Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.
As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.
Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine's three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they're far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren't shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn't really attempted to do this for four years.
Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.
Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I'm pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It's also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine's power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.
For everybody's sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I'm not holding my breath.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Answering some questions from last week’s discussion that I was unable to get to:
@QinShiHuangsShlong@hexbear.net
Following your reasoning, Mao must be an extremist who simply wanted to cause maximum chaos and destruction, which is essentially the narrative pushed by Western propaganda.
Because why would Mao want to completely break with thousands of years of tradition with the Cultural Revolution? Perhaps he had identified crucial elements within the Chinese societal traditions that are responsible for propagating such reactionary features in the contemporary socialist movement? Otherwise the entire logic behind Cultural Revolution would not make sense if it is just to correct for some mistake about capitalist restoration.
He was labeled as an extremist and a radical, yes, but he was probably not completely wrong. Look at what happened after the collapse of the USSR - 70 years of institutions simply went down the drain, and the society reverted to its past, reactionary form, just like that. It demonstrates that 70 years of institutions by themselves had failed to transform human behavior. Mao probably was on to something about culture and tradition.
(Note: personally, I am not onboard with the Cultural Revolution like the ultra-left does, but I am starting to see the point)
Understanding this, you will realize that the prioritization of East Asian culture on education did not just appear out of nowhere. It has clear ties with class mobility that goes back thousands of years. I guarantee you it’s not because people in East Asia like to study and read books lol. It has more to do with how you (and your entire family) can leap into a higher class and leave behind generations of poverty, a tradition that is still very much alive in modern day China.
Yet none of these are present in your arguments. They are mere rhetoric that did not tell us anything about the Chinese system. Your arguments essential boil down to: “China is building towards socialism, there are problems and they are being corrected”. Anyone can make those statements, but there is no explanatory and predictive power. It is not dialectics, it is at best, sophistry.
Let’s go over how dialectics work, using Marx’s classic example (in a very simplified form for illustration purpose):
Marx identified a key contradiction in the industrialization process undertaken by the capitalist class.
To maximize capital accumulation, they had to destroy the feudal system that held back the productive capacity, yet in the process, it emancipates the peasantry from their land and tied their labor to production, not land as it did previously. To maximize profit, the industrialists needed to extract surplus value from labor; yet the process also caused the labor who is no longer attached to their land to have “nothing to lose but their chains”. Therefore, capitalism creates the necessary conditions for its own demise and paves the way towards socialism.
Note how the dialectical process captures the causal interactions between labor and capital under the process of capitalist industrialization. It has explanatory power. It has predictive value. It actually tells us something about the capital accumulation process that goes beyond mere rhetoric. It may not be entirely accurate, but it is a scientific form of socialism that goes far beyond what the utopians had attempted in their own analysis.
——
@thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net
As I had explained in the class mobility post, the Imperial Court Examination was a response to the feudal oligarchy, most famously the Guanlong group that had begun to erode the authority of the emperors by the 5th-8th century.
It was essentially a parallel track to promote court officials loyal to the emperors, acting as a counterbalance force against the feudal oligarchy in the imperial court.
By the time we get to Northern Song in the 10th-11th century, the feudal oligarchy in the form of menfa (门阀) had been completely purged (Huang Chao rebellion put the final nail in the coffin) and the Song emperors had assumed total control of the bureaucracy. Ironically, this caused the weakening of the state control over its peripheral vassals and eventually led to the invasion by the Jurchens (Jin) and the Mongols (Yuan).
See my recommendation below for Prof. Zhou Xueguang’s book that elaborates on the cyclical centralized and decentralized nature of the Chinese state political apparatuses.
——
@truly@lemmygrad.ml
I am as skeptical of the article as you are (whether it is about the nuclear secrets). However, the purge of the highest ranks in the CMC (and especially Zhang Youxia, who is noted for his close ties with Xi) is real and exposes a corruption problem within the military that has permeated even at the very top. We simply don’t know the details (and probably won’t get the true details, like ever) and the longer term consequences. But for sure, this isn’t some mid ranking officials who took money on the side.
