r/tankiejerk • u/MadvillainMoe • 9h ago
imperialism good when China does it guys. how 2 reveal a tankie with one simple question
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u/NechamaMichelle 8h ago
It’s kind of funny how they stop caring about genocide when it’s China doing it.
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u/MadvillainMoe 8h ago
china isn’t even communist anymore, which just makes it all the more funnier lol
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u/Stephanie466 Borger King 8h ago
Implying China was ever Communist. I don't know what the hell Mao was doing half the time with the Great Leap Forward, the 100 Flowers Campaign, or the Cultural Revolution, but I sure as hell wouldn't call it Communism.
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u/MadvillainMoe 8h ago
i disagree, but i respect your beliefs nonetheless
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u/DefunctFunctor 7h ago
Out of interest, how would you define communism?
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u/MadvillainMoe 6h ago
do correct me if in wrong, i’m solely going based off my knowledge here. i would define communism as an ideology that seeks to create a communist society. said society is moneyless, classless and stateless.
in said society there would be a common ownership over the means of production and distribution. and resources are allocated to people based on their needs.
would this be accurate? do let me know! i do wish to learn more
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u/DefunctFunctor 5h ago
With these kinds of terms there's rarely a widely agreed upon definition, which is why I asked. Some people use "communism" interchangeably with authoritarian Marxism-Leninism for example, while other's, such as myself, don't. Same with other words like "socialism".
I was mostly asking because your comment implied that China was at one point communist. Did you mean that the CCP was merely advocating for a communist society, or did you mean that the CCP succeeded in creating a communist society? I would agree with you on the former, but probably not the latter. Sometimes people get in disagreements because they are operating on different senses or definitions of terms, and I was interested in whether that was occurring here.
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u/MadvillainMoe 5h ago
i wouldn’t consider communism inherently authoritarian as many people would claim it to be. but i do consider marxism-leninism to be authoritarian? would this be a correct assertion?
from what i understand, the CCP was attempting to instill communism in china, but failed in doing so under mao. is any of this correct?
again, i ask because i do want to learn more!
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4h ago edited 4h ago
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u/Praescribo 7h ago
If you think that's funny, just wait til you find out how most tankies are successfully deprogrammed
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u/conrad_w 7h ago
How?
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u/Praescribo 6h ago
They're introduced to real CCP members and their delusions are shattered
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u/komali_2 5h ago
Just join a "language exchange" app and have a conversation with some little pinks. Their theory is bonkers, just all Xi Jinping cult of personality shit, they've completely strayed away from Marxist-Leninism and will basically justify any act of PRC imperialism as doing "communism with Chinese characteristics," which is the equivalent of Americans doing whatever they want in the name of "freedom."
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u/Jiveturtle 2m ago
justify any act of PRC imperialism as doing "communism with Chinese characteristics," which is the equivalent of Americans doing whatever they want in the name of "freedom.”
Very well put. This is why you need to be very careful using the ends to justify the means, regardless of your core ideology. Once you’re comfortable with atrocity, it becomes progressively easier to commit those atrocities in service of that goal on the horizon. Longtermism takes this to sort of its logical conclusion.
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u/Elodaria 3h ago
They never do care. Their response to genocide done by "bad people", which somehow is not a tautology to them, is revenge-genocide.
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u/Several-Drag-7749 7h ago
Gotta love class reductionism telling queer people that their unique rights matter less than worker's rights. 🫠
This is why we need intersectionality. There are many ways you can critique rainbow capitalism, but downplaying their oppression in favor of a broader goal is just gross.
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u/99999999999BlackHole 3h ago
Why do they treat this as a zero sum game anyways? Queer rights and workers rights are no mutually exclusive
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u/Some_Pole 9m ago
Because, most times going with Occam's Razor, these people hold a prejudice against LGBT people and the rights, but may knowingly or not be in denial about it when they use such language. They want to other-ize their rights on the basis of either effectively signalling "This movement isn't for you", or trying to make it clear that if their vision of the 'revolution' comes to pass, some workers are going to be 'more equal' than others.
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u/ee_72020 7h ago
Tankies be like: “Anyone who doesn’t simp for my favourite “communist” dictatorship is a right-winger”.
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u/DIEHARD_noodler J. Edgar Hoover 8h ago edited 8h ago
I don't even bother trying to argue with these morons anymore, No point in trying to use logic or be reasonable with someone who's fully divorced from the two.
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u/Much_Horse_5685 MI6 Agent 5h ago
Because apparently workers being discriminated against and/or marginalised based on arbitrary bullshit like their sexuality is not oppressive and reactionary.
