I was gonna commend you for the perfect sarcasm of your comment, but your comment history suggests you actually mean it... if words have so little meaning to you that you can call China (and Venezuela) democracies, then I highly doubt we're talking about the same reality.
I mean, I'm a communist so I perceive these countries to be the leading forces of democracy worldwide. When a State serves the general welfare of its citizens, I hold it to be a democratic State. On the other hang, western oligarchies with their pedo-presidents, where citizens are very unsatisfied of their leadership and who get imprisoned for speaking out against genocide, are dictatorships in my opinion.
I’m very unsympathetic to making China some boogeyman intent on world domination, but I have to say that speaking out against the government isn’t exactly welcomed with open arms there.
I mean, open criticism of the govt is super okay. Peeps do this all the time. Protests are part of daily life. But openly calling for an armed rebellion will get you arrested for sure, like in many other countries.
How about "our country should have a free market economy because I think that is morally correct"?
How about "our country should not be led by the Communist Party because Communism is a mistaken, harmful idea?" (or if you prefer, "because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't reflect the correct version of communism"?)
How about "our country should have a multiparty competitive electoral democracy with direct elections for the central government"?
How about "we should be allowed to directly access all foreign Internet content"? [I know a very large number of countries are having trouble with this concept lately, but here the question is about the right to say this rather than whether it happens.]
How about "there should not be a state, because state systems are not the ideal way to run a society" (or "because there is no way for states to acquire legitimate authority to rule populations")?
How about "as citizens, we should be able to directly recall individual members of the central government by secret ballot"?
How about "our political system should not formally favor any party and should not give any form of special status or position to any party; no political party should be identified by name in the constitution or any legislation"?
How about "some territorial units of our country should be able to have a process by which they could choose whether to continue to be part of our country"? [This is another one that many countries have been having trouble with, so again the question is whether people can advocate this.]
How about "we should have rule of law, with a legal system that binds the government as well as private parties, and that is applied by a completely independent judiciary, giving a fair and objective hearing to all sides in every matter, and is not required or expected to favor the state, government, or any party in interpreting or applying the law, and decides all cases openly and publicly on the basis of written, public legal principles and instruments"?
How about "high-profile court case __________ was wrongly decided, resulting in an unjust outcome, and we should try to figure out how to keep that from happening again"?
How about "our country was in the wrong in its conflict with ____________ on the occasion of ___________"?
How about "we should immediately begin a process to draft a new constitution for our country, with no political or ideological preconditions of any kind"?
Edit: I am thinking of all of these things as things that are either completely politically normal elsewhere or that are advocated by a noticeable segment of the population elsewhere. It's clear that people don't necessarily prevail when they advocate these things, like no state has dissolved itself because of advocacy by anarchists, and some states that don't have a process for secession or constituent assemblies or whatever haven't ended up creating those things just because people asked for them. (E.g. Canada and the UK created a process for a province to have a referendum on secession, but Spain didn't, and the U.S. only allows this for some kinds of political units and has never agreed to make the referendum results automatically binding. Or, in Germany, it might arguably be considered illegal to hold a constituent assembly to create a new constitution without a requirement to maintain some existing entrenched clauses from the existing constitution in the new text.) So again, I am not focusing on whether people can achieve each of these political goals in modern China through advocacy (some of them directly contradict each other), but whether they can advocate these things in a nonviolent fashion and avoid any form of punishment by the government.
I'm not sure what your point is. Whilst a lot of the opinions you shared here are legal in CN, they are considered frowned up (communism being harmful), edgy (free marketism), or backward(direct recall of the executive), thats why they are uncommon. The proof is that China's top legislature has many political parties besides the communist party (which keeps 2/3 of all seats by constitutional guarantee). Some political activities and ideologies are proscribed, but imo that's healthy. A bit like how Germany officially prohibits nazi parties.
If I were you, I'd simply get in touch with chinese or vietnamese peeps and ask their own opinion of their respective country. You will see that it's normal folks - just like you -, and that they aspire to similar things. You may get surprised that many will say that, yes, their country is democratic. These countries are more than the propaganda you hear on the TV, and they are a lot more accessible than you might think :)
I've personally met Chinese people who were stopped by force or threat of force from saying what they wanted to say about domestic politics.
There are many selection biases in how I came to know the people that I do, and it's entirely possible that there are many, many more people who are quite happy with the government and/or its restrictions on speech. However, I can confirm that the Chinese government is, in fact, oppressing a non-zero number of political dissidents.
If these people you know were publicly calling for the socialist system to be overthrown and replaced by a bourgeois liberal democracy, then I'm afraid to say I don't see anything wrong with this kind of oppression.
For example, I wish my country (Switzerland) were actively cracking down on Nazis, so oppression is okay for me. It really depends who's the target. Censorship is just a tool. One can yield it for good, or for bad purposes.
Can you see how this makes it look like the "socialist system" only survives by force, by physically preventing people from thinking and talking about its flaws? That it can't actually withstand criticism at all?
(That's exactly what I've personally believed for a long time, and your position tends to confirm that impression for me.)
Is it possible that you're not concerned about this issue because you follow a school of Marxist thought in which it's considered literally impossible for people to persuade each other about important political questions, because all people are constrained to believe particular things based on their situations?
Your bourgeois liberalism is a lot more violent than my Marxism. All of Africa and Asia can attest of that. After all, liberals are known to spread "civilisation" and "freedom" by force, whilst lying to themselves about how lucrative those spoils were. This is why throughout the 20th and 21st century, it's ideology and now obselete mode of production has been fought against so vehemently. This is your liberalism that made Libya, Irak and Afghanistan what they are today. And when liberalism is resisted and vanquished, prosperous and solid democracies emerge out of its womb. Whole sciences and philosophies have even emerged through anti capitalist struggles, so maybe in a way I should be thankful ahah
Edit: if you are curious, historical and dialectical materialism are the sciences and philosophies I was refering to.
Are you somehow committed to the idea that it's not useful or morally valid to debate about whether those ideas are right or wrong? From your discussion of the Chinese political speech issues, it seems like you actually think that -- if there were a way to enforce that -- I should not be able to try to persuade people that you're mistaken, because that's just how transparently evil my anticommunism is, or because people don't actually possess a faculty of reason, or something.
> Are you somehow committed to the idea that it's not useful or morally valid to debate about whether those ideas are right or wrong?
Well, it really isn't.
At the end of the day, ideologies are just fronts for material interests. You argue for your material interests, and they might be at odds with the material interests of the masses.
If a revolutionary movement wants to achieve its goals, it must take care that such deviations don't take root, especially if they use naïve liberal humanism and appeals to human emotion as Trojan horses.
Honestly, this applies to movements in general. You can see this in the USA. Trump's dictatorship was nurtured and empowered by naïve liberal humanist moderates who thought they could debate and 'when they go low, we go high' their way into power and stability.
Decry censorship and ideological rigidity all you want, your enemies won't think twice about using everything in their power to crush you.
So you’re saying I could post a picture of Xi Jinping and say our country is broken because we’re lead by an idiot who looks like Winnie the Pooh while posting some ai mash up of the two and it would be fine? Even if it gained traction and was widely shared?
I honestly don’t believe that, but readily admit I could be in a propaganda bubble. Anything you can point to as examples of large scale mocking of powerful people being acceptable in China?
