Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory reading group on hiatus, will move to Lemmygrad later this year
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive, libgen
watching 《觉醒年代》 Awakening Era at the suggestion of friends over from XHS(Rednote), though I’ve lost where I got that suggestion from. I’ve had more serious readings regarding modern Chinese history in my backlog but I’ve got a bunch of other stuff I want to prioritize too ;A; but anyway a dramatized rendition is a decent way to gain familiarity while having an easier time with reining in my attention. Enjoying it thusfar, got really emotional in the first episode when Chen Duxiu said (paraphrased) “our country is cooked, the old way of ‘revolution’ to change the leader but not the structure will not work. I don’t know the way yet, but I have to find a new way.” (context: Yuan Shikai’s beiyang government that was nominally a republic but eventually Yuan appointed himself emperor although that lasted for less than 3 months)
before too much excitement, unfortunately I already knew some about Chen Duxiu. He is rightfully lauded for being very influential in overthrow of the Qing dynasty and in the early Republican era, as well as being a co-founder of the CPC. However he was later expelled (much history that I’m not qualified in summarizing, yet) and later found company with Trots (trotskyism was found to be the wrong line and almost nonexistent in prc today as far as I can tell)
So what I recall for context of seeing this suggestion, is something along the lines of “Wow, what I hear about the US Gov and conditions from you guys reminds me of our own [Chinese] history during Republican era.” (This was a recurring comment I had seen in multiple places), so I think I found the recommendation (to someone else) along these lines.
and yeah. I get why someone might see parallels, it was a dark and chaotic time. I had known about it generally speaking, but with less context of social conditions, like social hierarchy/structure, or mass feeling of helplessness and not really knowing what to do or how to find a way out.
Obviously the specifics of the conditions of China in early 1900s are vastly different from US right now… much to think about.