this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Socialism dies as soon as a single person becomes its absolute leader. From there, it is just a walk toward authoritarism.
I agree kinda, I don’t think Mao weaseled his way to becoming an absolute leader, more like history created the specific circumstances that lead to him in that position and the historical situation of the 20th century created all these leaders. We like to pretend that the west didn’t have these single person political leaders, but honestly what the fuck was Henry Kissinger or FDR? These figures exist all over 20th century history most countries literally had their leader.
Maos biggest mistake was not absolving himself of responsibility and power because guess what those things are fucking awesome and most humans who have responsibility and power love it and never want to give that shit up just look at old people.
I think that this video gave me the best insight into how China works nowadays, and I suspect things weren't entirely dissimilar in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1TeeIG6Uaw I also looked into things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People%27s_Congress and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Congress_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party after starting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China and it seems that things are pretty complicated. For example: Due to the temporary nature of the plenary sessions, most of NPC's power is delegated to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPCSC), which consists of about 170 legislators and meets in continuous bi-monthly sessions, when its parent NPC is not in session.
this is actually a surprisingly good overview from a western publication https://www.noemamag.com/what-the-west-misunderstands-about-power-in-china/
this is also a great resource for understanding how the government is structured https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html
Cool thanks I’ll check it out.