“Authoritarian” is largely a meaningless term. All it really means is one group using force against another group, but it doesn’t say anything about which group is which. In the US Empire, the capitalists use the state to crush the workers, and export genocide and chaos to the global south. In the PRC, the working class uses the state to keep the capitalists in check as they progress and develop along socialist lines. This stark difference in which class is in power is shown with immense popular support in the PRC:
I stated that all states are “authoritarian,” all are methods by which one class exerts authority over another. The only way out of “authoritarianism” is to fully collectivize production, eliminating class distinctions. Until then, it’s better for capitalists to be under the thumb of the workers, rather than the inverse. Like I said, it’s a largely meaningless term.
You are believing in a fantasy. There are countless countries around the world that are arguably more socialist than China without even calling themselves such. Quite frankly, I trust actions and numbers more than words.
Ignoring the blatant ableism in your comment, the PRC has been a socialist country since the CPC successully won the Chinese Civil War. The working class is in power, and capitalists are kept in check by the state. I don’t defend the PRC just to criticize the west, but because it’s the world’s most developed and largest socialist state.
Attacking me with ableism isn’t a substitution for a point.
Repeating what you said doesn’t make it more true. China is not a socialist Country. It’s State Capitalism at best.
The workers have no right to vote. They do not rule the country.
Yes they can vote in local Elections between People that have to be aproved by the CPC… Thats no real choice, not to mention on a National Level they have no say at all.
And about that equality in the last graph, how about we ask the Uighurs about that? Or the tibetans?
And please do provide the source for the first picture, they are very hard to see.
Capitalists and those who would undermine socialism are prevented from political power, yes. As for the source, it’s in the bottom left, here’s another bunch of sources.
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.” [12]
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. [13] Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” [14] In fact it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeatedremoved, beginning at age nine. [15] The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. [16] The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. [17] Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location. [18]
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” [19] Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed. [20]
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. [21]
The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order. The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime. The rich and powerful treated their good fortune as a reward for, and tangible evidence of, virtue in past and present lives.
Selection two, shorter: (CW sexual violence and mutilation)
The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. [22]
Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” [23] Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. [24]
In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who wasremovedd and then had her nose sliced away. [25]
Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W. F. T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. […] The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.” [26] As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri-La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.
Turn off right-wing media and actually pay attention to what China’s actually like.
I don’t watch right wing media. And all those sources are extremely unreliable. The Quia Collective for instance has no transparency about who is funding them and dont cite proper sources themselves. This is just hot air
Qiao Collective absolutely cites proper sources, and you’re repeating right-wing Euro-nationalist talking points. Why would anyone take anything you say seriously? You’ve offered no sources for anything yet act condescending, and openly used ableism to attack me. You’re entirely unreliable and just parrot right-wing talking points ad nauseum, unsourced.
Meta argument: charts like this are basically useless.
I was raised in a very religious town. If you asked, the people in that town would say “my religion is a religion of love” “people should be as free as possible because it’s an extension of personal agency” and all the while they beat their kids and would rather die than let gay or trans people be themselves.
They can quote the scriptures and could likely write some pretty strong rhetoric implying they are loving and kind and caring, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the truth.
Point is that just because you get phrases pounded into your head doesn’t mean you truly believe them or even know what they imply.
If your country’s rhetoric specifically states that the government serves the people and says it over and over, regardless of the truth of that statement, people will have a tendency to select it. (Like if your government called itself the people’s republic…)
If you asked Americans and Chinese if they think personal freedom is important, you’d likely get the reverse pattern in your graph. Is this because America has more freedom? No, more likely it’s because the historical rhetoric we get exposed to emphasizes “freedom” whereas China’s revolutionary rhetoric was centered around “democracy”
If you asked Americans if they support socialism, you’d get lower bars than if you asked it indirectly. Just using the word socialism skews your metric.
People will say they support or don’t support concepts they don’t understand, or that they view in a different light than others. Does democracy mean more than two political parties? Does democracy mean no capitalism? Does democracy require freedom to spread information freely? Etc.
So once again these metrics are useless because I’d imagine most of these countries’ voters would disagree on what the statements even mean.
You’d have more of a point if the fact that the people of China support their system wasn’t regularly proven in various metrics, not just a single poll.
Why would that have any effect on the point of my argument?
My point is about the ineffectiveness and unscientific nature of this kind of questionnaire.
