religion, etc. It’s practically anti freedom and contradicts every protected class we have in the US.
Does anyone have the statistics on how many abortion occur there? Even if you’re pro choice, the piles of discarded fetuses could reach skyscraper height. This is not a normal issue to have. How many illiterate? How many old people died while they were bolted inside their homes during COVID?
If the question is what system would you be willing to put your life in the hands of, there is only one answer: which one has the most distributed power and wealth above the rest.
How many old people died while they were bolted inside their homes during COVID?
Just popping in to remind everyone that millions of people died because they west decided to let COVID run wild and those China wouldn’t have had to bolt those people inside for long if the rest of the world had bothered to properly respond to a pandemic.
This was pointed out to them before, they are repeating this dishonest framing because they’re a Polish nationalist. They pulled a quote from Marx talking about how bad the French state was and applied it to the USSR.
A single group of elites who decide who leads as the next president without any input from the people. This is exactly the definition of concentrated power.
I don’t have time to go through everything wrong with your post but I want to touch on Chinese vs American literacy rates for a moment
In America while the total population literacy rate is often cited at 99%, functional literacy (the ability to manage daily living and employment tasks) is lower, with estimates placing it between 65% and 85%.
China’s literacy rate has grown from 79% in 1982 to 97% in 2020.
In 2018 PISA results,15-year-olds in China outperformed U.S. peers in reading, math, and science. Some analyses suggest about 20% of U.S. 15-year-olds do not read as well as they should by age 10.
In the 2018 PISA China ranked first globally in all subjects. The U.S. ranked roughly 13th in reading and 37th in math among 79 education systems
Youth literacy in the U.S. is facing a crisis, with 25% of 16-to-24-year-olds deemed functionally illiterate as of 2023, up from 16% in 2017. Roughly 60% of U.S. teens do not read at grade level, and 34% of fourth-graders perform below basic reading levels.
In 2020, youth (15–24) literacy in China reached 100%.
Nothing you said contradicts anything I wrote, so I’m struggling to understand why you started your comment this way. To say “everything wrong with my post” then address nothing I wrote… I’m not sure you should be quoting literacy at all.
You’ll find I’m highly critical of both China and the US once we discuss further.
Lastly, there is no chance in hell China’s literacy reached 97%, not will it as long as rural lifestyle continues with no need for it.
Lastly, there is no chance in hell China’s literacy reached 97%, not will it as long as rural lifestyle continues with no need for it.
Whether you think they had need for it doesn’t matter. History shows that every socialist state has put enormous effort into universal literacy. This is not controversial; it’s a settled question among historians.
I just want to clarify, I’m saying there is no need for literacy in some of the rural areas in China. They are farmers, some without basic electricity and plumbing. It’s completely third world, except not in a suffering kind of way. Those are some of the kindest and hospitable people I’ve ever met.
I’m not disagreeing with your idea that socialist states put effort into education. To me education is everything no matter what system you have. Education should be the highest priority of society at large. I’m ecstatic that we might agree on that point.
They are farmers, some without basic electricity and plumbing. It’s completely third world
It was third world, thanks in part to a century of humiliation by the British empire, but everyone has plumbing, electricity, media, and communication now. There are some farmers using Chinese-made technology that already surpasses our own agricultural technology.
Absolutely not true. I lived among these people not long ago. To say “everyone has electricity” is simply false. That’s not true of any country… sadly.
How long ago was this and where? China made a big push against extreme poverty in the years leading up to 2020 and a central element was making sure people had functional housing and plumbing where in some cases people literally lived in a big cave or in huts in remote villages. While poverty in general persists, conditions that bad were basically eliminated.
Edit: I see elsewhere you said 11 years ago, so yeah, I think it’s perfectly likely you encountered something like that if you say you did, but I expect that if you look into how wherever you were is doing now, you’ll see that it has changed because of the national initiative.
No see his 6 months is worth more than my multiple decades because I accurately called him out on being a chauvinist, orientalist and fascist pig while pointing out the MANY issues with his “ideas” and that makes me “emotional”.
You think this angry, name calling, emotional person is schooling me? I’m a progressive on paper, the Bernie Sanders kind and they’re calling me a Nazi. I’m shocked people would give this type of person a second of thought.
Feel free to ask them about Mao “accidentally” killing 30-50 million people with STARVATION in the name of their oh so beautiful system.
What about throwing musicians and professors in prison for speaking out against the overbearing government?
How about Tiananmen Square?
Does this person even know what these events are? The government actively covers it up to this day. The millennial generation doesn’t even know what these are because it’s forbidden.
No. That’s why I usually say I’m a progressive on paper, but no modern politician represents that definition despite what they may call themselves. I like that Bernie would invest in the environment and tax the shit out corporations and billionaires though.
You think this angry, name calling, emotional person is schooling me?
Fuck off back to reddit with this debatebro crap. I’m under no obligation to be nice to your racist ass. And why would I be? Multiple people have tried talking to you in good faith and got dismissed them out of hand. I’m not here to debate you, I’m here to tell you to fuck off.
I’m a progressive on paper, the Bernie Sanders
So, a capitalist. And you’re expecting communists to give you props for that?
Feel free to ask them about Mao “accidentally” killing 30-50 million people with STARVATION in the name of their oh so beautiful system. What about throwing musicians and professors in prison for speaking out against the overbearing government? How about Tiananmen Square?
Lol. I can see why you say you’re only progressive on paper. In practice you’re a standard western Cold War Warrior, repeating far right claims word for word. What argument are you even trying to make? None I suppose, just vomiting out talking points.
Does this person even know what these events are?
Yes, you racist fucking vermin.
The millennial generation doesn’t even know what these are because it’s forbidden.
First off, I’m a progressive. Second, I lived in China for 6 months and I’m telling you the statistic is wrong. I have first hand experience among the many many many rural areas that are basically third world. China historically reports garbage numbers and this one of them. Shocking I know! How could they!
Nah, you’re repeating far-right talking points. You have no counter-evidence other than your belief that underdeveloped rural areas cannot possibly achieve high literacy rates, when exactly that has happened everytime socialism has been established around the world. Further, in recent decades China has been focusing on the urban/rural divide.
First off, I don’t have any right wing, let alone far right propaganda in my life. I’m a progressive. Do you think a MAGA idiot would go live in China themselves? Obviously not.
I don’t actually need evidence to be correct, because I saw it first hand. But I probably can prove it anyways. The simplest way: there are multiple definitions of literacy. They now call it functioning literacy in some cases. Others get very specific such as can they read a newspaper or write a statement about a topic? I do believe China is achieving great things with their younger generations. That, I also saw first hand. Although, they conveniently rewrite history as well. Completely covering up the atrocities the government has caused. That is pretty unforgivable.
Anyways, the older generation is filled with people who are still illiterate. They are not in school. They are not learning. They are working. And mostly happy by the way. Illiteracy is not a criticism on well being. That was someone else’s argument that “they must be doing well because they’ve achieved so much LITERACY.” Those are the happiest people I’ve ever met. Willing to share their food and home with total strangers. Their jobs and their lives and their happiness do not require literacy. That is why they will never change. Only once the younger generation has outlived the older long enough to reach a 97% rate could we call it the achievement you are wanting to believe.
Anyways, none of this has anything to do with my initial statement. Both systems suck! Everyone else is throwing these random statements such as literacy to try to change the argument. Draw it into a which is better contest. It’s just like red and blue politics in America. Fuck all that. We the people, everywhere, deserve better than either of these power and control hungry psychos would have for us. Period.
You do need evidence to back your claims. Literacy rates were chosen as merely one example to prove the effectiveness of socialism in China at dramatically improving people’s lives. One person’s anecdote, especially when said person has no idea about basic socialist concepts like idealism vs. materialism, is not at all sufficient.
The truth is that capitalism sucks, and socialism works. You haven’t demonstrated that you even understand what these systems are, and have been confidently incorrect when others have explained them to you.
You add more invented problems like the idea that the CPC is “hiding atrocities.” Why should anyone take you seriously?
You don’t think the CCP* is hiding history from their people? It’s ironic you think I’m confidentially incorrect when I know for a fact you are. I don’t see this as an argument at all. This is me playing teacher to you so you can go research the many topics covered here that you don’t seem to understand. My original argument is simple. China’s system sucks. The US system sucks.
To think you can even define China’s system as socialism is ridiculous. No modern super power has an economy or government that abides by a single definition.
It is you and others here who have tried to change the argument to something you think you understand to try to “win.” It’s honestly exhausting. I’ve rewritten my thesis about 20 times and it’s still being ignored.
The irony: I like socialism. You people are simply too caught up in your own ego or something to let that sink in.
Yes. China has many expats. The information was revealed to the world and the Chinese government’s response? Control the Internet, all foreign media, all history books, etc.
These are extremely well known topics across the globe. Don’t take my word for it lol.
How about 30-50 million dead from starvation while trying to implement communism under Mao? How about Tiananmen Square?
Do you realize that the government punishes those who bring it up and leave it out of the history books for the younger generations?
What about Uyghur genocide?
You can walk around the campus of a Chinese university, ask person after person about the Tiananmen Square massacre and no one knows what the hell you’re talking about.
You think this is the shining example of socialism that should be implemented across the globe?
Do you think China educated unwilling old people who have a job like farming in the last ten years? Why? So they can read a book before they die? There’s no point…
I do think China has done a great job of educating the younger generations. And with that many people, it’s a system producing genius after genius. That part is impressive enough and better than the US system.
But China is known for producing fake numbers to always promote their control, patriotism among their people, reduce revolutionaries…
They have completely state controlled media. No independent journalism. Kind of hard to take any of that as a scientifically proven statistic. Do you disagree?
Because I learned China doesn’t report accurate numbers all the time. They have state controlled media since the 40s. I’m a real life person who studied China, lived there, learned from natives about what is really going on. Put yourself in my shoes. Hypothetically, how could you explain this experience differently?
And how does you going to China for six months support any of those claims? Especially when you’re just brushing off the person actually from China (aka, a “native” as you’re racist ass calls him)
You accused the Chinese of being illiterate and I provided statistical evidence. The paragraph you wrote maligning Chinese literacy rates literally starts off with “does anybody have any statistics”.
You reject the statistical evidence because you personally can’t believe it. The rest of the world believes it. Nobody gives a fuck about your opinion when you are so wrong, so many times, in such relatively short comment.
If we can just personally dismiss things we don’t believe in, evidence, statistics, and facts be damned then I don’t believe in you. Are you an actual thinking person with a brain or sinophobic caricature impervious to evidence?
They are very clearly a fascist doing third way dog whistling and even breaking into full techno fascist rhetoric about ai enforcing morals in some replies.
The capitalist subject, so accustomed to being lied to and ripped of by their society, refuses to believe that any socio-economic order can deliver good results for the people in it. This is what passes for “common sense” in capitalist countries: a religious belief that anyone who claims to want to make things better is lying to you.
All idealism regardless of type can be summed up in one belief: that it is not possible to improve the world. Materialism, on the other hand, posits that it is possible. Is it any wonder that Capital goes to such lengths to keep materialist thought out of its public discourse? The worker who believes they cannot improve their lot poses little threat to Capital.
The saddest thing is how “enlightened” they feel in believing that there is no alternative, and that feeling further entrenches them in capitalist realism. Anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker, a naïve utopian.
Your entire argument rests on idealism. You treat ideas like communism and capitalism as abstract moral propositions to be judged in a vacuum. This is precisely the error historical materialism was developed to correct. Systems do not emerge from the minds of philosophers. They arise from the material conditions of production, from the way human societies organize labor to meet their needs. To ask which system you would “put your life in the hands of” as if choosing from a menu ignores that history is not a matter of choice but of struggle grounded in concrete reality.
