What an absolute nightmare not just for James Lin, but his family who can do nothing real to petition on his behalf without risking also being labeled criminals. They literally have to issue statements essentially apologizing on his behalf rather than fighting for his freedom.
I’ve run across people who have tried to convince me that China has a normal government, or that places like the US are “just as bad so it’s ok” but this highlights pretty clearly how it is not the same. The Chinese government is not a normal government, it is still the same government that crushed its own people with tanks, and we should never allow this kind of treatment of people be normalized.
I wouldn’t even consider tankies extreme left, they’re more or less identical to right-wing authoritarians in terms of the reality of what they’re defending.
The two groups use different labels and superficially different rhetoric but the political solutions they advocate are very much the same (authority through violence, the abolishing of human rights, silencing of speech etc.) You can’t really be to the left and advocate those kinds of things, they’re antithetical.
If you think about it it kinds of makes sense, they’re essentially the MAGA of China. It would be more strange if such an authoritarian nation like China that is hyper-focused on monitoring speech and manipulating public narrative *didn’t * have some kind of deluded super-nationalistic demographic.
I think the skepticism of their prevalence from the outside is understandable and happens because A) hardcore prepper types do tend to be melodramatic, often mixing in racism and applying terms like tankie in bad faith and B) the tankie’s themselves can often operate in a lowkey way in english-speaking communities. They can’t go into a community and immediately start advocating bloody dismantling of democracy, so it’s not immediately apparent how extreme they are until confronted with something that criticizes or contradicts the Chinese government and the like. Like Russian trolls, I don’t get the impression that they really have any issues pretending to be someone else to stir up chaos.
Demographically a lot of them are teenage girls and women in their 20s. The “Little Pink Army”. So it’s like if MAGA was fuelled by the same passion, energy and stamina that fuels a lot of pop star fandom.
The “left…right” is just not a good scale, it only refers to where people sit. In reality there are several orthogonal scales, like:
Conservative — Progressive
Totalitarian — Anarchist
Nationalist — Internationalist
Capitalist — Communist
Autocrat — Democrat
Monarchist — Republican
Bigoted — Egalitarian
…and some more.
That means there can be “Conservative Anarchist Bigots”, and “Progressive Capitalist Bigots”, and “Progressive Anarchist Internationalist Communist Democratic Republican Egalitarians” (sometimes called “hippies”), or “Monarchic Democratic Internationalists” (we have some of those in Spain). The scales don’t really influence each other (“Autocratic Monarchist Anarchists” are rare nowadays, but they do exist and have a precedent in Aristotle’s “one good ruler” idea, or the “Benevolent dictator for life” in FOSS).
China right now, is a “Conservative Totalitarian Nationalist Capitalist Autocratic Bigoted Republic”, they only keep “Communist” in the name for historical reasons, and to prevent anyone from trying to push for actual communism. To their credit, they’re still “Popular” (Nationalist) and a “Republic”… yet it’s still anyone’s guess when they might become a “Hereditary Autocracy” (aka: Autocratic Monarchy) like North Korea.
What I find the funniest though, is US’s “Democrats vs. Republicans”… they’re not even on the same scale! While the country is already both, a “Democratic Republic”, the parties are named less like what they might defend, and more like an insult to each other: “you’re a monarchist!” vs. “you’re an autocrat!”. And look at that, a Republican wannabe-Autocrat is getting indicted right now… but might still win the Democratic elections 🤦
I honestly think both of these categories are largely astroturfing. The way they attack queer people who are actually concerned about their rights precludes their even being half-assed allies. It doesn’t really matter how much they claim otherwise, their actions speak louder than their protests.