Doesn’t matter what topics or debates these are used in or who is right in those debates; the point is that these kind of charts are useless regardless of their content.
Sidenote: if you had “various metrics” why’d you post the least scientific one? Like bro, brain-dead “libertarians” could probably pull out some statistic or study that is more sound than this chart to support their idiotic bullshit. If a fellow anarchist tried to use a metric like this I’d call them out too even if I agreed with their point
The questionaire is valid, though. It highlights differences in the system, in an easy to understand graph. If you want, here’s another bunch of sources.
The only thing the questionnaire does, assuming it is built well, is show that when asked those questions people in different countries answered differently.
Did the Chinese populations sampled by the study respond more positively to those four questions more than the samples of other nations? Yes.
Can you assert that this is proof that china is more democratic and less authoritarian than those countries? NO.
At best, this study shows that public opinion of the government in china is higher than that of the other countries. Which definitely doesn’t mean all that much at all, for example I could ask half my family members and they’d say that things are better now under trump than they’ve ever been before. Is that the case? Absolutely not. Does that change their minds? No.
Now, the original article you linked seems much more soft science but the article it first mentions actually has more concrete data but still that data is on public opinion.
Unfortunately the democracy index site appears to be missing and “for sale”
If you could find me the actual questionnaire in mandarin so we could read it as it was presented and compare with the English version we could rule out some of the bias I presented earlier, but not all.
Lastly, kairos buddy, your argument was that a country (which many of the people you’re trying to persuade think is George Orwell big brother level controlling) isn’t authoritarian. Using polled data, especially that which was “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” is not going to hold much evidentiary worth to your target audience.
I’m not Anti-China, in fact I was and possibly still am thinking about taking a semester or internship out there; I only wanted to point out that you aren’t actually backing your argument up with any solid evidence especially with regards to your target audience.
I really am curious about the test though, especially since the democracy index paper is on a dead site, so if you could find it in Mandarin I’d be interested. If you could find a source on what “reputable polling firm” Harvard used I’d be interested in that too since the report didn’t actually mention the name…?
Oh and one last thing is that the article mentions “Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world.” Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.
From just the “my government serves the people” bars alone, it would appear the Chinese dataset is well beyond 1.5 standard deviations if the other three are so much lower and show such low variation. If this was a single data point, one would throw it out, but considering it is supposedly a longitudinal collection of samples it implies that there is a very strong influencing factor that is only largely affecting the Chinese survey takers.
If the pattern holds for many other metrics, then it implies this singular factor (or other factors) have significantly biased the Chinese samples. This doesn’t necessarily mean that factor is government intervention or bias from being raised in rhetoric from an authoritarian state, but it is statistically unlikely that this factor is simply due to china just somehow having a better democracy than every single country on earth (including all of its allies and enemies alike) by a statistically gigantic margin.
Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.
“This jet’s speed is an outlier in this set of planes. Outliers mean the methodology must be invalid, so jets can’t be faster than planes.”
This is nonsense. China and the euros have fundamentally different political systems, there is no reason to suppose they should have similar outcomes. The whole point of the discussion is that China’s system is superior, if you say that any data that supports that is an outlier, and therefore must be invalid you’re just presupposing your conclusion.
On your other point about the usefulness of this data: while it is true that there can be many different explanations for the observed results, that just means that we need more evidence to show which system is more democratic, not that this evidence is useless. Saying that people’s opinion of their own system is irrelevant is extremely chauvinistic. In the case of China, we can see the massive increase in quality of life of it’s citizens, as well as a systematic overview of it’s political structures like here. I’ve also heard the book Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners is good, but I haven’t read it yet myself.
Furthermore, your point about manipulation of public opinion goes the other way, too. Where did the idea that China is authoritarian come from? People going to China and studying what life is like there, or media manipulation? Who do you think is more likely to be manipulated like that, the people living there who actually experience the political structures of China, or rando westerners whos only source of information is capitalist media? A simple poll like this is more than enough to debunk the people who think China is authoritarian based on nothing but vibes from capitalist media.
KimBongUn already provided other sources, I’m not going to go through the trouble of finding a poll in mandarin when I can’t speak it. Popular support for the PRC is well-documented, as well as the ability for the people to direct policy in a far more material way than in liberal countries.
China has democracy comparable to other socialist states. The difference is socialism vs capitalism, it’s as simple as that.
The study in that link is the same one from the last in the report they have the “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” line.
