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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2185 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is there some list of sins the Chinese Communist Party has committed somewhere? I've heard of the widespread general repression and censorship, of Tiananmen Square, of the One Child Policy, and of the Uighur Genocide, and I am wondering if I am missing something. I want to be ensured of their actual level of awfulness before I get into hypothetical arguments with hypothetical tankies, who despite knowing China is capitalist, still seem bent on interpreting them in the most charitable light possible and dismissing the rest as western propaganda.

If you have book suggestions on the subject, that would be good too. I had to read "The Origins of the Modern World" for college non-western civ, and I quite liked it. On that note, if you have any general world history books, that would also be great. I especially have no idea about Korean history.

You have to understand that atrocities committed by the CCP are only considered unique in their sheer scale and numbers due to their desire to centralize and manage power across such a large population. At that scale, what seem like minor screwups in policy and small errors can cause tsunami-like effects. And as usual, the Chinese Politburo makes American political squabbling look small and cute. The meme about political infighting in China causing millions dead every so often is unfortunately quite true, and it's also why Chinese tend to be very sensitive about political instability and will cling desperately to a bad regime for fear of change bringing worse.

Land Reform movement (post ww2) that was basically wholesale looting of land from "landlords", with "landlords" being loosely defined, of course, and the associated forced resettlement.

Four evils campaign that included sparrows (well-meaning, dumb, alongside crackpot wonk agricultural planning caused widespread famine 1959-1961 and approx 15-55 million deaths depending on how you count them).

Anti-rightist campaign is Chinese political infighting that caused the political persecution of around half a million to two million depending on how you count them (but it centralized one-party rule).

Cultural Revolution needs to be understood (as it is within China) as a power play by Mao to grab power within the party by weaponizing the youth. "Four Olds" destruction was a byproduct; Chinese scholars outside China will privately bemoan how the country put its own cultural heritage to the sword just so Mao could win a dick measuring contest within the CCP. Also worth reading about the "five black categories", politically motivated massacres, including the Guangxi Massacre (and attached cannibalism), etc.

I also recommend the book Seeing Like a State if you haven't already read it. The modern state of China can be seen as some kind of mass experiment in what happens when you "See Like a State" at Level 100 or something. They have achieved, and will continue to achieve, things that leave other governments in awe, terror and envy, but they will continue to do this at the expense of their own human capital.

For the events of the Mao era, Frank Dikötter's People's Trilogy will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. I haven't read his more recent book covering the last half century, although I think the focus there is more on the economic side of things. It's hard to find unbiased accounts of the 1989 protests and events since then in English, so your best bet might be to supplement whichever interchangeable mainstream source you choose to consult with something like Carl Zha's Silk and Steel podcast (unfortunately most of his newer stuff is paywalled), which will give you the opposite perspective, and split the difference. I tend to get my own information on these things secondhand from older relatives who are plugged in to the Chinese language media ecosystem.

The main item you left out of your list was the extreme covid lockdowns and subsequent CCP crackdown on anti-lockdown protestors in 2022. This is the proximate cause of the current wave of emigration that has sent hundreds of thousands of their citizens fleeing to Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and the US in the last 3 years. Dan Wang's 2023 letter gives a good rundown of this. There's also the ever-present persecution of religious adherents, though the Falun Gong diaspora take it a bit far with overblown claims of mass executions of prisoners to harvest their organs (though feel free to investigate this yourself). Most of the rest is bog-standard developing country stuff that isn't China-specific e.g. air pollution from factories causing illness, infrastructure projects built too fast that occasionally collapse, lax safety standards in food and consumer products, and so on.

I don't know about general world history books, as that seems a bit too broad of a topic for a single volume that isn't a college textbook, but for pre-modern China, Mote's Imperial China is in the running for best history book I've ever read. For Korea, I have a few books on my list, but haven't gotten around to them yet, so can't give an informed recommendation.

Surely the great leap forward and the cultural revolution must be at the top of that list, or are you absolving the party of responsibility and pinning all that on Mao?

Or do you mean current things? Tienanmen square was 35+ years ago and most of the people responsible are dead.

I think I did mean something more current? Something you can use to criticize the current government. The undercurrents that caused Tiananmen Square are surely still there. The undercurrents that caused the Great Leap Forward seem to be mostly gone, since China embraced capitalism after some decades of struggling with the whole socialism thing.

The current government still hasn't condemned the GLF and the CR so you can use this fact to criticize them and compare it with how the US celebrates the dismantlement of Jim Crow legislation.

You can also criticize the social credit system, which has a massive chilling effect on the freedom of expression.

The current government still hasn't condemned the GLF and the CR so you can use this fact to criticize them and compare it with how the US celebrates the dismantlement of Jim Crow legislation.

Doesn't apply to CR, according to this:

2 The resolution describes the Cultural Revolution as “a catastrophe” and “10 years of turmoil” and holds Mao responsible for it. The resolution also reiterates the Party’s long-held position that the 1989 Tiananmen event was a “political turmoil” caused by both external and domestic forces. “Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe and Mao was responsible, China’s Communist Party upholds in landmark statement”,

Thank you for this clarification.

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