False dichotomy. Both of these things suck.

libertarian socialist/communist

When your socialist / communist group arms and starts defending themselves and their class interests, what prevents someone labeling them as authoritarian for doing so?

Socialist countries like the PRC lived through a hundred years of imperial exploitation by foreign powers (Britain, the US, and Japan), and fought a decades-long civil war against feudal reactionaries to finally liberate themselves from these oppressions. Do you know something they don't, about how to establish socialism, "non-authoritarianly"?

Lmao

-You don't even know what ad hominem means, dumbass

-This isn't the high school debate club you peaked in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBmk5N5aDPA

I am curious, who is "them" in your statement and how does opposing all three of those things inherently cause me to give up my bargaining power?

"American values" are freedom for a few selected individuals, this shit is ass.

The values that you probably want is incompatible with capitalism and never truly existed in America, you love the idea of it not the reality.

Sleeping is authoritarian

I cannot emphasize enough how much air would be sucked out of our propaganda overnight if china just fucking uncensored the internet and truly protected freedom of speech and information.

Everybody disliked that

In your opinion, what is the worst of the allegations that is actually true?

I'm impressed. The US legal system is incredibly anemic when it comes to punishing corporations for violating workers' rights. I hope we really can achieve a multipolar world, one where a standard like this is upheld to emulate, and not the rotten neoliberal legal morass of the West.

The PRC would be incredibly naive to let US tech companies in, and take over and hoover up their social media landscape, like so many other countries have done. For example India's most popular communications platform, is facebook. The US effectively controls the social media of a country many times larger than itself, and can influence it whatever way it wants, as well as spy on every person who uses it.

For those who want to view US-run tech sites in the PRC, they can of course via VPNs which are completely legal, but that friction is very worthwhile for encouraging home-run alternatives, and preventing mass surveillance by an evil empire.

You can dislike it all you want doesn't make it less true.

Silly proletarian, that's not even the credit score they use for home loans

American values

The values of the US settler-colonial project, are native eviction, and genocide.

The values of the indigenous peoples were not considered worthy to the european settlers, so they did their best to wipe out hundreds of peoples/tribes/cultures. You either don't know that history, or worse, you are proud of it.

I highly suggest reading both An indigenous people's history of the US by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, or her Not a nation of immigrants.

That's because the US like pretty much all the western world is a dictatorship of capital why would capital willingly discipline itself. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat hence the constant crackdowns on unruly capital and capitalists that is impossible in the west.

Many far right countries (australia, japan, south korea) use ranked choice voting... it doesn't make a bit of difference. If capitalists control the political system, then they will stack candidates and fund the campaigns that support their interests, and the "democracy" there is nothing but political theatre.

Outside of Marxists, even the ancient greeks knew that representative government is just another name for plutocracy, because only wealthy / landed family have the money and prestige to fund campaigns to get themselves elected. Liberals still haven't learned this simple lesson.

I mean judging by how cooked the brains of so many western people are with internet conspiracies like qanon, I'm not sure that would be the result of deregulation

No don't, you never will. You'll always contribute what ever system you're a part of. Just choose one and the chienese might do a lot of bad things but they aren't the pedofile baby eating elites.

You do realize that ranked choice voting is one of the simplest and least violent ways to push forward progressive candidates right? Because it makes people comfortable with voting options that with first past the post would be throw away votes

Not to mention that western countries are the ones going towards 1984 with thier fucking age verification

That makes sense, and then you look at Europe and realise the issues at hand are systemic, caused by material conditions and bourgeois democratic electoralism is never going to fix those issues.

Much of Europe already uses ranked choice or proportional voting, yet remains austerity-ridden and sliding toward the far right because it is still under the dictatorship of capital. The voting mechanism is secondary to the concrete material conditions: capital's imperative to accumulate, the commodification of labor, and the state's role as an instrument of class rule. Until that dictatorship is overthrown, electoral reform is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

The core contradictions at hand are:

Socialized production versus private appropriation:workers collectively create value, but capitalists expropriate the surplus

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall: as organic composition of capital rises, profitability declines, forcing capital to seek new fixes

Overaccumulation and underconsumption: capital produces more than can be profitably sold, leading to crisis, layoffs, and austerity

The contradiction between capital's global mobility and labor's relative immobility, which fuels a race to the bottom in wages and protections.