The brief neither mentions the name of the polling organization nor does it list or link to the actual questions asked. Honestly seems odd given that it’s Harvard, then again isn’t meant to be a rigorous academic paper and I doubt the Chinese government would be up for letting more research be done if they had found negative associations.
Still odd that they won’t name the firm anywhere. Like “The work began in 2003, and together with a leading private research and polling company in China, the team developed a series of questionnaires for in-person interviews.” what leading polling company? Wouldn’t they want their name attached to this? Also an in person questionnaire seems both much more qualitative and much less private than I would have expected. If you want to get people’s true anonymous opinions without any coercive bias, having them physically go somewhere and have to answer questions to an actual person is definitely not the best approach.
Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren’t allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between “hell yeah, my country is making my life great” and “there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble”? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I’ve personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn’t want trouble.
Yes, capitalists are prevented from undermining socialism. If you read the studies, the reason the people of China support their system is because it supports them and represents their interests.
But it’s also a ban on other socialist parties, not just capitalist ones, and it plays directly into the talking point that socialism is an authoritarian system that is imposed on people, not chosen on its merits. If the CCP really has enjoyed resounding, unwavering support from the proletariat for 75 years straight, why appear so weak by never allowing any competition whatsoever?
The PRC is officially organized under what the CCP terms a “system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CCP,” in which the minor parties must accept the leadership of the CCP.
The PRC isn’t weak for not allowing capitalist and other liberal parties to compete, and socialist democracy has never cared too much about multi-party “democracy.” The PRC values cohesion and cooperation, not needless competition. Any competing “socialist” party would, in all reality, be used by the west to undermine the long-term socialist project.
Further, they have 8 minor political parties that cooperate with the CPC.
Yeah, those don’t count, if they’re required to align with the party then they’re just subcommittees or something, not actual political parties.
I promise I’m keeping my mind open, but all of these answers seem indistinguishable from authoritarian rule, which was kinda my original point. The same organization has to rule in perpetuity because foreign influence would subvert the interests of the country if there were other options, quite lucky that they locked in the right one. Practically all one billion people are aligned on this and agree that this system is working for them, but no, they will not be allowing that to be tested at the ballot box or in a media environment where people can speak their mind, it might all fall apart despite how unified they are. It’s a party controlled by the workers and acting for their interests, with total control of the levers of power, they just felt like keeping some ultra-rich and ultra-powerful folks around for a laugh, not because they’re the ones who actually have the power.
Honestly, shit’s so bad in the west that I’m kinda open to the idea that maybe a totalitarian government that recognizes it needs to keep workers decently happy to allow them to rule is, in fact, better than what we’ve got going on now, but it’s really hard to go as far as saying that it’s an active, ongoing, consensual choice by the workers to never give themselves a choice.
You keep repeating the idea that the PRC is “totalitarian,” despite being broadly democratic with comprehensivs influence being driven from the bottom-up. You’re getting too wrapped-up in liberal, multiparty democracy that it’s running interference for your understanding of cooperative, socialist democracy.
I’m trying to get to how it’s democratic and worker-controlled in your eyes because it’s hard to see for me, as people don’t seem to get to choose much in the system as designed. What’s the mechanism for average people to change a government policy that they disagree with? If the party does start to lose touch with what the workers need or start working against their interests, how do the workers course-correct it?
They refuse to offer criticism to you, they will criticize the CCP constantly amongst themselves. They’ve sadly learned right or wrong that westerners are always trying to make China look bad. It’s largely from western news like BBC. Just look up the phrase China, but at what cost. The most hilarious one I read was China is curing cancer fast, but at what cost.
Of course not? If they gave you that impression then you would pry. As I said, it’s pretty universal at this point. No mind reading needed. The fact that you were trying to do exactly what they’re trying to avoid is hilarious to me.
“Authoritarian” is largely a meaningless term. All it really means is one group using force against another group, but it doesn’t say anything about which group is which. In the US Empire, the capitalists use the state to crush the workers, and export genocide and chaos to the global south. In the PRC, the working class uses the state to keep the capitalists in check as they progress and develop along socialist lines. This stark difference in which class is in power is shown with immense popular support in the PRC:
So you consider a state censoring all it’s citizens from discussing certain words and topics to not be authoritarian?