For understanding the evolution of Chinese bureaucracy, the logic behind the cyclical centralization and decentralization of power, I strongly recommend Prof. Zhou Xueguang’s The Institutional Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach, who is professor of sociology at Stanford.
It is a very well researched and foundational academic text towards understanding how the enormous bureaucratic system operates at various levels. I know of plenty PhD students specializing in Chinese history and sociology who swear by it.
This is not remotely true. The RF, as reactionary as it is, isn't a past reactionary form but a new reactionary form distinct from its tsardom past, which makes sense since the tsardom and the federation have different modes of production. Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality isn't the guiding ideology of the Russian state no matter how much Westerners try to paint Putin as a new tsar. The current Russian state cherrypicks the highlight reel moments of its distant feudal past and much less distant socialist past, but it's still fundamentally a liberal state with a liberal ideology. And the fact that it cherrypicks its nonliberal history in order to form a highlight reel exposes an insecurity with the state: the liberal state is a young state that hasn't accomplished a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.
Correct. I should not have used the word reversion but to illustrate how the entire New Soviet man project has failed as soon as those institutions collapsed despite years of cultivation. The argument here is that institutions simply curb the excesses, but to completely rewire human behavior lies deeper in the sociocultural traditions of the people itself.
You are seemingly misunderstanding my argument, leading you to arguing against a position I did not make.
At no point did I ever infer or imply Chairman Mao was an extremist, irrational, or motivated by chaos. That framing is your insertion, not a logical consequence of what I said. Recognizing the limits and contradictions of the Cultural Revolution is not equivalent to repeating Western liberal narratives. Marxism does not require us to sanctify every tactic in order to defend the revolutionary line behind it.
Chairman Mao was obviously correct that class struggle continues under socialism. He was again obviously correct that bourgeois elements can emerge within the Party itself. He was yet again correct that institutions alone do not guarantee socialist consciousness. I disputed none of this.
Your reasoning begins to depart from dialectical materialism through what you identify as the material source of those contradictions.
You are treating “culture,” “tradition,” and long civilizational memory as semi-independent causal forces, capable of reproducing class society even after the economic base has been transformed. That is the upmost of idealism.
Marxism does not deny that ideology exists. It insists that ideology is shaped and reproduced by material relations. If culture itself were decisive, then land reform, collectivization, and socialist industrialization should have failed immediately. Instead, they succeeded in abolishing entire classes that had ruled China for millennia. That alone falsifies the idea that tradition possesses autonomous historical power.
What Chairman Mao identified was not tradition acting on socialism, but material contradictions produced inside society:
These are not cultural remnants. They are structural contradictions of transition. This distinction is important.
If reaction emerges because “Chinese tradition reproduces hierarchy,” then socialism is impossible not only in China, but anywhere with history. Marxism collapses into civilizational pessimism.
Chairman Mao never argued that. He argued that new bourgeois relations emerge from socialist production itself, not from the Tang dynasty.
On the USSR: its collapse does not demonstrate the supremacy of tradition over institutions. It demonstrates the failure to maintain proletarian political power over the state and economy. The material base had already shifted long before 1991, market mechanisms, managerial autonomy, labor commodification, and elite reproduction were already dominant.
What collapsed in 1991 was not socialism’s cultural shell reverting to tsarism. It was a system whose class character had already changed. There was no feudal restoration in Russia. There was capitalist restoration. Another important distinction.
Regarding education and class mobility: yes, examination-based advancement historically functioned as a route out of poverty. But again, you are mistaking continuity of form for continuity of essence. Modern educational competition exists because:
This is true in China, South Korea, Singapore, and also in France, Japan, and Germany. The Gaokao is not the imperial exam reborn. It is a modern mechanism of labor allocation under industrial conditions.
