It is literally propaganda, but could you explain to me how it is bad or negative propaganda?
The overarching motifs of the show are that the Chinese state is committed to protecting the rights of the workers. Let me give you an example:
In one arc, a factory owner hires mercenaries and dresses them up as cops in order to break a strike. In response, the anti-corruption bureau gets involved and arrests said mercenaries and demands a negotiation on behalf of the workers.
Another arc is about a Chinese businessman who has been bribing corrupt party officials in order to push for a return to bourgeois rule. When his accomplices are arrested, he is 'forced' to flee to Amerika, where the only job he can land is one of manual labor - a janitor - making shit wages and experiencing great disrespect for that occupation. His Westaboo petit bourgeois son convinces him to do this, claiming that Amerika is the true land of opportunity.
Arresting corrupt party officials and punishing bourgeois criminals are good things, or do you disagree?
I will say - from my limited perspective on the machinations of the Chinese people's republic - I believe that the show is quite brutally honest. It shows privatization occuring. It shows the ramifications thereof. Sympathetic older characters yearn for the days of Mao. It shows class war in action.
Let me also ask: is it not worthwhile to merely engage with propaganda from elsewhere, even if it is negative? If you maintain critical thinking skills while watching it, I believe you can learn more about China in its entirety from this one show than damn near anything coming out of imperialist rags like HRW, the BBC, or WSJ.
It's a Chinese cop show, but instead of poor black people like in Amerika, they hunt down corrupt party officials and bourgeois scum circumventing Chinese law. It's amazing and available for free with English subs on YouTube.
Yes. I went through them rather often when I was young. They were labeled "intruder drills", but the idea was to try to survive a firearm-induced massacre.
Lock the doors, stay away from windows. Hold your coughs, your sneezes. Stay out of sight, under something if possible. Crouch like you would during an earthquake.
It is a poem, one Nelson Mandela was quite fond of. It is, genuinely, quite a banger -- I once wanted an "INVICTVS" tattoo because of how much the poem resonated with me... until I researched the bastard who wrote it lol.
Fuck it, Mao wrote Invictus. Stalin wrote Invictus. I wrote Invictus. We should bury the fool's name and keep the poem, author anonymous.
Motherfucker (William Ernest Henley) had the gall to suffer his entire adult life from disability brought on by tuberculosis, yet talked about the need for the superiorly bred Englishman to civilize the savage world.
Invictus reads quite differently in hindsight. Wish he had, in fact, lost the will to live.
In the Maoist circles I was in, Che's Guerilla Warfare was considered mandatory reading.
It was pretty good, really inspiring honestly, though I can't speak to the universality of the tactics. I especially liked the bit where he admonished western leftists who excused lack of revolution on the presupposed indestructibility of the imperial militaries. Of course, Che did not have to face drones and robot dogs.
He does, however, make explicit note of how poor Cuban revolutionaries overthrew a military dictatorship supported by U.S. aircraft and other technologies well beyond the means of Cuban workers.
Funnily, though mandatory reading in my circle, I have seen Gonzaloite tweets come out since then denouncing Che's Guerilla Warfare as "Focoist revisionism", among other things. I do not see how becoming so enraged at a successful revolutionary giving tips on making revolution helps anyone, but ultras are a silly lot.
Instead ultras adopt the liberal preference for simple, well-established narratives that are considered true by virtue of being repeated often enough, and of course the prioritizing of moralistic idealism and ideological purity over actual materialist analysis and engaging with the real world as it exists not as we may wish it
Perhaps a little strangely, this paragraph evoked in me the memory of "All Cops Are Bastards (Including "Socialist" Ones!)" discourse I was subjected (and sometimes contributed) to in online anarchist circles.
All virtue signaling and no substance beyond sloganeering. All cops means all cops! Wow, so true! The cool-ass slogan says "all cops", why wouldn't that include north Korean or Chinese cops?
As if "police" serve nearly the same function under a dictatorship of the proletariat as they do under a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The nonsense 'police protect the interests of capital and private property, that is their sole purpose'... I've heard it often from those aforementioned anarchists. Extrapolating the roles and actions of the Amerikan police onto the socialist world is just another example of the ultra (and the orientalist)'s incredible aptitude for projection.
Sorry, fellow Amerikans! The rest of the world is not so fucking savage as we are. DPRKorean police actually serve the people, you know, like law enforcement should in civilized society? Chinese police protect striking workers!
Amerikan cops are the ones murdering black folk en masse, not Chinese ones, not Iranian ones, not Korean ones, not Russian ones... take your "all cops" and shove it.
edit: (ACAB is still a good slogan tho and all Amerikan cops most certainly are, even the kindest ones)
personally, I think it's a rather funny ×offensive× meme to uphold bomberman.
_____ and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
What a bitingly hilarious potential sentence. Timeless, too.
wrt genuine support from anarchists or others, I have only seen one case. The anarchist wrecker in town who had enough friendly connections to make their way into parties they did not belong in as someone with an avowed distaste in the party structure, vanguard and otherwise.
During a lengthy one-sided conversation wherein they accused the party I represented of being a sex cult and China of being imperialist... they told me that they wrote letters to Teddy boy and then began to engage in regular correspondence. I nodded politely and prayed I'd never have to deal with this person again. My prayers have been answered, but I still hear news of some 'leftist infighting' disaster they are involved with from time to time.
In my experience, this person seemed to crave attention and seemed waaaaay too online. If other anarchists do support him genuinely, I'd assume much the same.
You should see what happens over on the 'grad when we give liberals reading recommendations.
"Fucking tankies, never willing to open their minds to new ideas."
"Here's some new ideas!"
"No."