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No the firewall is one-way generally speaking. The fact foreign news agencys need a license to report in China probably doesn’t help but it is almost entirely down to the fact that corpos and the countries they own don’t actually want to report factual information about China and much prefer NED funded NGOs and but at what cost speculation about whatever China announces.
To say 0 of this happened would definitely be untrue but I would say that coming from a time of sadistic landlord/warlord rule and the Aristocracy before that who could and would torture and murder you and possibly your family if your reports displeased them was a larger contributing factor as habits and traditions built up around saving you from this fate would be incredibly hard to shake in such a short time. A beaten dog in a new loving home still flinches at sudden movements. But also if you think of the wider culture such necessity would foster, of reporting accurate information being entirely secondary to pleasing the one being reported (generally at threat of terrible painful torture and or death). This culture of pleasing the one being reported to being more important than the actual information feeds back into both points anyway.
Honestly I don’t think the semantics of it are overly important is it technically anti intellectual if you simply don’t know better probably not but was the wide roll out without real testing anti intellectual possibly, but in the end it all comes down to the 3 core factors which were the natural disasters, immense lack of agronomic knowledge, and poor reporting traditions what exactly you call them is not as important I think.
No it’s that the party promoted anti intellectual polices not just a lack of knowledge.
What do you think leads people to promoting anti intellectual policy? Maybe the fact they lacked the knowledge to promote effective policy at the time due to the country being mostly made up of illiterate peasants? How are you this much of an idiot? Do you not think anything through before you post?
inefficiency in a planned economy.
So inefficient it brought the USSR from backwater to superpower in under 50 years and did the same for China. Ronald Reagan is that you?
eliminate sparrows campaign, the four pest campaign
And again we’re back to lacking agronomic knowledge etc etc. 🤦♂️ 😮💨
I understand you have an ideological conviction and years of western chauvinism that are forcing you to try twist this but genuinely the levels of idiocy you are going to is amazing.
That’s their citation standards they also have a page that says Wikipedia should not cite itself.
Again what they say about themselves is irrelevant. The fact is they constantly cite RFA, scumbag frauds like Montefiore and other entirely unreliable or dare I say dogshit sources. The fact they say they really don’t doesn’t change that.
We can’t forget about the anti-intellectual polices can we?
What do you think lacking agronomic knowledge means? Are you a complete fucking idiot or have you not been reading what I’ve been saying?
And still the one party state need to rapidly industrialize was a driving cause.
And still this is meaningless words salad that says nothing about what actually caused the famine. Which was again lacking agronomic knowledge, natural disaster and poor reporting traditions.
The fact you link Wikipedia to talk about how Wikipedia is reliable is genuinely amazing. “The CIA is so trustworthy they even told me themselves how they only use the best sources”/s. Entirely unserious person.
Again the communes were not the issue communal farming works as shown by it working post famine the issue was the implementation of new farming techniques while lacking the necessary agronomic knowledge to effectively do so. This failing was then worsened by natural disaster and poor reporting tradition as the actual material driving factors of famine. Have you considered actually thinking before posting?
wikipedia is reliable
I have seen them cite Radio Free Asia on multiple occasions. Alongside Epstein island visiting Ghislaine Maxwell best friend Sebag Montefiore also famous for lying about viewing soviet archives. If that’s what you take to be reliable then honestly wow I have no words…
it was also a direct reaction to Soviet development polices and of the single party state.
Word salad. The industrialisation was but again industrialisation doesn’t cause famine generally.
The 3 core factors were natural events, lack of knowledge due to backwardness, and poor reporting traditions.
And again none of these 3 things are communist.
Please actually read what I’m saying. I’m not denying famine happened but the actual causes were not issues with communism or even related to communism but a mix of natural issues and hold over problems from the preceding years that left the country lacking agronomic knowledge and with a tradition of poor reporting to please feudal lords and landlords due to risk of retribution rather than convey accurate information.
Also you should avoid linking NATOpedia it only serves to demean yourself.
Ah I didn’t realise industrialising was a communist policy or that industrialising caused famine.
The actual reasons for the famine in reality were natural causes mixed with agricultural plans made with poor agronomic knowledge due to the backwardness of the country coming from the century of humiliation and a degree of poor reporting tradition held over from the feudal and landlord years.
None of these are “communist policy”.
The famine during the great leap forward wasn’t due to communism though? It was due to China being a backward country thanks to the century of humiliation (caused by capitalism) leading to lacking the necessary technical knowledge (there’s a reason it was the last famine China ever had).