Forms may resemble each other. Their class content does not. This is precisely why Marx warned against superficial historical analogy.
Now to dialectics. You are absolutely correct that dialectical analysis must have explanatory and predictive power. But dialectics does not mean identifying one contradiction and projecting it linearly forward forever.
Dialectics analyzes motion through contradiction under specific material conditions. Your capitalism example works because Marx identified:
Now apply the same rigor to socialist transition.What is the dominant motion today? It is not tradition reproducing itself. It is the contradiction between:
From that contradiction arise:
These phenomena are not residues of feudalism. They are contradictions produced by development itself. This is why Chairman Mao emphasized continuing revolution , not because ancient culture would resurrect itself, but because new bourgeois relations continuously emerge unless actively constrained.
That struggle cannot be permanent chaos. It must be institutionalized, regulated, corrected, and rebalanced, precisely what was missing in the late Cultural Revolution period.
To say this is not to reject Chairman Mao and Mao Zedong Thought. It is to apply Mao Zedong Thought materially, not dogmatically.
Finally, your accusation that my position reduces to “there are problems and they are being corrected” misses the point entirely. The explanatory power lies here:
That predicts instability, anti-corruption cycles, policy reversals, re-centralization, and ideological tightening, exactly what we observe.
That is dialectics. Not cultural fatalism. Not civilizational inheritance. Not pessimism disguised as depth. Contradictions are real. They are sharp. They are dangerous. But they are not proof that history is repeating itself, only that socialism, is a long and uneven process of transformation, not a clean rupture where motion ceases.
I think we are talking past each other. You seem to think that I am insisting the entire feudal institutions are inherited without changes, while I have clearly said that these evolved out of the traditional institutions and repurposed under capitalist mode of production.
I will give you an example: patriarchy is a feudal institution, yet it continues to perpetuate in modern day society to serve a different purpose under capitalism. This does not negate the fact that patriarchy emerges out of its feudal past and retains (“inherits”) many elements, reactionary and destructive, that hold back socioeconomic progress.
This is the essence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao saw the need for a complete and decisive break with the past traditions and saw it as a necessity towards building socialism. Of course, the liberal reformers disagree, we all know that. I am not saying Mao is completely right here but you are ignoring an important aspect of how modern Chinese bureaucracy is shaped by dismissing them all out of hand. Traditions don’t simply disappear, they evolve and stay latent in how we interact with the world every day.
China is the only civilization in the world today that has retained a continuity of its institutions for over 2200 years. To ignore that role and impact of such long-lasting traditions and equate them with the much younger, modern Western states is to ignore the historical role of such institutions in the sociopolitical and economic spheres of modern day China.
Similarly, gaokao is not the exact same institution as the Imperial Court Examination, but it is an extension and an evolution of such system. The tradition of “lineage” that has been so dominant throughout Chinese history is very much alive in modern day China’s academia, private sector and government bureaucracy.
I don’t know if you are Chinese or not, but anyone who grows up in the culture knows just how such “unwritten rules” remain in modern Chinese society, whether you are interacting with family members and at the workplace with your superiors etc.
I think I understand your point more clearly now, and you’re right that institutions do not vanish magically when one mode of production replaces another. I like all marxists fully accepts that superstructural forms can persist, mutate, and be repurposed under new material conditions. Patriarchy is indeed the classic example to explain this.
But this is exactly where precision matters. Patriarchy persists under capitalism not because of cultural memory alone, but because it continues to serve material functions: reproduction of labor power, unpaid domestic labor, inheritance control, and stabilization of wage relations. Its survival is not explained by history, but by utility to the dominant mode of production. Without that utility, patriarchy would decay rapidly regardless of tradition. The same standard must be applied to bureaucracy, lineage, and examination systems.
If a social form persists, scientific socialism through dialectical materialism demands we ask: what material role does it currently play? Not where it came from, but why it continues to reproduce itself today. This is where I think your argument still slips from materialism toward historical determinism. You are correct that China has unusual institutional continuity. That fact alone, however, does not explain causality. Continuity describes form; it does not explain motion.