As imperialism declines (neocolonial extraction becomes costlier, interimperialist rivalry intensifies, and the Global South resists outright plunder) capital can no longer rely on external superprofits to offset domestic falling rates of profit. The response is internal repression: austerity to slash social wages, union-busting to weaken labor power, surveillance to preempt dissent, and the normalization of authoritarian governance. This is capital's logical reaction to crisis.

This dynamic mirrors Weimar Germany: economic crisis, delegitimized liberal parties, and a bourgeoisie that ultimately backed fascism to crush the organized working class and restore "order" for capital. Today's far-right surge is the same phenomenon: capital's emergency management when consent can no longer be manufactured through bourgeois democracy alone.

Voting under these conditions is not a path to liberation; it is a ritual that legitimizes the managers of decline. For voting to matter, you must overthrow the dictatorship of capital and reach the synthesis of these contradictions: a revolutionary transformation that socializes production, abolishes exploitation, and builds a state that serves human need, not profit. Only then does political power and thereby voting become meaningful.

place where the 996 work schedule is the norm

Wrong. It was never the norm across China's economy. It was concentrated in roughly forty large tech firms during the 2016-2019 boom cycle. In August 2021 the Supreme People's Court explicitly ruled 996 illegal, stating it violates statutory working hour limits and mandatory rest periods. The 2025 Consumption Boost Plan tightens this further with concrete measures against invisible overtime and stronger rest-time guarantees.

capitalists maliciously withholding wages is commonplace

Wage arrears will persist so long as capital exists. That is the unfortunate material reality of the world we live in. What distinguishes China is the enforcement architecture built to counter it. The judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人) publicly names individuals and companies that fail to comply with court orders on wage payments and debts. Once listed, they face high-consumption restrictions (限制高消费): no business-class travel, no luxury hotels, limits on real estate and vehicle purchases. Combined with the blacklist for owed migrant worker wages and criminal prosecution for willful arrears, this creates real pressure on employers. It is not a perfect system but it is institutional recourse. Compare that to the procedural maze workers navigate in many Western systems when chasing unpaid wages

even establishing a union is treated as a crime

China's labor framework operates through the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. This isn't about silencing workers. It is about preventing fragmentation, foreign interference, and ensuring disputes resolve through arbitration and courts rather than adversarial chaos. Enterprise unions under this system negotiate contracts, handle grievances, and oversee safety. The ban on independent unions reflects a choice for unified, state-coordinated representation. That is a policy position. Debate it if you want. But calling it criminalization of worker advocacy is dishonest at best.

those aiding workers in defending their rights are arrested

Vigilante action undermines rule of law anywhere. China channels labor disputes through arbitration committees and courts that handle millions of cases annually. When people bypass legal channels to organize unsanctioned actions, it is the method that triggers enforcement.

Then is the broader picture you ignored. The CPC maintains over 95 percent public approval according to long-term Harvard Kennedy School surveys. Most mainlanders view China's system as highly democratic because it delivers accountability through performance: poverty alleviation that lifted nearly one billion people, infrastructure built for public benefit not shareholder profit, and anti-corruption enforcement that reaches from village cadres to top generals. The National People's Congress includes nearly 3,000 deputies with hundreds of farmers, frontline workers, and representatives from all 55 ethnic minorities. That is structural inclusion. When platform capitalists like Jack Ma pushed financialization models that threatened household debt burdens, regulators restructured those businesses toward consumer protection. Similar scrutiny has applied to ed-tech, gaming, and real estate speculation. Public hospitals, high-speed rail, rural broadband. These are not profit centers. They are working-class infrastructure. If your analysis starts from Western media caricatures instead of documented policy and measurable outcomes, you are not critiquing China. You are performing ideology (and poorly at that I might add).

