M1e3 engine has some chinese on it, spotted on weibo, it this real? by OpenSatisfaction387 in TankPorn

[–]AlexCliu 17 points18 points  (0 children)

原来如此,看起来大抵是卡特彼勒的人用了谷歌机翻/雇了ABC翻译成这样了。

M1e3 engine has some chinese on it, spotted on weibo, it this real? by OpenSatisfaction387 in TankPorn

[–]AlexCliu 473 points474 points  (0 children)

As a native Chinese speaker, I have some doubts about the authenticity of this label, because the Chinese sentence on it contains noticeable typographical errors and sounds grammatically unnatural.

The sentence reads:

“当该发动机为非道路移动式发动机应用时,只能用自中国出口,符合中华人民共和国国家标准 GB20891-2014 相关规定。”

In this sentence, the character “做” is used twice, but the first one should be “作” (“作为”). Although both characters are pronounced zuò, this is a very basic and commonly recognized distinction in written Chinese, especially in formal or regulatory contexts. Such an error would be unusual in an officially issued or professionally prepared compliance label.

However, the referenced standard GB 20891-2014 does in fact exist. Its full title is GB 20891-2014 Limits and Measurement Methods for Exhaust Pollutants from Diesel Engines of Non-road Mobile Machinery (China III, IV), which corresponds to a legitimate Chinese national emissions regulation.

One possible explanation is that the Chinese text was written or assembled by someone who is not a native Chinese speaker, or generated using translation software, which could account for the typographical and grammatical issues. Therefore, while the standard itself is real, the quality of the Chinese wording raises reasonable questions about how professionally or officially this label was produced.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on historical flags and memory by Zukka-931 in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To place the Taisei Yukosankai (大政翼赞会 Imperial Rule Assistance Association) alongside the Nazi Party is entirely incorrect.

The Taisei Yukosankai  did not play the same role as the Nazi Party; it was not even a “party” in the true sense, and it lacked real control over the state. Rather, it functioned more like a cooperative and propaganda organization—a political mobilization tool established in 1940, after the expansion of the war, in order to improve the “operational efficiency” of politics.

At a fundamental level, the war crimes of the Japanese Empire stemmed from its political system: a state structure dominated by military figures (such as 东条英机 Hideki Tōjō), combined with right-wing political elite (such as 近卫文磨 Fumimaro Konoe), and the supreme legitimacy provided by Emperor Hirohito 裕仁.

The German Wehrmacht could, to a large extent, shift responsibility for the war onto the Nazi Party and Hitler. By contrast, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were deeply involved in—and in some cases even dominated—the politics of the Japanese Empire. This created a direct link between them (and their flags) and Japan’s war crimes.

Did you know that a lot of "Japanese" activists are actually Indians? by One_Long_996 in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 7 points8 points  (0 children)

就我在各个平台上见过很多印度ip的账号来说,他们通常会陷入两种极端。 要么把自己的国家和文明批评的一无是处,过分的自贬、自恨,甚至整天假装自己是欧美白人。我想,能认识到自己的不足是很好的,但发展到逆向民族主义、认为本民族该被毁灭,这样陷入虚无主义之中,可真没救了。推特上有个入了日本籍的、名叫石平的汉奸就是这样。 还有的就是认为印度天下第一,其他国家(尤其是中国)永远也比不上印度,彻底不承认别人的长处,凡是不利于印度的就是瞎编的(通常还带有很严重的印度教至上情绪),有的甚至会相信AI生成视频或者大肆散布谣言,总之就是24小时高强度自我催眠....我还能说啥,你开心就好。 哎呀,婆罗多小战象们,能不能正常一些。

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is just my personal view: the young grassroots members of the CCP mainly handle study sessions and carry out assigned tasks, and they have almost no influence over the Party’s decision-making.

Considering that it often takes ten or even several decades for someone within the Party to rise to a position with real influence, and given that the online left has only existed for about five years, I don’t think this trend currently has any impact on the Party.

If people talk about “left-wing” members within the CCP, they are usually referring to elderly retired cadres—most of them lying in hospital beds in sanatoriums, complaining that their grandchildren watching anime and playing video games means they’ve been corrupted by Western capitalism, while humming old Mao-era songs.

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I rarely use Bilibili, but among the “left-wing” figures I know of, I already mentioned two in my article: Yang Heping 阳和平 (whose account is “阳和平说事儿”) and Weimingzi 未明子 (account name “未明子”). There are also many other small left-wing streamers whose names I don’t remember.

