Which features of the Chinese communist regime are reminiscent of the previous dynasties?

I often hear the phrase "communist China isn't that different from the previous Chinese dynasties". So I want your ask you which features of the current regime are similar to how things were before, and if you think there are some intrinsic characteristics of Chinese society that would always generate similar results, despite ideological differences.
 
Well, the post Mao era PRC tries it's best to not fuck up in terms of providing a stable regime over the country, and deriving their continuous rule from that. Although it's often compared to the ancient "mandate of heaven", but you gotta wonder, isn't that the point of most governments? To provide tolerable conditions for the people within their borders? Or suffer backlash from those people if things has gone bad enough...
 
There are some aspects that are the same, mostly owing to geography and demography (China is still China whether red or otherwise), as well as plain old sentiment. Mao must have felt like the emperor of a new dynasty when he gave that speech in Beijing in 1949 as his forces were sweeping aside the KMT armies. So many of the levers of power are going to function in classic imperial fashion. You're going to have the typical Chinese political features of top-down directives, heavy reliance on informal "guanxi" connections and factional interests in tandem to rule of law, and so on, things that have been around since at least the time of the First Emperor.

What people don't get, or ignore, is that there are massive differences between communist China, republican China, HK/Taiwanese China, and imperial China in its various iterations, despite the levers of power functioning rather similarly in all cases on account of the people themselves being Chinese. The differences arise from the ideology and values espoused by different regimes.

The CCP at its core is not content with just running a country. Its ideological roots are in revolutionary struggle and mass mobilization with an elite vanguard at the helm. Whether it uses planned economics or market economics, the underlying political agenda is the same: to have the CCP maintain control over society, gain greater control over society, and expand its control beyond what it already controls. The Party is structured in such a way that incentivizes its leaders to continue pursuing its Marxist-Leninist program of power maximization. Pretty much every social group in China has at one point or another become a direct target of the CCP's political campaigns: religions, businessmen, landowners, peasants, the Party bureaucracy, students, academics, cultural elites, ethnic minorities.

Compare this with various imperial dynasties which were more interested in maintaining the authority of the imperial family, coping with barbarian invaders or natural disasters, or finding the best spiritual-philosophical system to keep elite society in harmony. Or the republican system's Three Principles of the People, which mixed the European ideal of a national welfare state with American concepts of representative government and liberty. Despite several decades of military dictatorship, the KMT continued espousing these principles, rather than the CCP's class struggle, and eventually let Taiwan transition to the democracy they were supposed to have in the first place. In Hong Kong, they had no democracy, but enjoy many rights under the robust British legal system.

If you look at these systems, I'm sure you can find aspects of imperial rule and traditional social hierarchy in all of them because they are all Chinese. But the outcomes of each were totally different.
 

I just have two minor bones to pick (well, the first wasn't against you, but rather in general):

One, it's a bit oversimplified to say "resemblance to previous dynasties" as if Imperial China was and had ever been the same from the First Emperor to the (currently) Last. Even dividing it into different stages (Xia-Shang-Zhou as "Bronze Age China", Qin-Han as "Ancient/Antiquity China", Wei/Jin-Noth/South Divide-Tang as "Medieval China", Song-Yuan-Ming-Qing as "Late China") would be something of a simplification already. Anything more would require at least one degree on the actual subject, so I'm not exactly saying you need to go into that sort of details. Just that you might want to ask "which periods does modern China resemble and why" instead.

Two, the common "consensus" among educated Hokkien Taiwanese is that Three Principles of the People is a pile of unadulterated shit made up by our "glorious" Father of the Nation, probably while high. Democratization in Taiwan had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nothing that has happened - political systems of the Republic, cliques and faction formations in Taiwan under Nationalist rule, etc. - has ever had anything whatsoever to do with the Three Principles.
Well, no, that isn't quite correct. You see, ever single child, myself included, had to memorize Three Principles of the People as a school subject and is physically beaten (as with all other subjects) if we fail, so in that sense probably a lot of things, indirectly, had to do with Three Principles.

......OK, that was just empty and biased complaint. I just want it to be known that a lot of us Taiwanese hate Three Principles with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. It's a minor miracle we didn't go communist just out of spite for it. Just kidding though after all the brainwashing in high school nobody even knows what's a communism.

