No need to waste time when you see someone mention these three events together:
Famine, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution.
It’s the Chinese liberal equivalent of that “TIANANMEN MASSACRE. ORGAN HARVESTING. UYGUR GENOCIDE” trope.
(Hint: It’s aimed at Mao Zedong and the CPC)
This sounds very much like the popular rhetorical technique of demanding your opponent do impossible things in order to prove you wrong.
The only way this person’s argument can be disproven is if their opponent were to move to another fucking country.
This person is saying that China is really bad, but only mentions major events that occurred more than 40 years ago. If someone were to move to China, how would the cultural revolution happening be at all relevant to their life there? It wouldn’t.
The CR and GLP are just empty excuses anti-China people use to dismiss anything positive about China.
“Oh, China alleviated extreme poverty? Well, the cultural revolution killed people!”
“China is investing more in green energy than any other nation? But what about the Great Leap Forward? That was really bad!”
“China cancelled billions of dollars of debt to other nations? Tinyman square!”
It’s a non-sequitur argument. It wouldn’t matter if Mao or Deng killed a million billion people each, neither of them are in power now, we look at China as it is, not based on some of the worst events in its modern history that occurred half a lifetime ago.
Also, the Great Leap Forward wasn’t perfect, but it overwhelmingly succeeded, though the famine was terrible. Even during the Cultural Revolution – which I see as backwards and utopian in many respects – the trend in life expectancy rapidly increasing maintained.
Something a lot of anti-China people don’t want to understand about it. It had a lot of failures, sure, but China actively learned from them and became a stronger nation as a result. I think it is telling that the big part of the GLF that the west talks about is the famine, the natural disaster, the one part China couldn’t learn from their mistake because it was caused by climate conditions, not by direct action. They talk about it almost like China was “smited by god” for daring to be socialist. Like they deviated from the One True Correct Path of Capitalism and faced divine punishment in the form of natural disasters and “authoritarian dictators.”
I’m chilling in China right now. Alot of ppl here would give this hanjian a stern talking to if not beat the shit out of them (the latter being the older generation who actually lived through the cultural revolution, stayed and saw how great the country has become).
Alot of people here are also party members. They dont wear fancy suits and drive expensive cars. They are just ordinary people, who fkn read the theory and have seen it materialised in their own hometowns. They are us.
Alas, libs will exist no matter what country you are in. The important thing to remember is they deserve to be laughed at.
Anyone know the Mandarin for ‘gusano fuckbag’? That’s deffo the vibes I’m getting here.
汉奸 - traitor, usually meant Han ethnic traitors who helped the Japanese in ww2 卖国贼 - those that sell out their homeland to imperialists
Nowadays there are labels for liberals, but it’s one that they wear with pride 公知 - “public intellectuals”
My wife’s grandma is in her 90s, and she remembers the famines before and after the revolution. She’s not a party member, but she’ll slap your shit if you trash the Party in her presence. She said she remembers being sent to forage for food and finding dead people with their fingers missing because finger meat stays when you starve to death. She remembers how a neighbor would die and then they’d smell meat cooking and everyone knew but nobody said anything.
She also remembers when the Party brought the Revolution to her town and requisitioned all the grain to distribute it and end the famine. The Party saved her life, and she is an avid supporter of it. There’s a reason that so many of the generation of Chinese people born to the ones who experienced the famines have super patriotic names.
In summary, yes, there have been horrible famines in China, and yes, the Party’s decisions exacerbated one of the worst famines, but the Party still ended famine in a famine-ridden country and that’s why the Chinese people support the Chinese government.
People don’t take into account what was before, they just hate on Chinese government by cherry picking bad things without context.
Very similar to not understanding which state Russia was before Putin and playing stupid why Russians are supporting him even with all the problems he brings.
Wait, I thought the “ruthless Chinese Communist Party” banned and silenced anything even slightly cricial of the “horrible Communist regime” but I can also just go there and talk about these things with people right on the street and buy books right in the stores and online to read about it? And apparently it’s just taught openly in the schools?
The Schrödinger argument, there is freedom or not based on what you ask.
Yes there was a big famine, and yes the Great Leap Forward was not handled well. But if any of that is a systemic problem of Chinese communism, we really got to ask ourselves: Why was that the last famine ever experienced in China? One would expect this to be repeated over and over. Why has life expectancy and standard of living being skyrocketing in China since then? On the other hand, if we take a look at the history of China before the communists came to power, we see famines being a regular event.