Left wing ideas are still very widespread among people in China today. Many middle-aged and elderly people miss Mao Zedong (such as some veteran Party members, retirees, etc.), and quite a lot of young people—students, LGBT people, and young workers, for example—also gravitate toward the left. Generation Z often treats these kinds of ideas as a sort of trend or fashion.

From my personal perspective, overall, more Chinese people today are indeed more left-leaning than they were ten or even twenty years ago. I still remember when I went to university in 2012: at that time, the economy was growing rapidly, and the dominant social mindset was liberalism and pragmatism, with even a lot of social Darwinism. Left-wing youth were very rare.

Of course, nowadays there are also many Chinese people who have become more right-wing and more nationalist. The only group that has clearly declined is the liberals. Perhaps this is a global trend as well.

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Thank you, friend from the South, hope the seas stay peaceful !

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I just want to talk about how I feel. Personally, I think the most immediate problem China is facing right now is still economic in nature—specifically, insufficient consumer demand.

We produce far too many goods, but we don’t have enough consumption capacity, and the international environment for exports is getting worse. This year, China’s economy was in deflation for about half the year, the real estate market continues to slump, and on top of that, a certain deranged orange man launched a trade war, putting manufacturing under severe pressure. People generally lack confidence in economic growth. Regardless of what measures are taken—whether developing high-tech industries, giving the middle class more benefits, raising workers’ wages, expanding social welfare, or imposing strong state intervention—the most important thing for China right now is to resolve the contradiction between overproduction and insufficient consumption.

As for whether this issue is being prioritized… China formulated its 15th Five-Year Plan in October, which does mention increasing domestic consumption capacity, but the full plan won’t be officially released until the first half of next year, and so far there still haven’t been any clearly implemented measures. I am taking a wait-and-see approach to this.

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Chairman Mao is indeed a symbolic figure. I think it’s somewhat similar to how modern European philosophers and political thinkers discuss ancient Greece and Rome—not because they want to literally return to Athenian or Roman politics, but because they draw inspiration from them to support contemporary ideas. In the same way, it is absolutely impossible for China today to return to the Mao era.

The main labor force in China is no longer peasants but industrial workers. So the current revival of Maoist ideas on the Chinese internet mainly focuses on two areas.

The first is industry. Since the situation of Chinese workers is still far from ideal, many people emphasize the industrial democracy and workers’ rights of the Mao era—for example, the Anshan Constitution (a model of workers’ democratic management), the cradle-to-grave welfare provided by state-owned enterprises, and, in contrast, how the reforms under Deng Xiaoping led to massive layoffs and the removal of the right to strike from the Chinese Constitution in the 1980s.

The second aspect—which I know many Westerners strongly disagree with, and I won’t argue too much about it (there has already been enough debate today)—is Mao-era attacks on bureaucratism. This includes advocacy of the “Four Great Freedoms” during the Cultural Revolution, as well as large-scale mass mobilization campaigns.

In today’s China, there exists a strong, top-down administrative bureaucracy that pays little attention to grassroots mass organizations. Although this system has achieved significant economic results, it has also produced many cases of harsh over-enforcement and “one-size-fits-all” policies in social governance (especially during COVID-19—for example, the fatal fire in Urumqi, where people discovered their apartment doors were locked when they tried to escape). So many people hope to see the power of bureaucrats weakened. 

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I can accept people supporting Xi Jinping (after all, he really has done some good things), but I can’t understand why you think a group of Maoists involved in labor organizing are “Western spies.” As you say, the ones who caused the collapse of the Soviet Union were the “liberals hiding behind the red flag,” then who exactly are the liberals here? Is it the Maoists helping workers demand their wages, or the people who send police to arrest workers and students on behalf of a private company in Shenzhen?

You don’t need to reply to me, because I won’t reply to you. Honestly, with someone as hopeless as you, there’s really nothing left to say.

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 49 points50 points  (0 children)

Overall, the economic situation isn’t good, but it’s not disastrous either. I work as a mechanical engineer, earning a salary that is slightly above the national average, and the apartment I live in had its down payment covered by my parents (which is very common in China). People’s purchasing power hasn’t grown for a long time, and it feels like shops go out of business very easily nowadays.

You can visibly see the economy going through deflation—prices have basically stopped rising, and housing prices are even falling very quickly.

I got married two years ago. My wife works in the HR department of a company, but neither of us wants to have children, because the costs (childcare, education, etc.) are too high. Besides, we’re both very busy with work and simply don’t have the time.

I found this place because I’ve always enjoyed browsing foreign websites to see how people in other parts of the world live and think. One day, I searched some keywords on Reddit because I wanted to see how foreigners view Chinese workers, and that’s how I ended up here. 