Let’s begin with the base and superstructure. The economic base, the mode of production, determines the political and ideological superstructure. You claim the issue is concentration of power, as if power floats freely above society. But power is not an independent variable. It is rooted in ownership and control of the means of production. Under capitalism, private ownership necessarily concentrates power in the hands of those who own capital. This is the logical outcome of a system where production is organized for profit rather than human need. You cannot have capitalism without class antagonism because the extraction of surplus value requires a class that owns and a class that sells its labor. To wish for capitalism without exploitation is to wish for a square circle.
China’s path must be understood through the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. Socialism presupposes a high development of productive forces. A society emerging from semi-feudalism, shattered by colonialism and war, cannot leap directly into advanced communism. The socialist transitionary period is a scientific recognition that the relations of production must correspond to the level of productive forces. China develops its economy under the leadership of a proletarian state. This allows for the accumulation of social wealth under public direction. Market mechanisms are employed, but they are subordinated to strategic planning and social goals.
Your characterization of capitalism as a “true ideal” if only it were built on human rights reveals a profound misunderstanding of the system’s inner logic. Capital is not a neutral tool. It is a social relation that compels accumulation. The imperative of endless expansion is not optional. A capitalist firm that does not maximize profit is eliminated by competition. This structural compulsion drives the exploitation of labor, the plunder of nature, and the imperialist domination of the global south. Human rights discourse, while valuable, cannot tame a system whose very metabolism requires inequality. The “immovable foundation” you imagine is impossible because capital constantly revolutionizes production, uproots communities, and commodifies every aspect of life to survive.
On the question of China’s policies, a materialist analysis refuses moralistic abstraction. The one child policy was a response to a specific historical conjuncture. In the late 1970s, China faced the real prospect that rapid population growth would outstrip agricultural and industrial capacity, undermining the very basis for development. This was not an arbitrary choice. It was a harsh measure taken under conditions of scarcity. A proper approach acknowledges the genuine harms while understanding the pressures that produced the policy. It also recognizes that the policy was adjusted as conditions changed. This is materialism in practice. Ideas are evaluated by their correspondence to reality, not by their conformity to an external moral standard.
Your claims about illiteracy and COVID are not just inaccurate. They serve an ideological function. China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and achieved near universal literacy through massive public investment in education. This is a historical achievement without parallel. Zero COVID was a public health strategy that prioritized the preservation of life, particularly the lives of the elderly and vulnerable. The outcome was among the lowest per capita death rates in the world. You dismiss this as tyranny while accepting a Western approach that sacrificed the vulnerable to maintain market “normalcy”. The long term disability caused by long COVID is a social catastrophe you ignore because it does not fit your narrative. A society that protects its weakest members is not tyrannical. It is humane.
The orientalism in your comment is also unmistakable. The image of “piles of discarded fetuses reaching skyscraper height” is not analysis. It is a trope drawn from a long tradition of Western propaganda that depicts Asian societies as inherently cruel, irrational, and disposable. This rhetoric dehumanizes an entire population to justify hostility. You speak of free thought, sex, and religion as if these are abstract rights detached from material conditions. But for the majority of humanity, freedom is first and foremost freedom from want, from disease, from premature death. China has delivered these substantive freedoms on a scale the West has not matched. Your focus on formal liberties while ignoring material outcomes reflects a privileged position that takes survival for granted.
Finally, your conclusion that distributed power is the only answer is correct in principle but empty without class analysis. Power is not distributed by wishing it so. It is redistributed through struggle against the structures that concentrate it. The US Constitution, for all its rhetorical brilliance, was designed to protect property interests. Its evolution into a system of concentrated corporate power is not an accident. It is the logical result of a state that serves capital. True democracy requires social ownership of the economy. It requires that the producers control what they produce and how it is distributed. This is not a utopian dream. It is the necessary next step in human development, visible in the experiments and advances of socialist construction around the world.
To judge China by the standards of liberal idealism is to miss the point entirely. History moves through contradiction. Socialism in the primary stage contains contradictions. It utilizes market forms while building the foundations for their eventual transcendence. This is dialectics. The task should not be to condemn an actually existing socialist project for not yet being perfect. The task should be to understand its trajectory, learn from its successes and errors, and advance the struggle for a world where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. That world will not arrive by wishing. It will be built through the material practice of millions, guided by the science of socialism, rooted in the concrete conditions of their time and place.
Of course it’s based on idealism. The correct path to progress is to think of the ideal, then compare it to the current situation, identify what is missing, then close the gap.
So many commenters on here are caught up in comparing which is better: China or the US?
That is a waste of time and mirrors the ridiculous two party propaganda that wastes away American politics.
The truth is both systems are terrible.
COVID was barely more lethal than the common flu so both countries completely overreacted. Your idea of humanity being the reason they used militarized forces to bolt people’s doors in is a joke. China historically overreacts with their concentrated power as proven time and time again. Once of which resulted in the potential LARGEST loss of human life in all of history. How many did Mao “accidentally” kill in the name of creating a humane world? 30 million? 50?
The idea of fetuses pulling as high as skyscrapers has nothing to do with propaganda or justifying criticism. These are real facts with the number of abortion being 10 million per year. No country comes close to this number. It will factually create a skyscraper every single year.
I actually lived in China and the US in my lifetime. Believe me there are plenty of positives about that society that are far better than the US. But overall comparing the two existing systems… they both suck.
Lastly, the reason an ideal capitalistic structure can exist is because of technology. The point you have failed to cover (despite using AI to generate your arguments) is that humans are failed aspect of capitalism.
There is no comparing the competitive dominance of this system for the last 100 years. With barely a fraction of the same populous of China, the US sits comfortably with no potential military threat and is now leading the AI race. It’s a fools game to pretend that progress is not worthy of consideration in the best system. But to prevent the absolute abortion of human rights, it needs an infallible system to enact the foundation which I previously described. Some obvious choices are: corporations must have regulated profits to own housing and housing must have a cap on ownership by corporations, healthcare must be universal and promote preventative measures rather than for-profit reactive measures, centralized postal service is one of the greatest examples of a non profit system that has worked for Americans for a very very long time to save them millions and create jobs.
AI could be the answer to enforcing these in a way that cannot be overturned by the interests of politicians and corporations finding common goals to destroy morality.
I know this user is banned but I’m still losing it over the ‘you wrote your comment with Ai’ accusation
buddy is so out of depth that the concept of a commie dropping an essay of their own accord is an impossibility instead of the least surprising thing to happen when you’re arguing online with a communist lmao
Your definition of idealism is so wrong its incredible, it really shows how little knowledge of political economy you truly have (if you quantified it it would likely be negative). Idealism posits that consciousness determines existence. You do exactly this by imagining a perfect system in your head and demanding reality conform to it. Historical materialism understands that systems emerge from material conditions and class struggle. You cannot design morality into a system built on exploitation. Your claim that both China and the US suck is not insight. It is third way centrism that protects the status quo by refusing to analyze class character. Equating a state focused on poverty alleviation with one focused on profit maximization is a political choice to ignore reality.
COVID was not the flu. Millions died and hundreds of thousands suffer permanent disability. You trivialize this mass death to protect your worldview. You dodge the core argument that Western capitalist countries left millions to die. Zero COVID was the correct material response to preserve life. It lasted longer because Western nations refused to cooperate and instead hoarded vaccines while preaching liberty. You call it tyranny I call it protecting the vulnerable. The western strategy was to let the virus burn through the workforce to keep markets open. That is the logic of capital. Your defense of that outcome shows where your priorities lie.
The Mao era famine propaganda you recycle is again showing the kind of person you truly are. The Great Leap Forward had policy errors but the famine was largely exacerbated by natural disasters and external pressure. It was the last famine China ever had. Since then China lifted over 900 million people from poverty, all but eradicated illiteracy, built infrastructure from the coast to rural villages including roads, electricity, and clinics. You ignore this massive material gain to fixate on decontextualized body counts. You are a fascist drunk on propaganda.
Your abortion argument is blatant orientalism. Raw numbers mean nothing without population context. Ten million abortions in a population of 1.4 billion is a rate of roughly 28 per 1000. That ranks China 66th in the world. There are no skyscrapers of fetuses. That imagery is dehumanizing trash designed to paint Asian society as barbaric. You claim you lived in China but your “insights” are just Western media talking points. You sound like a disgruntled sexpat sexpest who never understood the society he lived in (if you’re not just outright lying). Maybe you just resent it now that you’re no longer glorified here.
Ideal capitalism does not exist. The Western safety net you crave is built on pillaging the periphery through violence and imperialism. You cannot have regulated profits and universal care under a system driven by accumulation. Capital will always find a way to bypass rules to survive competition. Your solution to let AI enforce morality is techno fascist logic. It assumes humans are the problem and algorithms are the savior. Also I did not use AI to write this. Your arguments are the ones that sound like generated propaganda. But I still decided to engage in the hopes maybe you were simply misguided, I see now that misguided is the wrong phrase you clearly purposefully seek out reactionary talking points.
The US is dominant only because it emerged from World War II intact and assumed leadership of Western imperialism. It spent decades extracting wealth from the Global South. Even with that head start they are losing ground to China in multiple sectors. You talk about military threats but ignore the budget. The US spends more than the next ten nations combined. Comparing the US and China is not irrelevant (even though I didn’t do that in my original comment) they both embody the current most advanced forms of their respective systems.
Your rhetoric exposes a deep seated chauvinism and you are spouting fascist logic. You speak of distributed power while proposing an infallible AI enforcer to override human agency. Your imagery of fetus skyscrapers relies on old tropes of Asian barbarism to dehumanize a population. This is orientalism pure and simple. You claim to hate power concentration while defending a system that concentrates wealth in historically unprecedented levels. Your third way Nazi dog whistles serve only to protect Western hegemony. You have a surface level understanding of political economy. You fetishize technology and ignore relations of production. You are just an a fucking idiot who barely grasps the material world. Stop parroting orientalist lies and learn what materialism actually means. Maybe then you can start to actually understand the world.
I was actually really excited to reply to you because I can explain where our miscommunication is occurring. But then I skipped ahead and saw that you have devolved into an emotional wreck incapable of controlling yourself. This is textbook form of running away and painting someone you truly don’t know the first thing about with extreme, and I do mean extreme broad brush insults as well as… name calling? I just feel sorry for you now. This will be last message to you because I simply don’t continue with people who abandoned reason in the face of challenge. Best of luck to you.
You are not leaving because “I am emotional”. You are leaving because your arguments were dismantled and you have no response that wouldn’t embarrass yourself further. Claiming I am an emotional wreck is the oldest deflection in the book. It is what people do when they cannot engage with substance. You never addressed a single point about productive forces, class character, or the material basis of policy. You just recycled orientalist tropes and techno-utopian fantasies. Now that those have been exposed you retreat behind a facade of moral superiority.
You call it name calling. I call it accurate characterization. Your fetus skyscraper imagery is dehumanizing propaganda. Your dismissal of 900 million lifted from poverty is chauvinism. Your proposal for an infallible AI morals enforcer is fascist. These are not insults. They are accurate descriptions of what you actually wrote. If the truth feels like an attack that is a problem with your position not my delivery.
You say you do not continue with people who abandon reason. Yet you are the one who refused to engage with historical materialism. You are the one who reduced complex historical processes to body count propaganda. You are the one who claimed capitalism could be moral if only we designed it better. That is not reason. That is idealism, a fairytale concocted in your mind to make you feel better.
