A Tyranny Made In China

Mao Tse-tung was a monomaniacal, brutal dictator who, when not actively executing perceived opposition — merely killing masses of Chinese citizens as the unintended consequence of catastrophically failing policies — showed zero regard for human suffering either way. His body count is estimated at a staggering 40 to 50 million. As much as we know anything about history, we know these ugly facts to be true of Mao. His reign of terror is well-documented and corroborated. Even the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not audacious enough to declare Mao innocent of the charges, though they tepidly underplay them, acknowledging ‘unfortunate errors.’

Such audacity instead falls upon western hyper-polarized, self-identified “leftists” who seem to have imbued their tribal identity with a mystical power of infallibility. To them, their political ideology — endlessly malleable to the convenience of current events though it may be — holds a mystically purifying quality that renders it incapable of being a mere rhetorical pretext for a tyrannical monster, such as Mao. “The West,” they have decided, is the root of all evil, the true Satan. Surely these claims about Mao are nothing more than Western Propaganda, and those who believe them must do so because they, perhaps secretly, advocate right-wing values. Perhaps they are outright Nazis. In the cultivated simplicity of binary thought, the unfathomable mass killing of 10s of millions can be overlooked, the suffering of the starved and the wrongly imprisoned, tortured and murdered, ignored.

The question here is not which side is worse. It is not a question of “left” versus “right,” as though either of those designations denote static, enduring, coherent principles. Under a dictatorship, ideology becomes nothing more than the justifying rhetoric of tyranny, a pretext elevating the narcissistic personal will as a moral imperative. The question here is one of autocracy versus democracy, authoritarianism versus autonomy.

Recently, a high profile online pundit named Hasan Piker, crossed the reprehensible red-line of praising Mao, apparently as part of a larger effort to rehabilitate China in the face of Western “misunderstandings.” To the question as to whether there is a country “that’s done socialism the way you like,” Piker did not mention Norway, Denmark, Sweden, or Finland, which probably are closer to the Bernie Sanders conception of free-market, tightly-regulated, highly-taxed, expansive social welfare program “socialism” that one might credibly argue the merits of without advocating for mass-homicidal dictatorship. Piker responded that “China is probably the closest…that we should follow.”

The Dispatch reports that “Piker’s extremist worldview often takes the form of calls for political violence here in the U.S. He’s advocated for people to kill landlords, joked about the rape of wealthy women, and pushed for violence against U.S. lawmakers.” It is astonishing that, in the world of Facebook “activists,” characterized by their refusal to offer redemption to anybody revealed to have made thoughtless, inflammatory comments, or ill-conceived jokes in the past —whether or not apologies have been offered and amends made — they can nonetheless line up behind a fool who is currently and unapologetically “joking” about raping women.

But then, in order to embrace the higher virtues of contemporary China, we not only need to advocate for autocracy, but accept LGBT discrimination, overlook colonialism (Tibet), overlook the active genocide of the Uyghur people, and abandon bodily autonomy in favor of policies that include forced sterilizations, mass detentions, and torture. It all leads one to wonder, if we acknowledge Mao’s ‘unfortunate errors,’ are we to somehow believe that the positive upshot is that that he at least set up a non-capitalist utopia in which sweat-shop and factory workers are forced into such extreme overwork that measures need to be taken to mitigate an epidemic of on-the-job suicides?

Thinking themselves wise in invoking “late-stage capitalism” as the root of all the world’s ills, the mindlessly sloganeering, online “activist” in support of China simplistically imagines a binary of Good versus Evil, in which China is a thriving socialist paradise, and the criticisms against this paradisiacal nation of true equality must be nothing more than the propaganda of greedy capitalists who fear a general awakening to the truth. In reality, capitalism, more than anything, suppresses the grim reality of China’s autocracy from public awareness. Unwilling to forego access to the substantial Chinese market, film studios, and the larger western entertainment industry, often avoid any topic material that might prove uncomfortable to the Chinese government. Likewise, Meta’s oversight board recently released a study revealing that chatbots are “more than twice as likely to refuse requests to generate material critical of governments that restrict free expression [including China] than those that permit it.” And that epidemic of employee suicides? The best known documented case was at a factory manufacturing Apple products.

The two largest autocracies, Russia and China, are keenly aware of American polarized political divisions and how easy it is to play one simple-minded side against the other. Russia, with its unhinged conspiracy theories regarding a Satanic threat to traditional values—and its pathetic “strongman”-posturing, tough-talking little imbecile dictator—appeals most directly to the perpetually frightened, militant, boot-licking tribal right. China, however, knows how to play the self-loathing, supplicating tribal left, often pretending that the Western mind simply is incapable of understanding the virtues of the unfailingly peaceful culture of the East. The concept of “conquest,” apologists for the CCP insist, despite their activities in regards to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet, not to mention all of Chinese history that, like the rest of human history, is replete with examples of warring tribes and conquering warlords.

Even after banning AI companion services domestically, the Economist reported that:

Xi Jinping told an audience at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai that AI development should be a “symphony of international co-operation”. China’s leader offered platitudes and promises of “inclusiveness” to woo poor countries, implicitly contrasting China’s “open” approach to artificial intelligence with America’s controlling bent. Mr Xi promised that China would help others develop and deploy AI systems to prevent “new historical injustices”.

Exporting AI, of course, offers China’s autocracy new means of international surveillance and influence, just as it promises virtually unconstrained power to tech companies, but the use of the term “new historical injustices” is particularly revealing. Would not current injustices simply be better labeled “injustices”? No. This is a direct appeal to the tribal left for whom “historical injustices” and their reparation has taken on the moral air of a crusade that ultimately insists that non-Western interests take precedence over all others, regardless of what those interests are.

In all of this, of course, the CCP would have us believe, and indeed openly propagandize the idea, that the Chinese people are uniquely inclined to the peaceful conformity of their autocracy. Never mind the history of pro-democracy agitators and protestors in China, many of whom have been imprisoned or killed.

Again, it is not a matter of “Left” versus “Right.” Such positions are merely rhetorical posturing in an autocracy. The division is between Authoritarian and non-Authoritarian, and in this, China is solidly on the wrong side.