So do modern Chinese people consider the current regime as being a distinctly different government from the communist era? It's sort of confusing to me that they still have a "CCP" and call themselves "The People's Republic" despite being apparently not communist at all. Like you said, "more free-market unregulated capitalist than America." Is there any official policy like "we're just going to call ourselves the CCP for the sake of tradition but we're not longer communist?"
They don't say that explicitly--it's still too politically sensitive to completely denounce Mao, because then you lose a lot of legitimacy as a government. So nobody comes out and says outright, "This is a new government now, ran on a different philosophy entirely." But although they don't go into the details very much, the CCP does in fact outright admit, "Yeah, we've made a lot of mistakes in the past and screwed up for a couple of years. And now we've changed and we're doing things differently now."
They just refuse to call what they're doing capitalist. They dress it all up as ~*~Modern Chinese socialism~*~. But it's capitalism. And it happens to be free market unregulated only because the modern Chinese government is too young and too slow to really effectively regulate most things.
People are definitely very aware there's a big distinction between "back when we were seriously trying to do communism" and the modern day.
Are they still just afraid to denounce Mao? To me he seems like one of the worst leaders of all time. He basically got millions of people killed because he had terrible ideas, and then anyone who would tell him his ideas were bad was also killed. Does that terror live on even after he's dead?
That depends on what line of work you do. If you're an official government employee--especially in any sort of front-facing position where you represent the government to the people or on media, then definitely no. It's not politically correct.
But it's not illegal. If you're a businessman or McDonald's fry cook or whatever, then you can outright say that Mao was a retard, and other than maybe some other people picking a heated argument with you, nothing's gonna happen. So long as it's in real life. Online, your posts will still totally get censored. But people still talk about what a humongous fuck up the Great Leap Forward is, they just have to use blurry terms to get around the censors.
An excellent series! Interestingly, Deng was rather in love with what he saw as a majority ethnic Chinese state's economic success (my country, Singapore) and thus began the Suzhou projects, amongst others. This era of opening also marked Singapore's gradual policy shift towards Asia and yes, an increasingly vociferous pride amongst Chinese-educated Singaporeans, who were marginalised from the 50s onwards, about China's rise.
Well, and that concludes the history series! And now I have time to work on everything else I've been promising. XD
So do modern Chinese people consider the current regime as being a distinctly different government from the communist era? It's sort of confusing to me that they still have a "CCP" and call themselves "The People's Republic" despite being apparently not communist at all. Like you said, "more free-market unregulated capitalist than America." Is there any official policy like "we're just going to call ourselves the CCP for the sake of tradition but we're not longer communist?"
They don't say that explicitly--it's still too politically sensitive to completely denounce Mao, because then you lose a lot of legitimacy as a government. So nobody comes out and says outright, "This is a new government now, ran on a different philosophy entirely." But although they don't go into the details very much, the CCP does in fact outright admit, "Yeah, we've made a lot of mistakes in the past and screwed up for a couple of years. And now we've changed and we're doing things differently now."
They just refuse to call what they're doing capitalist. They dress it all up as ~*~Modern Chinese socialism~*~. But it's capitalism. And it happens to be free market unregulated only because the modern Chinese government is too young and too slow to really effectively regulate most things.
People are definitely very aware there's a big distinction between "back when we were seriously trying to do communism" and the modern day.
Are they still just afraid to denounce Mao? To me he seems like one of the worst leaders of all time. He basically got millions of people killed because he had terrible ideas, and then anyone who would tell him his ideas were bad was also killed. Does that terror live on even after he's dead?
That depends on what line of work you do. If you're an official government employee--especially in any sort of front-facing position where you represent the government to the people or on media, then definitely no. It's not politically correct.
But it's not illegal. If you're a businessman or McDonald's fry cook or whatever, then you can outright say that Mao was a retard, and other than maybe some other people picking a heated argument with you, nothing's gonna happen. So long as it's in real life. Online, your posts will still totally get censored. But people still talk about what a humongous fuck up the Great Leap Forward is, they just have to use blurry terms to get around the censors.
An excellent series! Interestingly, Deng was rather in love with what he saw as a majority ethnic Chinese state's economic success (my country, Singapore) and thus began the Suzhou projects, amongst others. This era of opening also marked Singapore's gradual policy shift towards Asia and yes, an increasingly vociferous pride amongst Chinese-educated Singaporeans, who were marginalised from the 50s onwards, about China's rise.