What reproduces hierarchy today is not the memory of imperial lineage, but concrete mechanisms:
These mechanisms would generate elite reproduction even if the imperial examinations had never existed. This is precisely why similar phenomena appear in the USSR, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, and even France’s grandes écoles system, societies with no shared civilizational origin.
The resemblance is structural, not genealogical. On gaokao: yes, there is historical resonance. But resonance is not determination. The gaokao functions today as a labor-allocation mechanism under industrial conditions. Its brutality comes from scarcity and competition, not Confucian morality. If economic structure changed such that upward mobility was not concentrated into narrow credential channels, the social meaning of education would change accordingly, just as it already has for segments of the urban middle class.
That demonstrates material causation, not cultural destiny. Regarding “unwritten rules,” when have I denied their existence. But unwritten rules are not ancient ghosts; they are informal adaptations to power concentration. Wherever access to resources depends on approval from superiors, informal relations emerge, whether in Chinese ministries, Soviet factories, Wall Street firms, or Western universities.
Calling this “lineage culture” risks obscuring the real issue: bureaucratic power without sufficient mass supervision. Chairman Mao understood this clearly. The Cultural Revolution was not an attempt to annihilate tradition for its own sake. It was an attempt (however flawed in execution) to prevent the crystallization of a new bureaucratic class by mobilizing the masses against administrative privilege. Its target was not history. Its biggest target was power.
That is why Chairman Mao emphasized “those in authority taking the capitalist road,” not scholars, families, or customs as such. He did not argue that culture autonomously reproduces class society. He argued that class society reproduces culture. This is a fundamental difference. If tradition itself were the decisive force, then socialist transformation would depend primarily on ideological purification. Chairman Mao rejected that. He insisted that ideological struggle must be rooted in mass participation and material change, not moral critique.
This is also why later socialist practice emphasized institutionalization rather than permanent mobilization, not because the problem disappeared, but because contradiction must be handled at a level consistent with development.
So yes forms evolve. Yes history leaves traces. Yes people experience continuity in daily life. But dialectical materialism draws a firm line:
The question is not and should not be whether tradition exists. The question is what reproduces power today. That is where scientific socialists must always place their focus, not in inherited memory, but in living relations of production and authority that can actually be transformed.
Sorry I really don’t want to accuse you of anything, but the way you write is all ChatGPT-style sophistry.
“It’s not this, but that…” “This is precisely where it matters.”
Lots and lots of these circular statements. There is no concrete example or evidence being presented here. It’s all vague statements you typically get from chatting with an LLM. I spent the last hour trying to write a detailed response but I don’t even know how to respond when the statements are sufficiently vague that you can write any answers and they still fit and continue to go in circles.
We keep going in circles because you remain entrenched in an idealist framework, even while sometimes using materialist language. You constantly redirect the analysis back to historical origin, tradition, or civilizational continuity. When asked to identify concrete present-day mechanisms, the answer becomes imperial examinations, lineage culture, or institutional inheritance, rather than existing relations of production and authority.
When I distinguished between historical origin and present function, you treat that as if I am denying history itself, which allows the same claim to be restated without actually engaging the critique.
You have repeated this consistently. When comparative cases are raised (the USSR, France, Japan, Korea) instead of explaining what is materially different in China, you bypass comparison by asserting uniqueness. When patriarchy is discussed, you accept that it persists because it still performs material labor functions, but you refuse to apply that same standard to bureaucracy or lineage, never specifying what concrete economic function those traditions perform today. When the USSR collapse was raised, material transformation was replaced with cultural reversion.
This is why the discussion cannot move forward. You continusly treat history as an active causal force in itself, rather than something whose continued influence must be explained through present material conditions. Your analysis is idealist: tradition is allowed explanatory power independent of political economy. As long as that framing remains, we will keep talking past each other.
