Anonymous #3 9w

social credit doesn’t exist in China as we understand it in the west. it was rolled out as a brief experiment in (iirc) Wuhan before being phased out. There does exist a system that can be translated in those terms, but it’s essentially analogous to our own credit scores. They’re obviously a surveillance state, though, and I’d agree with your assessment that we are following their lead in that regard. Perhaps we’re a bit better at hiding it.

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Anonymous #2 9w

🤨

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Anonymous OP 9w

hey man, I’m open to hearing what about my above statement made you “🤨”, no need to vague-post. this is ultimately j a matter of opinion. I don’t believe Mao was a particularly good dude, especially toward the end of his life, and I’m not interested in defending his character. But he’s also the father of the modern nation of China; it feels unfair and inaccurate to divorce him entirely from the evidently successful foundation he had laid. We don’t do that for the slave-rapist, Jefferson.

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Anonymous #2 9w

I don’t think we should be looking at China when thinking what Americans want. In terms of the founding fathers, I’m not overly fond about them

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Anonymous #4 9w

He simply did not kill 40-70 million people. Famines were a historical regularity in densely populated China. Mao’s top-down oversight and the GLF exacerbated the famine, but the intentions were explicitly the opposite. It was a political/logisitical/bureaucratic failure, AND one for which Mao should be held accountable, but not a conscious program of death. This is a significant distinction. The intent was the precisely opposite. Mao failed to save tens of millions.

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Anonymous #2 9w

damn this isn’t all that coherent mb. I hate being put in the position of “defending” Mao Zedong, but with the many, many, valid critiques to choose from of the man, I beg you to arrive at one of those instead of regurgitating Heritage Foundation talking points. Mao was a power-hungry, ideologically driven, and eventually quite paranoid leader. He was also just a dude, not some monstrous evil boogeyman. Took a lot of talking with my (not Maoist) Chinese homie to understand my own prior bias.

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Anonymous OP 9w

Likewise regarding the founding fathers as men themselves, but even just focusing on Jefferson, I can appreciate the simple beauty of the Declaration of Independence just as easily as I can Mao’s “women hold up half the sky” rhetoric or his material support for American Civil Rights dissidents in the 60s. Ig my main argument is that what I, and I imagine most folks with a nuanced take, feel about Mao’s impact, legacy, policy failures/successes are removed from my opinions of the man himself.

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Anonymous bisexualmaozedong 9w

lmao ty bisexual mao, very good points. “self-crit” is such a theoretically dope piece of Maoist doctrine that Mao himself made a total mockery of during his tenure. 100 flowers campaign my beloved, you live on in our hearts.

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Anonymous #2 9w

I get that he wasn’t trying to kill millions via famine (unlike the USSR with the Holodomor), but the great Chinese famine killed upwards of 40-50 million alone. This famine was nearly entirely preventable as it was artificial, but there were many natural famines. The difference with this one was that it was caused by unscientific policies and the purging of anyone who warned Mao about starvation. The people were forced to either farm using unscientific methods or melt down their farming tools

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Anonymous #4 9w

into useless tools, all while keeping up the exportation of grain and refusing international humanitarian aid. This famine was preventable

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Anonymous #4 9w

absolutely no argument that Mao exacerbated the famine. I’m not an expert on ecology or agriculture, nor the extent to which Chinese farms had been ravaged amid the ~3 decades of nonstop conflict, so I’m not comfortable saying it was entirely artificial. nonetheless, I do believe that Mao’s dogged refusal to listen to the advice of those who knew better is more than a glaring indictment of his leadership at the time.

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Anonymous #2 9w

I’m mostly not a fan of the “Mao killed 40-70 million” claim because it invokes, at least it did in my own 11th grade mind, images of the killing fields in Cambodia or the Nazi concentration camps. And I’ve found that this is a misconception many political bad-actors leave intentionally ambiguous (not you, to be clear)

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Anonymous #2 8w

If we ever wish to see a Marxist state we must maintain an equal distribution of power and influence. The workers must be centered and we must demand this.

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