from the sino-soviet split onwards, china has consistently given material support to pretty much every regressive and reactionary force there was during the cold war, including but not limited to khmer rouge, the nicaraguan contras, the laotian anti-communists, the unita puppets of apartheid south africa, the afghan reactionary drug lords, the régime of siaad barre, the pro-israeli forces of the traitor saad haddad in lebanon, the greek military hunta, the dictatorships of augusto pinochet in chile and yahya khan in pakistan and many, many more.

chinese media covering the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the soviet union never misses to highlight the various real and imagined problems within the late soviet system. never does it however lose a word about the fact, that chinese foreign and domestic policy was a major contributing factor to the defeats the communist movement suffered during the late 80s and early 90s

i don't think it would too harsh to point out that China has more or less abandoned the idea of proletarian internationalism. i can see why they did it but i don't think it should be above criticism

They could show more solidarity with anti-imperialist movements all around the world, stop trading with the zionists for example

Also they need to curb public smoking

2 issues of equal importance

Drug policy. The war on drugs is bad. It’s bad when America does it, it’s bad when China does it.

I understand the history, in particular regarding opium. That doesn’t make it acceptable in a modern context, the opium wars don’t justify draconian policies on weed in 2026. Especially given that tobacco use is so prevalent while tobacco is more harmful than many other drugs.

Great firewall...? I know it's a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?

I used the same Mullvad VPN I use in the US the whole time I was there, it worked fine. The real purpose of the "great firewall" isn't keeping people in, it's keeping western tech companies (facebook, google, etc) out so that Chinese companies can fill those niches.

I think the comments here have covered the big ones like foreign policy, Sino-Soviet split, etc very well. So I'll mention that the reform and opening up period has a lot of issues that I personally see as right deviationism, even through the lens of developing productive forces and integrating with the world economy by allowing limited capitalist relations. Specifically, dismantling communal farms, and dismantling welfare systems like the iron rice bowl. The state there does step in to manage things like healthcare costs, housing etc, but frankly a workers' state should always be able to guarantee the basic needs of life to the workers, and privatizing these resources into the hands of capitalists only restricts access and commodifies them.

The social credit score thing was mostly a way of policing small businesses, not private citizens.

The great firewall is overwhelmingly justified on the basis that it's better for China to have its own social media sites, etc. and it's not like people in China are in any way incapable of accessing the outside internet anyway, and people absolutely do get "illegal" VPNs without punishment.

They are too censorious on their intranet but people overblown it because gommunism 1984.

Do people literally ever get disappeared? Surely so, but every time someone doesn't appear in public for a few days in China that means they were "disappeared" according to liberal news, the same way people in the DPRK die and come back to life.

They functionally do monitor everyone (sort of), and they do this by basically the same means as any other even semi-advanced country does this.

There are other common complaints that have merit, like repression (not genocide) in Xinjiang, but of course it gets mischaracterized as worse than it was, as genocide, and also isn't given the context of being in response to a serious terrorism issue that does not justify the repression but makes it more comprehensible as them failing to figure out a better way to fight imported terrorist ideology that was mainly resulting in Uighurs getting massacred rather than the CPC just doing ethnic persecution because idk they were bored and just hate this specific group of Muslims.

You will get endless defenses on here of Deng and subsequent, uh, let's call them pro-market factions. If you want to get criticisms of this, you can for example read the old posts from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net, who I think has been banned for a while but for unrelated reasons. As they note, China is moving in a relatively more positive direction on this matter under Xi, but that's relative and the other comparison point was a time where the revisionism was so comically crass that people were trying to figure out how to smuggle Austrian Economics in with Marxist vocabulary.

As a general response to this, consider that they don't claim to be infallible. Regarding Xinjiang, for example, the CPC to my knowledge openly acknowledges their part in the development of poor material conditions in the region that ultimately was a major driver in the terrorism problem of the early 21st century.

One child policy was also IMO a pretty appalling piece of legislation, although that's a situation where I have to concede there really was a problem that needed to be solved and I wasn't there and am not an expert, so...

They won't give me citizenship and this is unforgivable.

China daily just recently posted a video depicting Filipinos as monkey's getting duped by Japan and the USA.

While the overall idea of the message may or may not hold water, I think it's an issue to show state owned media (or any media for that matter) to post videos depicting one group of people as monkey's and having everyone else be people. Suffice to say, they might be pretty chill on racism sometimes.

(I'm not super familiar with this situation and it is developing)

Their support of the Khmer Rouge is a genuine stain on their legacy.

Their immigration policies are way too fucking strict.

I’ve heard homophobia can be issue among Chinese people too.

Censoring queer relationships in media is reactionary and does not befit a modern socialist state. LGBT+ representation and acceptance has grown over the years in China, especially among young people. More queer content creators have popped up as a result, but because of these dumb restrictions some content has to be toned down or shared on Western social media instead. There's a bunch of interesting Chinese queer TV shows, from BLs to lesbian dating shows that seem to get around the censorship issue by moving production to another country, like for example Thailand. (has Visa free travel for Chinese citizens)

This shit has also made it so much more difficult to talk to the average queer liberal in the West about China. If you're in a vacuum, and all you read in the media is le evul SeeSeePee censoring yet another piece of gay content, you get the impression that it must be some sort of oppressive hellscape where queer people have to hide underground for fear of being hunted down by Xi himself.