Do not pretend this is about civility. You were comfortable spouting orientalist lies and fascist dog whistles until someone actually pushed back. Now you want to exit with a sanctimonious farewell. That is cowardice. If you truly believed in distributed power and reasoned debate you would stay and engage. But you cannot. Because your position collapses under materialist analysis.
Go ahead and block me. It will not change the fact that your arguments were refuted point by point. It will not erase the orientalism in your rhetoric. It will not make your techno-fascist solutions any more viable. You are not rising above. You are running away. And everyone who reads this thread will see which one of us actually engaged with substance and which one retreated when challenged.
The only true ideal for power is that there is none except when handled by all. The US Constitution seemed to have this idea in mind with its intent
Are we talking about the same document granting exclusive political rights to land and/or slave-owning white males or are you a visitor from another dimension?
Do you understand the word “intent”? Do you know the history of founders trying to install this intent, but being forced back by those slave owners? If you do, then I believe we both agree the intent was good and the execution has failed.
The constitution explicitly, openly vests power exclusively in wealthy and/or slave holding men. Are you seriously claiming that wasn’t “intentional”?! Your founding fathers overwhelmingly WERE wealthy slave owning white men, they “extracted” those concessions FROM THEMSELVES.
So you’ll just skip over the historical facts surrounding how the initial document was better intended and the push back was from those who wanted to protect their “property.”
I don’t understand. Make a real argument with a list of supporting facts. If you truly believe what you’re saying then prove it to me. Change my mind. Why is everyone so lazy with their counter arguments. I feel like I need to educate my “opponents” just to feel like we’re having a conversation.
This is some “revolution betrayed” mythology. The founders WERE the slave owners. But even if they what you say was true, that means that their constitution crumbled immediately to the opposition and is unworthy of my respect or consideration
Oh I fully agree it’s not worthy of your respect or consideration. You’ll find most of my downvotes and arguments on here are from people who think this conversation is about China bad, US good. It’s not. My argument is both systems suck.
Okay, well if that’s your argument then you have an uphill battle ahead of you, considering the world-historical surges in life expectancy, literacy, poverty alleviation, education, crime reduction, social mobility and political autonomy brought by the Chinese system, which enjoys an over 90% approval rating among its people.
I think New Zealand has a great example of how historically socialist political organizations have integrated a capitalist economy in a way that still continues to promote the welfare of their people.
Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland… these are the leaders in this index. How? A high-welfare free market economy.
This is basically capitalism but with high taxes using examples like net wealth tax.
Also, it’s not fair to use a statistic like 90% approval rating. The state controls all the data and media. That’s like trump saying he’s the best that ever lived. Okay, but that’s not actually true!
New Zealand is not socialist, it’s a part of the western empire and subsidizes its safety nets off of the plunder of the global south. Same with the Nordics. They all rely on it. Secondly, the 90% approval rating is fair and valid. Socialist systems need to own their own press, and not allow private capitalists to steer the narrative.
As a Norwegian, I find it pretty funny that this guy keeps bringing up my country as an example to be followed, while at the same time using anecdotes he (supposedly) heard from Chinese people to prove that China is bad.
Why? For the simple fact that Norway produced someone like Anders Breivik. If anecdotes are now evidence, then I suppose that Breivik’s claims of how Norway functions must be taken seriously, rather than be dismissed as the ravings of a mass murdering fascist. And he’s not alone in his beliefs either, I’ve seen and heard some variation of “I don’t agree with his actions, but his manifesto does have some really good points” more times than I can count. Must all be true then, right?
And by the way, the 90% approval number actually comes from a study done by Harvard University, not from the CPC. But I suppose comrade Xi is personally controlling Harvard now lmao
New Zealand has tons of socialist influence and has had many many socialist political organizations influencing their politics for decades.
I know they are not socialist, but it’s am example of a free market economy with that necessary socialist influence. (Although, I think they are starting to crumble since their economy is so attached to foreign nations, it’s pretty unfortunate)
I will say the only way for the people to truly control anything is for them to have a vote on each decision. If they are not voting on the media, they do not control it. It would be amazing if ownership of your government and economy included actual decision making on the individual - collective level.
A small group of leaders can’t relate to their people’s interests on an individual level in a way that perfectly executes their will. It’s impossible.
Ya covid was barely worse than regular flu viruses when you compare the death ratios. And I’m progressive by the way. I got the shots and locked down then saw that all the smart money was in healthcare, the vaccine manufacturers and insurance.
If the west cared about their economies then why did they require vaccine cards to enter grocery stores or the work place in their most populous areas?
I truly don’t understand where you get these ideas or care which country is better. Both suck. The people of this world deserve better than either has to offer. That is the conversation I’m trying to have.
Ya covid was barely worse than regular flu viruses when you compare the death ratios.
It is hard to avoid the temptation of insulting you for this abysmally dogshit take.
Idk how privliged you are. I’ve had multiple family members die to covid. Worldwide, the number of deaths confirmed from covid was over 5 million, but estimated excess mortality was in the 25 million range.
You get all pissy about “10 million aborted fetuses” (as if fetuses have a conscious life for me to take", but 25 million actual dead is nothing for you. On brand for a capitalist!
The first sign of self consciousness is throwing insults.
Out of respect for yours and my family members who passed from COVID, I will say I think it’s stupid anyone dies from the flu regardless of which one it is.
Lastly, when you look at deaths per cases, you’ll see I’m correct. The uniqueness of COVID was not its mortality like the drug manufacturers wanted you to think. “The vaccine stops the spread.” Remember that? How many people died from the vaccine after being coerced into taking it? Do those people matter to you?
Masks were the real solution. China already had a culture of mask wearing while sick. I myself an immunocompromised. I was so angry at people who didn’t wear masks and still get highly perturbed when people appear in public places without them while coughing or sneezing their personal fluids everywhere. It’s disgusting.
But after all my thrashing about, I came to a very simple conclusion about life and people. You can’t force people to do anything. You can’t tell them what to do and expect them to listen. Creating a forceful or even violent consequence for this situation isn’t “correct.” It’s just more bad on top of bad.
The truth is education is the answer to most problems. Better education reduces racism, violence, drug use, susceptibility to propaganda, increases financial decision making, emotional control, overall happiness and should absolutely give people the perspective that they should not do onto others that they would not have done upon themselves with higher standards than “derr my southern attitude is that I don’t care about me own health so I’m fine coughing on you.” What a load of shit. Some Americans set a truly low bar in that regard.
But, I have evolved from the previous mindset you seem particularly situated on. Believe me my worst fear is that this was part of their intention. Real deaths creating permanent divide between the red and blue. Right where they want us, right? Fighting each other instead of them. Isn’t this all simply a class war? At least in America it is.
Search for how many land/companies they own in South America/Africa, were the Amazonian wood go, the minerals extract from South America and the gems from Africa, who owns the vast majority of Brazilian coffee
This is capitalism but with a foundation of human rights built on high taxes using examples like net wealth tax.
This is imperialism with nice things for white people.
So, I looked it up. You’re right. NATO countries are pillaging Africa in a way I never knew about. The index score is a good thing still, I think. But the source of that score should be considered.
Does anywhere exist with a high score that is ethically sourced?
I know China does the same thing in Africa. So they’re out…
Regarding that comment about white people. The US is far more diverse than any super power. The only close comparison is Canada which is more diverse, but not a real super power.
The combined population of NATO is nearing 1 billion and it’s much more diverse than China or Russia or any other “communist” or “socialist” state.
Anyways, I’m not saying NATO is good thing or bad thing. I don’t truly know. But I know the US style of capitalism appears to bleed into NATO is shit. And China’s “socialism” is shit too.
The legal system creates a system of punishment. Do you think this works in forcing people to do whatever? If it did, people wouldn’t be in prison, right?
So what? We’re talking about the US handled COVID. Keep up. Your personal background doesn’t belong in this conversation.
The mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, which have now been administered several billion times, have been heavily scrutinized for safety and have been shown to be extremely safe, said Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, the director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute.
Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose. For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccinees age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccinees.
Direct quote from your source. All it says is that in some people it can cause a little heart tissue damage.
Point 2:
If you wish to abolish the prison system then I am OK with that. If you ain’t wishing to do that I’m not even sure what your position is and I doubt it would be coherent in any way.
1 in 32000 is very close to the ratio of deaths from COVID itself. And they recommended 3 shots minimum with continuous maintenance doses!!
Myocarditis from the mrna vaccine has killed several people which is the point I was making.
I got three shots myself and they didn’t work (according to the same doctors who administered them). Imagine my resentment in not being able to grocery shop without my vaccine card which only increased my heart disease risk without any of the benefit. I had to go back and get antibodies directly injected at a later date. Then still got a fever of 104 for 36 hours. It’s sort of hard to believe all the bullshit from my perspective. I still think masks are the way to go.
This is entirely vibes-based. Capitalism, socialism, and communism are modes of production and distribution, not ideals or ideas. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership as the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes in charge of the state, socialism is public ownership as the principle aspect and the working classes in charge of the state, and communism is a post-socialist mode of production where all production and distribution has been collectivized.
China is a socialist country governed by a communist party. Public ownership is the principle aspect of its economy, and the working classes control the state. The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
The US Constitution was written to protect slave owners, capitalists, and landlords. It is not written to protect the many. China, on the other hand, puts the working classes first and manages to use this system to uplift the working classes year over year.
An excellent and very clear answer comrade, but don’t you have any book recommendations that are more on the commenter’s level? Roland Boer is great but it takes a pretty advanced level of political econ and history knowledge to grasp. Do you know of any simpler books on the subject? Or would you recommend just listening to Hasan Piker to someone at that stage of the journey?
Not cowbee but, at this commenters level the most on his level suggestion I can think of after reading his comments is that he should try hit himself in the head with a brick repeatedly until he forgets everything he knows and start over.
Roland Boer’s work is useful because it’s meticulously well-researched and sourced. Unfortunatley, for someone actively hostile to the idea of democracy in China, simple works are easily tossed aside as “propaganda.”
You are either ignorant or so desperate to pretend China is not a tyranny that you will actually say outloud that the state is controlled by the people. What a joke. It is so far from that I don’t even think a conversation is possible with you. We must first agree the sky is blue to have a conversation…
I love my job. It involves about 25 presentations per month on how I’m saving companies millions of dollars by increasing their efficiency. It’s a small bubble in capitalism that doesn’t have a negative side effect. Though, I do wish I was an owner in the company. I’m all for that idea! I’m pro socialism!!!
i just downvoted you but i’m commenting to let you know so that i’m not a coward, i’ll let my comrades handle it, im not in the mood. you’re about to get schooled
Oh I’m still plugging away. So far this entire comment section is trying to pull the argument into China good, US bad direction. Ignoring my argument altogether (both systems suck).
Unfortunately, my role has become teacher just to try to keep people in topic. I’m talking about a unifying system we should all be working on and everyone else is rooting for their sports team like drunken idiots.
Ignoring my argument altogether (both systems suck).
Redditers need to learn that disagreeing with an argument is not the same as ignoring it. (Though in the case it’s just an assertion, not an argument)
Unfortunately, my role has become teacher just to try to keep people in topic.
Oh my God, what an insufferable loser you are. You’ve been catagorically schooled by multiple people much more knowledgeable than you and now you’re trying to fall back on smug condescention like you arrogant western supremacists always do. “A foreigner disagreed with me? Clearly I just need to educate this ignorant savage!”
I’m talking about a unifying system we should all be working on
No, you aren’t. All you’ve done is shrug and say “both sides bad” while condemning the actually better system.
