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Comment by avoutthere | Hacker News Reader

Held in "secret detention" and posting a full apology including praise for the government. It sounds like the Chinese government is in full tyranny mode.

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As opposed to when it wasn't in full tyranny mode... when exactly?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_toll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#T...

etc, etc...

I mean you could technically go all the way back to the Qin emperor and the Great Wall...

Sure, but for this argument I think the most recent Chinese Civil war to present (1927- ) will suffice. I don't give the KMT a free pass either just because they were buddy-buddy with the "West". Different sides of the same autocratic coin if you ask me.

edit: And before this devolves any further, no I don't give the "West" a pass for its tyrannical tendencies either...

for a while after Mao's death China functioned more as an authoritarian oligarchy than a totalitarian dictatorship. Not a liberal democracy by any means but clearly less bad. This has been reversing somewhat under Xi Jinping.

China was never really a totalitarian dictatorship under Mao either, he mostly got forced out of power by the rest of the communist party in 1959 after his great leap forward reforms resulted in millions dying. He never really regained power except in a sort of spiritual sense. There is a lot of complex political history in communist China.

Its most certainly incorrect to compare Mao with Xi.

> Totalitarianism is a political concept that defines a mode of government, which prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life

He was unabashedly and indisputably, totalitarian. The fact that he lost power eventually, is irrelevant. Every type of leader, eventually, loses power.

The key term was dictatorship, not totalitarian, China under the communist party has always been totalitarian.

You don't need a dictatorship for horrific things to occur.

>[...] China functioned more as an authoritarian oligarchy than a totalitarian dictatorship

Those both still sound like tyranny to me.

He didn't say anything about it being new, I don't know why you would try to take the opposite side of an argument that didn't exist.

See "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Cheng Nien, this isn't exactly "new" behavior for the Chinese government.

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