Last I’ve heard, there were some issues, but things were getting better. Now I have stumbled upon this headline and wish to know more details about the situation.
Last I’ve heard, there were some issues, but things were getting better. Now I have stumbled upon this headline and wish to know more details about the situation.
Western activists, many educated by, paid for, sympathetic and useful to CIA/NED are being harassed, rightfully for being dangerous western puppets. These are people who fell for the siren song of the west, who fully believe only liberalism can bring about LGBTQ+ rights and are willing to work with the west and undermine the CPC, China, the Chinese people, etc for that. Some of them are naive, some are self-hating Chinese convinced by the west that Chinese socialism and culture is evil and backwards and must be destroyed in order for progress to take place. I cannot speak to this particular instance.
Though the west is happy to groom and use fascists, far more useful in public propaganda are their efforts to groom liberals, faux-progressives. Much as the Solidarity-Union movement in Poland which was used by the CIA to bring down communism in Poland presented itself as being more for workers than the party but turned out to unleash the most horrible anti-worker consequences, so too are these types of people mostly of the same risk.
Are there perhaps issues with overly conservative types within the party pushing back on gay rights? Almost certainly. However these movements and movement leaders being crushed are I would bet to a one liberal in nature, allied with, influenced by the west and therefore dangerous.
Queer liberation as with other forms of liberation in China cannot and should not be based off western conceptions in the imperial core under liberal capitalism. It should be home-grown, developed with the party, and have a strong Marxist nature.
There is room for improvement in China but it is a developing country only a couple generations removed from feudalism so that is to be expected. There has been steady progress. There was a recent court ruling, I cannot remember the details but the court upheld I believe a trans persons rights in the fact of the private company they worked for.
I think this is the main point to remember. Rainbow imperialism is the order of the day, and the west will fund subversive LGBTQ groups in other nations in the hopes of sowing division and making that nation look homophobic. It’s win/win as far as the west is concerned, as they try to place liberalism as the only way to actually ensure protection for these people.
And the western press preys on people’s naivety about that all the time. I’ve heard so many people insist China is homophobic because they don’t have big western style corporate funded pride parades. Rather than consider whether or not LGBTQ people in China want that, they insist that if China’s LGBTQ people don’t behave exactly like people in the west, they are being oppressed.
“Gay rights is when western style pride parades sponsored by lockheed martin and women’s rights are when girl-boss drone pilots who kill women and children and force families out of homes for the bank’s profits” - Many western liberals and “leftists” unironically who think what they know of a thing is the only way it can exist. Pure chauvinism.
Capitalism knows it has an awful image problem. It knows it is indefensible. It is clever however.
So it clothes itself in liberatory language and appropriates liberation movements, it clothes itself in the language of progress, it extols how progressive it is by inviting those in the imperial core who were typically marginalized to take part in the blood-letting (after beating the shit out of and scapegoating them for centuries), to let a few of them gain some wealth and power, to scream to the heavens how only liberal capitalism can accomplish this and look how much better our system is than the alternative of this only recently industrialized socialist nation and these groups of global south people suffering from centuries of depredation at the hands of the west, suffering from the west sponsoring the most fringe maniac religious extremists and their ideology to splinter and keep these regions down and bogged with war so the western hegemony is supreme. (Lenin said it better than I ever could of course)
It’s white savior complex liberal-LGBTQ+ edition. Same as white savior complex liberal-feminism-edition. It says the western white liberal context truth is the only one that is real, all others are false, our path is the only real path, any who deny it are <insult here>.
There are some right deviationists (a couple in this thread and they are wrong) who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, who ignorantly proclaim because there is liberal taint within these movements which are globally centered in the west (which always seeks to infect and control anything and everything) that the whole thing is decadence or bourgeois or whatever nonsense it is which is wrong. Instead we must seek to pry these concepts from liberalism, from capitalism as part of our greater drive to revolution. There’s already many revolutionaries within these communities who want this who are being suppressed or carefully sidelined by high-powered corporatized concepts of rights.
China is the opposite of the west. In the west they allow liberal compromise feminists and LGBTQ+ and black civil rights leaders and kill, marginalize, humiliate, and sabotage revolutionary and Marxist ones while appropriating the movements to push consumption and loyalty to capitalism. In China they allow Marxist ones but seek to clamp down on, control, and put a stop to liberal ones. That is what most of this crying is about.
Of course China has a struggle to fight, of course there is progress to be made. But as a socialist country with an in-power communist party there is the risk of infiltration and it must be addressed. It is to Marxists in a nation like China to create this change, not by begging western CIA fronts and running dogs that call themselves civil society and “human rights” groups to sanction China or going for training (indoctrination) by these groups in the west but by applying Marxist principles, theory, and good old fashioned action.
Brilliantly put. I think one of the reasons this kind of liberalism is so enticing to so many is that liberalism is excellent at promising everything. We saw a similar situation with the USSR, where the western liberals promised that the citizens of the USSR could have everything they ever wanted under liberalism, and so there were calls for liberalisation, and liberalism is an ideology that cannot fail, it can only be failed, so the USSR’s attempts at liberalisation were “failures” when they didn’t give the people what they were promised, and the people were told that if they just liberalise a little bit more, everything they’ve ever wanted would be theirs.
I would imagine a similar situation in China as well, LGBTQ liberals could easily be swayed by the west’s empty promises. After all, if you only hear about the west’s opinion on gay rights from very loud internet liberals, you’d probably come away with the idea that the west is a haven of LGBTQ acceptance. No country is perfect, but liberalism is really good at tricking people that perfection is just a few liberalising reforms away…