Oh absolutely not. I simply treat my commentary on the internet in line with how I treat people face to face. I don’t know you or what is going on in your life. What things you’ve achieved or suffered. I simply cannot devolve a person to fit my needs because I’m hiding behind an anonymous keyboard. I’m not trying to take a moral high ground either. I want us to reach common ground in the end.
I’m convinced 99% of the world cares about a few common goals: health, family, housing, entertainment, peace and fairness.
The fact we are struggling with each other to to figure the best way to get that… shit. You’re like a great person compared to so many that don’t even think about these things or have the education to consider it. It’s okay that we disagree or misunderstand each other. I’m giving us both the benefit of the doubt that our intent is good and not just selfishly.
Unfortunately unlikely he will bother to read my effort post and if he does I have my doubts at his ability to comprehend it as he spouts off “third way” dog whistles and the most ridiculous orientalist chauvinist narratives and lies about China.
China is not communist. But we should talk about different economic systems because that’s the ultimate goal.
Communism in itself is a true ideal as long as output exceeds intake and satisfaction is high. It’s also possible on a global scale, if not designed for it.
Capitalism is also a true ideal as long as it’s built on an immovable foundation of human rights paid for by centralized non profit corporations.
This is accurate enough and largely in line with modern communist theory although lacking in detail (why did you get my hopes up to dash them?)
The issue is and always has been the concentration of power.
No it’s not, unless you are talking about literal electrical/mechanical power (engineers of the world, unite!).
Sociological power is a poorly defined concept with a nebulous effect on society.
Economic power, while more defined isn’t a cause but an effect of the organisation of production (and thus, whether a society is feudal, capitalist, socialist or communist).
And totally tyrannical in their wielding of power against free thought, sex, religion, etc. It’s practically anti freedom and contradicts every protected class we have in the US.
Not at all lmao. LGBTQ rights are about the only ones the Chinese are a bit lagging on. The rest are fine.
And before you come at me about freedom of speech, that is nothing more than the freedom for the rich to buy the public opinion. You don’t want to live in such a society, cause then you get Elon buying twitter and Trump buying the US.
Even if you’re pro choice, the piles of discarded fetuses could reach skyscraper height. This is not a normal issue to have.
Bruh … what the fuck are you talking about?
Also pro-tip, you can just Google the stats. Here it is. China is number 66.
If the question is what system would you be willing to put your life in the hands of, there is only one answer:
Selfish answer: the one that gives me tons of money and protection (imagine a dictatorship of the transfemmes)
Non-selfish answer: a dictatorship of the proletariat cause I’m a proletariat and so are most people
When was the last time you visited China? Have you ever lived there?
Born and raised. You clearly have never been, yet you speak with arrogance as you spout off talking points.
The government rounds up religious minorities and genocides them
This claim gets repeated endlessly, but repetition does not turn an allegation into proof. Words like “genocide” get deployed because they carry moral weight, not because the evidence meets the definition. The actual situation is far more mundane and far more complicated. There are policies directed at separatist violence, religious extremism, and regional security. Those policies are harsh in places and worth debating, but transforming them into an industrial genocide narrative is propaganda, not analysis.
China officially recognizes multiple religions. Mosques, churches, temples, and monasteries operate openly across the country. Anyone who has actually walked through cities in Ningxia, Gansu, Henan, or Zhejiang would know that immediately.
They once encouraged people to speak up about how they can improve upon society then threw all the people who did in prison for 35 years.
You are vaguely referencing events without understanding the historical sequence. The campaign encouraging criticism of the party was followed by a backlash when leadership feared that the criticism was destabilizing the state itself. It was a political struggle inside a revolutionary system still trying to define its direction after a civil war and a massive social transformation. That period was chaotic and involved real repression, but your version reduces decades of complex political conflict into a moral fable.
The Cultural Revolution itself was something entirely different from what you described. It was a moment when ordinary workers and students were mobilized directly into politics at a scale never before seen in modern states. Institutions collapsed, factions formed, and power moved outside bureaucratic structures. The problem was not that “people were punished for speaking.” The problem was that the political struggle escaped all stable mechanisms of coordination. The result was excess, factional violence, and eventually a reassertion of centralized authority. Treating it as a simple story about free speech misses the entire point.
The one child policy barely was removed recently and there are still abortion clinics on every corner like Starbucks in America
The one-child policy was relaxed progressively and formally replaced in 2015. Calling that “barely removed” nearly a decade later is a stretch. More importantly, the policy emerged from specific demographic pressures in a poor country attempting to industrialize rapidly with limited resources. Whether one supports it or not, it was not some arbitrary cruelty invented for ideological reasons.
As for the “Starbucks abortion clinic on every corner” line, that is simply fantasy. Reproductive health clinics exist, as they do in any country with a population exceeding a billion people. But the picture you are painting does not match reality. It reads like something copied from a political meme.
Maybe they are 66 on your list but the number is 10 million fetuses per year.
You did not read the source he linked did you? Yes, the absolute number is large. In a country with roughly 1.4 billion people almost every raw number will look enormous. Rates are what matter. Around 28 per 1,000 women places it roughly mid-table globally. That is precisely why the ranking is around 66th. Statistics are meaningless without context.
Free speech is not available anywhere. That is a criticism for all governments.
Now the argument shifts. First the claim is that China is uniquely oppressive. When that collapses under scrutiny the claim becomes that no country has free speech anyway. That contradiction should tell you something about the reliability of the earlier claims.
I could argue at least the US has a path to change through voting and the checks/balances of power
This is the most revealing sentence in your entire comment because it exposes the mythology underlying the rest of it. The United States presents itself as a system where the population governs through elections, but the material structure of power sits elsewhere. Political campaigns are financed by concentrated wealth. Media systems that shape public opinion are owned by large corporations. Lobbying organizations write legislation. Regulatory agencies rotate personnel with the industries they supposedly regulate.
Voting occurs, but the range of outcomes permitted by the system remains narrow because the economic foundation never changes. Parties compete over management of the same underlying order. When policies threaten entrenched capital interests they simply do not survive the process. That is why universal healthcare has been debated for generations without implementation. That is why financial institutions responsible for economic crises receive bailouts while ordinary people absorb the consequences.
“Checks and balances” function primarily as inertia mechanisms. They slow structural change, not empower it. The idea that the population can fundamentally redirect the system through periodic elections ignores how power actually organizes itself in advanced capitalist societies. The state becomes intertwined with the interests of the dominant economic class. Elections then operate more like a controlled feedback loop than a mechanism for transformation.
So when you claim the United States offers a path to change, what you are really describing is a ritual that produces the appearance of choice while the underlying distribution of power remains intact. If the population truly had the capacity to vote away the interests of the wealthiest sectors of society, those sectors would never have allowed such a mechanism to exist in the first place.
Just admit you’re a racist who seeks out orientalist and chauvinist narratives about China because it makes you feel better about the decline of your empire.
The US Constitution seemed to have this idea in mind with its intent, though it’s evolved into the same old concentration of power over time. Doesn’t matter which party either. The reality is power is so concentrated now that there are no true parties anymore. This is a mafia that transcends both sides.
So no China is no proof of anything except improper concentration of power. Mostly capitalist by the way.
If your opinion is that power is concentrated in the hands of the few in both the USA and China, how do you explain the difference between how bad it’s going for America rn vs. how good it’s going for China rn? Sure, both have their problems, no country is perfect, but it really looks like the USA is completely falling apart while China is having technological breakthrough after technological breakthrough.
Thanks for your response btw, the original commenter is right that people who downvote and leave don’t contribute anything to the conversation, unlike you.
I think we have different definitions of how good things are going.
In my mind the scientific breakthrough phenomena is an interesting one. The US just defunded their universities and research programs across the board. So they are truly not even competing in that space at the moment.
Right now the world is desperately racing to AI dominance because the innovations in warfare are so tragic, they are left with no other option. The US leads in this space which implies that all innovation will soon be greatly enhanced with these tools.
To me, 99% of people on the planet are interested in a handful of common ideas: health, family, housing, entertainment, and a good job (I’ve not heard a better definition for this than: challenging, make an impact, fairly compensated).
I honestly don’t care much about comparing the US and China in these regards since neither match the systems I mentioned before which are capitalism with a foundation of human rights paid for centralized non profit organizations or communism with high satisfaction and reduced concentration of government power.
If 99% of people are aligned on these topics, the reality is all war, conflict, government powers, regional economic competition are unnecessary. The government should be for the entire planet and simply administrative. That is the true ideal. Everyone gets to vote on their administrative tasks based on performance and efficiency markers every year.
Provide sources for your claim and you just may change my mind. However, even if it is a current lead, I wonder if it would last any relevant length of time. For one, their chips are not as quality. Second, as far as I can tell the US is entering a war with military contracts being signed with AI companies. This unprecedented coupling of AI and warfare isn’t being matched by anyone on earth.
Regarding the future, what use are those chips if you don’t build more electric grid? China builds tons of solar panels, and usa builds nothing. China is already developing better chips, and has cut off your rare earths supply, so you can’t develop better chips.
I don’t understand your link. It just lists open source AI models which are… free? And about creating entertainment?
I’m not sure if that plays into the AI warfare dominance the US is building and is not open source.
I know China dominates energy sustainability. Will they go nuclear to stay ahead of the US? I think that’s the US response is basically entire nuclear plants dedicated to specific companies like Microsoft and Google.
Do you have sources for “the US has no rare earths supplies and can’t make better chips?”
I’m happy to be taught honestly. My ego is not about winning an argument here.
My initial argument is still that: both systems suck and the people of earth deserve better!
I’ll bite.
China is not communist. But we should talk about different economic systems because that’s the ultimate goal.
Communism in itself is a true ideal as long as output exceeds intake and satisfaction is high. It’s also possible on a global scale, if not designed for it.
Capitalism is also a true ideal as long as it’s built on an immovable foundation of human rights paid for by centralized non profit corporations.
The issue has nothing to do with the ideas themselves. The issue is and always has been the concentration of power.
It is the ideas of the few which can never properly represent the masses. Even with the best intentions. The only true ideal for power is that there is none except when handled by all. The US Constitution seemed to have this idea in mind with its intent, though it’s evolved into the same old concentration of power over time. Doesn’t matter which party either. The reality is power is so concentrated now that there are no true parties anymore. This is a mafia that transcends both sides.
So no China is no proof of anything except improper concentration of power. Mostly capitalist by the way. And totally tyrannical in their wielding of power against free thought, sex, religion, etc. It’s practically anti freedom and contradicts every protected class we have in the US.
Does anyone have the statistics on how many abortion occur there? Even if you’re pro choice, the piles of discarded fetuses could reach skyscraper height. This is not a normal issue to have. How many illiterate? How many old people died while they were bolted inside their homes during COVID?
If the question is what system would you be willing to put your life in the hands of, there is only one answer: which one has the most distributed power and wealth above the rest.
Just popping in to remind everyone that millions of people died because they west decided to let COVID run wild and those China wouldn’t have had to bolt those people inside for long if the rest of the world had bothered to properly respond to a pandemic.
Who holds the political power in China? Therein lies your answer as to what is China.
On executive level? Princelings.
In the NPC? Worker representatives are 15% vs 50% in the 1970’s. So… bureaucrats and the princelings?
Worker in the statistic youre quoting is just manual labour and farmers you realise that right?
This was pointed out to them before, they are repeating this dishonest framing because they’re a Polish nationalist. They pulled a quote from Marx talking about how bad the French state was and applied it to the USSR.
Unfortunately not surprising.
A single group of elites who decide who leads as the next president without any input from the people. This is exactly the definition of concentrated power.
