✍🏼 Let’s debunk tankie talking points together
🚩 no. 1
« Addressing foreign interference and transnational repression activities conducted Chinese party-state apparatus is Sinophobic »
✅ Holding state entities accountable to human rights violations, political violence, as well as other clandestine, corrupt, criminal and covert operations is not racist.
❌ Generalizing all ethnic Han Chinese people as supporters of the Chinese government is racist and actively diminish an entire racial population of their political autonomy.
📖 The Communist Party of China 中國共產黨, commonly referred to as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the founding and sole-governing political party of the People’s Republic of China. The CCP holds the highest decision-making power within the Chinese party-state apparatus. Since XI Jinping became the paramount leader of PRC in 2012, XI’s leadership has led the CCP to further institutionalize the integration of the CCP and PRC as a permanent form of governance.
📖 The People’s Republic of China (PRC) 中華人民共和國 is colloquially known as China, the PRC refers to the one-party nation-state founded in 1949. The PRC has gained territories through military operations, annexation, bilateral agreements, and/or occupation. The political governance of the PRC is described as a partocracy, a political party that has monopolized access to the state without being subjected to regime changes.
🚩 no. 2
« The People’s Republic of China is a communist country governed by the Chinese Communist Party »
‼️ The Chinese party-state apparatus is by any means a communist regime.
💰 Reported by World Inequality Database (December 2024), the PRC has the second largest number of billionaires globally. The top 10% owns 68% of the country’s wealth.
💪🏼 Minimum wages differ across the PRC, but it could be as low as ¥16 (USD$2.23)
🔺 There is a new category of rich in the PRC:
- Out of 5.18M families with over ¥6M in wealth (USD $824,000), their cumulative wealth is ¥150 trillion
- 130,000 of those ultra-rich families own ¥87 trillion in assets
📚 Case study: Shanghai
- Minimum wage is ¥24 per hour (USD $2.23) or monthly minimum at ¥2,690
- Living wage is ¥5,132
- To reach a living wage - if paid at minimum hourly wage: that is 213.833 hours per month; or
- To work TWO full time jobs.
🚩 no. 3
« We must support China as the anti-capitalist counter power to US-imperialism »
Stand with People, not nation-states.
The geopolitical US-PRC rivalry does not require us - the people - to pick a side between two oppressive regimes. Both state entities are awful to marginalized communities: BOTH NATIONS are leveraging settler colonialism, Islamophobia, exploitation of immigrant workers, providing arms and military technologies to human rights abusers.
The only "side" that we need to take - is the side of the people, particularly to stand with and stand up for marginalized and exploited communities.
🤡 TLDR: Campism is fucking stupid.
🚩 no. 4
« Tibetans and Uyghurs were liberated by China from their savage oppressive societies »
📖 Tibet refers to the region that is commonly known as the Tibetan Autonomous Region 西藏自治區 and its surrounding PRC-occupied territories. As of October 2023, the Chinese party-state apparatus began to use “Xizang”, Tibet in Romanized Mandarin - a deliberate effort to Sinicize - to erase the non-Han name of the region.
📖 East Turkestan refers to the territories commonly known as Xinjiang Autonomous Region 新疆維吾爾自治區 of the PRC. Xinjiang 新疆 is a Mandarin word translated as “new territories”, a reference to the Chinese party-state apparatus’ settler colonial occupation of the land.
In my position as a Han analyst in solidarity with Tibetans and Uyghurs fighting for their liberation, I use Tibet & East Turkestan rather than the Chinese colonial names, following the terminology used by diasporic communities.
Chinese authorities are engaging in settler colonialism in Tibet and East Turkestan. The tactics used by the Chinese authorities mirror settler colonial violence inflicted against Indigenous communities on Turtle Island (North America).
Genocide of Uyghur communities are founded from the West’s marginalization of Muslims and widespread Islamophobia after 9-11 attacks, weaponizing Islamophobia to associate Muslims and Islam are with terrorism. These became policy narratives that empowered the PRC’s national security spending targeted at Uyghurs and Muslims - particularly in the occupied East Turkestan region.
Forced assimilation via residential schools for Indigenous children paralleled similar anti-Indigenous and colonial infrastructure in occupied Tibet, where Tibetan children are taken away from their families and communities to be ethnically cleansed of their Tibetan cultural, religious, linguistic, and family ties.
🚩 no. 5
« Hong Kong is part of China »
🏴 Hong Kong deserves the right to self determination & decide our political future
The peoples of Hong Kong were never given an opportunity to make a decision about their political future post-British occupation.