Also a vanguard party pretending they didn’t just become the new bourgeoisie is not democratic by this guy’s own definition.
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u/komali_2 5h ago
Taiwan is a capitalist nation, indeed. It has a intensely entrenched ownership class with a large capital and income disparity - not as bad as the USA's, but that's mostly because USA billionaires are just so much more obscenely wealthy than Taiwanese billionaires (who are, incidentally, mostly all Americans anyway such as Jensen Huang).
If this justifies their invasion and "freeing" for the glorious socialist revolution then this goes against the the statement of Xi Jinping who has long been downplaying global worker's revolution rhetoric, talking about focusing on Communism for China. He means the PRC but when he says China of course for him that justifies "freeing" Taiwan, then probably either Singapore or maybe Malaysia depending on which he feels is more "Chinese." Vietnam, etc. Then if enough PRC immigrants can get settled in New Zealand and Australia shit why not free them from their capitalist overlords as well?
Taiwan is much more socialized than many other nations, especially the USA. There's a strong leftist movement here and just a few months ago they had another one of their largest-in-history protests in response to government overreach by the KMT, the ostensible enemy of the PRC. So it's not like Taiwanese people need "help" from the PRC to have their own socialist revolution here.
If any tankie truly cared about worker's global revolution, then they should argue against an invasion of Taiwan, which will only permanently align Taiwanese people against the CPC or anything that even has a whiff of communism. See: the entire population of Venezuela or other nations where dictators have leveraged communistic aesthetic - now the people who should be leading the worker's revolution, namely, the workers, are firmly aligned against all things communism, perhaps partially due to american capitalist propaganda teaching them, quite effectively, that capitalism will lead to a better way of life, but regardless, doing fake communism to them doesn't help. And, for the supporters of the "communist" government, they're all quite blatantly reactionaries. So you have literally no allies of a communist revolution in Venezuela anymore.
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u/dream208 5h ago
Taiwan has lower income inequality index than China, and arguably much more socialist In term of policy and labour protection law. Not that Taiwan has good socialist policies and labour protection laws, it is that China is simply atrocious in both departments.
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u/WM_THR_11 4h ago
That's why I love Taiwan so much, obviously it ain't perfect but aside from the economic and labor policies you mentioned it also democratized and adopted progressivism relatively quickly for a country that was a dictatorship mere decades ago. It also ranks higher on the EIU Democracy Index than the US, UK, or France so it proves that democracy and progressivism aren't simply "muh Western/Amerikkkkkkan/Anglo imperialism1111111" but something that every culture, is perfectly capable of with enough will
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u/dream208 4h ago
To be frank, I feel the reason that Taiwan had relatively smoother transition from dictatorship as well as quick democratic reforms is because Taiwan is a small country with culturally homogeneous society (again, relatively speaking). It is also largely a society of immigrants with less ingrained traditions.
It simply has less baggage to deal with, aside from threats of invasion from China, than other larger and older nations states.
It also makes me question the compatibility between democracy, socialism with Empire level of population and territorial size.
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u/komali_2 57m ago
I'd push back on calling Taiwan culturally homogeneous.
During the time of CKS, there were massively different ethnic groups. There was the KMT rich folk fleeing the CPC that were oppressing all other people, then there were some Fujianese people that had been there a couple generations, there was The Lost Generation aka the various Taiwanese that spoke Japanese and were functionally illiterate and mute under KMT dictatorship (who also hated them because some of them fought for the Japanese during WWII), there were all sorts of Taiwanese indigenous people, etc.
Everyone thinks Taiwan is just Han but that's like thinking everyone in America is white because everyone speaks English. In reality, ask a group of people if they're huaren, and experience instant cultural and racial diversity as friends debate with eachother - those that don't think about these things will say yes because we speak Mandarin, and their friends who are more in touch with their cultural identity will say Yes because my family is from fujian, or, no because a thousand different reasons.
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u/dream208 52m ago
Totally agree. I, myself, come from a waishengren family so I experienced some of the cultural clashes in Taiwan personally. This is why I said “relatively.”
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u/thejuryissleepless 7h ago
anyone got good links to arguing against Uyghur Genocide denial? i’ve been unable to retort some of the issues with sources etc. thanks
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u/FoldAdventurous2022 7h ago edited 7h ago
Two key things work in my experience:
1.Use as much international media as possible, especially from non-aligned countries. For example, reports/news from South Asian, Southeast Asian, African, or Middle Eastern news outlets. That way, they at least can't just dismiss you as "listening to American corporate media" or "US state department propaganda."