As for my writing style, it may come across as rigid or formulaic simply because this is not my native language, I am still far from 100% comfortable in it and thus fallback on standard easy to use structures to try best convey my thoughts.
Also, I don’t mean to accuse: I am getting ChatGPT vibes here. Are these posts assisted with LLM in some ways?
I am trying to compose a detailed response to your long comment and it took more than an hour just to write the outlines, whereas yours took mere minutes to respond. The more I read, the less these arguments make sense to me.
There are a lot of circular ChatGPT-like arguments (“it’s not this, it’s that”) so I don’t even know how to respond without concrete examples being presented. I feel like I am arguing with an LLM lol (no offense, but maybe you do write like that).
If you’re interested in furthering the discussion, we need concrete examples beyond the vague LLM-style sophistry where we can go in depth and dissect in detail the historical progression of the Chinese bureaucratic system. Otherwise the answers are always going to be vague and we go in circles.
What? We should judge arguments on their merits, not on how long the person making them has been here. Every account here was just a week old at some point.
It's also particularly silly to invoke this in a discussion with xhs, one of our most prominent examples on this site of people deleting accounts and making new ones (although I think the xhs account has actually hung around for quite long compared to some of the previous ones).
The whole paranoia about new accounts being wreckers or otherwise suspicious could never really coherently fit in with the simultaneous site party line about the importance of opsec, and practice of account switching. In fact, I'm pretty sure we've already had this struggle session, but I've kind of lost track of those.
I'm trying to call this out specifically because I remember the last struggle session about this and was fedjacketing people a bit too much myself at the time.
I'm not passing judgment on the arguments, I think the discussion is interesting.
I'm referring to the age as evidence of whether the account's responses are llm assisted, where it carries a small amount of weight.
I don't see how that tracks. They themselves have mentioned that English isn't their first language, and I could see an argument for that being proof of them using an LLM, but just because an account is new doesn't mean they must be using an LLM, I don't understand how "new account" and "LLM" are related in any way.
And I can't believe I'm defending LLMs, but the actual content of an argument is what is important, not whether they used an LLM to help deliver it. LLM speak is bad because it usually waffles on about nothing and fails to have a clear and direct point, entire paragraphs with 0 information. But I'm not getting that at all from QinShiHuangsShlong's comments, they have clear points they are making. Sometimes people get so hyper-vigilant at spotting "AI speak" that they forget that AI constructs sentences that way because a ton of the data it scrapes from speaks like that.
It just feels like a low blow to accuse them of using an LLM rather than addressing the points they make in their argument, xiaohongshu might as well be calling them a fed or a wrecker, because that seems to be the intention behind this "polite" accusation, to discredit the person rather than address their argument.
Like it or not, I've seen my ESL coworkers use AI to write out their emails. Critical support because it's a world-historic injustice for people to be forced to learn English.
To be fair XHS is addressing their arguments as well, just not in that same comment
To be clear, I am not criticizing the poster’s English here. I am criticizing the sophistry that simply does not address the points I made, but instead presented a lot of beautiful words strung together without coherency.
Read this paragraph for example:
Read it again and see if it even addresses my argument.
Have I ever said that the Imperial Court Examination was about Confucian morality? No. I clearly stated that it was a class mobility mechanism that evolved out of deeply rooted traditions and entrenched elements continue to operate in its modern form.
In fact, I never even used the word “Confucian” once, and based my argument solely from the perspective of class analysis. If LLM is being used, then I can see why it got confused and associated with Confucianism because that’s what the examination is often associated with (hence my initial suspicion), but clearly has nothing to do with what I wrote.
There is no argument here, no evidence being presented here, only words. It doesn’t even correctly address what I wrote in my previous comment. You literally cannot respond because there is no argument here.