I don’t have time to go through everything wrong with your post but I want to touch on Chinese vs American literacy rates for a moment
In America while the total population literacy rate is often cited at 99%, functional literacy (the ability to manage daily living and employment tasks) is lower, with estimates placing it between 65% and 85%.
China’s literacy rate has grown from 79% in 1982 to 97% in 2020.
In 2018 PISA results,15-year-olds in China outperformed U.S. peers in reading, math, and science. Some analyses suggest about 20% of U.S. 15-year-olds do not read as well as they should by age 10.
In the 2018 PISA China ranked first globally in all subjects. The U.S. ranked roughly 13th in reading and 37th in math among 79 education systems
Youth literacy in the U.S. is facing a crisis, with 25% of 16-to-24-year-olds deemed functionally illiterate as of 2023, up from 16% in 2017. Roughly 60% of U.S. teens do not read at grade level, and 34% of fourth-graders perform below basic reading levels.
In 2020, youth (15–24) literacy in China reached 100%.
Nothing you said contradicts anything I wrote, so I’m struggling to understand why you started your comment this way. To say “everything wrong with my post” then address nothing I wrote… I’m not sure you should be quoting literacy at all.
You’ll find I’m highly critical of both China and the US once we discuss further.
Lastly, there is no chance in hell China’s literacy reached 97%, not will it as long as rural lifestyle continues with no need for it.
Whether you think they had need for it doesn’t matter. History shows that every socialist state has put enormous effort into universal literacy. This is not controversial; it’s a settled question among historians.
I just want to clarify, I’m saying there is no need for literacy in some of the rural areas in China. They are farmers, some without basic electricity and plumbing. It’s completely third world, except not in a suffering kind of way. Those are some of the kindest and hospitable people I’ve ever met.
I’m not disagreeing with your idea that socialist states put effort into education. To me education is everything no matter what system you have. Education should be the highest priority of society at large. I’m ecstatic that we might agree on that point.
It was third world, thanks in part to a century of humiliation by the British empire, but everyone has plumbing, electricity, media, and communication now. There are some farmers using Chinese-made technology that already surpasses our own agricultural technology.
China’s Robot Tractors Are Replacing Farmers—Here’s How
Absolutely not true. I lived among these people not long ago. To say “everyone has electricity” is simply false. That’s not true of any country… sadly.
How long ago was this and where? China made a big push against extreme poverty in the years leading up to 2020 and a central element was making sure people had functional housing and plumbing where in some cases people literally lived in a big cave or in huts in remote villages. While poverty in general persists, conditions that bad were basically eliminated.
Edit: I see elsewhere you said 11 years ago, so yeah, I think it’s perfectly likely you encountered something like that if you say you did, but I expect that if you look into how wherever you were is doing now, you’ll see that it has changed because of the national initiative.
“Your claim is false because I’m an 1800s racist”
“That isn’t true because I personally am incredulous about it!”
Very compelling argument.
Oh idk I lived in China and the US. Hope about you? Do you have any personal experience to go off?
“My personal incredulity isn’t enough for you? Well I also have unverified personal anecdotes!”
Uhuh. You’re also getting schooled by an actual Chinese person elsewhere
No see his 6 months is worth more than my multiple decades because I accurately called him out on being a chauvinist, orientalist and fascist pig while pointing out the MANY issues with his “ideas” and that makes me “emotional”.
Yeah, but he’s Le Rational Westerner, he’s different from the inferior foreigner.
He’s carrying the white man’s burden he just needs to reeducate all us untermensch about our real history that only he knows.
You think this angry, name calling, emotional person is schooling me? I’m a progressive on paper, the Bernie Sanders kind and they’re calling me a Nazi. I’m shocked people would give this type of person a second of thought.
Feel free to ask them about Mao “accidentally” killing 30-50 million people with STARVATION in the name of their oh so beautiful system.
What about throwing musicians and professors in prison for speaking out against the overbearing government?
How about Tiananmen Square?
Does this person even know what these events are? The government actively covers it up to this day. The millennial generation doesn’t even know what these are because it’s forbidden.
Correct. Are you pro genocide like Bernie too?
No. That’s why I usually say I’m a progressive on paper, but no modern politician represents that definition despite what they may call themselves. I like that Bernie would invest in the environment and tax the shit out corporations and billionaires though.
Fuck off back to reddit with this debatebro crap. I’m under no obligation to be nice to your racist ass. And why would I be? Multiple people have tried talking to you in good faith and got dismissed them out of hand. I’m not here to debate you, I’m here to tell you to fuck off.
So, a capitalist. And you’re expecting communists to give you props for that?
Lol. I can see why you say you’re only progressive on paper. In practice you’re a standard western Cold War Warrior, repeating far right claims word for word. What argument are you even trying to make? None I suppose, just vomiting out talking points.
Yes, you racist fucking vermin.
Bullshit
Removed by mod
Literacy rate by country, 2026. China is at 97%. Get out of the 20th century and turn off Fox News.
First off, I’m a progressive. Second, I lived in China for 6 months and I’m telling you the statistic is wrong. I have first hand experience among the many many many rural areas that are basically third world. China historically reports garbage numbers and this one of them. Shocking I know! How could they!
Nah, you’re repeating far-right talking points. You have no counter-evidence other than your belief that underdeveloped rural areas cannot possibly achieve high literacy rates, when exactly that has happened everytime socialism has been established around the world. Further, in recent decades China has been focusing on the urban/rural divide.
First off, I don’t have any right wing, let alone far right propaganda in my life. I’m a progressive. Do you think a MAGA idiot would go live in China themselves? Obviously not.
I don’t actually need evidence to be correct, because I saw it first hand. But I probably can prove it anyways. The simplest way: there are multiple definitions of literacy. They now call it functioning literacy in some cases. Others get very specific such as can they read a newspaper or write a statement about a topic? I do believe China is achieving great things with their younger generations. That, I also saw first hand. Although, they conveniently rewrite history as well. Completely covering up the atrocities the government has caused. That is pretty unforgivable.
Anyways, the older generation is filled with people who are still illiterate. They are not in school. They are not learning. They are working. And mostly happy by the way. Illiteracy is not a criticism on well being. That was someone else’s argument that “they must be doing well because they’ve achieved so much LITERACY.” Those are the happiest people I’ve ever met. Willing to share their food and home with total strangers. Their jobs and their lives and their happiness do not require literacy. That is why they will never change. Only once the younger generation has outlived the older long enough to reach a 97% rate could we call it the achievement you are wanting to believe.
Anyways, none of this has anything to do with my initial statement. Both systems suck! Everyone else is throwing these random statements such as literacy to try to change the argument. Draw it into a which is better contest. It’s just like red and blue politics in America. Fuck all that. We the people, everywhere, deserve better than either of these power and control hungry psychos would have for us. Period.
You do need evidence to back your claims. Literacy rates were chosen as merely one example to prove the effectiveness of socialism in China at dramatically improving people’s lives. One person’s anecdote, especially when said person has no idea about basic socialist concepts like idealism vs. materialism, is not at all sufficient.
The truth is that capitalism sucks, and socialism works. You haven’t demonstrated that you even understand what these systems are, and have been confidently incorrect when others have explained them to you.
You add more invented problems like the idea that the CPC is “hiding atrocities.” Why should anyone take you seriously?
You don’t think the CCP* is hiding history from their people? It’s ironic you think I’m confidentially incorrect when I know for a fact you are. I don’t see this as an argument at all. This is me playing teacher to you so you can go research the many topics covered here that you don’t seem to understand. My original argument is simple. China’s system sucks. The US system sucks.
To think you can even define China’s system as socialism is ridiculous. No modern super power has an economy or government that abides by a single definition.
It is you and others here who have tried to change the argument to something you think you understand to try to “win.” It’s honestly exhausting. I’ve rewritten my thesis about 20 times and it’s still being ignored.
The irony: I like socialism. You people are simply too caught up in your own ego or something to let that sink in.
Lol. “Water? Whats that?” Says fish
But that you somehow know about
Yes. China has many expats. The information was revealed to the world and the Chinese government’s response? Control the Internet, all foreign media, all history books, etc.
These are extremely well known topics across the globe. Don’t take my word for it lol.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1127087/
https://www.britannica.com/event/Tiananmen-Square-incident
https://ieres.elliott.gwu.edu/project/chinas-genocide-against-uyghurs/
https://www.columbia.edu/~qc2218/history.html
Which atrocities were those?
Obviously that abortion tower. But yeah totally not going off any right wing talking points 😂
How about 30-50 million dead from starvation while trying to implement communism under Mao? How about Tiananmen Square?
Do you realize that the government punishes those who bring it up and leave it out of the history books for the younger generations?
What about Uyghur genocide?
You can walk around the campus of a Chinese university, ask person after person about the Tiananmen Square massacre and no one knows what the hell you’re talking about.
You think this is the shining example of socialism that should be implemented across the globe?
No thank you.
You lived in rural China when? 25 years ago? I don’t think you’re aware of the pace of change that’s been happening.
Less than 12 years ago.
Do you think nothing has changed in an entire decade?
The poverty eradication campaign alone has made a dramatic difference, let alone the electrification of China and expansion in solar and EVs.
Do you think China educated unwilling old people who have a job like farming in the last ten years? Why? So they can read a book before they die? There’s no point…
I do think China has done a great job of educating the younger generations. And with that many people, it’s a system producing genius after genius. That part is impressive enough and better than the US system.
But China is known for producing fake numbers to always promote their control, patriotism among their people, reduce revolutionaries…
They have completely state controlled media. No independent journalism. Kind of hard to take any of that as a scientifically proven statistic. Do you disagree?
How exactly would you spending a few months in China in any way affect whether the statistic was correct?
Because I learned China doesn’t report accurate numbers all the time. They have state controlled media since the 40s. I’m a real life person who studied China, lived there, learned from natives about what is really going on. Put yourself in my shoes. Hypothetically, how could you explain this experience differently?
A mix of you being racist and likely lying.
And how does you going to China for six months support any of those claims? Especially when you’re just brushing off the person actually from China (aka, a “native” as you’re racist ass calls him)
I call myself a native Californian. Maybe it’s a cultural thing that makes you think it’s racist?
Honestly you’ve gotten just about as toxic as the other guy. I’m concerned a good faith argument is no longer possible. I hope you prove me wrong.
You accused the Chinese of being illiterate and I provided statistical evidence. The paragraph you wrote maligning Chinese literacy rates literally starts off with “does anybody have any statistics”.
You reject the statistical evidence because you personally can’t believe it. The rest of the world believes it. Nobody gives a fuck about your opinion when you are so wrong, so many times, in such relatively short comment.
If we can just personally dismiss things we don’t believe in, evidence, statistics, and facts be damned then I don’t believe in you. Are you an actual thinking person with a brain or sinophobic caricature impervious to evidence?
You asked:
They answered that is not that many???
Because a bird told you?
I think their source is much worse, after all they write things like this:
They are very clearly a fascist doing third way dog whistling and even breaking into full techno fascist rhetoric about ai enforcing morals in some replies.
True capitalism was never achieved!
The capitalist subject, so accustomed to being lied to and ripped of by their society, refuses to believe that any socio-economic order can deliver good results for the people in it. This is what passes for “common sense” in capitalist countries: a religious belief that anyone who claims to want to make things better is lying to you.
All idealism regardless of type can be summed up in one belief: that it is not possible to improve the world. Materialism, on the other hand, posits that it is possible. Is it any wonder that Capital goes to such lengths to keep materialist thought out of its public discourse? The worker who believes they cannot improve their lot poses little threat to Capital.
