> I don't think the evil caricature is an accurate description of the CCP Have a read of a summary of John Garnaut's talk to the Australian Parliament on "Engi

> I don't think the evil caricature is an accurate description of the CCP Have a read of a summary of John Garnaut's talk to the Australian Parliament on "Engineers of the Human Soul": https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in He posits that Stalin -> Mao -> Xi consider that everything must serve the State: culture, the arts, etc. Obviously that would include people. So Xi Jinping Thought (recently written into the constitution) has people serving the state. In fact, not only their bodies, but their artistic expression belongs not to them but to the state. The CCP doesn't physically enslave people, it enslaves them through fear. People are theoretically free to choose not serve, but they risk bad things for themselves and their family. On top of this, they claim to serve the people (but instead the people serve them), so they are living out a lie. To maintain the deception they have to control what people know about the world, hence the Great Firewall. If you value liberty, honesty, or free expression, I think being nearly forcibly deprived of them could qualify as evil. Now imagine a society where no one is truly free to think for themselves, where your neighbors can potentially turn you in (= can't trust people close to you), where the arts are limited to the party line. It kind of deprives society of the best of humanity (trust/community, wealth of ideas, innovative arts). That could qualify as evil. But hey, China is strong, prosperous (in terms of money), and seemingly unified. I do believe that the CCP is doing what it thinks is best for China, but creating a cultural dystopia in exchange for outward wealth and strength seems like a bad bargain. If they created cultural wealth I bet outward wealth and strength would show up naturally.