I ask my mate in Shenzhen what he thinks of China and Xi.

He hates Xi and so do most of his friends. His wife is even a member of the CCP.

If you don’t fully commit to the party line and pay increasing fees you don’t progress in the CCP. Sounds a lot like Scientology tbh and they see it as more of a tax. Because leaving is a huge no-no. She wishes she never joined.

I take his (Chinese) opinion of China much more highly than a bunch of angry Zoomer kids on Lemmy.ml posting puff-pieces by the CCP.

Tankie drivel.

I agree the glee some have around China supposedly failing is misguided at best and just spurred on by propaganda.

That said the last decades of explosive economic growth in China is because they adopted more Western economic policy, albeit with more far reaching government control. Calling the economic system of China “communist” is misleading, sure it’s the communist party that rules and set the system up. But it shares much more with a modern capitalistic system than the economic systems we’ve seen in other communist states.

As for political system it feels very ominous to read a text that very clearly hints that democracy is not any better than authoritarian systems. I also strongly feel that is a bit of a reverse from how it normally goes.

Democracy is the ideal state, the good in theory but with flaws in practise. Just as marxist / socialist systems are wonderful in theory but in practice has had problems.

I reject the notion that anything existing today is optimal. And I very much believe that the optimal path is somewhere in-between China and US policy for a lot of things. And to the left of China for some.

Finally, excusing human rights abuses by proclaiming “they do it too!” is just distasteful.

This was possibly the worst waste of my time. Five minutes of pure CCP worship. Wrong on so many levels. And they have the gall to drag the Israel-Palestine conflict into this fucking trite.