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This is just disgusting.

China will ban people with poor ‘social credit’ from planes and trains

Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning “social credit” system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place....
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Rimbaud said:
The CCP must be opposed firmly, and leftists should cast away any vague sympathy based on the word "communist."
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I don't understand why China is "now a classical fascist state" more than it was in 1990.
I see it a vicious authoritarian 'developmentalist' state much like many others over the world from Vietnam to Congo.
Its aim seems to be to solidify internal acquiescence and secure beneficial deals abroad.

How are you firmly opposing the CCP in China, Rimbaud, and what also should it be replaced with?
 
sihhi said:
I don't understand why China is "now a classical fascist state" more than it was in 1990.
I see it a vicious authoritarian 'developmentalist' state much like many others over the world from Vietnam to Congo.
Its aim seems to be to solidify internal acquiescence and secure beneficial deals abroad.

How are you firmly opposing the CCP in China, Rimbaud, and what also should it be replaced with?
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As for how I am firmly opposing them in China, well I am not, I got the fuck out of there the summer gone because I could see the way the winds are blowing - Xi's declaration of President for life since then has removed any doubts from my mind about the train wreck the country is going towards. Call me a coward but I was being watched closely. Every 15 minutes my phone stopped to upload data to police servers and I had to throw away my laptop upon return because it was so riddled with spyware from the CCP. You think Im being paranoid? Stories like this make me doubt: British teacher locked up in China forced to watch Nicolas Cage films

I am most concerned in trying to get some sympathy for the Uighur cause, but I am in a new city and without any comrades. I am in the slow process of trying to find a way to contact Chinese dissidents, Taiwanese, and people potentially sympathetic to the plight of the Uighurs e.g. Action Palestine, but it is a slow process. I am motivated personally by the disappearance of several Uighur friends I had while in China, who are most likely imprisoned in re-education camps, but it is kind of hard to find people where I am now who give a shit at all... so all I've done is join Amnesty International because they seem to be the only group to have even mentioned it who are active in this city, and sent a few emails out.

As for what it should be replaced with... an end to the CCP without a period of reform would be a bloody catastrophe, like Syria on an epic scale, as civil society is not existent and people's capacity to self organise is crippled. There would be nothing but the military to fill the vacuum. What I would hope for is a coup against Xi Jinping by a more enlightened cadre willing to loosen grip on society and allow more open discussion and association outside of the party's control. Not very radical, but it is the only thing that can be realistically hoped for which doesn't involve millions upon millions of deaths. From outside of China this could be carried out by demonstrating that China cannot be accepted as a world power so long as Xi Jinping remains and it continues on the closed off fascist route. There is precedent in Deng Xiaoping, and Xi is actually quite hated by a lot of the party at this stage, so it is possible I think.

Quite a lot differentiates China now from China in the 90s, and although it is true that many core traits of fascism has been present in China previously, I think these have matured in recent years, so there isn't a clear cut off point. From the 90s through to 2012, there was no Fuhrer and the Party focused on collective leadership. The first time I went to China was in 2007 and I was surprised to see that a range of opinions were acceptable, and you could advocate democracy so long as you advocated it from the perspective of the Party reforming in that direction - the red line was talking about overthrowing the Party, but beyond that there was a range of opinions possible, which reflected the collective leadership style at the time and the range of opinions within the central committee. Wang Yang in Guangdong province experimented with more relaxed attitude to NGOs, and even allowed the formation of proto-trade unions, which were seen as possibly an effective way of combating corruption, improving rule of law, and creating a more consumption led economy. Some other environmental NGOs were also permitted for similar reasons.

In retrospect the big change came with the Bo Xilai saga. If you are unfamiliar with this you can look it up yourself. Basically, he launched a popular anti-corruption campaign and took a leftist stance economically, spending more on social programmes and giving rural migrants better access to public services, and embarked on a social housing programme. He was also a dramatic self publicist with a glamorous public image, and far more popular than Xi and his faction. As a student in Beijing circa 2010-11, I spent some time hanging out at a leftist bookstore called 乌有之乡, who were big fans of Bo Xilai. (that bookstore got shut down in 2012 when Xi became Chairman.) This basically split the Party, and the result was a victory for the Xi faction, life sentence for Bo and suspended death sentence for his wife on what were probably trumped up charges.

