Posted on 09/30/2018 10:57:58 AM PDT by ETL
HUIZHOU, China — They were exactly what China’s best universities were supposed to produce: young men and women steeped in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.
They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping.
Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers.
That’s when the party realized it had a problem.
The authorities moved quickly to crush the efforts of the young activists, detaining several dozen of them and scrubbing the internet of their calls for justice — but not before their example became a rallying cry for young people across the country unhappy with growing inequality, corruption and materialism in Chinese society.
“You are the backbone of the working class!” the protesters chanted at one rally, addressing workers at an equipment factory. “We share your honor and your disgrace!”
Protests are common in China, especially by workers who have nowhere else to turn in a nation without independent unions, courts or news media. ..."
Carrying portraits of Mao and singing socialist anthems, they espoused the very ideals that the government fed them for years in mandatory ideological classes, voicing grievances about issues like poverty, worker rights and gender equality — some of communism’s core concerns.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The Chinese leadership wants the rhetoric but not the pollcies.
For them, Marxism is about keeping the people in line, not transforming Chinese society.
But they may have inadvertently hoist themselves on their own petard.
The Harrison Jacobs article is wrong - the official Western death toll is around 2,700 with estimates of 10,454 killed and 40,000 injured.
See article in the Hong Kong Free Press by Kris Cheng 21 December 2017, FR posted on 12/29/2017, 9:46:48 PM by TigerLikesRooster
A far more comprehensive article with many more images and documents.
You’ll have to search FR.
Also see - if you van find it
Tiananmen Massacre - Tank Man_ The 1989 Chinese Student Democracy Movement (320 kbps).mp3
Youth movements are significant in China.
The May 1919 youth movement eventually led to the Chinese Revolution.
No wonder the authorities are nervous.
It may well be the government itself behind the pro-communist student movement, in an attempt to justify a hard left push.
And Tiananmen Square protests was triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, who was a former Communist Party Head, who the students greatly admired.
The students repeatedly emphasized that their goal was not to eliminate the Communist Party, but merely to reform it.
Here was a broadcast that was on Radio Beijing, I heard it on my shortwave live as it happened....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt2vy_QftKU
An hour later, Radio Beijing was announcing the Party Line. I’ll never forget it.
——Very nice!-—
I’m sorry. Apparently the photo was so glaring that you might not have grasped my point.
The photo is a radical depiction of the youth of China that see and want and are working for stuff. That would be the stuff not availale on the communist collectives.
The communist problem is not radical young communists but young people liking stuff and the freedom that folks have in the rest of the world.
“How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve got Daisey Maes?”
Unfortunately (for them) is that their one child policy has resulted in a severe shortage of Daisy Mae’s and the frustrated males have to look elsewhere.
So picture an army of testosterone fueled frustrated males, armed to the teeth and sitting on somebody’s border...
More NYT drivel, trying to say communists aren’t communists.
“The Chinese leadership wants the rhetoric but not the pollcies.”
They want the policies.
Chinese Communist Party is the only party and ruler.
China is oppressed. Victim of imperialism.
Only communist party can defend Chinese victims of oppression.
Any disagreement to above is treason.
It would be VERY surprising if they were NOT trying to squelch a young communist movement.
Anyone that thinks this is surprising action by the Chinese government has zero understanding of China and its history with youth and the communist movement.
They DO NOT want that crap back again.
The ChiComs are a corrupt oligarchy who spout Marxist slogans for show. Visit China. There is no welfare system as we know it. There is unbridled capitalism on every street as people sell anything to stay alive in a society where the poor and disabled are tossed aside. The gap between rich and poor in China far exceeds that in the West, with a tiny urban elite (often government insiders) living like kings, driving BMWs, shopping at Louis Vuitton, dining at 5 star restaurants, while the vast majority live a subsistence life. And that’s just in the cities. The more than 800 million Chinese who still live in the countryside are living in the dark ages, slaving to support the politburo hacks.
You think communism is an economic system?
It’s not.
Exactly correct.
They are capitalist with a one party system. They do not practice communism any more.
