This is an interesting point. All I have to add is, I’m sure it makes a difference for a project like China’s whether a position is coming from an organization or from an individual and whether the organization is trying to gain political power. In general, it would probably be impractical to try to micromanage this kind of thing in the general populace and is more in line with fictional anti-communist representations of socialist states as scary and repressive.
The thing that gave me pause and what led me to making this comment is I was thinking about China’s efforts in the “great firewall” and sovereign tech and all. But it’s like… is that even about “keeping out bad ideas”? Or is it mainly about ensuring political power is in the hands of the vanguard party digitally as well as physically, which also happens to be tied up in preventing the western empire from doing digital propaganda warfare like they do to countries that don’t have sovereign tech.
Chinese people who read political/ideological theory have been educated in Dialectical Materialism and Anti-imperialism to some degree which will inoculate them against western “Marxists” or other political theory. Like how no westerners first novel is War and Peace nobody in China is starting their political theory education with zizec.
The great firewall protects non-political people from being inundated with reactionary political ideas.
This is an interesting point. All I have to add is, I’m sure it makes a difference for a project like China’s whether a position is coming from an organization or from an individual and whether the organization is trying to gain political power. In general, it would probably be impractical to try to micromanage this kind of thing in the general populace and is more in line with fictional anti-communist representations of socialist states as scary and repressive.
The thing that gave me pause and what led me to making this comment is I was thinking about China’s efforts in the “great firewall” and sovereign tech and all. But it’s like… is that even about “keeping out bad ideas”? Or is it mainly about ensuring political power is in the hands of the vanguard party digitally as well as physically, which also happens to be tied up in preventing the western empire from doing digital propaganda warfare like they do to countries that don’t have sovereign tech.
Chinese people who read political/ideological theory have been educated in Dialectical Materialism and Anti-imperialism to some degree which will inoculate them against western “Marxists” or other political theory. Like how no westerners first novel is War and Peace nobody in China is starting their political theory education with zizec.
The great firewall protects non-political people from being inundated with reactionary political ideas.