>> Ironically, given that China is a communist country, workers’ rights movements and unions are extremely uncommon
> mind-boggling.
The CCP feels threatened by any kind of idependent political organization that's not the CCP or directly under its thumb. This includes students that actually take Marxism seriously:
Yeah, kind of interesting phenomenon. It is now the left of the party that is being marginalised, and they actually are the ones who are more active on Internets: banyuetan, CYL journals, utopia, caogen...
The party is now busy purging CYL. The few CPC candidates that came through that route to CPC were driven out of politics, down to village mayor levels in the middle of nowheres. 刘剑 kicked from a post in a far away Hami, 余远辉 in Nanning
19th CPC really has close to no people younger than fifty, and is the oldest CPC by average age after 12th or 13th CPC.
China is not a communist country, it's a “communist with Chinese values” country. I don't know what it means, but every time the topic is brought on the table, this is the official stance from the Chinese Communist Party.
I guess it means you owe loyalty to whatever authority you get: father, teacher, employer, emperor. Respect them, or they will crush you.
It means socialist country with Chinese style or Chinese variation. What it really means is that whenever needed, rules and values are bent and interpreted to the advantage of the ruling party. I am disgusted by it. That is doubly unfortunate because I consider myself Chinese, yet I consider myself fortunate compared to the millions in China because I am in a free country.
China was a pure communist country before the reform.
To keep the name, they had to attach it to a different interpretation.
when it comes to respecting the authority,
「王侯將相,寧有種乎!」is a pretty common value to Chinese people. can be partially translated as "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman？--John Ball".
The people who was drafted for army was moving to the designated place. But due to the flooding, it is obvious they can't reach the place by the deadline. The penalty to miss the deadline is, by any means, death.
By facing the certain and unfair death penalty ahead of them, they decided the uprising. Saying.
王侯將相寧有種乎, "The king, loads, generals or ministers, Is there the seed for them?(no it isn't)"
In the end, they(the leaders, 陳勝 and 呉広) couldn't complete the the revolution. But the uprising movements continues and 秦 era was ended soon after.
It's quite understandable how it happens, in China like most single party countries the average person has no political power, if they have no power then they can't exercise any rights or hope to gain any.
The idea of communism is that government is your employer and you trust your government to re-distribute product of all labours fairly among all participants. Given that workers unions exist as an adversarial or at the very least opposing power to employers, they are explicitly not allowed in communism because otherwise (in theory) you hurt government's ability to meet its goals for fair redistribution. Another reason they are not allowed is because they can potentially create new workers movement overthrowing present government. Also, things like work hours, overtime, holidays are non-negotiable because now you are supposed to be working for all your comrades, not just yourself. If country happens to have only 1/10th of doctors and if doctors are now need to work 18 hours shifts, that's what they need to do for same pay.
No, that is state capitalism. It is where all communist revolutions seem to get stuck. Seems to be a bit of a fixed point and the idea that you can transition through this to the workers owning the means of production is deeply flawed.
I think there was a similar thing in USSR: there were no independent workers' unions and a worker in a capitalist country had better chances to protect their rights. There wasn't anything like 996 though and people mostly didn't work overtime.
mind-boggling.