The saddest thing is how “enlightened” they feel in believing that there is no alternative, and that feeling further entrenches them in capitalist realism. Anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker, a naïve utopian.
The This is Fine dog but you’re trying to hand him a fire extinguisher and he rolls his eyes and says “Pfft sure buddy, you think I’m stupid?”
Your entire argument rests on idealism. You treat ideas like communism and capitalism as abstract moral propositions to be judged in a vacuum. This is precisely the error historical materialism was developed to correct. Systems do not emerge from the minds of philosophers. They arise from the material conditions of production, from the way human societies organize labor to meet their needs. To ask which system you would “put your life in the hands of” as if choosing from a menu ignores that history is not a matter of choice but of struggle grounded in concrete reality.
Let’s begin with the base and superstructure. The economic base, the mode of production, determines the political and ideological superstructure. You claim the issue is concentration of power, as if power floats freely above society. But power is not an independent variable. It is rooted in ownership and control of the means of production. Under capitalism, private ownership necessarily concentrates power in the hands of those who own capital. This is the logical outcome of a system where production is organized for profit rather than human need. You cannot have capitalism without class antagonism because the extraction of surplus value requires a class that owns and a class that sells its labor. To wish for capitalism without exploitation is to wish for a square circle.
China’s path must be understood through the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. Socialism presupposes a high development of productive forces. A society emerging from semi-feudalism, shattered by colonialism and war, cannot leap directly into advanced communism. The socialist transitionary period is a scientific recognition that the relations of production must correspond to the level of productive forces. China develops its economy under the leadership of a proletarian state. This allows for the accumulation of social wealth under public direction. Market mechanisms are employed, but they are subordinated to strategic planning and social goals.
Your characterization of capitalism as a “true ideal” if only it were built on human rights reveals a profound misunderstanding of the system’s inner logic. Capital is not a neutral tool. It is a social relation that compels accumulation. The imperative of endless expansion is not optional. A capitalist firm that does not maximize profit is eliminated by competition. This structural compulsion drives the exploitation of labor, the plunder of nature, and the imperialist domination of the global south. Human rights discourse, while valuable, cannot tame a system whose very metabolism requires inequality. The “immovable foundation” you imagine is impossible because capital constantly revolutionizes production, uproots communities, and commodifies every aspect of life to survive.
On the question of China’s policies, a materialist analysis refuses moralistic abstraction. The one child policy was a response to a specific historical conjuncture. In the late 1970s, China faced the real prospect that rapid population growth would outstrip agricultural and industrial capacity, undermining the very basis for development. This was not an arbitrary choice. It was a harsh measure taken under conditions of scarcity. A proper approach acknowledges the genuine harms while understanding the pressures that produced the policy. It also recognizes that the policy was adjusted as conditions changed. This is materialism in practice. Ideas are evaluated by their correspondence to reality, not by their conformity to an external moral standard.
Your claims about illiteracy and COVID are not just inaccurate. They serve an ideological function. China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and achieved near universal literacy through massive public investment in education. This is a historical achievement without parallel. Zero COVID was a public health strategy that prioritized the preservation of life, particularly the lives of the elderly and vulnerable. The outcome was among the lowest per capita death rates in the world. You dismiss this as tyranny while accepting a Western approach that sacrificed the vulnerable to maintain market “normalcy”. The long term disability caused by long COVID is a social catastrophe you ignore because it does not fit your narrative. A society that protects its weakest members is not tyrannical. It is humane.
The orientalism in your comment is also unmistakable. The image of “piles of discarded fetuses reaching skyscraper height” is not analysis. It is a trope drawn from a long tradition of Western propaganda that depicts Asian societies as inherently cruel, irrational, and disposable. This rhetoric dehumanizes an entire population to justify hostility. You speak of free thought, sex, and religion as if these are abstract rights detached from material conditions. But for the majority of humanity, freedom is first and foremost freedom from want, from disease, from premature death. China has delivered these substantive freedoms on a scale the West has not matched. Your focus on formal liberties while ignoring material outcomes reflects a privileged position that takes survival for granted.
Finally, your conclusion that distributed power is the only answer is correct in principle but empty without class analysis. Power is not distributed by wishing it so. It is redistributed through struggle against the structures that concentrate it. The US Constitution, for all its rhetorical brilliance, was designed to protect property interests. Its evolution into a system of concentrated corporate power is not an accident. It is the logical result of a state that serves capital. True democracy requires social ownership of the economy. It requires that the producers control what they produce and how it is distributed. This is not a utopian dream. It is the necessary next step in human development, visible in the experiments and advances of socialist construction around the world.
To judge China by the standards of liberal idealism is to miss the point entirely. History moves through contradiction. Socialism in the primary stage contains contradictions. It utilizes market forms while building the foundations for their eventual transcendence. This is dialectics. The task should not be to condemn an actually existing socialist project for not yet being perfect. The task should be to understand its trajectory, learn from its successes and errors, and advance the struggle for a world where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. That world will not arrive by wishing. It will be built through the material practice of millions, guided by the science of socialism, rooted in the concrete conditions of their time and place.
🫡
Absolutely cooked that fraud! 🙏😭
I would like to hear his rebuttal to some of the points I raise but unfortunately I just don’t think it’s likely he will respond.
Of course it’s based on idealism. The correct path to progress is to think of the ideal, then compare it to the current situation, identify what is missing, then close the gap.
So many commenters on here are caught up in comparing which is better: China or the US?
That is a waste of time and mirrors the ridiculous two party propaganda that wastes away American politics.
The truth is both systems are terrible.
COVID was barely more lethal than the common flu so both countries completely overreacted. Your idea of humanity being the reason they used militarized forces to bolt people’s doors in is a joke. China historically overreacts with their concentrated power as proven time and time again. Once of which resulted in the potential LARGEST loss of human life in all of history. How many did Mao “accidentally” kill in the name of creating a humane world? 30 million? 50?
The idea of fetuses pulling as high as skyscrapers has nothing to do with propaganda or justifying criticism. These are real facts with the number of abortion being 10 million per year. No country comes close to this number. It will factually create a skyscraper every single year.
I actually lived in China and the US in my lifetime. Believe me there are plenty of positives about that society that are far better than the US. But overall comparing the two existing systems… they both suck.
Lastly, the reason an ideal capitalistic structure can exist is because of technology. The point you have failed to cover (despite using AI to generate your arguments) is that humans are failed aspect of capitalism.
There is no comparing the competitive dominance of this system for the last 100 years. With barely a fraction of the same populous of China, the US sits comfortably with no potential military threat and is now leading the AI race. It’s a fools game to pretend that progress is not worthy of consideration in the best system. But to prevent the absolute abortion of human rights, it needs an infallible system to enact the foundation which I previously described. Some obvious choices are: corporations must have regulated profits to own housing and housing must have a cap on ownership by corporations, healthcare must be universal and promote preventative measures rather than for-profit reactive measures, centralized postal service is one of the greatest examples of a non profit system that has worked for Americans for a very very long time to save them millions and create jobs.
AI could be the answer to enforcing these in a way that cannot be overturned by the interests of politicians and corporations finding common goals to destroy morality.
I know this user is banned but I’m still losing it over the ‘you wrote your comment with Ai’ accusation
buddy is so out of depth that the concept of a commie dropping an essay of their own accord is an impossibility instead of the least surprising thing to happen when you’re arguing online with a communist lmao
go back to reddit
Don’t tell me what to do.
Your definition of idealism is so wrong its incredible, it really shows how little knowledge of political economy you truly have (if you quantified it it would likely be negative). Idealism posits that consciousness determines existence. You do exactly this by imagining a perfect system in your head and demanding reality conform to it. Historical materialism understands that systems emerge from material conditions and class struggle. You cannot design morality into a system built on exploitation. Your claim that both China and the US suck is not insight. It is third way centrism that protects the status quo by refusing to analyze class character. Equating a state focused on poverty alleviation with one focused on profit maximization is a political choice to ignore reality.
COVID was not the flu. Millions died and hundreds of thousands suffer permanent disability. You trivialize this mass death to protect your worldview. You dodge the core argument that Western capitalist countries left millions to die. Zero COVID was the correct material response to preserve life. It lasted longer because Western nations refused to cooperate and instead hoarded vaccines while preaching liberty. You call it tyranny I call it protecting the vulnerable. The western strategy was to let the virus burn through the workforce to keep markets open. That is the logic of capital. Your defense of that outcome shows where your priorities lie.
The Mao era famine propaganda you recycle is again showing the kind of person you truly are. The Great Leap Forward had policy errors but the famine was largely exacerbated by natural disasters and external pressure. It was the last famine China ever had. Since then China lifted over 900 million people from poverty, all but eradicated illiteracy, built infrastructure from the coast to rural villages including roads, electricity, and clinics. You ignore this massive material gain to fixate on decontextualized body counts. You are a fascist drunk on propaganda.
Your abortion argument is blatant orientalism. Raw numbers mean nothing without population context. Ten million abortions in a population of 1.4 billion is a rate of roughly 28 per 1000. That ranks China 66th in the world. There are no skyscrapers of fetuses. That imagery is dehumanizing trash designed to paint Asian society as barbaric. You claim you lived in China but your “insights” are just Western media talking points. You sound like a disgruntled sexpat sexpest who never understood the society he lived in (if you’re not just outright lying). Maybe you just resent it now that you’re no longer glorified here.
Ideal capitalism does not exist. The Western safety net you crave is built on pillaging the periphery through violence and imperialism. You cannot have regulated profits and universal care under a system driven by accumulation. Capital will always find a way to bypass rules to survive competition. Your solution to let AI enforce morality is techno fascist logic. It assumes humans are the problem and algorithms are the savior. Also I did not use AI to write this. Your arguments are the ones that sound like generated propaganda. But I still decided to engage in the hopes maybe you were simply misguided, I see now that misguided is the wrong phrase you clearly purposefully seek out reactionary talking points.
The US is dominant only because it emerged from World War II intact and assumed leadership of Western imperialism. It spent decades extracting wealth from the Global South. Even with that head start they are losing ground to China in multiple sectors. You talk about military threats but ignore the budget. The US spends more than the next ten nations combined. Comparing the US and China is not irrelevant (even though I didn’t do that in my original comment) they both embody the current most advanced forms of their respective systems.
Your rhetoric exposes a deep seated chauvinism and you are spouting fascist logic. You speak of distributed power while proposing an infallible AI enforcer to override human agency. Your imagery of fetus skyscrapers relies on old tropes of Asian barbarism to dehumanize a population. This is orientalism pure and simple. You claim to hate power concentration while defending a system that concentrates wealth in historically unprecedented levels. Your third way Nazi dog whistles serve only to protect Western hegemony. You have a surface level understanding of political economy. You fetishize technology and ignore relations of production. You are just an a fucking idiot who barely grasps the material world. Stop parroting orientalist lies and learn what materialism actually means. Maybe then you can start to actually understand the world.
Racist fashie pig.
I was actually really excited to reply to you because I can explain where our miscommunication is occurring. But then I skipped ahead and saw that you have devolved into an emotional wreck incapable of controlling yourself. This is textbook form of running away and painting someone you truly don’t know the first thing about with extreme, and I do mean extreme broad brush insults as well as… name calling? I just feel sorry for you now. This will be last message to you because I simply don’t continue with people who abandoned reason in the face of challenge. Best of luck to you.
You are not leaving because “I am emotional”. You are leaving because your arguments were dismantled and you have no response that wouldn’t embarrass yourself further. Claiming I am an emotional wreck is the oldest deflection in the book. It is what people do when they cannot engage with substance. You never addressed a single point about productive forces, class character, or the material basis of policy. You just recycled orientalist tropes and techno-utopian fantasies. Now that those have been exposed you retreat behind a facade of moral superiority.