For how it is fascist, see below. I couldn't fit everything into one post. If you think it is basically the same as the 90s you have a lot to catch up on so I've collected a lot of links for you.
 
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SInce Xi came to power, the followings things have happened.

1 - Intensification of nationalist propaganda. Campaign against "universal values," removal of textbooks portraying foreign ideas.

Seven subjects off limits for teaching, Chinese universities told
China’s toxic nationalism
Chinese universities ordered to ban textbooks that promote Western values

2 - Crackdown on lawyers.

China lawyer recounts torture under Xi's 'war on law'
5 Ways China Is More Repressive Under President Xi Jinping

3 - Growing racial discrimination and chauvinism, with parts of the country resembling some combination of apartheid South Africa and Gaza strip with a high tech North Korea or digital Nazi Germany.

The upper Han
China's Hui Muslims fear Lunar New Year education ban a sign of further restrictions to come | The Japan Times
In China, sympathy for treatment of ethnic minority prompts death threats
Restaurants in Beijing university district ordered to only allow 10 foreigners in at a time
Could Han Chauvinism Turn the 'Chinese Dream' into a 'Chinese Nightmare'?
More Koreans are choosing to leave China and take their businesses with them due to economic issues and fluctuations in the relationship between the two countries - Global Times (from state organ, but couldn't find anything else about the South Koreans fleeing China. This story dumbs it down but from personal experience I know many South Koreans were attacked and subject to violence by nationalist mobs whipped up by the media, and also harrasment by the authorities.)
Beyond the pale: China’s cheerful racists | The Spectator
Why Are So Many Expats Leaving China?

4 - Crackdown on NGOs.

Foreign non-government groups in China fear clampdown under new law
China 'eliminating civil society' by targeting human rights activists – report

5 - Dictatorship and personality cult replacing collective leadership.

Nocookies
China says lifting term limits is about protecting authority of party
In 2017, the cult of personality returned to China

6 - Propaganda campaign against feminism, re-assertion of feudal family values.

Opinion | Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rise in China has been powered by sexism
Xi Jinping’s Family Values Contribute to China's Gender Inequality - The News Lens International Edition

7 - Opposition to democracy in principle, rather than being not ready for it yet/changing slowly.

Opinion | China’s president just laid out a worrying vision for the world

8 - Expansionism, imperial ambitions, militarisation.

Xi personally behind tough stance on South China Sea dispute
China's Expansion in the South China Sea: A Return to Great Power Politics | HuffPost
1,800 PLA troops, 2 helipads: Hint of China's 'salami slicing' on Doklam
China plans 2020 invasion: researcher - Taipei Times

9 - De facto apartheid and rounding up of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities into camps. (this is what I am most personally shocked and disturbed about. I believe the situation is deteriorating fast and drifting slowly but surely to the systematic extermination of the Uighurs.)


China: Release the 1 Million Uyghur Detainees Held in Nazi-Style Concentration Camp » Uyghurnet
China detaining 'at least 120,000 Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps'
Overcrowded Political Re-Education Camps in Hotan Relocate Hundreds of Uyghur Detainees
China is Forcing Uighurs Abroad to Return Home. Why Aren’t More Countries Refusing to Help?
In Xinjiang, China’s 'Neo-Totalitarian' Turn Is Already a Reality
Pakistani men helpless as Uighur wives, children 'vanish' in China
China’s Muslim minority banned from using their language in schools
Uyghur Muslims: Victims of the World’s Largest Ethnic Cleansing.
A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag

10 - Fierce ideological assertion of social darwinism.

“Social Darwinism and the stigmatization of ‘white left’”: a translation of a talk by Fang Kecheng
China Loves Trump


How can any reasonable person differentiate this from fascism? What exactly is the difference? Let's call a spade a spade.

Fundamentally, this is the issue at stake; Xi Jinping believes he can use AI and big data to create a perfect totalitarianism and cement the Party's rule indefinitely. Xi views himself as some kind of Confucian enlightened sage ruler, which isn't dissimilar to the concept of a Fuhrer.

China’s Predictive Policing and “Digital Totalitarianism” – China Digital Times (CDT)

What they are building with big data is something totally different to the Deng, Jiang, and Hu eras, and terrifying, possibly a threat to the human race. I'd say the kind of futurist fixation on tech is also something recognisably fascist, as well.
 