Adding an edit paragraph because I didn't catch that last bit on my first read of the comment:

On the specific claim about Marxist study groups in schools, let me be precise. I hold a Master's in Marxist Theory from a Chinese university. Marxism is compulsory coursework from middle school through postgraduate education. The state funds research institutes, journals, and conferences dedicated to this exact subject. What got disbanded were student groups operating outside legal registration requirements, refusing coordination with official university party branches, and using Marxist language to organize unsanctioned actions under the guise of study. That is not a crackdown on theory. It is enforcement of organizational discipline. Socialist democracy operates through democratic centralism: open debate within recognized structures, unified action once decisions are made. When students form parallel groups that reject institutional channels, they are not advancing Marxist practice. They are fracturing the very mechanisms that deliver working-class gains. This is not abstract. Foreign-funded NGOs have a documented history of instrumentalizing campus activism in developing states to destabilize socialist governance. Allowing unregistered groups to mobilize under Marxist rhetoric while bypassing party oversight creates openings for exactly that kind of interference. The result is not worker empowerment. It is system fragmentation that ultimately serves capital and foreign imperialist interests by weakening the coordinated capacity of the socialist state. If you genuinely understood Marxism as taught in China, you would know that the point is not performative dissent. It is building durable working-class power through institutions that can win material concessions. Disbanding unregistered campus groups is not anti-Marxist. It is pro-working-class unity. Your framing assumes that any restriction on organizing is inherently reactionary. That is a liberal assumption, not a socialist one.

It’s important to understand that everything you know about China comes from capitalist states, corporations, and NGOs (which are funded by those states & corporations) that have a vested interest in you believing that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. That’s why the lie to us about China and lied to us about the USSR.

In what world is Australia far right? Center right/neoliberal today maybe. But not far fight, especially compared to other countries

Also I recommend compulsory voting.

I actively steal from the USA

That doesn't happen in reality

Yes you are, you are winging about the the system to people like me who aren't part of it

Where are progressives on that scale? Oh, and do fascists, I definitely want to know how a fascist stacks up against a liberal!

Didn't the US make one of your prime ministers disappear for criticising pine gap? Isn't Australia part of five eyes? Isn't Australia an "Enhanced Opportunities Partner" to NATO? I think whether you like it or not you are part of the Euro-Amerikan empires system.

Absolutely!

Ummm....how though?

If you're not anti capitalist and anti bourgeois democracy even if you're "progressive" you're just a flavour of liberal. Fascists are obviously worse than liberals although they tend to agree on a surprising amount of things when push comes to shove unfortunately. Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is a widespread phrase for a reason.

I wouldn't say that I think it's a great strength for you to be able to be as concise as you were while still hitting the key points.

Alas, I fear the US might be too far gone for ranked choice to have an effect.

The problem is quality of candidates. Since Citizen's United opened the door for unlimited corporate money in elections, literally 90% of candidates are on someone's payroll. "Grassroots" is a thing of the past. Mass media and name recognition are everything.

Yep, we sure are all of those thing as well.

In this world, the world where open support for genocide is bipartisan in Australian politics

Lmao at you linking chuang. They wouldn't know good analysis if it punched them in the face. Their characterization of China as state capitalist for example rests on a series of fundamental theoretical errors that constitute a systematic departure from the methodological foundations of scientific socialism. Their analysis proceeds deductively from abstract definitions rather than inductively from concrete investigation, which represents a categorical rejection of the Marxist method as articulated in Marx's own preface to the second edition of Capital, where he insists that the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the human mind and translated into forms of thought.

Their primary methodological failure consists in the mechanical application of categories developed for the analysis of mature capitalist formations to a society undergoing socialist transition. They identify the presence of wage labor, commodity exchange, and market mechanisms and conclude that these phenomena constitute definitive proof of capitalist relations of production. This reasoning ignores the dialectical distinction between form and content that is central to Marxist political economy. Under socialism, wage forms may persist while the social content of labor relations undergoes qualitative transformation through the social appropriation of surplus, the subordination of production to planned social objectives, and the institutional mechanisms of workers' participation in management. Chuang's refusal to analyze these mediations renders their categorization analytically empty.

