So there’s this international student from China in my class and she constantly spreads misinformation about the PRC and its history. She basically bootlicks Western propaganda 24/7. She’s also politically active in numerous student organizations and travels back to China frequently, which leads me to believe she and/or her family and friends are up to no good over there as well. Should I report her to the 12339 website of the MSS?
They put out a maximalist statement, “snitching is bad”. No less ridiculous than saying all cops are bastards in the context of socialist cops. I countered that such thinking is unreasoned and ridiculous.
The fact is AES nations have historically and to this day by necessity maintain surveillance of liberals and counter-revolutionaries. If you think that’s not a threat you haven’t paid attention to what happened to the Soviet Union and Xi’s anti-corruption drive in China. And frankly if you think it is not a paramount concern of all Marxists everywhere, especially those who may have to live through a revolution and securing that revolution afterwords then we must pray that you and most others learn because if not any such revolution would be lost.
If you are a good Marxist you will snitch. It’s called accountability. It’s called living in a society with an emphasis not on maximum individual rights even to the detriment of others but a balance with the collective good. If you have or hold anti-social tendencies, especially of the anti-communist to the point of lying variety, expect to suffer from it, expect to be held to account.
Words and deeds do harm. Every voice raised with these lies by people like her has the potential to convince a potential western proletariat ally that no, we the Marxists are wrong, that a Chinese person wouldn’t lie, that communism is evil and bad, that China is evil and bad. Maybe later one of them takes up a gun, they fight communists (in a revolution or in China), they kill several comrades before being killed. All this part and parcel of the conscious actions of this person. Should we not wish for a world where she is held to account at least in a small way to what her actions and lies give rise to? Just because she wasn’t holding the gun? In that line of thinking why hold the western press to account for supplying to ink for the imperialist war machine? Why hold the politicians account who never personally shot and killed anyone just paid for it, ordered it, justified it, gave those listening moral authority and righteousness to do so.
Do you not trust the party? The problem was not people informing the authorities of liberalism. It was the red guards going out and punishing every minor little infraction of it. If they’d quietly taken that down in a file with a reasonable threshold for action there would have been no issue. China has learned and grown and it isn’t nice to insinuate that would be a problem today with a party as advanced in theory as the CPC is.
This is not a matter of someone committing the kinds of minor infractions that people had their lives ruined over in the cultural revolution. This is someone knowing lying about their home country, knowingly spreading falsehoods about the communist party, knowing engaging in rabid anti-communist messaging.
Silly in my opinion to compare these things. But I get not all comparisons can be perfect.
Unpack it comrade. Why are intelligence agencies scary and bad? Because you associate them with CIA and their abuses and anti-communism. But a proletarian intelligence agency is by virtue of its mission and authority it stems from good. Having information on someone is not a bad thing. Most modern sig-int collections intelligence is meta-data. Networks. Knowing who knows who, what times they talk, what their relevant overlap and ideology is. If you see someone who otherwise would be under the radar but they’re associating with people who thanks to work and tips are known to be anti-communists you look a little closer before letting them have power.
I don’t think OP should report this person to the MSS while in the west due to the risks such contact with the MSS brings to them personally.
“Snitching, the highest stage of Marxism.” by darkcalling
Honestly, they’re not totally wrong. The revolution does need to be protected. As I argued above, it’s more a matter of emphasis.
I agree. You can protect it by educating each new generation of people, among other things. Both the Soviet Union and DDR had snitches reporting people to the state, and in both the communist party failed to protect the revolution. Do you want to argue they failed because people didn’t snitch enough? That’d be interesting to see.
Now you get into some very difficult historical territory. The collapse of socialism in the USSR and Europe is a complicated phenomena, and probably no one fully understands it yet.
But yes, I agree it’s generally better to educate people in tandem with raising their living standards. All I want is to point out that there’s nuance, and sometimes ugly things have to be done. The situation that Swinging6917 described is not one of those times.
Like I said, I don’t think you’re wrong in principle, more so in application. The maximalist statement “snitching is wrong” is certainly to be condemned, as one can see from the fact that nobody, whatever their ideology, really holds it. There will always be some crime which people think the authorities should be apprised of. And I appreciate you calling out the anarchist/shitlib mentality that “all cops are bastards” and everywhere to be condemned, regardless of whether they serve capital or (in a socialist society) protect the people.
There does, however, have to be a balance struck between going after counterrevolutionaries, wherever they appear, and a sense of social trust. This is because, as history shows, too great a penetration into society of the security apparatus – and yes, security agencies are a good thing – also tends to undermine social cohesion, almost as much as too little penetration. The great purges in the USSR were necessary. They are also remembered by average Russians, even those who admire (as a whole lot of them do) Stalin as Russia’s greatest leader, as a particularly bad time in Soviet history. You and I and most people on this site are deeply interested in politics, and passionate about fighting injustice, and we like the idea of continued purges, and no counterrevolutionary sentiment being too small to report. Most people, and that includes most workers, are not like that; their interest is mainly in providing for their families, working a fulfilling job, feeling a sense of pride in their country, and having a sense of security in the future. Security agencies not doing their job obviously undermines that sense of security, but so does a situation where everyone feels they can be reported on at any minute. The latter situation does not generally exist in socialist countries, except in times of great crisis (and it is generally better at such times to crack down hard and at once, rather than extending the situation indefinitely as capitalist nations often do); but we always need to beware the ultra-leftist sentiment that could lead us there.
And speaking of avoiding ultra-leftism: national matters should generally stay national. Assume the MSS knows about this person if she is a threat, and that they will take the appropriate action. To say the a westerner should be involved in the situation to the same degree Chinese citizens are is to fall, in a minor way, into the trap of Trotskyism which states that the proletarian revolution is international in both content and form. As we know from Stalin, the revolution is socialist (therefore international) in content, but national in form.