I know of at least one Hexbear who has moved to China.

Allow me to make an analogy: Millions of left-liberals in the United States hold up Canada as a model country that they would like to live in, yet comparatively few (perhaps 1 in 1000) ever make the move.

Does that prove that those liberals are insincere in their admiration, that they secretly consider Canada to be a “shithole” country and only pretend otherwise for the sake of political posturing? No! It’s because permanently immigrating to any country is extremely difficult at best, and frequently impossible.

Countries do not just give out citizenship to people who ask politely. It usually requires some kind of employer sponsorship. Think of the millions of people who literally live in the United States right now and want citizenship but can’t get it.

Now take all of those difficulties involved in a move across the border to Canada and multiply them by at least two, and you have some idea of the practical barriers to moving to a place like China, a country much farther away with a much different language which gives out fewer employer sponsorships.

You can find more answers in our recent discussion of the topic here.

You know nothing about us

So you don’t think taking away someone’s bank account for their comments counts as suppressing free speech? Do you even read what you type?

Censorship? Like when the authoritarian Western regimes and corporations ban all Russian and Chinese journalism?

“bUt ThAt’S dIsInfOrMaTiOn!”

And that’s exactly what they say of American news media propaganda!

I think Petterson’s succinct definition is one of the best ones I’ve encountered, but the one in that study isn’t too bad—it’s certainly better than Wikipedia’s. I take issue with just two of the terms:

Stalinist is just a pejorative for Marxist-Leninist, and authoritarianism is a practically useless word that’s based purely on one’s ideology.

All states are authoritarian because they have monopolies on the use of violence. Liberals don’t view the routine weaponization of the bourgeois state against poor people as authoritarianism, but will instantly decry the reverse as such. Thus, a billionaire landlord evicting a single mother isn’t characterized as authoritarian, but Maoists giving landlords the boot is. Germany seizing the bank accounts of critics of Israel (as happened recently) isn’t labeled authoritarian, but the Stasi doing the same to corrupt capitalists in East Germany was.

Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [87] provides a succinct description of tankies:

Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.06981