Collective leadership, the idea that decisions will be taken through consensus, is the ideal in the CPC.[47] The concept has its origins back to Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Bolshevik Party.[48]
At the level of the central party leadership this means that, for instance, all members of the Politburo Standing Committee are of equal standing (each member having only one vote).[47]
A member of the Politburo Standing Committee often represents a sector; during Mao’s reign, he controlled the People’s Liberation Army, Kang Sheng, the security apparatus, and Zhou Enlai, the State Council and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[47] This counts as informal power.[47] Despite this, in a paradoxical relation, members of a body are ranked hierarchically (despite the fact that members are in theory equal to each others).[47]
In spite of this, the CPC is led by an informal leader principle, each collective leadership is led by a core, that is a paramount leader; a person who holds the offices of CPC general secretary, CMC chairman and President of the PRC.[49] Before Jiang Zemin’s tenure as paramount leader, the party core and collective leadership were indistinguishable.[50]
In practice, the core was not responsible to the collective leadership.[50] However, by the time of Jiang, the party had begun propagating a responsibility system, referring to it in official pronouncements as the “core of the collective leadership”.[50]
Democratic centralism
Further information: Democratic centralism
The CPC’s organizational principle is democratic centralism, which is based on two principles: democracy (synonymous in official discourse with “socialist democracy” and “inner-party democracy”) and centralism.[51] This has been the guiding organizational principle of the party since the 5th National Congress, held in 1927.[51]
In the words of the party constitution, “The Party is an integral body organized under its program and constitution and on the basis of democratic centralism”.[51] Mao once quipped that democratic centralism was “at once democratic and centralized, with the two seeming opposites of democracy and centralization united in a definite form.”
Mao claimed that the superiority of democratic centralism lay in its internal contradictions, between democracy and centralism, and freedom and discipline.[51]
Currently, the CPC is claiming that “democracy is the lifeline of the Party, the lifeline of socialism”.[51] But for democracy to be implemented, and functioning properly, there needs to be centralization.[51]
The goal of democratic centralism was not to obliterate capitalism or its policies but instead it is the movement towards regulating capitalism while involving socialism and democracy.[52] Democracy in any form, the CPC claims, needs centralism, since without centralism there will be no order.[51]
According to Mao, democratic centralism “is centralized on the basis of democracy and democratic under centralized guidance. This is the only system that can give full expression to democracy with full powers vested in the people’s congresses at all levels and, at the same time, guarantee centralized administration with the governments at each level exercising centralized management of all the affairs entrusted to them by the people’s congresses at the corresponding level and safeguarding whatever is essential to the democratic life of the people”.[51]
Multi-party Cooperation System
The Multi-party Cooperation and Political Consultation System is led by the CPC in cooperation and consultation with the eight parties which make up the United Front.[53]
Consultation takes place under the leadership of the CPC, with mass organizations, the United Front parties, and “representatives from all walks of life”.[53] These consultations contribute, at least in theory, to the formation of the country’s basic policy in the fields of political, economic, cultural and social affairs.[53]
The CPC’s relationship with other parties is based on the principle of “long-term coexistence and mutual supervision, treating each other with full sincerity and sharing weal or woe.”[53] This process is institutionalized in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).[53]
All the parties in the United Front support China’s road to socialism, and hold steadfast to the leadership of the CPC.[53] Despite all this, the CPPCC is a body without any real power.[54] While discussions do take place, they are all supervised by the CPC.[54]
Modern Communism in China
The current constitution was created in 1982 and been continually revised since. The constitution includes many civil rights: free speech, press, worship, the right to trial, and the right to own private property.
However, in practice this constitution has widely not been followed. There has been very little done to ensure that new laws instituted follow the constitution. The judicial system does not provide any particular method for review of new laws.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2007-08/communism-computing-china/china.html
ifinnegan wrote:
“You think communism is an economic system?
It’s not.”
Of course not. Communism is a political ideology, that claimed to support Socialist economic principles. The only three countries in the world that I know of that have a largely Socialist economy are North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. All economic basket cases. The ChiComs and southeast asia communist countries, had to abandon strict socialism due to its failures, and because they couldn’t afford the types of generous social programs provided by western democracies. What now exists in those countries is a weird hybrid of laissez-faire capitalism (which is almost unbridled at the street level), crony capitalism (the big industries are all controlled by friends of the government),and a deeply corrupt bureaucracy that exists on bribes and extortion. It’s a mess, but it’s no longer Socialism.
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