Summary
China condemned JD Vance on Tuesday for calling Chinese people “peasants” in a Fox News interview, where he said, “To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry labeled the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful.”
The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.
Critics mocked Vance’s own “hillbilly” background and pointed to China’s advanced tech and infrastructure, highlighting rising tensions amid Trump’s trade war.
I told you I was not exaggerating when describing things, you didn’t understand that apparently. About “corruption” - it wasn’t corruption, it was pretty formalized and normal what I describe.
Any stats about USSR and shares of income, inequality and such are bullshit from the start. I’ve described how it worked for individuals, it also worked the same for organizations, there was such a thing as “funds”, a permission to purchase from another organizations something in a certain quantity.
You don’t seem to get it worked like in some adult scout camp or whatever with some coupons - collecting coupons wouldn’t help you buy more or less soda, because you were permitted to buy soda only in a specific place at specific time and with specific frequency.
Or in the military, or in prison.
Soviet ruble wasn’t real money. That’s why they jokingly called coupons for “special distributors” (a kind of stores, something available only to the elites) the “real rubles”.
The elites didn’t formally own anything - well, neither they do in Russia today, but they do control that property and use it freely.
My bloodline on the Volga German side did undergo an attempt, it’s rather chilling to look at digitized documents of half a village’s male population executed for something like “hiding grain” or “being a Japanese spy”.
My bloodline’s male part on the Jewish side mostly vanished on the frontlines.
This word is a propaganda marker. Such a thing never existed. It was invented to justify mass repressions.
There were no noble landowners in 1914 anymore, it was approaching something like US south at the same time.
Anyway, no, it wasn’t feudal by 1914. It wasn’t feudal even by the turn of century. Again, similar to US south.
Have you met people who received that education? There are two kinds - those who were taught in universities basically by those nobles you seem to vilify, and those like my grandma on my paternal side and the majority of those “female engineers” you’ve read about. The latter is not all that impressive.
Soviet LikBez program was more or less about training technicians to work as bad engineers. Training as in “training dogs”. Because the industrialization required some kind of engineers.
Why didn’t this happen in Finland?
Essentially half of your rebuttal is unsourced “no bro, that’s not true”, when I’ve given you my sources for the information. You’re just showing cognitive dissonance. I was too considerate in my original comments assuming that you’d listen to actual evidence and data. Income inequality figures are bullshit, elites didn’t own and they dont own today either (false, oligarchs in modern Russia do own their companies), kulaks didn’t exist (Do you think peasants in 1917 majorly owned the lands they were working??), university studies weren’t real (I guess the first satellite and human in space and the pioneering research and military industry were just false too)… You’re just desperately denying and holding on to your propagandised version of the reality of the Soviet Union, with your greatest issue being that you couldn’t buy the soda you wanted, and discarding things like guaranteed housing, while ignoring most of my previous comment.
My utmost respect to your ancestors who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism. I hope you’ll show more respect to them and to the emancipatory project they defended with their lives.
Lmao, so essentially slavery, just without the racial component of the US. Please, tell me again: what percentage of the farmers owned in 1917 the lands that they were farming. Oh wait, I forgot you don’t care about data.
I already explained but here we go again: the USSR was a shining example of what socialism could achieve, right in Europe. If Finland had been colonised, they would have risked a socialist revolution there.
As I said, conversation over. You’re not willing to listen.
It’s both information and argumentation - the statements you can discard, maybe I’m lying, but the fact that it’s possible for a bureaucratic elite to not formally own anything yet factually own a country by itself should be something easy to agree with, no? And I’m bringing your attention to it.
Really hard to find sources for something as obvious.
Yes, because the stated value of Soviet ruble was irrelevant in a planned economy in a bureaucratic state. Should be easy to grasp the causation.
Yes, Putin doesn’t own his palaces, and any high-ranking official in Russia most likely has much more than they own. What they show is a drop in the sea of what they really control and use.
Oligarchs are a bit like publicity figures, they are one order of magnitude less significant that anybody in the actual ruling group. Sort of ambassadors.
Think of it like of mafia properties. It was similar in the USSR, the elites used and controlled a lot of state properties which nobody else used and controlled. Why would you need to formally own that if you own the state machine?
Peasants who owned the land they were working were called “kulaks” in propaganda and repressed, because they were a bit less of a herd of ignorant illiterate animals who’d just obey orders.
And Stolypin’s reforms were aimed exactly at changing the ratio. And they were succeeding, except WWI happened.
Military industry is the main thing all this was intended for until Stalin’s death.
You do realize USSR didn’t change that part, just rearranged it, right? At least until Khruschev.
Even in the 30s people were starting to doubt its shine. In 20s - oh yes, when you read things from that time, you feel amazed at how real it feels, people really believing into that steel monster.
I’m gonna stop engaging with your “I know better than empirical evidence approach based on my vibes of who controlled what”. Enjoy bootlicking the corporate overlords that plunge your country in imperialist war, at least now you have bananas and soda, even if people can’t afford housing.
They are not corporate, they are children of people who ran your beloved USSR. Putin’s grandpa was a cook in Kremlin and fed Lenin, did you know that? Yeltsin is somehow treated as if him being first president of Russia were his main role in history, but he’s been in CC CPSU for much longer. Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, lectured in MGIMO in USSR’s late years, while his father was the head of Azerbaijani SSR almost since Stalin.
Do you not understand your words just don’t match anything real? They don’t produce a response because there’s nothing in the place they hit. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you, Russia is not oppressed by some imaginary evil businessmen who hoarded everything in the 90s and then took power. Russia is oppressed by children and grandchildren of the same people who formed CPSU’s core. They didn’t get that through some business projects. They were the state and they are the state. They were the CPSU and ruled the big country, then they wanted better conditions for themselves and feared democratic movements, so they coerced those movements to help them survive. Then in Russia they created a few fake parties in the 90s, which changed names and appearances a few times, till ending up the current set of controlled CPRF, LDPR, the ruling party and some other I forgot, that was their popular effort direction, and the so called “administration of the president of Russia”, which is a parallel government free from constitutional limitations and oversight even when oversight existed in Russia, as their hidden front. Well, that’s all in the past, they won, no fronts anymore. They are killing people in this war just to distract their and Ukraine’s population from themselves.
I’m not going to give you any sources, since what I’m saying is on the surface for someone who tries to learn something about Russia and the USSR. Western socialists do have quite a few myths contradicting that, but if you believe those, then you didn’t try.
Not to say there are no problems with the “corporate overlord” types, but they lost. Khodorkovsky or Berezovsky or Ukrainian oligarchs are of that kind. They lost even in Ukraine. And that’s really unfortunate, had they won there’d be no war.
You’re absolutely laughable, as I said I disengaged with you already.
I’m the only one who provided source information instead of “vibes-based” analysis.
I noticed already, hence me disengaging.