Lots of Western media isn’t blocked, CNN isn’t blocked
What was blocked recently was BBC in response to CGTN getting blocked first in the UK
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were blocked because they refused to take down terrorist recruitment pages and accounts. Remember 2011 ISIS Twitter? Like that. Those services were available before
Additionally, the idea of Internet sovereignty is important to a healthy Web industry in any country. Without the firewall, companies like WeChat and Douyin/TikTok could not have developed
Furthermore, getting around the firewall is trivially easy. OpenVPN on port 443 does the trick, I’ve set one up for a friend before. Anyone who wants to get a VPN account and browse the wider Internet is freely able to, and many do this
Finally, censorship has a purpose, and that’s public safety first and foremost. China doesn’t have large conspiracy cults like QAnon or antivaxxers, because rumor-mongering gets reported and dealt with seriously. It’s like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, stopping it is censorship but also perfectly legal. They don’t have graveyards full of children or measles, mumps, or rubella making a comeback because of this
marxists.org is a great resource. My study group has had some growing pains, but it’s helpful to start reading some material during the sessions, like Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
My friend’s aunts from Qingdao were totally open to using CBD for pain relief. Since CBD doesn’t make you high like THC, I can see hemp being legalized, especially since hemp also has historical usage in TCM. Marijuana, though, I think won’t happen for a long while since seeing and treating the effects of opium addiction is in living memory. Some other friends who went to Tibet a few times did mention that there are some hookah cafes where there’s something other than tobacco in them
You shouldn’t be divulging political affiliation on a job form, and it won’t come up on a background check as what they check are credit and criminal records
The only thing you should be worried about with joining any Communist organization is if you’re a noncitizen or a naturalized citizen for less than 5 years, as that can get you deported
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Angela Davis, was an ML, now some sort of Marxist Communist, but definitely not an anarchist
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Cedric Robinson was a Marxist
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WEB Du Bois was an ML
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Libraries originally started being attached to feudal research institutions, and public libraries can safely be considered to have originated with liberals and liberally-inclined lords of the late-feudal era. The idea that poor people are simply lacking education which hinders them from raising their status is a wholly liberal notion
Some things can’t be broken, like a sufficiently strong GPG key. That’s something which can’t be backdoored in and of itself. What they could exploit is weak protection of your private key
Other things you could use are physical one-time pads, writing notes on flash paper and burning them when not needed, holding meetings in areas where nobody has a phone or electronics in a sufficiently remote location
All of these methods increase the expense of surveillance. Even if they could backdoor everything, there’s still the expense of assigning police agents to track groups and individuals
If your operation is implementing proper guerilla tactics of leaderless resistance, taking out the #1 or #2 of a cell wouldn’t affect anything as everyone is trained to take on the role of each person 3 levels above them
I think they’ve done well for themselves given they’re one of the most-sanctioned countries in the world, and I can understand their military-first system given that the US and ROK have semi-annual training exercises to invade their country
If you want to see relatively unbiased explorations of the country, I recommend checking out Douyin videos from Chinese tourists
Are they living the most ideal life possible? No, no place is that way, but the only way to improve things would be for the US to withdraw its troops from the Korean peninsula (like the treaty they made at the end of the war stated they would) and for sanctions to end
China Daily as well, Ian Goodrum works for them
For non-Chinese news, I like peoplesworld.org
I also found a tweet with some good resources https://twitter.com/SciTechJunkie/status/1341996155408945152
Deng wasn’t even kicked out of the Party, just removed from leadership. Reading Jude Woodward’s book The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War really helped me appreciate Deng’s vision for building up a stable China.
Regarding allowing monopolies to form, that has been a strategy by MLs since Lenin’s time to allow a company to rise to the level of a monopoly and then nationalize it. In China the critical infrastructure monopolies are still state-owned enterprises so capitalists can’t control the government. Juxtaposed to countries like the US where PG&E can burn California through neglect and merely get a slap on the wrist.
Revisionism is specifically the idea of blending capitalism and communism in a peaceful coexistence which will lead to communism through gradual reforms. Deng Xiaoping Theory not only draws from Lenin’s NEP, but also Mao’s New Democracy period, which allowed for strictly-controlled capitalism for the purpose of building productive forces and wasn’t a seamless blending. The New Democracy plans were scrapped because heavy sanctions severely limited foreign trade.
The reform and opening up under Deng was also the result of China accepting World Bank and IMF loans. Taking those loans comes with stipulations that the government loosen control over sectors of the economy as well as institute reduced spending on welfare. Deng approached it in a way which would allow China to get through the rules imposed by outsiders as fast as possible before it destabilized the government.
Now had Khrushchev not moved towards appeasing the West and instead created a strong trading bloc with China and newly liberated countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Deng would never have needed to appeal to the West. However by the time Deng was leading the country, the USSR was a shadow of its former self, and even Gorbachev’s attempt to end the Sino-Soviet split without preconditions couldn’t save it.
Mao did criticize Deng as a capitalist roader and sent him to the countryside to learn from the peasantry, but this ignores that Mao also invited Deng back after Lin Biao tried to stage a coup. This was criticism and education, not an expulsion from the Party. Had Mao thought Deng so irredeemable he would have pushed for expulsion.
Furthermore, the reasons for Deng and Zhou being sent away the 2nd time revolve around their criticisms of the Cultural Revolution, which was leading to an incredible amount of suffering, particularly in urban areas. Personally I think the CR had noble intentions and had better outcomes in rural areas where the peasantry was empowered to take control back from the most corrupt Party officials, but overall was idealistic to presume students would not succumb to excessive violence which the Red Guards became infamous for. The Cultural Revolution was correctly denounced as a left deviation.
Parenti lectures are great