Their treatment of political power demonstrates a further departure from historical materialism. Lenin's decisive contribution to Marxist theory consisted in establishing that the class character of a state is determined not by the legal form of property or the presence of market mechanisms but by which class exercises political command and directs the development of productive forces. Chuang inverts this priority by treating the state as an epiphenomenal expression of economic relations rather than as the concentrated instrument of class power. This theoretical error leads them to dismiss the substantive significance of the Communist Party of China's strategic control over finance, land, energy, telecommunications, and heavy industry, as well as its capacity to direct investment toward socially determined priorities such as poverty alleviation, regional development, and technological sovereignty.

Their analysis of China's integration into the world economy exhibits a crude economic determinism that Marx explicitly criticized in his polemics against the vulgar materialists. They assert that participation in global markets necessarily entails subordination to the law of value on a world scale, thereby erasing the mediating role of state capacity, capital controls, industrial policy, and strategic planning. This position ignores the extensive theoretical and practical work of Marxist-Leninist movements on the question of socialist engagement with imperialist economies. Lenin's writings on the NEP, Mao's analyses of New Democracy, and subsequent CPC theoretical developments all recognize that tactical engagement with market mechanisms and international trade can serve socialist construction when subordinated to proletarian political leadership and long-term planning objectives. Chuang's categorical rejection of this strategic framework reflects not theoretical rigor but sectarian dogmatism.

Their conception of transition reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dialectical character of socialist development. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all theorized socialism as a prolonged historical process characterized by the coexistence and struggle of old and new relations of production. The presence of contradictory elements does not constitute evidence of capitalist restoration but rather reflects the uneven and contested character of revolutionary transformation. Chuang's binary framework, which demands either pure socialism or explicit capitalism, rejects this core insight and substitutes utopian abstraction for concrete analysis. Their method cannot account for the actual trajectory of China's development, including the expansion of public ownership, the strengthening of social welfare systems, the reduction of inequality, and the advancement of technological capacity under conditions of imperialist encirclement.

Their analytical framework also fails to engage with the concrete mechanisms through which surplus is appropriated and allocated in China. Scientific socialism requires investigation of the actual flows of value, the institutional structures of planning and distribution, and the social outcomes of economic policy. Chuang bypasses this empirical work in favor of categorical assertion. They do not demonstrate that surplus value in China is privately appropriated in the manner characteristic of capitalist exploitation. They do not establish that investment decisions are governed by profit maximization rather than social planning criteria. They do not analyze the role of mass organizations, workplace democracy, or community participation in shaping economic outcomes. Their conclusion rests not on material investigation but on definitional fiat.

The political consequence of Chuang's theoretical errors is a politics of sectarian negation that substitutes moral condemnation for strategic analysis. Scientific socialism is not concerned with issuing abstract verdicts on historical processes but with identifying contradictions, assessing balances of forces, and advancing class struggle through concrete practice. Chuang's refusal to engage with the actual gains achieved by China's development model, including the lifting of hundreds of millions from poverty, the expansion of public infrastructure, and the strengthening of national sovereignty against imperialist pressure, reveals a politics disconnected from the material interests of the international working class. Their analysis serves not to advance socialist theory but to reinforce the ideological boundaries of a particular academic-leftist milieu that prioritizes theoretical purity over revolutionary effectiveness.

In sum, Chuang's characterization of China as state capitalist is not a contribution to Marxist analysis but a deviation from its foundational method. Their deductive formalism, their erasure of political power as a determinant of social relations, their mechanical application of categories, and their rejection of transitional dialectics collectively constitute a systematic departure from scientific socialism. The result is not sharper critique but theoretical error that obscures rather than clarifies the actual character of contemporary socialist construction. If one seeks to understand China's development, one must begin with concrete investigation of its material practices, institutional structures, and historical trajectory, not with predefined definitions imposed from without. Anything less is not Marxist analysis but its caricature.

If chuang is the basis of your political thoughts on China it is no wonder you have also arrived at the wrong conclusions.

Let’s also add wikipedia

I am once again begging liberals to learn how sources work