But also to be serious I really don't think Three Principles actually ever mattered to anyone. Least of all Sun Yat-Sen himself. But maybe I'm just cynical.
 
I just have two minor bones to pick (well, the first wasn't against you, but rather in general):

One, it's a bit oversimplified to say "resemblance to previous dynasties" as if Imperial China was and had ever been the same from the First Emperor to the (currently) Last. Even dividing it into different stages (Xia-Shang-Zhou as "Bronze Age China", Qin-Han as "Ancient/Antiquity China", Wei/Jin-Noth/South Divide-Tang as "Medieval China", Song-Yuan-Ming-Qing as "Late China") would be something of a simplification already. Anything more would require at least one degree on the actual subject, so I'm not exactly saying you need to go into that sort of details. Just that you might want to ask "which periods does modern China resemble and why" instead.
I've mentioned "imperial China in its various iterations." There have been some pretty nasty imperial regimes, and some relatively good ones. Despite the best efforts of pseudo-intellectual wumaos to prove that communism has been a part of the Chinese tradition since ancient times (TM), no dynasty has come close to successfully implementing as totalitarian an ideology as Marxism-Leninism.

Two, the common "consensus" among educated Hokkien Taiwanese is that Three Principles of the People is a pile of unadulterated shit made up by our "glorious" Father of the Nation, probably while high. Democratization in Taiwan had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nothing that has happened - political systems of the Republic, cliques and faction formations in Taiwan under Nationalist rule, etc. - has ever had anything whatsoever to do with the Three Principles.
Well, no, that isn't quite correct. You see, ever single child, myself included, had to memorize Three Principles of the People as a school subject and is physically beaten (as with all other subjects) if we fail, so in that sense probably a lot of things, indirectly, had to do with Three Principles.
The Three Principles of the People being the formally espoused ideology is significant for the simple fact that communism/imperial rule/etc. did not occupy that position.

I understand the sentiments of the Taiwanese who justifiably hate the KMT for their repressions and hypocrisy. I get that a lot of people would like to point at both the KMT and CCP and shout "dictatorships run by evil mainland Chinese! Bad!" I'm saying, the differences between the two regimes are massive. Not only I say this. Frank Dikötter, known for his social histories of the PRC, wrote a 100-page summary of developments in republican -era China, showing that despite the KMT's authoritarianism, many aspects of liberal society, such as free markets, technological innovation, international exchanges, NGOs, and independent media were all developing during that time. All of that would be crushed by the CCP. Even the KMT itself tolerated a good deal of political dissent and local autonomy, though whether that's because it didn't have the power to control that much or due to its own goodwill is obviously a matter of debate.

My feeling is, the KMT simply did not have the requisite ideology to exert the level of political and social control attained by the CCP using Marxism-Leninism. This is also reflected in Taiwan's modern history, where the KMT eventually gave up power after a long period of monotonous "paternal autocracy" (to use a term from Hearts of Iron), instead of finding new and inventive ways to continue the political cult.

Hence, I say it's wrong to claim that the CCP's rule is just par the course for Chinese history just because Chinese history is full of "paternal autocrats."
 

I still agree with the majority of what you wrote; to be honest, I replied at first 90% out of sheer spite for Three Principles. The other 10% was me wondering since when it's a serious thing now.

I feel your comparison between the Communists and the Nationalists are quite good, but I'm personally not so sure if ideology's behind all of these differences. It's a minor quibble, anyway - ideology is almost certainly a central part of why the two parties diverged as greatly as they did, when back in the 1920s (and still, to some extent, all the way to today) they're both sending people to USSR for training and doing other things that make them look really similar.

(To be honest, saying Communists are worse than Nationalists will probably continue to be unpopular in Taiwan for the near future for obvious reasons, but that's no reason not to see it for the bias it is.)

I admit, though, there's just some......comfort, in proposing the idea that paternal authoritarianism has been in China for 5,000* years and might be for another five millennia. The intellectual equivalent of a comfort blanket, probably. Which does mean we should try ditch it whenever possible, yes, but still.

PS: I also feel it's rather limited to just compare the Communists, the Nationalists, and the various dynasties of China just on the single axis of how bad/authoritarian they are, but I also have to admit limiting comparisons to just one dimension does make things somewhat more clarified.
 
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