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It's CCTV taken a step further. Imagine, if that is being done publicly, how they are watching your every on line move.
I thought something similar had been tried/tested in the States looking for trouble makers at a demo or criminals in known crime hot spots?
Big brother is watching you.
 
China Has Chosen Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang—For Now

Good article on the concentration camps in XInjiang, estimated to hold more than 10% of the province's majority Muslim population.

China Has Chosen Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang—For Now
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It’s expensive to destroy a people without killing them, but Beijing is willing to pay the price.
By Kate Cronin-Furman| September 19, 2018, 11:57 AM

The news out of Xinjiang, China’s western region, this summer has been a steady stream of Orwellian horrors. A million people held against their will in political reeducation camps. Intelligence officials assigned as “adopted” members of civilian families. Checkpoints on every corner and mandatory spyware installed on every device.

The targets of this police state are China’s Muslim Uighur minority, whose loyalties the central government has long distrusted for both nationalist and religious reasons. An already uneasy relationship deteriorated further in 2009, when Uighur protests led to violent riots and a retaliatory crackdown. Hundreds died in the clashes or were disappeared by security forces in their aftermath. Since then, a handful of deadly terrorist attacks outside of Xinjiang itself have served to justify increasingly heavy restrictions on the group’s rights and freedoms.

The Uighur are a problem for China, and perhaps an intractable one. They are reluctant subjects of the Chinese state, they sit on the route most key to Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, and increasing oppression has so far only prompted further resistance.

But as far as we know, China isn’t massacring the Uighurs. This is not to say that the repression hasn’t been violent. It has. Members of the security forces are committing torture and extrajudicial killings with impunity. But there is no evidence that China is systematically employing lethal violence in an effort to physically eradicate the Uighur minority. Why not?

It’s certainly not out of any reluctance to use deadly force. Restrictions have escalated alarmingly in recent months, with the authorities treating Islam as a contagious ideological disease whose sufferers must be quarantined. The vast network of internment camps has more than doubled in size since the beginning of 2018, and people no longer emerge from them after a few days or weeks. Now, they disappear for months or what may become years. Uighurs living abroad report that their relatives back home don’t answer their calls anymore. They don’t know if their loved ones have cut off overseas contact to avoid arousing suspicion or if they’ve vanished into the camps like so many others.

While the official language around Uighurs still portrays them as happy subjects of the state, the rhetoric of “terrorists” and “separatists” has become increasingly dehumanizing—and all-encompassing. Any Uighur, especially a young man, can be imagined as an extremist who must be eliminated. In China’s tightly controlled online environment, hate speech against Islam and Uighurs goes almost unchecked by the authorities. In practice, it’s now extremely hard for Uighurs to live outside of Xinjiang; Han Chinese have received detention time merely for renting rooms to Uighurs outside of the region—while their renters have been sent to the camps in Xinjiang.

By any measure, China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uighurs. Specifically: the offenses of arbitrary imprisonment and persecution, both of which qualify as crimes against humanity “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” Former detainees have also described torture inside the camps. This, too, is crimes against humanity if it’s widespread or systematic—as a recent Human Rights Watch report indicates is the case.

Some members of the Uighur community say the abuse goes further. They allege that China is committing a cultural genocide. Cultural genocide means the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites. Unlike “physical” genocide, it doesn’t have to be violent. Uighur activists point to the forced separation of families, the targeting of scholars and other community leaders for detention and “reeducation,” the bans on Uighur language instruction in schools, the razing of mosques, and the onerous restrictions on signifiers of cultural identity such as hair, dress, and baby names as evidence that China is trying to eradicate the Uighur identity.
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Continued in post below
 
Cont. from above.

Cultural genocide is not a defined crime in international law. Although it was discussed at length during the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the distinction between physical and cultural genocide did not make it into the final document. Of the actions that might qualify as cultural genocide, only the forcible transfer of children is criminalized.

In practice, this absence hasn’t been such a problem. The type of acts that qualify as cultural genocide generally occur alongside, or as a precursor to, mass violence. Nonviolent actions undertaken in pursuit of the destruction of cultural identity therefore often serve as the evidence of intent necessary for a mass slaughter to qualify as genocide. For example, the devastating violence unleashed against the Rohingya by Myanmar’s military has been accompanied by clear efforts to eliminate Rohingya cultural institutions and leaders, and it follows decades of restrictions on members of the group’s ability to marry, procreate, or seek education freely. What on their own might look like atrocities committed as part of a particularly brutal counterinsurgency campaign begin to look like genocide when considered in the context of a long history of efforts to eradicate the group’s identity.