You call it name calling. I call it accurate characterization. Your fetus skyscraper imagery is dehumanizing propaganda. Your dismissal of 900 million lifted from poverty is chauvinism. Your proposal for an infallible AI morals enforcer is fascist. These are not insults. They are accurate descriptions of what you actually wrote. If the truth feels like an attack that is a problem with your position not my delivery.
You say you do not continue with people who abandon reason. Yet you are the one who refused to engage with historical materialism. You are the one who reduced complex historical processes to body count propaganda. You are the one who claimed capitalism could be moral if only we designed it better. That is not reason. That is idealism, a fairytale concocted in your mind to make you feel better.
Do not pretend this is about civility. You were comfortable spouting orientalist lies and fascist dog whistles until someone actually pushed back. Now you want to exit with a sanctimonious farewell. That is cowardice. If you truly believed in distributed power and reasoned debate you would stay and engage. But you cannot. Because your position collapses under materialist analysis.
Go ahead and block me. It will not change the fact that your arguments were refuted point by point. It will not erase the orientalism in your rhetoric. It will not make your techno-fascist solutions any more viable. You are not rising above. You are running away. And everyone who reads this thread will see which one of us actually engaged with substance and which one retreated when challenged.
Bye bye piggie.
It’s too late: I have drawn myself as a rational Chad and you as a hysterical Wojak.
Brilliant strategy, I’m defeat
😱
Are we talking about the same document granting exclusive political rights to land and/or slave-owning white males or are you a visitor from another dimension?
Do you understand the word “intent”? Do you know the history of founders trying to install this intent, but being forced back by those slave owners? If you do, then I believe we both agree the intent was good and the execution has failed.
The constitution explicitly, openly vests power exclusively in wealthy and/or slave holding men. Are you seriously claiming that wasn’t “intentional”?! Your founding fathers overwhelmingly WERE wealthy slave owning white men, they “extracted” those concessions FROM THEMSELVES.
The founders were slave owners
So you’ll just skip over the historical facts surrounding how the initial document was better intended and the push back was from those who wanted to protect their “property.”
I don’t understand. Make a real argument with a list of supporting facts. If you truly believe what you’re saying then prove it to me. Change my mind. Why is everyone so lazy with their counter arguments. I feel like I need to educate my “opponents” just to feel like we’re having a conversation.
Westerners are so arrogant that assume that, if they believe it, it must be true.
I hope you go out like the last bad faith chud that used this catch phrase
Contributing a good faith argument has become too difficult. Engaging insults.
Go back to reddit you insufferable nerd
This is some “revolution betrayed” mythology. The founders WERE the slave owners. But even if they what you say was true, that means that their constitution crumbled immediately to the opposition and is unworthy of my respect or consideration
Oh I fully agree it’s not worthy of your respect or consideration. You’ll find most of my downvotes and arguments on here are from people who think this conversation is about China bad, US good. It’s not. My argument is both systems suck.
Okay, well if that’s your argument then you have an uphill battle ahead of you, considering the world-historical surges in life expectancy, literacy, poverty alleviation, education, crime reduction, social mobility and political autonomy brought by the Chinese system, which enjoys an over 90% approval rating among its people.
I’m glad you bright this up because this one of the markers I would use for a “good” system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_Human_Development_Index
The Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index.
I think New Zealand has a great example of how historically socialist political organizations have integrated a capitalist economy in a way that still continues to promote the welfare of their people.
Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland… these are the leaders in this index. How? A high-welfare free market economy.
This is basically capitalism but with high taxes using examples like net wealth tax.
Also, it’s not fair to use a statistic like 90% approval rating. The state controls all the data and media. That’s like trump saying he’s the best that ever lived. Okay, but that’s not actually true!
New Zealand is not socialist, it’s a part of the western empire and subsidizes its safety nets off of the plunder of the global south. Same with the Nordics. They all rely on it. Secondly, the 90% approval rating is fair and valid. Socialist systems need to own their own press, and not allow private capitalists to steer the narrative.
As a Norwegian, I find it pretty funny that this guy keeps bringing up my country as an example to be followed, while at the same time using anecdotes he (supposedly) heard from Chinese people to prove that China is bad.
Why? For the simple fact that Norway produced someone like Anders Breivik. If anecdotes are now evidence, then I suppose that Breivik’s claims of how Norway functions must be taken seriously, rather than be dismissed as the ravings of a mass murdering fascist. And he’s not alone in his beliefs either, I’ve seen and heard some variation of “I don’t agree with his actions, but his manifesto does have some really good points” more times than I can count. Must all be true then, right?
And by the way, the 90% approval number actually comes from a study done by Harvard University, not from the CPC. But I suppose comrade Xi is personally controlling Harvard now lmao
New Zealand has tons of socialist influence and has had many many socialist political organizations influencing their politics for decades.
I know they are not socialist, but it’s am example of a free market economy with that necessary socialist influence. (Although, I think they are starting to crumble since their economy is so attached to foreign nations, it’s pretty unfortunate)
I will say the only way for the people to truly control anything is for them to have a vote on each decision. If they are not voting on the media, they do not control it. It would be amazing if ownership of your government and economy included actual decision making on the individual - collective level.
A small group of leaders can’t relate to their people’s interests on an individual level in a way that perfectly executes their will. It’s impossible.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what its marketing department says.
Straw arguments are not unique to Reddit. Guess this site is just people banned from Reddit rather than the evolved form I thought it was. Lame.
Far fewer than died outside of their homes in the rest of the world.
China actually cared about their people’s lives honestly, all the west cared about were their economies.
Ya covid was barely worse than regular flu viruses when you compare the death ratios. And I’m progressive by the way. I got the shots and locked down then saw that all the smart money was in healthcare, the vaccine manufacturers and insurance.
If the west cared about their economies then why did they require vaccine cards to enter grocery stores or the work place in their most populous areas?
I truly don’t understand where you get these ideas or care which country is better. Both suck. The people of this world deserve better than either has to offer. That is the conversation I’m trying to have.
It is hard to avoid the temptation of insulting you for this abysmally dogshit take.
Idk how privliged you are. I’ve had multiple family members die to covid. Worldwide, the number of deaths confirmed from covid was over 5 million, but estimated excess mortality was in the 25 million range.
You get all pissy about “10 million aborted fetuses” (as if fetuses have a conscious life for me to take", but 25 million actual dead is nothing for you. On brand for a capitalist!
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
The first sign of self consciousness is throwing insults.
Out of respect for yours and my family members who passed from COVID, I will say I think it’s stupid anyone dies from the flu regardless of which one it is.
Lastly, when you look at deaths per cases, you’ll see I’m correct. The uniqueness of COVID was not its mortality like the drug manufacturers wanted you to think. “The vaccine stops the spread.” Remember that? How many people died from the vaccine after being coerced into taking it? Do those people matter to you?
Masks were the real solution. China already had a culture of mask wearing while sick. I myself an immunocompromised. I was so angry at people who didn’t wear masks and still get highly perturbed when people appear in public places without them while coughing or sneezing their personal fluids everywhere. It’s disgusting.
But after all my thrashing about, I came to a very simple conclusion about life and people. You can’t force people to do anything. You can’t tell them what to do and expect them to listen. Creating a forceful or even violent consequence for this situation isn’t “correct.” It’s just more bad on top of bad.
The truth is education is the answer to most problems. Better education reduces racism, violence, drug use, susceptibility to propaganda, increases financial decision making, emotional control, overall happiness and should absolutely give people the perspective that they should not do onto others that they would not have done upon themselves with higher standards than “derr my southern attitude is that I don’t care about me own health so I’m fine coughing on you.” What a load of shit. Some Americans set a truly low bar in that regard.
But, I have evolved from the previous mindset you seem particularly situated on. Believe me my worst fear is that this was part of their intention. Real deaths creating permanent divide between the red and blue. Right where they want us, right? Fighting each other instead of them. Isn’t this all simply a class war? At least in America it is.
You’re a right wing weirdo.
I’m not. I’m progressive. Like Bernie Sanders progressive. But your name calling makes you something alright.
This one of the markers I would use for a “good” system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_Human_Development_Index
The Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index.
Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland… these are the leaders in this index. How? A high-welfare free market economy.
This is capitalism but with a foundation of human rights built on high taxes using examples like net wealth tax.
Right.
Search for how many land/companies they own in South America/Africa, were the Amazonian wood go, the minerals extract from South America and the gems from Africa, who owns the vast majority of Brazilian coffee
This is imperialism with nice things for white people.
So, I looked it up. You’re right. NATO countries are pillaging Africa in a way I never knew about. The index score is a good thing still, I think. But the source of that score should be considered.
Does anywhere exist with a high score that is ethically sourced?
I know China does the same thing in Africa. So they’re out…
Regarding that comment about white people. The US is far more diverse than any super power. The only close comparison is Canada which is more diverse, but not a real super power.
The combined population of NATO is nearing 1 billion and it’s much more diverse than China or Russia or any other “communist” or “socialist” state.
Anyways, I’m not saying NATO is good thing or bad thing. I don’t truly know. But I know the US style of capitalism appears to bleed into NATO is shit. And China’s “socialism” is shit too.
None. Since when the fuck do mRNA vaccines kill people? Hell even older vaccines have negligible mortality.
You can. What do you think the legal system is?
Red and blue? Brother, I’m not American nor have I ever even been to America. I don’t subscribe to either side of your political aile.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-vaccine-covid.html
The legal system creates a system of punishment. Do you think this works in forcing people to do whatever? If it did, people wouldn’t be in prison, right?
So what? We’re talking about the US handled COVID. Keep up. Your personal background doesn’t belong in this conversation.
Point 1
Direct quote from your source. All it says is that in some people it can cause a little heart tissue damage.
Point 2:
If you wish to abolish the prison system then I am OK with that. If you ain’t wishing to do that I’m not even sure what your position is and I doubt it would be coherent in any way.
Point 3:
Blud … you brought up “red and blue”
1 in 32000 is very close to the ratio of deaths from COVID itself. And they recommended 3 shots minimum with continuous maintenance doses!!
Myocarditis from the mrna vaccine has killed several people which is the point I was making.
I got three shots myself and they didn’t work (according to the same doctors who administered them). Imagine my resentment in not being able to grocery shop without my vaccine card which only increased my heart disease risk without any of the benefit. I had to go back and get antibodies directly injected at a later date. Then still got a fever of 104 for 36 hours. It’s sort of hard to believe all the bullshit from my perspective. I still think masks are the way to go.
I applaud you for your bravery, I’m still gonna downvote you
The only way to avoid downvotes is to stay silent.
I mean not spreading reactionary nonsense also helps
Now that china is powerful, capitalists want to claim it as theirs…
This is entirely vibes-based. Capitalism, socialism, and communism are modes of production and distribution, not ideals or ideas. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership as the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes in charge of the state, socialism is public ownership as the principle aspect and the working classes in charge of the state, and communism is a post-socialist mode of production where all production and distribution has been collectivized.
China is a socialist country governed by a communist party. Public ownership is the principle aspect of its economy, and the working classes control the state. The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
The US Constitution was written to protect slave owners, capitalists, and landlords. It is not written to protect the many. China, on the other hand, puts the working classes first and manages to use this system to uplift the working classes year over year.
An excellent and very clear answer comrade, but don’t you have any book recommendations that are more on the commenter’s level? Roland Boer is great but it takes a pretty advanced level of political econ and history knowledge to grasp. Do you know of any simpler books on the subject? Or would you recommend just listening to Hasan Piker to someone at that stage of the journey?