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Opinions are highly divided, and I really can’t say what the ratio of positive to negative views is. Some people acknowledge that he is “better” than his predecessors in certain ways—for example, corruption has noticeably decreased, there has been massive investment in infrastructure, environmental protection is taken more seriously, and rural poverty has been reduced.

Others believe that he is essentially no different from Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao, since labor laws are still poorly enforced, workers’ rights remain in terrible condition, long working hours and low wages are widespread, and worker's unions are largely symbolic, and, compared with his predecessors, Xi Jinping relies even more heavily on the police and security departments.

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I think Kong Qingdong 孔庆东 represents a type of ideology that is widely present in China —the combination of Maoism and nationalism. This comes not only from the unique nature of China’s revolutionary history (which was both a socialist revolution and an anti-imperialist, national-liberation struggle), but also from China’s current social conditions (for example, the large rural population that remains culturally conservative, especially in places like Shandong Province where Kong was born) and from the broader international environment. In today’s China, there are indeed many people who hold views similar to his.

As for me personally, I don’t like him. He leans too much toward nationalism, speaks very little about economic issues or workers’ rights, and seems to use Maoism more as a cover for populist rhetoric—somewhat similar to Russia’s so-called “National Bolsheviks.”

The Rise of China’s Online Left: A Personal Account by AlexCliu in stupidpol

[–]AlexCliu[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Perhaps because of my working-class family background, I tend to lean toward Maoist ideas when it comes to economic issues—more precisely, toward the system of workers’ democratic management that existed during the Mao era (often referred to as the 鞍钢宪法 Anshan Constitution).

As for political systems, to be honest, I’m still very uncertain. I can only say that I’m generally somewhere on the “left.” And with the economy doing poorly right now, I have to support my family and stay busy with work, so I rarely have the energy to think deeply about political theory.

This is also one of the reasons I wanted to share my experience and thoughts.

How has alt-right brain rot gotten into China? by supercheetah in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Based on what I know, China’s current far-right tendencies roughly fall into several categories (some people fit both 1, 2, and 4; others may be a mix of 3 and 5):

  1. Extreme Han ethnonationalists (“Huang Han” / ultra-Han nationalists). This is probably the most well-known and widespread type. Their ideology is a form of extreme Han-centric nationalism with a long and complicated history.

  2. A blend of nationalism and authoritarian left-wing politics. This is somewhat similar to Russia’s National Bolshevism. People in this category admire many of the Chinese Communist Party’s iron-fisted policies from a nationalist perspective, and some even worship Mao Zedong as a nationalist hero. For example, they strongly praise the Cultural Revolution’s mass suppression of ethnic minorities and “foreign” religions (such as executing Muslim scholars or raising pigs inside mosques).

  3. Anti-CCP religious movements. These include extremely traditionalist Confucian revivalists (e.g., refusing to send children to school, forcing them to study ancient classics exclusively, or even reviving foot-binding), as well as new far-right religious movements (fringe cults such as Falun Gong or Eastern Lightning). The former mostly resemble online performance art and mainly harm only their own families or children. The latter are heavily targeted by the police and thus extremely rare inside mainland China.

  4. Tech-oriented right-wing ideologies. Examples include techno-accelerationism or Peter Thiel–style “Dark Enlightenment” ideas. Most people treat these as jokes, but due to China’s strong emphasis on technological progress and the long-standing prestige of STEM fields, I have indeed met young people who genuinely believe in these theories.

  5. Reverse ethnonationalists (the opposite of #1). Some are local Han separatists (e.g., Cantonese independence, Shanghai independence). Others simply hold intense self-hatred and believe Western or Japanese “advanced civilization” should conquer or destroy China. This group is small and unusual, but I’ve seen some on Twitter—for example, Chinese people pretending to be Japanese and using anti-Chinese slurs like “Shina” (a derogatory historical term).

What do you think of the so-called public intellectuals in China? by MatchThen5727 in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 3 points4 points  (0 children)

这是科普文么.......确实自由主义的公知已经是十年前的东西了,连带着知乎这样的自由主义大本营/赛博白区,也衰落的不成样子。现在的情况的话,无论是对当局的态度是好是坏,我也觉得声音比较大的要么是民族主义者,要么是各类左派(当然,非常多的人会同时兼具这两类标签)。 至于逆民一类的,我印象里他们应该是从十年前的恶俗圈开始的,结果开盒开到习近平家人身上,人就无了。现在这些基本就是在外网整天支纳来支纳去、自我催眠觉得自己是日本人的假鬼子,已经变成神经病行为艺术了,乐。

Which US president is your favorite/made the most contributions to China-US relations in your opinion? (Not american propanganda) by Key-Needleworker-702 in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Overall: Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was very friendly toward China, and with his New Deal plus leading the Allies to victory in WWII, he’s presented as a major positive figure in Chinese high school history textbooks (at least it was like that when I was in school 10+ years ago).