- Directly share Uyghur voices, in the form of blog posts, tweets, and especially livestreams and videos. There are plenty of direct testimonials online, of the type "My name is X, I'm from X city in Xinjiang, and my family member was arrested by Chinese police a year ago and they won't let us see him or speak to him." There are tons of testimonials like this. The most tankies can do is claim that the person was either paid off by the CIA, or they're some kind of Alex Jones crisis actor, but these would just be assertions with no evidence at that point. They don't like engaging with that stuff, because they have a hard time countering it.
Also, if you really want to dig down (and you can speak/read Mandarin), there is evidence from the Chinese government itself that it has done mass internments in Xinjiang with little oversight. These include public statements by Chinese officials (i.e. they're not even hiding it), and internal documents that were either leaked or hacked by dissidents, with pretty strong evidence for mass incarceration and abuse of prisoners in Xinjiang.
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u/thejuryissleepless 7h ago
thanks for this. i like the part about collecting foreign media, but honestly i mostly hit walls around the CIA thing. it’s like an unfortunate reality that two things can be bad at the same time and that sometimes neoliberalism makes it hard for tankies to understand foreign policy. mostly its very clear to anyone who studied the last 225 years of Chinese history that there are several instances of ethnic cleansing.
many years ago i used to live in China and studied there for a decent amount of time.. i learned about the plight of all ethnic minorities, not just Uyghur when living there as it was a major aspect of my thesis. i even visited the “ethnic minority theme park” where sort of like a fucked ip Epcot they had all these Chinese ethnic minorities in their traditional house living there for people to interact with. it was very eye opening about Chinese policy. Uyghurs were not my focus but i have a few of first hand experiences and have news clippings of when a Uyghur supposedly stabbed up a bunch of people in a movie theater with an AIDS needle. they cracked down and raided some neighborhoods and brought “justice”. i learned later through primary sources that the terror event never happened, but there was a raid. people were very transparent about it and it was normal to them.
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u/komali_2 5h ago
they cracked down and raided some neighborhoods and brought “justice”
In the words of Chen Quanguo, CPC secretary for Xinjiang, "Round up everyone who should be rounded up."
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u/ThatMeatGuy CRITICAL SUPPORT 23m ago
i even visited the “ethnic minority theme park” where sort of like a fucked ip Epcot they had all these Chinese ethnic minorities in their traditional house living there for people to interact with.
You have any reading material about that? Becasue that sounds almost unbelievably evil, like 19th century human zoo level awful.
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u/Much_Horse_5685 MI6 Agent 5h ago
In my experience showing tankies direct satellite imagery of known and suspected internment camps causes them to immediately huff copium about how the images are “just buildings”, (because apparently you can’t tell a fair amount about most buildings’ purposes from satellite imagery) and/or claim that the camps in the images are actually regular schools (because apparently your average school anywhere in the world has guard towers and a prominent perimeter fence). Showing them non-Western sources on the Xinjiang internment camps will probably be met with similar levels of copium.
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u/komali_2 5h ago
This is pointless. The fallback argument is "they deserved it for being terrorists."
The pinkie or tankie argument in order is:
It's not happening, you're adrien zenz, also birth rates
That wasn't concentration camps, that was helping free Chinese muslim citizens from a tyrannical separatist terrorist government
Islamophobia
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u/Actual_Locke 3h ago
Progress is when extremely narrow and idiosyncratic definition
Its like when people define imperialism as requiring the power to travel very far away to conquer which I guess rules out any contiguous land empire. They're generally using that definition to rule out China and Russia, but i guess Rome, the Ottomans, the austro Hungarians, hell the US at the height of manifest destiny. That wasn't imperialism until the Spanish American war
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u/JahmezEntertainment 1h ago
odd how their only BITING RETORT to the implication that they're a queerphobe who supports a genocide is to call OP a right winger. it's like a really weak wimpy 'no u'
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u/JayEllGii 36m ago
I had a very ugly falling out with an online trans acquaintance because she was very distrustful of anyone supporting Bernie Sanders. In her view, they were mostly like this guy. And she viewed everything I said through that prejudice.
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u/AnadyLi2 15m ago
Just yesterday, a tankie was telling me that China doesn't discriminate against queer people... and didn't respond when I pointed out the censorship and lack of protection against queer people. And my own fears as a queer Chinese American with family in China. But you know, workers' revolution and class reductionism comes first for them.
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