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Communism
Discussion Community for fellow Marxist-Leninists and other Marxists.
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Check out ProleWiki for a communist wikipedia.
All I will say is this: most Westerner MLs I have seen (online) fall into the binary camps of “China is a capitalist hellhole” and “China is a socialist paradise that does nothing wrong”, and both trivialize the very real and complex challenges that we have to face.
It’s almost like you have one side that buys fully into Western propaganda and the other side over-corrects by going against everything Western propaganda is saying.
The fact is that China has had many great achievements and also made many critical mistakes (from the perspective of a communist), but most people aren’t interested in nuances and learning the complex history about China. They are more interested in vibes-based politics and things you can meme about.
Like, seriously, how many of you Westerners understand the economic history of China? What happened during the first 30 years under Mao? What changed under Deng? What happened in 1995? What happened during the first decade of the 21st century? What happened after the 2009 global financial crisis? What changed after Xi became president?
I can guarantee you that 95% of the Westerner leftists/MLs (and I’m being generous here) cannot adequately answer the questions above, when each phase marked a very distinct period of Chinese economic history in their attempt to navigate the changing global economic and geopolitical environments.
I think your 95% is probably too generous. Westerners are intensely chauvinistic, “why learn from China’s struggles when I already know they’re completely wrong” is the starting position, from there you don’t have much room for understanding and growth. Whether that’s from boilerplate libs, Ultra’s, Maoists, or even ML’s.