I stated that all states are “authoritarian,” all are methods by which one class exerts authority over another. The only way out of “authoritarianism” is to fully collectivize production, eliminating class distinctions. Until then, it’s better for capitalists to be under the thumb of the workers, rather than the inverse. Like I said, it’s a largely meaningless term.
Can you please provide a source for the graphic?
It’s in the bottom left, here’s another bunch of sources.
Bottom left of the picture would be a good start
The state used the police to crush the working class when they demanded the money from the banks that invested it in a runaway housing scam.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/11/china-violent-clashes-at-protest-over-frozen-rural-bank-accounts
You are believing in a fantasy. There are countless countries around the world that are arguably more socialist than China without even calling themselves such. Quite frankly, I trust actions and numbers more than words.
Using a western, anti-communist news source for a report on how China is supposedly crushing the working class? Color me shocked! You have no points.
Removed by mod
Ignoring the blatant ableism in your comment, the PRC has been a socialist country since the CPC successully won the Chinese Civil War. The working class is in power, and capitalists are kept in check by the state. I don’t defend the PRC just to criticize the west, but because it’s the world’s most developed and largest socialist state.
Attacking me with ableism isn’t a substitution for a point.
Repeating what you said doesn’t make it more true. China is not a socialist Country. It’s State Capitalism at best. The workers have no right to vote. They do not rule the country.
And by “workers” you mean “foreign megacorps”, i guess?
The large firms and key industries in China are publicly owned:
State capitalism would be like the US, Singapore, or the Republic of Korea. Further, workers absolutely have the right to vote, and do so regularly:
Repeating what you said doesn’t make it more true. It’s time to stop it with the generic anti-communism.
Yes they can vote in local Elections between People that have to be aproved by the CPC… Thats no real choice, not to mention on a National Level they have no say at all. And about that equality in the last graph, how about we ask the Uighurs about that? Or the tibetans? And please do provide the source for the first picture, they are very hard to see.
Capitalists and those who would undermine socialism are prevented from political power, yes. As for the source, it’s in the bottom left, here’s another bunch of sources.
As for Uyghurs, see the Xinjiang Resource List. They are roughly similar in approval rates, same with Tibet, which was liberated from feudalism. Read Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth. Here’s 2 excerpts:
Selection two, shorter: (CW sexual violence and mutilation)
Turn off right-wing media and actually pay attention to what China’s actually like.
I don’t watch right wing media. And all those sources are extremely unreliable. The Quia Collective for instance has no transparency about who is funding them and dont cite proper sources themselves. This is just hot air
Literally every corporate media is right wing.
Qiao Collective absolutely cites proper sources, and you’re repeating right-wing Euro-nationalist talking points. Why would anyone take anything you say seriously? You’ve offered no sources for anything yet act condescending, and openly used ableism to attack me. You’re entirely unreliable and just parrot right-wing talking points ad nauseum, unsourced.
I bet you don’t watch conservative right wing media like Fox News, yet you watch CNN, New York Times and other progressive right-wing media.
Meta argument: charts like this are basically useless.
I was raised in a very religious town. If you asked, the people in that town would say “my religion is a religion of love” “people should be as free as possible because it’s an extension of personal agency” and all the while they beat their kids and would rather die than let gay or trans people be themselves.
They can quote the scriptures and could likely write some pretty strong rhetoric implying they are loving and kind and caring, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the truth.
Point is that just because you get phrases pounded into your head doesn’t mean you truly believe them or even know what they imply.
If your country’s rhetoric specifically states that the government serves the people and says it over and over, regardless of the truth of that statement, people will have a tendency to select it. (Like if your government called itself the people’s republic…)
If you asked Americans and Chinese if they think personal freedom is important, you’d likely get the reverse pattern in your graph. Is this because America has more freedom? No, more likely it’s because the historical rhetoric we get exposed to emphasizes “freedom” whereas China’s revolutionary rhetoric was centered around “democracy”
If you asked Americans if they support socialism, you’d get lower bars than if you asked it indirectly. Just using the word socialism skews your metric.
People will say they support or don’t support concepts they don’t understand, or that they view in a different light than others. Does democracy mean more than two political parties? Does democracy mean no capitalism? Does democracy require freedom to spread information freely? Etc.
So once again these metrics are useless because I’d imagine most of these countries’ voters would disagree on what the statements even mean.
You’d have more of a point if the fact that the people of China support their system wasn’t regularly proven in various metrics, not just a single poll.
Why would that have any effect on the point of my argument?
