I am not against ruthless criticism of China. Mao showed us the utility and necessity of untempered criticism. But there are some important elements of that process that are found lacking in some of y’all’s criticism of China.

What I’m mainly talking about is how y’all engage with Chinese people on here. Like I promise you no matter how much Mao you read, or how many articles you read from anti-China leftists, you won’t have a full picture of the nature of China.

That’s not to say you need all of that in order to criticize China for its failings/poor decisions. If that were the case we’d never be able to critique anyone or anything we aren’t intimately familiar with. The issue at hand is that lecturing Chinese people on China —

—when you don’t speak Chinese, haven’t lived there, don’t have a personal history connected to there, can come across as ‘Very Chauvinist’ and ‘Holier Than Thou’ if you don’t approach it from a specific perspective.

Let’s take the GPCR as our primary example. There are books and articles that discuss positive elements and outcomes from this time period. There are reexaminations that conclude it was not a totally negative endeavor. In the sense that very few things are purely 100% bad for all

It’s true. but for you to fully advocate for its utility and effectiveness without listening to the hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people who suffered during that time in China is a very bad look.

The GPCR brought a great deal of turmoil and suffering to the Chinese people at large. You can ask any Chinese person about family stories from that time, and almost always you’ll get overwhelmingly negative family histories.

Even if you advocate for the effectiveness of the GPCR and it’s necessity, you cannot dismiss the painful history associated with it. If you do you are no better than the western chauvinists who dismiss the suffering their own policies create.

Regardless of your stance on China, you need to understand that before anything else, Mao is a figure of Chinese history and society. His actions and example undergird modern China. It is Chinese people that interact with his legacy and influence in everything they do.

Even if you consider China to be a purely revisionist capitalist society, to deny that Chinese people themselves don’t remember and understand what Mao’s leadership was like is actually racist and chauvinist.

Independent of how you feel about the CPC, Mao’s legacy cannot be de-sinicized. You can’t take his successes and failures out of China. You can’t tell Chinese people that their own experiences and historical/cultural memories are wrong.

If you genuinely want to change the mind of Chinese communists about things like revisionism, you have to start by changing your approach when it comes to engaging with them. Blindly advocating for things that evoke extremely painful memories is no way to get their attention.

Casting aside their own lived experiences and familial histories will only make them less likely to want to hear you out.

For anyone who wants to link any number of articles which argue “the GPCR was actually a great thing for most Chinese people” I challenge you to talk to any Chinese person about it. Whatever take your American Org has on it is irrelevant in comparison to how Chinese people feel.

All Chinese communists agree that Mao was great. His legacy is positive (even with his personal and policy failures). But just because his legacy is a good one does not mean people forget about his failures, or about the impact of those failures on their own lives.

I implore you to listen to Chinese people on this topic. It’s independent of your stance on the current CPC. Even if the CPC is 100% revisionist/imperialist/capitalist it wouldn’t change the fact that Chinese people know best what happened to them.

Sorry for the long thread. I just really want to make it clear. I’m not ever opposed to honest critiques of China (of which there are many to be had). I’m just so tired of seeing western leftists totally blind to the actual experiences of Chinese people.