And yet, so far China hasn’t resorted to mass killings. That’s puzzling. Asking why a government isn’t carrying out a slaughter might seem perverse, but this is persecution on an astronomical scale. With repressive violence being employed against a vulnerable and reviled minority on such a widespread and systematic basis, the absence of mass death is an anomaly. And it’s especially surprising given how much more complicated, costly, and difficult it is to destroy a people without killing them.

The operation China is running requires a massive intelligence network that can monitor every Uighur home in China and reach members of the diaspora abroad, biometric technology to identify and track them, the construction of a huge system of camps to house them, and personnel to enforce their detention and oversee their “reeducation.”

Eliminating a people always requires a high level of organization and resources. While accounts in popular media may portray this type of violence as irrational, successful genocides are highly rational, and rationalized. This is not chaotic violence; it’s characterized by orderliness and control. The emblematic cases of the last century, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, are both notable for the extremely clear and routinized organizational hierarchies responsible for conducting mass murder. The Nazis’ notoriously rigid command-and-control structure enabled the smooth operation of a system that transported 11 million people to their deaths. Likewise, in Rwanda, the instigators of the genocide exploited the country’s sophisticated top-down bureaucratic apparatus to ensure that orders to kill from the top were carried out at the local level.

This is what is required to undertake the physical destruction of a group: a tightly controlled organizational structure whose members can effectively identify and overpower large numbers of victims, and who can be relied upon to carry out even the most morally repugnant commands.

Yet destroying a group’s culture without eliminating its members is an even taller order than mass murder. The need to continuously monitor the population imposes a significant—and extremely expensive—additional surveillance burden.

Xinjiang’s finances appear to already be straining under the pressure, with local governments reporting serious debt problems. An incarcerated population potentially unrestricted in size (rather than one whose members are killed to make room for more inmates) creates a consistent demand for more manpower; in 2016 alone, the region advertised for more security personnel than from 2008 to 2012 combined, according to researcher Adrian Zenz. And the fact that the task has no clear endpoint means the system must be maintained indefinitely.

Yet there are clear benefits to perpetrators to pursuing a policy of cultural, rather than physical, genocide. Yes, it’s more difficult and costly, but it’s also easier to conceal and obfuscate. There are no mass graves, no tell-tale miasma of death and decay. Arbitrary detention and incidental torture can much more easily be excused as overzealous counterterrorism efforts than mass murder. And even when the protestations of legitimate state purpose ring wholly false (as they must in the case of China’s ruthless treatment of the Uighurs), a limited international attention span and a never-ending supply of atrocities means that systematic repression unaccompanied by a high death toll simply incurs fewer reputational costs than a bloodbath. Given these international dynamics, it makes sense that a high-capacity actor like China might pursue this strategy.

The extraordinarily high levels of capacity and control required to implement a policy of cultural genocide explain why we so infrequently observe this type of repression in the absence of cataclysmic violence. Despite its high costs in absolute terms, lethal violence is the cheaper and easier path to the destruction of a group. It is no coincidence that the pace of the Holocaust’s butchery accelerated as Nazi Germany faced increased strain on its resources and capacity. Likewise, Myanmar’s recent shift from the maintenance of an apartheid state to an all-out onslaught on the Rohingya suggests a change of strategy in reaction to the inability to effectively employ less violent means to obliterate the group’s identity.

These precedents set off alarm bells about how things might play out in Xinjiang. China’s actions reveal a clear intent to eradicate the perceived threat that Uighur identity poses to state security. It is currently employing the highest-cost strategy available in pursuit of this aim. If this proves too difficult, it is more likely that it will default to an easier approach than abandon its goals—with fatal consequences.
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yield said:
Outline to read
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Copy pasted it here:

China’s most prestigious university has threatened to shut down its student Marxist society amid a continuing police crackdown on students who support workers in a dispute over trade union organisation.