My point is about the ineffectiveness and unscientific nature of this kind of questionnaire.
Doesn’t matter what topics or debates these are used in or who is right in those debates; the point is that these kind of charts are useless regardless of their content.
Sidenote: if you had “various metrics” why’d you post the least scientific one? Like bro, brain-dead “libertarians” could probably pull out some statistic or study that is more sound than this chart to support their idiotic bullshit. If a fellow anarchist tried to use a metric like this I’d call them out too even if I agreed with their point
The questionaire is valid, though. It highlights differences in the system, in an easy to understand graph. If you want, here’s another bunch of sources.
The only thing the questionnaire does, assuming it is built well, is show that when asked those questions people in different countries answered differently.
Did the Chinese populations sampled by the study respond more positively to those four questions more than the samples of other nations? Yes.
Can you assert that this is proof that china is more democratic and less authoritarian than those countries? NO.
At best, this study shows that public opinion of the government in china is higher than that of the other countries. Which definitely doesn’t mean all that much at all, for example I could ask half my family members and they’d say that things are better now under trump than they’ve ever been before. Is that the case? Absolutely not. Does that change their minds? No.
Now, the original article you linked seems much more soft science but the article it first mentions actually has more concrete data but still that data is on public opinion.
Unfortunately the democracy index site appears to be missing and “for sale”
If you could find me the actual questionnaire in mandarin so we could read it as it was presented and compare with the English version we could rule out some of the bias I presented earlier, but not all.
Lastly, kairos buddy, your argument was that a country (which many of the people you’re trying to persuade think is George Orwell big brother level controlling) isn’t authoritarian. Using polled data, especially that which was “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” is not going to hold much evidentiary worth to your target audience.
I’m not Anti-China, in fact I was and possibly still am thinking about taking a semester or internship out there; I only wanted to point out that you aren’t actually backing your argument up with any solid evidence especially with regards to your target audience.
I really am curious about the test though, especially since the democracy index paper is on a dead site, so if you could find it in Mandarin I’d be interested. If you could find a source on what “reputable polling firm” Harvard used I’d be interested in that too since the report didn’t actually mention the name…?
Oh and one last thing is that the article mentions “Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world.” Fun statistical fact: outliers are a sign your sampling methodology is flawed, especially when the outliers are a set of samples and not just a singular data point.
From just the “my government serves the people” bars alone, it would appear the Chinese dataset is well beyond 1.5 standard deviations if the other three are so much lower and show such low variation. If this was a single data point, one would throw it out, but considering it is supposedly a longitudinal collection of samples it implies that there is a very strong influencing factor that is only largely affecting the Chinese survey takers.
If the pattern holds for many other metrics, then it implies this singular factor (or other factors) have significantly biased the Chinese samples. This doesn’t necessarily mean that factor is government intervention or bias from being raised in rhetoric from an authoritarian state, but it is statistically unlikely that this factor is simply due to china just somehow having a better democracy than every single country on earth (including all of its allies and enemies alike) by a statistically gigantic margin.
“This jet’s speed is an outlier in this set of planes. Outliers mean the methodology must be invalid, so jets can’t be faster than planes.”
This is nonsense. China and the euros have fundamentally different political systems, there is no reason to suppose they should have similar outcomes. The whole point of the discussion is that China’s system is superior, if you say that any data that supports that is an outlier, and therefore must be invalid you’re just presupposing your conclusion.
On your other point about the usefulness of this data: while it is true that there can be many different explanations for the observed results, that just means that we need more evidence to show which system is more democratic, not that this evidence is useless. Saying that people’s opinion of their own system is irrelevant is extremely chauvinistic. In the case of China, we can see the massive increase in quality of life of it’s citizens, as well as a systematic overview of it’s political structures like here. I’ve also heard the book Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners is good, but I haven’t read it yet myself.
Furthermore, your point about manipulation of public opinion goes the other way, too. Where did the idea that China is authoritarian come from? People going to China and studying what life is like there, or media manipulation? Who do you think is more likely to be manipulated like that, the people living there who actually experience the political structures of China, or rando westerners whos only source of information is capitalist media? A simple poll like this is more than enough to debunk the people who think China is authoritarian based on nothing but vibes from capitalist media.
KimBongUn already provided other sources, I’m not going to go through the trouble of finding a poll in mandarin when I can’t speak it. Popular support for the PRC is well-documented, as well as the ability for the people to direct policy in a far more material way than in liberal countries.