In reality, there's a vibrant queer culture in the country, especially in major cities like Chengdu (often called the gay capital of China) and Chongqing. Plenty of gay bars and people being openly queer. Also a huge furry culture. An acquaintance of mine who regularly visits China for business, always brings up up how he feels much safer as an openly gay guy in China, because of the low crime rate and not having to worry about some random homophobe assaulting him when walking alone at night. There's a cultural aspect to it as well. Older people tend be less progressive, but they generally consider it someone else's private matter and none of their business. I guess it also helps when the people ruling the country have better things to do than blame queer people for every problem.

All that is not to say that China hasn't made any progress in that area over the years. A few years ago they even began opening gender clinics for trans kids. Courts have also repeatedly sided with queer people in various cases and considers them protected under Chinese law. But the laws regarding LGBT+, whether it's codified protections, marriage rights, etc. are behind the times and should be modernized. If other socialist countries like Cuba and Vietnam can shift to embracing queer rights, then so can the PRC. Especially with China's ascendancy as the new superpower, this would be a major win for queer people worldwide.

My opinion is that China has a history of trouble during quick changes (cultural revolution, great leap forward, dengism) that made the CPC rather slow and momentuous, so it takes longer than it (IMO) should to react to many things.

China should have fully embraced and promoted local development of queer and feminist ideas long ago, through they're slowly moving in that direction.

China should have realized that the extent to which market socialism is useful is reaching its limits once the west has been made dependent and deindustrialized, and it should transition towards a democratically planned economy and reject neoliberal economic theory. They may be slowly moving towards Modern Monetary Theory but they should be moving much quicker.

China should realize that it's already in a cold war situation with the US and it needs to rapidly develop and refine its soft and hard power projection to contend against the increasingly hostile NATO, and it's slowly reacting but should be moving much quicker.

Ultimately, China is a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat and it tends to reach the correct conclusions, but it has a bit too much inertia and could seriously benefit itself and worker internationalism by adopting stronger and faster policy.

Gave too much ground to capitalists both internal and external.

Chinese people can be stupid, racist and nationalistic and the government doesnt do enough to correct it

I think some of the restrictions on what can be shown in media content are a bit silly. Like depictions of skeletons being off-limits, it’s not “protecting” anything and just adds more fuel to the liberal narrative of “Ebul China 1984 censorship!”

They won't pay people to do revolutions

They probably wouldn't let me become a citizen

Chinese is like hard (don't tell me how easy it is or i'll just be like "good for you")

One of the very few Chinese-born people I've known in real life moved to Norway as a young man with a business degree and big dreams of starting a dropshipping company to eventually build up enough capital to start a café.^[This never came to fruition, naturally: last I heard he's a cashier at a convenience store now.] He told me about how being a worker in China is awful, given the hours, the pay, the working conditions, and all that, and that that's precisely why he wanted to start a small business, "so that he wouldn't be working for anybody but himself." He confirmed to me that people in China do study Marx and Mao in school, yet he was himself also a bit anti-DPRK and claimed to be "disinterested in politics." He was also a huge anime fan — of course, I am too — but it was because of this young man's recommendation (plus my desperation to make friends at the time) that I made myself sit through Wataten, the anime about a young woman in college who one day discovers that she's a fucking pedophile, and this is handled with about as much grace by the writers as you would expect from a 2010s "slice-of-life comedy."

Now, of course, I cannot judge an entire country of one and a half billion people based on exactly one individual, and even with his brainworms he was still a nice fellow overall^[Methinks practical experience has probably beaten his small business tyrant dreams out of him by now.]… Yet I still have to wonder what sort of socialist society could produce such a man.

How's the LGBTQ+ struggle over there? I always assume about the same as the rest of the region, possibly with hotspots of acceptance/prejudice, but that's just vibes-based

Poor working conditions for many workers. Long hours, low pay, often dangerous conditions etc.

Still have a wealthy capital owning class.

Crackdowns on non approved religions - not religious myself but I think people should be free to worship how they please (within reason - no human sacrifice lol).

Chinese foreign policy is often disappointing. But I don’t have any experience of navigating the global stage as China so I guess I’ll leave that to the experts I.e. the Chinese.

To have a grievance with China I would need to be aggrieved by China. I don't think I or anyone in this comment section are aggrieved by China. Like what you bought a cheap imported toy and the quality was slightly lower than your preference?

The USA still exists.

Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China's own capacity

I can't get over how easy and funny it is that the answer to "How to seize the means of production" is just "bro they'll give it to you for free".

What are your legitimate grievances with China?

I was promised 70 years ago that China was going to show up and force communism on the US. ATM I'm starting to feel like a Game of Thrones fan waiting for the next book or for those dragons to actually do something. I'm getting tired of sitting around and doing nothing all day.

Xi Jingping, while a great leader and impressive statesman has ignored foundational research (which i've repeated contacted his government to propose) with world-historical implications. Without figuring this out the CPC forestalls proletarian progress by decades, if not hundreds of years.

All because China hasn't established how many grains makes a heap.