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It is the same government. Those in power at the time chose who would succeed them, and so on to this day.

tw04 9y ago
Good point, whereas in America the Republican and Democratic parties have since been dismantled and replaced... Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.
- glenstein 9y ago
  In a meaningful sense, you can say the Republican party is largely the same today as it was during the Contract With America, and the Democratic Party is largely the party of New Deal programs. Sameness here refers to ideological continuity rather than literal individuals being the same.
  - jbooth 9y ago
    That's not what the person was saying, though. They were saying something much more simplistic. To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.
    - glenstein 9y ago
      I think you're right that all three parties have been subject to a certain degree of drift. However, applying that back to the original point (is the current regime the same one that did Tiananmen), to me that's an argument that, for the most part, this is the same regime. And if the original commenter wasn't arguing about a continuity in ideology or personnel, then I'm not sure what they were arguing.
      - jbooth 9y ago
        It's like saying Hollande and Chirac are both part of the 5th Republic regime. Technically true but not indicative of anything and probably a red herring.
        glenstein 9y ago
        I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b). The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.
        jbooth 9y ago
        It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery. From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.
        glenstein 9y ago
        As I'm sure we both know, few of those billion people have anything to do with how the government makes decisions about enforcement against dissent. Power is concentrated to a group of people representing a small fraction of the population that is intensely conscious of its own political and historical identity. The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question. Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- mutteraloo 9y ago
  Xijingping this year heavily emphasized the communist ideals in the country, to a point where the civil servants have to pass tests on the ccp ideals Also China is still the censoring, authoritarian regime it was before. Look at their citizen scores, monitoring, threatening South Korea, Taiwan, us, Australia, etc

tw04 9y ago

Good point, whereas in America the Republican and Democratic parties have since been dismantled and replaced... Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.

glenstein 9y ago
In a meaningful sense, you can say the Republican party is largely the same today as it was during the Contract With America, and the Democratic Party is largely the party of New Deal programs. Sameness here refers to ideological continuity rather than literal individuals being the same.
- jbooth 9y ago
  That's not what the person was saying, though. They were saying something much more simplistic. To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    I think you're right that all three parties have been subject to a certain degree of drift. However, applying that back to the original point (is the current regime the same one that did Tiananmen), to me that's an argument that, for the most part, this is the same regime. And if the original commenter wasn't arguing about a continuity in ideology or personnel, then I'm not sure what they were arguing.
    - jbooth 9y ago
      It's like saying Hollande and Chirac are both part of the 5th Republic regime. Technically true but not indicative of anything and probably a red herring.
      - glenstein 9y ago
        I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b). The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.
        jbooth 9y ago
        It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery. From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.
        glenstein 9y ago
        As I'm sure we both know, few of those billion people have anything to do with how the government makes decisions about enforcement against dissent. Power is concentrated to a group of people representing a small fraction of the population that is intensely conscious of its own political and historical identity. The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question. Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mutteraloo 9y ago
Xijingping this year heavily emphasized the communist ideals in the country, to a point where the civil servants have to pass tests on the ccp ideals Also China is still the censoring, authoritarian regime it was before. Look at their citizen scores, monitoring, threatening South Korea, Taiwan, us, Australia, etc