On how it works:
It’s effectively an IP/domain/protocol blacklist. So if you break the rules for example by refusing to host Chinese user data on servers in China as is required by law you get out on the list and your site is blocked. Other things blocked are domains commonly used for spam e.g. .ml is blocked by the firewall as it was a free domain commonly used for spam. So I’m using a VPN as all .ml sites are blocked (as far as I’m aware, there might be some who petitioned their way off but I don’t know)
On why it was put in place:
The firewall was created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. Many countries regulate foreign platforms and data flows. China built its own ecosystem instead of depending on foreign companies. We have seen what happens when foreign platforms operate without local oversight: Facebook facilitating genocide in Myanmar, coordinated anti-vax disinformation campaigns in Southeast Asia, algorithm-driven radicalization, etc. The firewall makes those kinds of external influence operations harder or close to impossible to run at scale.
More insightful than peddling incremental change nonsense in 2026. “If we just elect the guy with the totenkopf tattoo we can push them left guys really”. Supremely unserious
The world is not black and white
No one said it was
incremental change
You should incrementally eat shit
Just to clarify given the context do you mean the how as in the actual mechanism or the why it was put in place etc?
Yeah I 100% agree but also felt that it was long enough that it was 50/50 they’d actually read past the first few lines anyway so I could clarify in any follow-ups if they did and if they didn’t then it was fine as is anyway.
I wrote a more direct reply to this, but I have come to realise that in this situation it would most likely be unproductive. You appear to be a very new leftist of some description: you seem to like the idea of socialism or communism, but you do not yet seem to have a firm grasp of what they actually entail. So instead of arguing point by point, I am going to explain what socialism is, why China has been socialist since 1949, and then add some book and article recommendations so you can begin studying the question more seriously on your own.
To start, we have to define a term that is commonly used but rarely properly understood: the state. Many people use “the state” and “the government” interchangeably, but this is not accurate. The state is specifically the organised force by which class antagonisms are mediated through the rule of one class over others. The government, on the other hand, broadly refers to the administration, coordination, planning, record-keeping, infrastructure management, public decision-making, and the organisation of social production required by advanced societies. This distinction will be important later.
Next, it is important to define socialism. Socialism is the transitionary period between capitalism and communism. It still contains many contradictions inherited from capitalism: classes, class struggle, uneven development, commodity production, wages, bureaucracy, ideological struggle, and often limited market mechanisms. Socialism is not “when everything is already communist.” It is the period in which the proletariat holds political power and uses that power to transform society, develop the productive forces, suppress reaction, and gradually overcome the material basis of class society.
This stands in contrast to communism, where class society has been abolished as a meaningful social reality. Communism is classless because there are no longer opposed classes standing in antagonistic relation to one another (as only a single class, the proletariat, remain after the other classes have been proletarianised during the socialist period). It is stateless because, once class antagonisms have disappeared, the state as an instrument of class rule no longer has a function and withers away. This of course does not mean that organisation, administration, planning, or collective decision-making (the government) disappear. It means that the coercive state as an instrument of class domination disappears.
At this point you might ask: if contradictions remain under socialism, how is it different from capitalism? That is a reasonable question. The answer rests on one primary and one secondary characteristic.
The primary question is: which class commands the state? Under socialism, the proletariat commands the state through the people’s democratic dictatorship, also called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie commands the state, which communists refer to as the dictatorship of capital (even if they have a liberal democratic cascade).
The secondary question is: which mode of ownership holds primacy, public ownership or private ownership? This is secondary because public ownership under the dictatorship of capital functions as state capitalism, while public ownership under the dictatorship of the proletariat is part of socialist construction. Ownership forms matter, but they cannot be separated from the class character of political power.
Now, with this groundwork laid, we can finally look properly at the Chinese situation.
China has been socialist since October 1, 1949, because the old landlord-bureaucrat-comprador state was destroyed and replaced by a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class through the Communist Party. The Communist Party of China has more than 100 million members as of the end of 2024 (slightly over 1/14 people). The commanding heights of the economy were brought under public ownership and workers state direction. The new state was built to suppress reaction, defend sovereignty, develop the productive forces, and transform society.
In China, the bourgeoisie still exists, but it does not rule as a class. Capitalists can own firms in non-commanding sectors, make profits, and accumulate wealth within limits, because developing the productive forces still serves necessary social goals at China’s current stage of development. But they do not command the state, the army, the land system, the central banking system, or the strategic direction of the economy. They do not stand above the people or above the people’s organised political instrument, the Communist Party, as a sovereign power.
