MeisterEckhart wrote on Aug 28^th, 2024 at 11:28am:


So Mao came so close to being overthrown that the party let him do it all again?

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So Chinese leaders could never whitewash their hypocrisy by relabeling it as something else? Like "communism with Chinese characteristics"?

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It was their first experiment with it. It succeeded, and was rolled out across the country.

MeisterEckhart wrote on Aug 28^th, 2024 at 1:22pm:


And he managed to come back and do that after taking a voluntary holiday from leadership?

And your take on this was that he came close to being deposed?

Suppose and Australian PM killed millions of us, then stepped down as leader for a while, then changed his mind and appointed himself PM and started killing people again. Would your interpretation be that he came close to losing his head, or that he can get away with anything, and even when he gives his opponents within the party the opportunity to get rid of him, they just let him walk right back in?

MeisterEckhart wrote on Aug 28^th, 2024 at 1:28pm:


And it succeeded. So it was rolled out across the country. You see the same thing, but you always manage to interpret it backwards.

freediver wrote on Aug 28^th, 2024 at 1:28pm:

No, economic freedom began to be practised despite CCP restrictions. Read up on it... Check out what farmers did when they abandoned collective farming... It'll save you bitching on.

Laugh till you cry wrote on Aug 28^th, 2024 at 2:07pm:



But FD is right - it's also based on almost slave labor.

They don't have good health and safety regulations either -
as companies in the West have to implement at great cost.

Kate Xiao’s ‘How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People’ explains how the surviving peasant farmers of the great famine defied the CCP by embracing local entrepreneurship and establishing small-scale farming innovations. This included covertly abandoning collective farming in favour of a local free market economy.

The CCP, under Deng Xiaoping begrudgingly accepted that the farmers had improved their economic situation, and attempted to coopt and control the process by creating special economic zones, However, it ultimately could no longer be contained.

What Deng and the CCP feared, and the democratic world anticipated, was that economic freedom would lead to popular demands for social and political freedom – a direct existential threat to the CCP’s monopoly of power.

Their fears were well founded, as that is exactly what happened during the 1980s, culminating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

MeisterEckhart wrote on Aug 29^th, 2024 at 7:14am:


Is that a pamphlet, or a book? Whatever it is, it does not appear to have bestowed upon you the ability to make a rational argument. The CCP acknowledging the reality, begrudgingly or not, is not proof, or even evidence, that the people that the CCP could get away with starving and slaughtering in their millions suddenly rose up and forced the CCP to do anything, without ever rising up or forcing them into anything. There were examples  all over the world for the CCP to learn from. It merely had to make a conscious decision to do so.

Your argument is nothing better than an elaborate and convoluted version of the graph that shows that the lack of pirates is causing climate change. You can see the facts, but they are like a jigsaw puzzle to you, and you do not know how they fit together to form a meaningful picture. Because you are trying to do it upside down.

One of the side effects of Orwell’s 1984 is that it can cause a form of infantile arrested development on its readers’ perception of totalitarian power such that, like the infantile perception of parental omniscience and omnipotence, totalitarian systems are necessarily as sensitive and as effective as a nervous system, capable of ending the ‘pain’ of political/ economic/ social heterodoxy everywhere instantly.

While, of course, that is exactly what totalitarians want those subjugated by it to believe, the truth is that totalitarian rule can sometimes be remarkably ineffective – at least initially – in identifying, and then responding to, dissent with an iron fist. Crackdowns while necessarily brutal, must ultimately be intermittent. It’s a case of - you can terrorise some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time…

In the case of the CCP, after the death of Mao, it was forced to accept that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were horrific mistakes. They did so by deflecting blame from ‘the great helmsman’ to ‘the gang of four’ in Stalinist show trials primarily to exonerate Mao and thereby absolve the CCP of blame for these ‘errors’.

Dealing with the breakout of farmers’ independent expression of economic freedom could not be so easily halted by tanks and guns, or show trials, after the people had survived so much under CCP rule – after all, ‘starve me once, shame of you, starve me twice, shame on me’ – notwithstanding that there was the imminent threat of national economic collapse.

Yes, economic change was necessary, but the CCP never intended to achieve that by acknowledging or granting farmers economic independence from its total CCP control.

The CCP was forced to go along with this independence until it could reimpose total state control.

However, in the interim, what Deng and the CCP feared, and the democratic world anticipated, was that this economic freedom they were forced for the time being to tolerate, would lead to popular demand for social and political freedom – a direct existential threat to the CCP and its monopoly of power.


Their fears were well founded, as that is exactly what happened during the 1980s, culminating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

That massacre demonstrated what the wielders of totalitarian power, when threatened with annihilation, can brutally and effectively achieve via targeted orgies of blood and death on the people whose well-being they claimed to ensure and defend.

After Tiananmen Square, China’s economic future was back under the iron fist of the CCP.

And those rural farmers? Their children and their children’s children became slaves to a new and, once again, fully state-controlled economy – something Hong Kongers can ‘look forward’ to: totalitarian retribution for their demanding economic/ social/ political freedom.