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Comment by RealityNow | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely disturbing, not to mention so ironic that a self-proclaimed "communist" regime is torturing and kidnapping communist activists.

We can debate Marxism here in the comments, but the fact is that nobody regardless of their political stance should have to worry about being kidnapped or tortured by their government. At that point your government is effectively a gang, of no higher moral ground than a bunch of thugs with guns.

Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries. Unless people passively watch Peking University students (statistically harder to get into than Harvard) get kidnapped by their government and do nothing about it.

I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.

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> Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries.

I think russia has been taken seriously for a century now, with not better track record. What makes your country be taken seriously is your military strength, which is your capacity to flip-off any other country that tries to take political advantage over you.

> I wonder what Chinese people think about the odds of any of this improving.

What I think is that the vast majority of chinese don't care about this topic at all, and would rather not think about it. Remember, most of them dont know about Tiananmen square, not because the government censored it, but because they don't care about it.

How do you know the difference between not caring and not being given any information they could care about?

I've asked this question to people that live in china, which is very anecdotal.

In the modern age, it's impossible to keep information out. Any chinese person that left the country has had access to this information, and could have disseminated with virtually no effort.

You're correct, but only because we live in the core of this empire. The story is different for folks who live in its periphery

>Until China fixes their government, they will never be taken seriously on the same level of other "first world" countries

This is hubris. It won't matter how seriously they are taken if they become the dominant power.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/01/how-the-west-go...

Meanwhile, the US is leaving a power vacuum and can't be taken seriously either.

China's government is not Marxist in any sense of the word. And it could hardly be considered to be communist unless you're willing to accept self-applied labels. From the article:

“The government is scared because the domestic contradictions are growing,” Michael said. “Once you study Marxism, you know real socialism and China’s so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics are two different things. They sell fascism as socialism, like a street vendor passes off dog meat as lamb.”

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