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Comment by Leary | Hacker News Reader

Americans: I'm not anti-China, just anti-CCP

Chinese: I'm not anti-west, just anti people who are anti-China

In Seattle, in the summer we have anti-CPC protests almost every Saturday run by Chinese Americans I assume, I think it is driven by Falan Dafa though.

The biggest critics of the CPC seem to be ethnic Chinese though (well, or other ethnicities present in China or Asia as a whole), not generally European descended Americans.

And all the cubans in the US hate castro. Its not a representative sample. Also its CCP not CPC

When all the immigrants from some place are there because they are running from the same thing, yes, that's very representative.

The few Chinese I met who managed to (permanently) escape China after covid consider themselves extremely lucky.

Biased sample, maybe. Life doesn't seem easy for (young) folks in China right now and Winnie doesn't seem to be very popular among them.

The CCP is actually widely popular in mainland China.

They definitely win all of the elections.

Russia is popular in Russia. All North Koreans you would be allowed to speak to in North Korea love North Korea. What a news.

I used to share this view but it turned out to be naive. After living in China for over a decade I can confidently say that the majority of Chinese actually support the CCP. I know, it's hard to believe for us Westerners.

Tell me, what happens when they don’t openly support the CCP?

You don’t have to openly support the party as long as you don’t openly oppose it. China has a lot of grass mud horses (people who aren’t at harmony with the party) and most of them are never sent off for re-education. The central government doesn’t really have that level of surveillance or control, and local governments have even less of that.

> as long as you don’t openly oppose it … most of them are never sent off for re-education.

Thanks for the answer.

Nothing. In fact, most Chinese people tend to be apolitical and show little to no interest in politics. You'll occasionally see portraits of figures like Mao or Deng hanging in restaurants though it probably serves more as a historical symbol than a political statement.

Most Chinese are apolitical and won’t express strong support for or against. I would say they are even less political than Americans since they don’t have much say in it anyways.

I worked at an American tech in Beijing for 9 years, and some of my colleagues would express some nationalism, especially when the South China Sea conflicts started, some of them were always subversive, most didn’t care. Everyone thought the political education courses they were required to take in college were a waste of time.

Agreed.

As much as Castro in Cuba. Last week I had a conversation with a man from Cuba, who escaped and is living in Europe… he said sooo many good things about Castro and his mother.

That's bullshit. If the party was really popular in China, there would be emigrants that are looking just into making more money, but actually loved how the country is run.

Representative of what? There is an obvious selection bias.

Maybe you could interview people people in Green Bay about the Bears to find a similarly “representative” sample.

CPC is the official acronym, since the party’s name is the Communist Party of China (CPC), only in English does it become the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t use the CCP abbreviation in China.

CCP is a closer translation of how the party name is written in Chinese. It has never made sense why they decided they would be referred to as CPC in English, when the original party name in Chinese reads as CCP.

It’s definitely because they want to be known as the communist party of China (place distinction) rather than a Chinese (ethnic or nationality distinction) communist party. The former definition is one of land and the other one is bound to people, and not all Chinese live in china, and not all people in china are ethnically Han. This probably meant more during the Stalin years (before the Sino-Soviet split) when they were strongly a branch of the communist party of the Soviet Union. The same ambiguity pops up in their acronym: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Sovie...

The Soviet party is translated as it is traditionally spelled in Russian.

And what do you think was the first language translation for the communist party of China? Definitely Russian. I bet we find the same pattern in the other affiliated communist parties.

Chinese doesn't even have adjectives, so there's no difference between CCP and CPC in Chinese.

The whole issue is just a shibboleth. The party itself prefers CPC, while CCP is more common in the US (where it's increasingly used as a slur for anything related to China, as in "TikTok is a CCP app").

The organization conventionally known in English-language media as the CCP consistently refers to itself as the CPC in its own communications, although there seems to be a pretty broad consensus that both acronyms are fine.

Well, taiwanese people for one.

Americans:

>If I was the US President, and I wanted to win hearts and minds in China, here's what I'd do. In every single speech where I'm talking about China, I'd make a conspicuous effort to complement Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture. I'd talk about how my Chinese staffers are the smartest and most hardworking people I've ever worked with (which honestly is probably true). I'd talk about how much my daughter is obsessed with ancient Chinese dresses. I'd talk about how I'm learning Mandarin in my free time, and have a live "Aw shucks" conversation in Mandarin.

It's kind of incredible this is a serious suggestion. "Our foreign policy is to punch you in the face, but now we're also going to lie about our enmity to gaslight you, because we think you're that naive and stupid". PRC nationals also not going to buy a word of it when the central narrative is economic / military containment. New gen of patriots/nationalisms doesn't seek western validation anymore. Few in PRC is going to be fooled as long as sanctions / export controls are ongoing and US military bases are around. People not that gullible. There's also the 100,000s of international students and millions of diasphora to report back all the sinophobic shit happening in the west despite honeyed words.

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