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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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"Authoritarian" is largely a meaningless term. All it really means is one group using force against another group, but it doesn't say anything about which group is which. In the US Empire, the capitalists use the state to crush the workers, and export genocide and chaos to the global south. In the PRC, the working class uses the state to keep the capitalists in check as they progress and develop along socialist lines. This stark difference in which class is in power is shown with immense popular support in the PRC:
The state used the police to crush the working class when they demanded the money from the banks that invested it in a runaway housing scam.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/11/china-violent-clashes-at-protest-over-frozen-rural-bank-accounts
You are believing in a fantasy. There are countless countries around the world that are arguably more socialist than China without even calling themselves such. Quite frankly, I trust actions and numbers more than words.
Using a western, anti-communist news source for a report on how China is supposedly crushing the working class? Color me shocked! You have no points.
What would be a source you deem valid in this case. The only thing I can say is that multiple news sources published about this topic.
And what do you have to say about the problem of half-assed building projects that keep killing people in china because they used the wrong type of sand for concrete for example?
What's important is the framing, and what is left in vs what is left out. Those that were harmed by the government popping the real estate bubble were those who had the extra money to invest in real estate, which is the primary vehicle for balooning your wealth in China. The user I replied to specifically stated working class, which in reality should be more like the petty bourgeois.
Secondly, the scale of violence inplied by the user is the idea that the state sent in jackbooted thugs to crush the protest, but reading the article it seems as though it was only a handful of people that got into a skirmish with plainclothes police officers. That doesn't excuse anything, of course, but now we know "CPC crushes working class protestors with police" is at best an exaggeration of "crushes" and the "working class" part is an embellishment.
Finally, the article says the government worked to address the complaints! This wasn't a protest against the government, but a protest for government intervention. This wasn't because the CPC did something bad, but was a request for the CPC to step into the banking system failing and help people harmed by that.
So, again, we have what appears to be light police skirmishes with upper-middle class people harmed by a banking failure that requested CPC intervention, which they did. What they framed it as was poor, working class protestors harmed by CPC action being met by overwhelming jackbooted thugs in order to squash dissent against the CPC. See how that's dishonest? And that's taking the Guardian at face value, just reading between the lines.
Do you have more information on what the specific banking error was, because most sources I was able to find are focused on the violent intervention and less about what exactly happened in the banks.
If not, the incident doesn’t make china as bad or worse than the us but it does make the perfect image of the chinese government seem a bit more questionable.
Also, what do you think about the issue of things like tofu dreg construction? Why do you think that happens or did it even happen as shown on multiple videos from chine?
I don't personally know more about this single event, but the broader housing bubble has been widely reported on. If you want a Chinese perspective, I recommend searching CGTN.
As for the CPC, it is by no means perfect. As a socialist country, the PRC does a much better job of meeting the needs of the people. Even the linked article was a protest for government action, not against it. The CPC makes mistakes, but the system itself is better, so it's likely shortcomings are resolved over time.
As for "tofu-dregs," they aren't all that common. It has happened, it was a term coined by Zhu Rongji, premier of the CPC at the time. Using insufficient rebar, poor quality concrete, etc has happened because of rapid development and the ability for individuals to cut corners for higher profits or to meet deadlines. However, this is more of a problem of the past, and not a widescale problem, despite how western countries would report on it.
Really, identifying bias within an article and engaging with it critically is good practice in general.
Alright, I think tofu-dregs are mostly an issue that happened at a scale once and the reporting is mostly happening as the broken buildings are showing up. I could imagine the issue that caused this has been worked on by now
That's closer to the truth. China builds more than anyone, so by sheer numbers there were going to be some people skirting their responsibilities. State intervention and oversight has largely rectified the problem, which was more prevalent in the 90s/2000s.
Can you please provide a source for the graphic?
It's in the bottom left, here's another bunch of sources.
Meta argument: charts like this are basically useless.
I was raised in a very religious town. If you asked, the people in that town would say “my religion is a religion of love” “people should be as free as possible because it’s an extension of personal agency” and all the while they beat their kids and would rather die than let gay or trans people be themselves.
They can quote the scriptures and could likely write some pretty strong rhetoric implying they are loving and kind and caring, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the truth.
Point is that just because you get phrases pounded into your head doesn’t mean you truly believe them or even know what they imply.
If your country’s rhetoric specifically states that the government serves the people and says it over and over, regardless of the truth of that statement, people will have a tendency to select it. (Like if your government called itself the people’s republic…)
If you asked Americans and Chinese if they think personal freedom is important, you’d likely get the reverse pattern in your graph. Is this because America has more freedom? No, more likely it’s because the historical rhetoric we get exposed to emphasizes “freedom” whereas China’s revolutionary rhetoric was centered around “democracy”
If you asked Americans if they support socialism, you’d get lower bars than if you asked it indirectly. Just using the word socialism skews your metric.
People will say they support or don’t support concepts they don’t understand, or that they view in a different light than others. Does democracy mean more than two political parties? Does democracy mean no capitalism? Does democracy require freedom to spread information freely? Etc.
So once again these metrics are useless because I’d imagine most of these countries’ voters would disagree on what the statements even mean.
You'd have more of a point if the fact that the people of China support their system wasn't regularly proven in various metrics, not just a single poll.
So you consider a state censoring all it's citizens from discussing certain words and topics to not be authoritarian?
I stated that all states are "authoritarian," all are methods by which one class exerts authority over another. The only way out of "authoritarianism" is to fully collectivize production, eliminating class distinctions. Until then, it's better for capitalists to be under the thumb of the workers, rather than the inverse. Like I said, it's a largely meaningless term.