Under China’s Communist party, Marxism has been part of the compulsory university curriculum for decades. But universities are now under pressure to embrace “Xi Jinping thought” as the president strengthens his ideological control over the nation. The government is also inspecting primary and secondary school textbooks to remove foreign content.

Peking University’s Marxist Society was not able to re-register for the new academic year because it did not have the backing required from teachers, the society said. “Everyone can see what the Peking University Marxist Society has done over the past few years to speak out for marginalised groups on campus,” it added.

The threat to close the society follows a summer of student and worker unrest in the Chinese manufacturing hub of Shenzhen. Students from Peking and other elite Chinese universities were detained for supporting workers trying to organise a trade union at a Jasic Technology factory.

While workers’ protests have become more common in China, the support of a small yet growing student movement has made the Jasic protests politically sensitive.

Zhan Zhenzhen, a member of the Marxist Society at Peking University, was among those arrested in Shenzhen last month. In July, police detained about 30 workers in the biggest such arrest since 2015. In August, police wearing riot gear stormed a student dormitory and took away about 40 students who had been supporting the workers, according to witnesses.

Mr Zhan and the Marxist Society initiated an investigation into working conditions for low-paid workers at Peking University this year. The group said its focus was labour rights, and it gained media attention in 2015 when it published an earlier working conditions report.

The Marxist Society said it had approached teachers in the university’s department of Marxism for support with registration but had been refused, with no explanation.

A teacher from another department had volunteered to register the society but said his offer was rejected by the university’s Student Society Committee.

The university’s Marxism department did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The Student Society Committee declined to comment.

Mr Xi visited Peking University this year to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. “Peking University is the first place to spread and study Marxism in China. It makes a great contribution to the spread of Marxism and the foundation of China’s Communist Party,” he said at the time.
 
DotCommunist said:
Dissapearing the head of Interpol seems to be a bold move.
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Fan Bingbing disappearing was quite a big deal too. She is the ultimate A List celebrity and basically defines what the Chinese standard of beauty is. It's a bit like if Beyonce mysteriously disappeared with no explanation and references to her online started being deleted.
 
Idaho said:
I can't see how that's going to work. There are millions of Chinese undergraduate students spending years in the UK, Australia, America, etc
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Certain types of Chinese civil servants are forbidden from foreign travel, usually of the military variety. Recently these rules are getting stricter and even diplomats can only get permission to make visits for a couple of days at a time. As teachers are technically civil servants, this can be viewed as an extension of these rules. They want to make sure teachers are indoctrinated so they can indoctrinate others, and having overseas experience makes it harder to control their perceptions.

I still think they are expecting a serious economic crash and are knuckling down to ride out the storm by sheer repressive force. I really hope it backfires on them and hastens their demise instead.
 
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China no longer wants to negotiate a free-trade agreement with Canada.

Once Canada signs the USMCA, the United States can veto any trade deal that Canada (and Mexico) makes with any other country.
 
Rimbaud said:
Certain types of Chinese civil servants are forbidden from foreign travel, usually of the military variety. Recently these rules are getting stricter and even diplomats can only get permission to make visits for a couple of days at a time. As teachers are technically civil servants, this can be viewed as an extension of these rules. They want to make sure teachers are indoctrinated so they can indoctrinate others, and having overseas experience makes it harder to control their perceptions.

I still think they are expecting a serious economic crash and are knuckling down to ride out the storm by sheer repressive force. I really hope it backfires on them and hastens their demise instead.
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But would China collapsing actually be a good thing? It would likely cause millions of deaths and could spark regional wars.
 
Idaho said:
But would China collapsing actually be a good thing? It would likely cause millions of deaths and could spark regional wars.
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Who said anything about a collapse?

The Communist Party have got to go. That won't necessarily be through war or violence though. Imo they could collapse quite suddenly and peacefully, because they generally promote cynicism and apathy rather than ideology or passion. (i.e. Mind your own business, don't think about politics, just toe the line and you'll be safe. They actively promote this attitude and it is the prevailing political stance in China.) I don't think many people would die or even fight to defend them, even most of their members and top leaders.

Most Chinese privately dislike the Party, but believe that everyone else loves them due to constant public displays of loyalty necessary for career advancement, as well as tight censorship of any news of protest. The Party's rule could collapse incredibly quickly once dissent becomes too widespread to censor, and reaches a critical mass that makes people lose their fear of being singled out.
 
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