After the PRC successfully petitioned the United Nations to remove Hong Kong from the list of non-self-governing territories in 1972, Hong Kong was declared that the colony was a "Chinese territory under British administration". The British’s decision to hand Hong Kong over to the PRC is still built atop of Imperial Chinese sovereignty over the region from the Qing dynasty.
- In 1985, the Sino-British Joint Declaration was registered in the United Nations, outlining the conditions of the sovereignty transfer and PRC's governance of Hong Kong after July 1st, 1995.
- In 2020, UK declared PRC is in breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
- In 2021, UK declared PRC is in ongoing non-compliance of the agreement.
📖 Near the end of the First Opium War, Hong Kong was ceded to the British (1841). At the time, Hong Kong was about 6,000 in population. After the Second Opium War, Kowloon and the New Territories were leased to the British (1860 & 1898). In 1997, the British formally handover Hong Kong to the PRC and was established as a Special Administrative Region (SAR).
Throughout Hong Kong’s history, Hong Kong was a hub for those escaping political violence, famine, floods, and wars.
After a century of British occupation, Hong Kong blended British influence into the local cuisine, language, as well as social and cultural practices. The transfer of sovereignty from the UK was glamourized as the end of colonization in Hong Kong.
- Egg Tart 蛋撻 evolved from custard tart
- Hong Kong Milk Tea 港式奶茶 evolved from English tea
- Taxi in Hong Kong: 的士
Taxi in Chinese: 出租車/計程車 - Bus in Hong Kong: 巴士
Bus in Chinese: 公共汽車
EVEN IF Hong Kong was a part of China...
🚧 Why do Hong Kong & Macau residents use a specialized travel document Mainland Travel Permit (MTP) to enter the PRC? Why do borders exist between Hong Kong, Macau, and the PRC?
MTP and border division are reinforcing non-citizenship of those residing within Hong Kong & Macau SARs:
- Border crossing process into the PRC is no different than travelling to a “foreign” nation.
- PRC government has long denied Hong Kong residents & other MTP holders’ claims to PRC nationality.
📝📝 Reference List 📝📝
Baogang Guo (2020). "A Partocracy with Chinese Characteristics: Governance System Reform under Xi Jinping". Journal of Contemporary China. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10670564.2020.1744374
Dream Zhou (2025). "China minimum wages". MS Advisory. https://msadvisory.com/china-minimum-wages/
Eli Friedman (2020). "Why China is capitalist". Spectre Journal. https://spectrejournal.com/why-china-is-capitalist/
Frank Chen (2025). "China’s wealthiest have bigger share of wealth pie, Hurun report says". South China Morning Post. https://amp.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3300729/chinas-wealthiest-wealthy-have-bigger-share-wealth-pie-hurun-report-says
Global Living Wage Coalition (2024). "Living wage benchmark: Urban Shanghai, China". Global Living Wage Coalition. https://www.globallivingwage.org/living-wage-benchmarks/urban-shanghai-china/
Government of the United Kingdom (2020). "Foreign Secretary declares breach of Sino-British Joint Declaration". GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-declares-breach-of-sino-british-joint-declaration
Government of the United Kingdom (2021). "Foreign Secretary statement on radical changes to Hong Kong's electoral system". GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-statement-on-radical-changes-to-hong-kongs-electoral-system
Hong Kong Police Force (2007). "History of the Hong Kong Police Force". Government of Hong Kong (Archived). https://web.archive.org/web/20070418054929/http://www.info.gov.hk/police/hkp-text/english/history/history_01.htm
James Pasley (2023). "Photos show what life is like for Hong Kong's dwindling fishing community living in a floating city". Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-hong-kong-fishing-community-sampan-floating-city-2023-10
John Clark (2021). "The evolution of Chinese capitalism". Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières. https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article57382
Matthieu Burnay and Eva Pils (2020). "Weaponizing Citizenship in China: Domestic Exclusion and Transnational Expansion". State Crime Journal. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/statecrime.9.1.0004
RFA Tibetan (2023). "China changes Tibetan names to erase culture". Radio Free Asia. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/name-change-10202023160523.html
Tibet Action Institute (2021). "Colonial boarding schools". Tibet Action Institute. https://tibetaction.net/colonialboardingschools/
Vincent Wong (2021). "China, the Canadian left, and countering state-capitalist apologia". Briarpatch Magazine. https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/china-the-canadian-left-and-countering-state-capitalist-apologia
World Inequality Lab (2023). "China’s contemporary paradox: rising inequality, falling support for redistribution". World Inequality Lab. https://wid.world/news-article/chinas-contemporary-paradox-rising-inequality-falling-support-for-redistribution/
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