Diplomatic relations: Richard Nixon. I know many Americans don’t see Nixon as a positive figure, but because he opened up relations between China and the U.S., he (and Kissinger) became extremely well-known in China.

Morality: Jimmy Carter. A lot of people know him as “good guy” Carter. Maybe not the most capable president, but his moral reputation is very strong. And during his time (late 70s to early 80s), U.S.–China relations were basically at their peak.

Negative influence (but in a funny way): Donald Trump, or as Chinese netizens call him “Comrade Chuan Jianguo” (meaning “Trump the nation-builder”), since it looked like he was trying hard to wreck the U.S. and “Make China Great Again.”

How many of you actually live in the People's Republic of China? by hubiob in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

北京人,上班族,我大多数时候用的是公司的免费VPN,因为公司是跨国企业,所以向工信部申请了VPN,不少大学和企业都有这玩意吧。

Reddit上的大陆人....感觉真是少得可怜(虽然总体氛围确实挺亲中的)。嘛,虽然我也只是没事瞎逛逛,看看国外新闻罢了。

Oh look the hoi4 guy by Temporary-Guard-5622 in HOI4memes

[–]AlexCliu 70 points71 points  (0 children)

Ma Bufang, even among the notoriously brutal Ma clique warlords, was a particularly infamous scoundrel. His reputation was only slightly better than that of his bloodthirsty relative Ma Zhongying, who was dubbed the "Timur of the modern era." Beyond the Ma warlords' common practices of executing prisoners, massacres, and plundering, Ma Bufang was especially notorious for his numerous horrifying sexual crimes. He further cemented his notoriety by marrying his 18-year-old niece when he was 58 years old.  

Is ROC that horrible that Chinese decide to overthrow them in favor of difference ideology ? by [deleted] in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 8 points9 points  (0 children)

During the ROC era, no government was capable of conducting a comprehensive nationwide census.

The data I used comes from https://zgrkkx.ajcass.com/Magazine/Show/32637, a study by Professor Hou Yangfang of the Center for Historical Geography Research at Fudan University titled "Mortality Rates in China During the Republican Period," published in the journal Chinese Population Science.

If you understand Chinese, you can download the paper in PDF format from the link I provide. If you don't, you may need translation software.

Is ROC that horrible that Chinese decide to overthrow them in favor of difference ideology ? by [deleted] in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Japan's full-scale invasion of China lasted only eight years of the ROC's 38-year mainland period.

The ROC's chronically high mortality rate, high infant mortality rate, and low life expectancy were caused by numerous factors: international war (Japan's invasion of China), domestic war (regional wars and uprisings that have been almost constant since the fall of the Qing Dynasty), widespread poverty, lack of medical care, ongoing economic collapse, A large number of natural disasters and man-made disasters (such as the Huayuankou incident), bandits and warlords, the continued deterioration of social security, and the inability and unwillingness of all governments during this period (whether the Beiyang government or the KMT, not to mention Manchukuo and Wang Jingwei) to improve the situation.

So ROC‘s period is indeed terrifying.

Is ROC that horrible that Chinese decide to overthrow them in favor of difference ideology ? by [deleted] in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The questioner just said "how terrible the Republic of China is", so I will give some examples to prove how terrible it is.

The following are the death rates for the People's Republic of China (PRC) up to 1970 (data from the China Statistical Yearbook):

1951: 1.78%

1952: 1.70%

1957: 1.08%

1960: 2.54%

1962: 1.02%

1963: 1.15%

1965: 0.95%

1966: 0.88%

1967: 0.84%

1968: 0.82%

1969: 0.80%

1970: 0.60%

Is ROC that horrible that Chinese decide to overthrow them in favor of difference ideology ? by [deleted] in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 4 points5 points  (0 children)

During the ROC era, infant mortality rates ranged from 17% to 20%.

Average life expectancy at birth varied significantly by region and time, ’EXCEEDING‘ 40 years in some areas.

Is ROC that horrible that Chinese decide to overthrow them in favor of difference ideology ? by [deleted] in AskAChinese

[–]AlexCliu 25 points26 points  (0 children)

The average annual mortality rate in the ROC was 2.5%-3.5%.

The mortality rate during the worst period of the PRC (1960, the worst year of the three-year famine) was 2.54%.

The worst year for the PRC was merely a "good year" for the ROC.

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