Not cowbee but, at this commenters level the most on his level suggestion I can think of after reading his comments is that he should try hit himself in the head with a brick repeatedly until he forgets everything he knows and start over.
He needs to wash his brain, you could even say.
Oh come on!
(You had me in the first half ngl)
Roland Boer’s work is useful because it’s meticulously well-researched and sourced. Unfortunatley, for someone actively hostile to the idea of democracy in China, simple works are easily tossed aside as “propaganda.”
Do you have a pdf for Boer’s book on SWCC? I’ve wanted to read it but haven’t been able to find it.
https://www.sintelins.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Boer-2023-Socialism-in-Power.-Singapore-Springer.pdf
This is for Socialism in Power, ashestoashes is asking for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners.
My bad misread their comment
No worries, now they have both!
Tysm!
This should work! Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners
Thank you!
No problem!
You are either ignorant or so desperate to pretend China is not a tyranny that you will actually say outloud that the state is controlled by the people. What a joke. It is so far from that I don’t even think a conversation is possible with you. We must first agree the sky is blue to have a conversation…
Do you have a counterpoint, or are you just going to cope? Professor Roland Boer’s work is meticulously researched and very well-sourced.
Get a job
I love my job. It involves about 25 presentations per month on how I’m saving companies millions of dollars by increasing their efficiency. It’s a small bubble in capitalism that doesn’t have a negative side effect. Though, I do wish I was an owner in the company. I’m all for that idea! I’m pro socialism!!!
Okay, so get a real job then lmao
Ok, I was not sure before, but now I am. Good bait, caught a lot of us
I do witness ignorance and desperation. But it is emanating from you.
No attempt at explaining yourself or providing evidence is the easiest win of my life. Thanks for playing. Next…
Fucking. Cringe.
i just downvoted you but i’m commenting to let you know so that i’m not a coward, i’ll let my comrades handle it, im not in the mood. you’re about to get schooled
Still waiting for the teacher to show. Let us all know if your mood improves enough to discuss.
You already got schooled extremely hard with multiple effort posts you couldn’t respond to
Oh I’m still plugging away. So far this entire comment section is trying to pull the argument into China good, US bad direction. Ignoring my argument altogether (both systems suck).
Unfortunately, my role has become teacher just to try to keep people in topic. I’m talking about a unifying system we should all be working on and everyone else is rooting for their sports team like drunken idiots.
Redditers need to learn that disagreeing with an argument is not the same as ignoring it. (Though in the case it’s just an assertion, not an argument)
Oh my God, what an insufferable loser you are. You’ve been catagorically schooled by multiple people much more knowledgeable than you and now you’re trying to fall back on smug condescention like you arrogant western supremacists always do. “A foreigner disagreed with me? Clearly I just need to educate this ignorant savage!”
No, you aren’t. All you’ve done is shrug and say “both sides bad” while condemning the actually better system.
This is such projection, Jesus Christ
Ah it seems you’ve failed to keep your composure as well. Why would anyone take you seriously?
Are you actually trying to do a caricature of the most insufferable kind of reddit shithead? It’s hard to believe anyone could sincerely type this out
Oh absolutely not. I simply treat my commentary on the internet in line with how I treat people face to face. I don’t know you or what is going on in your life. What things you’ve achieved or suffered. I simply cannot devolve a person to fit my needs because I’m hiding behind an anonymous keyboard. I’m not trying to take a moral high ground either. I want us to reach common ground in the end.
I’m convinced 99% of the world cares about a few common goals: health, family, housing, entertainment, peace and fairness.
The fact we are struggling with each other to to figure the best way to get that… shit. You’re like a great person compared to so many that don’t even think about these things or have the education to consider it. It’s okay that we disagree or misunderstand each other. I’m giving us both the benefit of the doubt that our intent is good and not just selfishly.
@QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml already schooled you so hard
Unfortunately unlikely he will bother to read my effort post and if he does I have my doubts at his ability to comprehend it as he spouts off “third way” dog whistles and the most ridiculous orientalist chauvinist narratives and lies about China.
This is accurate enough and largely in line with modern communist theory although lacking in detail (why did you get my hopes up to dash them?)
No it’s not, unless you are talking about literal electrical/mechanical power (engineers of the world, unite!).
Sociological power is a poorly defined concept with a nebulous effect on society.
Economic power, while more defined isn’t a cause but an effect of the organisation of production (and thus, whether a society is feudal, capitalist, socialist or communist).
Not at all lmao. LGBTQ rights are about the only ones the Chinese are a bit lagging on. The rest are fine.
And before you come at me about freedom of speech, that is nothing more than the freedom for the rich to buy the public opinion. You don’t want to live in such a society, cause then you get Elon buying twitter and Trump buying the US.
Bruh … what the fuck are you talking about?
Also pro-tip, you can just Google the stats. Here it is. China is number 66.
Selfish answer: the one that gives me tons of money and protection (imagine a dictatorship of the transfemmes)
Non-selfish answer: a dictatorship of the proletariat cause I’m a proletariat and so are most people
Removed by mod
Born and raised. You clearly have never been, yet you speak with arrogance as you spout off talking points.
This claim gets repeated endlessly, but repetition does not turn an allegation into proof. Words like “genocide” get deployed because they carry moral weight, not because the evidence meets the definition. The actual situation is far more mundane and far more complicated. There are policies directed at separatist violence, religious extremism, and regional security. Those policies are harsh in places and worth debating, but transforming them into an industrial genocide narrative is propaganda, not analysis.
China officially recognizes multiple religions. Mosques, churches, temples, and monasteries operate openly across the country. Anyone who has actually walked through cities in Ningxia, Gansu, Henan, or Zhejiang would know that immediately.
You are vaguely referencing events without understanding the historical sequence. The campaign encouraging criticism of the party was followed by a backlash when leadership feared that the criticism was destabilizing the state itself. It was a political struggle inside a revolutionary system still trying to define its direction after a civil war and a massive social transformation. That period was chaotic and involved real repression, but your version reduces decades of complex political conflict into a moral fable.
The Cultural Revolution itself was something entirely different from what you described. It was a moment when ordinary workers and students were mobilized directly into politics at a scale never before seen in modern states. Institutions collapsed, factions formed, and power moved outside bureaucratic structures. The problem was not that “people were punished for speaking.” The problem was that the political struggle escaped all stable mechanisms of coordination. The result was excess, factional violence, and eventually a reassertion of centralized authority. Treating it as a simple story about free speech misses the entire point.
The one-child policy was relaxed progressively and formally replaced in 2015. Calling that “barely removed” nearly a decade later is a stretch. More importantly, the policy emerged from specific demographic pressures in a poor country attempting to industrialize rapidly with limited resources. Whether one supports it or not, it was not some arbitrary cruelty invented for ideological reasons.
As for the “Starbucks abortion clinic on every corner” line, that is simply fantasy. Reproductive health clinics exist, as they do in any country with a population exceeding a billion people. But the picture you are painting does not match reality. It reads like something copied from a political meme.
You did not read the source he linked did you? Yes, the absolute number is large. In a country with roughly 1.4 billion people almost every raw number will look enormous. Rates are what matter. Around 28 per 1,000 women places it roughly mid-table globally. That is precisely why the ranking is around 66th. Statistics are meaningless without context.
Now the argument shifts. First the claim is that China is uniquely oppressive. When that collapses under scrutiny the claim becomes that no country has free speech anyway. That contradiction should tell you something about the reliability of the earlier claims.
This is the most revealing sentence in your entire comment because it exposes the mythology underlying the rest of it. The United States presents itself as a system where the population governs through elections, but the material structure of power sits elsewhere. Political campaigns are financed by concentrated wealth. Media systems that shape public opinion are owned by large corporations. Lobbying organizations write legislation. Regulatory agencies rotate personnel with the industries they supposedly regulate.
Voting occurs, but the range of outcomes permitted by the system remains narrow because the economic foundation never changes. Parties compete over management of the same underlying order. When policies threaten entrenched capital interests they simply do not survive the process. That is why universal healthcare has been debated for generations without implementation. That is why financial institutions responsible for economic crises receive bailouts while ordinary people absorb the consequences.
“Checks and balances” function primarily as inertia mechanisms. They slow structural change, not empower it. The idea that the population can fundamentally redirect the system through periodic elections ignores how power actually organizes itself in advanced capitalist societies. The state becomes intertwined with the interests of the dominant economic class. Elections then operate more like a controlled feedback loop than a mechanism for transformation.
So when you claim the United States offers a path to change, what you are really describing is a ritual that produces the appearance of choice while the underlying distribution of power remains intact. If the population truly had the capacity to vote away the interests of the wealthiest sectors of society, those sectors would never have allowed such a mechanism to exist in the first place.
Just admit you’re a racist who seeks out orientalist and chauvinist narratives about China because it makes you feel better about the decline of your empire.
Thanks for writing this out. You’ve a way with words I do admire.
I’m honestly impressed.
If your opinion is that power is concentrated in the hands of the few in both the USA and China, how do you explain the difference between how bad it’s going for America rn vs. how good it’s going for China rn? Sure, both have their problems, no country is perfect, but it really looks like the USA is completely falling apart while China is having technological breakthrough after technological breakthrough.
Thanks for your response btw, the original commenter is right that people who downvote and leave don’t contribute anything to the conversation, unlike you.
I think we have different definitions of how good things are going.
In my mind the scientific breakthrough phenomena is an interesting one. The US just defunded their universities and research programs across the board. So they are truly not even competing in that space at the moment.
Right now the world is desperately racing to AI dominance because the innovations in warfare are so tragic, they are left with no other option. The US leads in this space which implies that all innovation will soon be greatly enhanced with these tools.
To me, 99% of people on the planet are interested in a handful of common ideas: health, family, housing, entertainment, and a good job (I’ve not heard a better definition for this than: challenging, make an impact, fairly compensated).
I honestly don’t care much about comparing the US and China in these regards since neither match the systems I mentioned before which are capitalism with a foundation of human rights paid for centralized non profit organizations or communism with high satisfaction and reduced concentration of government power.
If 99% of people are aligned on these topics, the reality is all war, conflict, government powers, regional economic competition are unnecessary. The government should be for the entire planet and simply administrative. That is the true ideal. Everyone gets to vote on their administrative tasks based on performance and efficiency markers every year.
No need for presidents, militaries, etc.
Usa doesn’t lead in AI. China leads in AI.
Provide sources for your claim and you just may change my mind. However, even if it is a current lead, I wonder if it would last any relevant length of time. For one, their chips are not as quality. Second, as far as I can tell the US is entering a war with military contracts being signed with AI companies. This unprecedented coupling of AI and warfare isn’t being matched by anyone on earth.
huggingface.co/models
Read it and weep. China is completely dominating.
Regarding the future, what use are those chips if you don’t build more electric grid? China builds tons of solar panels, and usa builds nothing. China is already developing better chips, and has cut off your rare earths supply, so you can’t develop better chips.
I don’t understand your link. It just lists open source AI models which are… free? And about creating entertainment?
I’m not sure if that plays into the AI warfare dominance the US is building and is not open source.
I know China dominates energy sustainability. Will they go nuclear to stay ahead of the US? I think that’s the US response is basically entire nuclear plants dedicated to specific companies like Microsoft and Google.
Do you have sources for “the US has no rare earths supplies and can’t make better chips?”
I’m happy to be taught honestly. My ego is not about winning an argument here.
My initial argument is still that: both systems suck and the people of earth deserve better!
Appreciate you commenting but I have nothing to add to critique this beyond what others have already said.
I misread! This should be the state, not NGOs!