With a billion and a half citizens it's unlikely they lack for fanatics to exploit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations
Resistance against the CCP is a very tiny minority since there is a heavy brainwashing about how great everything CCP does since kids go to school at a young age - and they never get any other version of reality.
It's not only about brainwashing.
40 years ago 85% of the chinese population was below the poverty line. Today it's between 10% and 15%. Under the party governance, almost everyone saw their life standards go up substantially. A lot of the people studying abroad saw their family starting from the bottom and they can now afford to study in western universities. They think the Chinese system works because economically it is working very well so far.
Just another example: We have some friends who bought a very expensive new apartment in Beijing (around 4.5M US$). This is a brand new residence founded by Wang Jianlin, the founder of Wanda Group (the most powerful estate developer in China). The government allowed him to run this project under one condition: to build 3 apartment blocks on the same field (sharing the same park) which will be given to families under the poverty line. A lot of the wealthy people complained a lot about this, 1/3 of them got a refund and the price of the apartments dropped.
So to get back to my point, this is not only brainwashing. The party is giving its people a new life, and these people will be thankful and loyal for at least decades.
I'm curious about how a long term economic recession could change people minds though.
How do they rationalise that HK had a far higher standard of living all along, by doing exactly the opposite of what the CCP said?
At what point will be start going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and what more that material / economic satisfaction? Will there come a point when people feel "rich enough" and want other things?
Recently the vlogger laowhy86 and his Chinese wife have moved to the US because things have gotten a bit too 'totalitarian' for him in China:
What is the 'cultural priority' of the Chinese people?
> But, with only very few exceptions, they really conceived of liberalism not as an end in itself but rather as a means to the decidedly nationalist ends of wealth and power. They believed that liberalism was part of the formula that had allowed the U.S. and Great Britain to become so mighty. [...]
> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
* https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...
Sure in the case of China it is a more crude form of propaganda, but if you don't believe me, just try to find information about what happened in Ecuador just now in your newsmedia. That information was supressed by media conglomerates because of a pro-US president that ended up doing something wildly unpopular. Compare the same exact event happening in a country like Venezuela. You get the idea.
Not really the same. Americans are taught to love an abstract, idealised version of America, an eagle perched atop a flag, and it doesn’t really work, half of Americans hate even that, and that’s fine, no one really cares. Whereas the Chinese are taught to love a specific leader of a specific party operating a specific system, etc. And the consequences for not complying are harsh.
And boy do we have a lot of harsh things to say about all of them.
What Israel is doing to some Palestinians would also qualify as shady behavior, but what I'm saying is that I don't have a personal feud with any of those countries, and I would totally visit them. But I have friends and family that based on the amount of propaganda about China are refusing to buy certain products, use software like Wechat, etc. That is sophisticated propaganda in my opinion.
The special position of China goes dramatically beyond that. I'm not sure you could downplay China's position more than what you just did. I'd almost confuse them for being Cuba by that description.
For all but a few countries, stealing data on how to build the next great airplane, does not enable them to actually build it.
The unique position of China is the combination of: vast resources and a very determined, centrally orchestrated, national will to pursue hegemony (now almost universally culturally regarded as their natural right).
Pretending a mole from China is similar to a mole from most any other nation, is pretty absurd. No other nation other than the US has the capabilities that China now possesses.
They have: extraordinary national wealth ($50x trillion in household wealth); extraordinary annual economic output; rather openly flaunted mercantilism; global leading manufacturing capabilities spanning nearly anything as needed and supply networks to match; a strong cohesive nationalism, supported by both the people (culture) and the leadership; very large, very potent tech capabilities, spanning everything from software to hardware, unrivaled by any nation other than the US; military spending that pretty well matches the US when you adjust for either PPP or just merely adjust for the difference in salaries; extremely large land & water territory, and all the benefits that go with it; nuclear weapons and military technology that by the day is getting close to parity with other elite militaries; an authoritarian system that is willing to entirely disregard human rights whenever it suits their national purpose at the time and a culture that heavily tolerates it; the ability to rapidly pursue epic scale, unmatched (eg Three Gorges) national construction and or engineering challenges at the snap of a CPC finger; and 18% of the world's population, for practical purposes an endless supply of relatively cheap labor of all types.
Show me a bunch of other nations like that. In all of human history you can count on one hand the number of nations even remotely comparable to where China is now at, their general position and capability vs peers in the world order. And they're not quite done rising in power yet.
I can understand that the US feels threatened by the massive competition created on the other side, but this is very rapidly leading to a similar situation like the anti-Japanese mentality that ended up stigmatizing a whole swath of people based on ethnicity alone.
I do recall a couple of countries invading Afghanistan, none of them named "China."
If you're going to call building railroads, highways, power plants and other infrastructure in Africa an "invasion," that's just plain unreasonable. I get that you may find the amount of debt African nations are taking on troubling, but it's dangerous hyperbole to call this sort of thing an "invasion."
China does have a long history of invading other countries, but they try to suppress knowledge of it. That’s why they’re so hypersensitive about the definition of China, because they’re hiding their present and former invasions.
Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, all the islands inside the vague nine-dashed line... Even border disputes with India.
China doesn't invade other countries, it just discovers inseparable parts of China.