When capital conflicts with the long-term interests of socialist construction, it is disciplined, subordinated, investigated, broken up, fined, or otherwise brought to heel. Jack Ma and Ant Group is a useful example: its $37 billion IPO was suspended in 2020 and Jack Ma was made step away from public life as he attempted to put his profit before the benefits of the people by pushing for loosening banking regulations so he could provide micro loans. Foreign capitalists spent years crying about this as it showed the truth capital holds no power in China.
To put it briefly: China is socialist because the proletarian-led state holds political power, commands the strategic economy, subordinates capital to national and social development, suppresses reactionary threats, and continues the long transition out of capitalism under conditions of imperialist encirclement, uneven development, and a still-existing world capitalist system.
It would also be remiss not to mention that much of what you “know” about China has been manufactured through a mix of exaggeration, selective framing, omission, and outright lies. For example, you have likely heard about “996” as if it represents Chinese labour law or the normal working life of the whole country. In reality, 996 was an issue in ~40 of the large tech firms around the 2019 tech boom and was quickly ruled illegal which it now has been for half a decade.
For a proper explanation on how this kind of ideological manufacture happens, I would recommend reading Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality.
Further reading recommendations:
I have to a plug @Cowbee@lemmy.ml and their beginner reading list
But for my recommendations more directly related to the topic at hand I would recommend:
- Engels: The Principles of Communism
- Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
- Marx: Wage Labour and Capital
- Marx: Value, Price and Profit
- Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme
- Lenin: The State and Revolution
- Lenin: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
- Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
- Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
- Stalin: Foundations of Leninism
- Stalin: Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
- Mao Zedong: On Practice
- Mao Zedong: On Contradiction
- Mao Zedong: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
- Mao Zedong: On New Democracy
- Mao Zedong: Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan
- Mao Zedong: On Protracted War
- Deng Xiaoping: Build Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
- Deng Xiaoping: We Must Follow Our Own Road in Economic Development
- Xi Jinping: Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
- Xi Jinping: The Governance of China
- Roland Boer: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
- Rong Zhaozi: Productivity, Public Capital, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
- Carlos Martinez: The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century
- Roderic Day: China Has Billionaires
- Michael Parenti: Blackshirts and Reds
- Michael Parenti: Inventing Reality
- Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
- Kwame Nkrumah: Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
- Vijay Prashad: Washington Bullets
- J. Sakai: Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat
I understand having such a long list dumped on you is likely off-putting however that’s the unfortunate truth of being a real socialist/communist, constant reading, education and investigation is a must. If you have any specific questions on any of them I can try help you if need be.
You understand so little you would likely have to unlearn effectively everything you “know” to even approach 0 understanding.
I’m also finding it a little bit suspicious that Chinese people–whom are propping up the USSR–are replying to me.
Fuck you first of all you massively racist fucking loser. You don’t get to be suspicious whitey.
For the record, China is still capitalist,
Maybe, if you have no fucking idea what capitalism, socialism or communism actually mean.
Hell, are Chinese people even legally allowed to use Lemmy?
Not understanding the firewall award.
Actual Gulag survivors have told stories about how horrific it was to be in those camps, too.
Gulag archipelago reader award. (A book so terribly it’s been disavowed by everyone involved bar the main author)
Chinese cruelty toward the Uyghurs?
Depends do you mean the real issues that occured during the crackdown on ETIM or the Zenz/US state department fantasy.
Or the children working in factories and producing carcinogenic products for Shein for next to no money?
Views stuck decades in the past award.
What about the Tianamen square massacre?
Categorically not a massacre but a clash between violent rioters and the military acting as riot police at the time, also funnily enough none of the violence was actually in the square.
greenwash
I don’t think you know what this word means
The West is pretty evil, but let’s not greenwash the USSR or China.
“My country is evil and constantly lies but I also believe everything they say about their ideological enemies”
I don’t even believe in a class society.
You don’t think classes exist? Or you think it’s possible to abolish classes at the press of a button without any transitionary phase? Either way this is idiotic.
more classy like Thomas Sankara.
Leader who believes the things I believe (Marxism Leninism) but was assassinated before the consolidation of the workers state began. You should probably investigate subjects before you speak on them.
have several articles I can cite, but I’ll use this one because it jumps straight to the point.
This site won’t load but from dealing with them previously I vaguely remember them as a liberal nonsense publisher however if you can provide an archive link or equivalent I can give my proper views on this article in particular.
Present Russia is not socialist or communist so I don’t see how this is relevant?