China has democracy comparable to other socialist states. The difference is socialism vs capitalism, it’s as simple as that.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
The study in that link is the same one from the last in the report they have the “implemented by a reputable domestic Chinese polling firm” line.
The brief neither mentions the name of the polling organization nor does it list or link to the actual questions asked. Honestly seems odd given that it’s Harvard, then again isn’t meant to be a rigorous academic paper and I doubt the Chinese government would be up for letting more research be done if they had found negative associations.
Still odd that they won’t name the firm anywhere. Like “The work began in 2003, and together with a leading private research and polling company in China, the team developed a series of questionnaires for in-person interviews.” what leading polling company? Wouldn’t they want their name attached to this? Also an in person questionnaire seems both much more qualitative and much less private than I would have expected. If you want to get people’s true anonymous opinions without any coercive bias, having them physically go somewhere and have to answer questions to an actual person is definitely not the best approach.
ok
Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren’t allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between “hell yeah, my country is making my life great” and “there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble”? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I’ve personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn’t want trouble.
A party that opposes the communists? Like, a fascist party?
Yes, capitalists are prevented from undermining socialism. If you read the studies, the reason the people of China support their system is because it supports them and represents their interests.
But it’s also a ban on other socialist parties, not just capitalist ones, and it plays directly into the talking point that socialism is an authoritarian system that is imposed on people, not chosen on its merits. If the CCP really has enjoyed resounding, unwavering support from the proletariat for 75 years straight, why appear so weak by never allowing any competition whatsoever?
There are 8 other minor parties in China.
Oh, c’mon.
The PRC isn’t weak for not allowing capitalist and other liberal parties to compete, and socialist democracy has never cared too much about multi-party “democracy.” The PRC values cohesion and cooperation, not needless competition. Any competing “socialist” party would, in all reality, be used by the west to undermine the long-term socialist project.
Further, they have 8 minor political parties that cooperate with the CPC.
Yeah, those don’t count, if they’re required to align with the party then they’re just subcommittees or something, not actual political parties.
I promise I’m keeping my mind open, but all of these answers seem indistinguishable from authoritarian rule, which was kinda my original point. The same organization has to rule in perpetuity because foreign influence would subvert the interests of the country if there were other options, quite lucky that they locked in the right one. Practically all one billion people are aligned on this and agree that this system is working for them, but no, they will not be allowing that to be tested at the ballot box or in a media environment where people can speak their mind, it might all fall apart despite how unified they are. It’s a party controlled by the workers and acting for their interests, with total control of the levers of power, they just felt like keeping some ultra-rich and ultra-powerful folks around for a laugh, not because they’re the ones who actually have the power.
Honestly, shit’s so bad in the west that I’m kinda open to the idea that maybe a totalitarian government that recognizes it needs to keep workers decently happy to allow them to rule is, in fact, better than what we’ve got going on now, but it’s really hard to go as far as saying that it’s an active, ongoing, consensual choice by the workers to never give themselves a choice.
You keep repeating the idea that the PRC is “totalitarian,” despite being broadly democratic with comprehensivs influence being driven from the bottom-up. You’re getting too wrapped-up in liberal, multiparty democracy that it’s running interference for your understanding of cooperative, socialist democracy.
I’m trying to get to how it’s democratic and worker-controlled in your eyes because it’s hard to see for me, as people don’t seem to get to choose much in the system as designed. What’s the mechanism for average people to change a government policy that they disagree with? If the party does start to lose touch with what the workers need or start working against their interests, how do the workers course-correct it?
Here’s a good overview of how China’s democracy works. The CPC adheres to the mass line, policies come from the people, and the CPC gets support for carrying that out.
“I want a different party”
There are 8 to choose from
“They don’t count”
Unserious af
They refuse to offer criticism to you, they will criticize the CCP constantly amongst themselves. They’ve sadly learned right or wrong that westerners are always trying to make China look bad. It’s largely from western news like BBC. Just look up the phrase China, but at what cost. The most hilarious one I read was China is curing cancer fast, but at what cost.
I’m in awe of your ability to read minds, because that was not at all the vibe I got when I was actually in that conversation.
Of course not? If they gave you that impression then you would pry. As I said, it’s pretty universal at this point. No mind reading needed. The fact that you were trying to do exactly what they’re trying to avoid is hilarious to me.