Again, pure sophistry. If anything, the statement confirms what I said about the gaokao being an extension of Imperial Court Examination that provides a class mobility mechanism that continues to this very day. The statement is saying that after 1300 years, we’re still at the same spot (the examination provides upward mobility to the court officials in the past and the urban middle class today), until something changes (which I don’t even agree with). It even contradicts the poster’s own comment that gaokao is an independent invention of the Imperial Court Examination, which is ahistorical to begin with.
As you can see, these are sophistry made up of beautiful words strung together but do not correspond to reality. There is no historical evidence being presented to support these arguments. Anyone can make vague statements like this, and LLM is especially good at it (“it is X, not Y” that are littered across the paragraphs), regardless of whether the poster is using it or not.
I don’t expect everyone to exercise the same academic rigor as I do, but be careful when you read words like these that don’t make coherent sense.
Finally, if you’re truly interested in actual academic text on the evolution of Chinese bureaucracy, start with the book I recommended above by Prof. Zhou Xueguang.
I think you are misrepresenting what I have written. I will say it again clearly. You are entrenched in an idealist framework where culture and tradition are treated as driving forces of history and development. We disagree on that at a fundamental level.
I have made arguments. You just do not accept their premises, so you treat them as if they are not arguments at all. For example, when I said bureaucracy exists across socialist and capitalist states regardless of cultural background (USSR, modern Vietnam, post-war Eastern Europe), you dismissed this by returning to civilizational continuity. When I argued that gaokao functions today due to material scarcity and labor competition, not lineage tradition, you reframed that as me denying history rather than addressing the material cause.
I have also given counter examples that were not engaged with. For instance, the Soviet Union developed deep bureaucratic contradictions without imperial examinations, Confucianism(brought up due to its deep ties to Chinese culture and tradition), or lineage culture. Patriarchy persists globally under capitalism, including in societies with little to no shared past, which shows that survival of social forms does not mean they are driven by ancient tradition.
You have clearly read many books, but reading history is not the same as applying dialectical materialism. At several points you substitute origin for causation and continuity for explanation. Where something came from is not the same as what reproduces it today.
We are arguing from different theoretical positions. That is fine. But at this point we are talking past each other because you are unwilling to let go of a cultural explanation even when material ones are presented. I think it is better to acknowledge that we simply see this differently. I would however appreciate not being bad jacketed going forward.
Thank you.
Now — I'm — just — an — it? — I'm — not even — a — person — in — your — eyes?
That's — not — just — rude — it's unnecessary.
My — account — may — be — only — 5 — days — old — but — your — 小鸡鸡 — is — only — 5cm — long.
Doesn't — feel — so — good — when — people — are — rude — for — no — reason — does — it?
Yet I am a person and when talking about benefit of the doubt you were talking about me.
You could have said "them" you chose "it".
You are not your account comrade, 他, 她, & 它 all mean something pretty similar meaning, it is a valid first person pronoun, you're just too english language structures
please do not respond to someone saying what approximates to 'i can't take you seriously', by immediately invoking a phalus, the fact your account handle invokes a phalus is offputting enough
if you're feeling put out, take a breath, take a break, do something that makes you happy for a while
I am my account and if I'm banned, I die in real life, SAO-style.
它 is specifically for non human things. I am a human.
When talking about benefit of the doubt that is talking about me the person behind the account and if I'm trustworthy.
As for "phalus" (are you a professor?) this is the pig pooping on its balls forum I never could have imagined penis jokes would be too much for such a place.
It's usually ok, but it's not alright to body shame people here, we shouldn't mock people for things outside of their control.
Ah ok that's my bad I'll avoid similar jokes so from now on.
If you don't know someone's pronouns, ask, or use their name. If someone calls you out on it, apologize and correct. This is uncomplicated and there's no excuse for it.
Hilariously enough even though you are clearly attempting to dehumanize QinShiHuangsShlong by "not using pronouns", you immediately used the wrong pronouns in your flaccid defense of your own ignorance. Go do some self crit but you're not welcome to misgender other users here