pandapoo

Is your argument that multiple empires have tried bombing Afghanistan into being a civilized country, but by golly, they want to be savages?

Do you maybe want to, and I'm just brainstorming here, play that out in your head a few more times and rethink your response?

I was, and you cited something that is not applicable.

At least, not as it was intended and has been applied. Maybe this will be a precedent setting case, but until then...

Maybe you should read it...

Those are rooted in actions like bombardments of civilian areas e.g. Dresden, Gaza, etc.

Just because an action has collateral damage, does not make it indiscriminate.

Again, it's not like Israel isn't already committing war crimes every day, I'm just not clear if this is one of them.

For example, when the Ukrainian's assassinated the propagandist in St Petersburg at the cafe, there was collateral damage. Still doesn't make it a war crime.

I am not comparing the morality of Ukraine to israel, I'm just giving you relevant example from recent history

Not that Israel needs an excuse to commit a war crimes on any day that ends in Y, but I don't believe this is a violation of the Geneva convention.

It was a mass targeted assassination campaign against an opposition military force structure. I'm not saying it's not a crime, just that I don't believe it's a war crime.

But I'm open to the very real possibility that I am wrong about that. So if I am, can you point me to the article(s) it's in violation of?

I genuinely would like to fill that gap in my knowledge, if it exists.

I imagine that doing research on the fly for a back and forth on CCP governance, forced you to rapidly consume a bunch of half-assed Wikipedia articles, and that flood of new information felt similar to a moving goal post of sorts, but that's in your head.

Regardless, I started, and ended, at the same position... It's the same one that I will lay out one final time: post-Mao, pre-Xi China was not a dictatorship.

From your source:

A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations. Politics in a dictatorship are controlled by a dictator, and they are facilitated through an inner circle of elites that includes advisers, generals, and other high-ranking officials.

Now, you saw the word uniparty on the Wikipedia entry for dictatorships, and assumed that applied to all uniparty government's, but it does not.

Other metrics have to be met before it can be considered a dictatorship, for example the USSR under Stalin was a dictatorship, but not under Gorbachev. The USSR was still a repressive authoritarian one-party state, but Gorbachev was not an unaccountable autocrat without systemic checks or limits on his power.

So, back to China:

Here's a list of Chinese presidents, but you can probably skip down to the 4th Constitution, which is the start of the era you keep bringing up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_China

Notice that these leaders come from competing factions and groups within the CCP, some more conservative, some more liberal, but more importantly, they transition power at regular intervals, well, until Xi.

So you can call them totalitarian technocrats, or authoritarian capitalists, but you can't call them communists, and you definitely cannot call them dictators.

All that aside, I don't know why some factual inaccuracies become commonly believed, but I guess the simple answer would be a lack of education, or interest.

Maybe a better question would be why it is you put so much faith in the average layperson's understanding of subjects such as the history of CCP governance, or the political economies of post-Mao China...?

Edit: this isn't a thesis I'm defending, it's a non-controversial fact, that I resent spending so much effort to reiterate, but that's my fault for engaging.

Imagine that your position is that the Earth is flat, and no matter what I say, you respond by telling me that my thesis regarding a theory of a round earth hasn't been sufficiently argued.

Because that's what's been going on here, you're a flat earther of post-Mao Chinese political theory.

So....you couldn't even be bothered to read more than a few paragraphs?

The Communist Party has long been the ultimate decision maker in China. But after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping and his successors built some checks against excessive power, hoping to avoid a repeat of Mao’s turbulent rule.

The party and government systems worked in tandem. Party leaders often set broad policy, and government ministries and agencies refined and implemented their goals, sending feedback to the leaders.

Dictatorships don't have legal and systemic checks against the autocratic rule, which is why Xi removed them.

You're using a lot of words, but they're based on your lack of understanding post-Mao CCP goverence that Xi upended when he seized power.

But I'm done going back and forth on this. You should feel free to go on believing that I am wrong, and that you are right, because I have no confidence that you would read any dry academic writings on the topic that I respond with, as you couldn't even make it through a few hundred words of a NYT article.

I've already booked my ticket, because I'll be damned if I'll let something as lame as not being a Brazilian citizen, prevent me from casting 1,273 votes for this man, our hero.

Unless it comes out that he was with Bolsanro during his infamous visit to the brothel full of underage Venezuelan girls...

But anything short of that, I stand with him.

Your first link shows exactly why the CCP wasn't a dictatorship in the era the preceded Xi, and your second link has nothing to do with that era at all.

I have an academic background in this field, so the idea that my understanding is based on reading a single sentence, or a few Wikipedia entries, is amusing.

Here's a nice simple infographic article that would be a good starting point before jumping into any dry academic readings.

I know it's cliche, but I really think you need to go look up the the definition of dictator.

Or, crack a political science 101 book and skip right to the section on political systems.

Or maybe your misunderstanding is just a lack of knowledge of how China's government structure functioned post-Mao, pre-Xi.

Whatever the reason, I think you need to do a little bit of reading, but it's not like you're alone in this misconception so I don't mean this as an insult.

Words have meanings, and the word you're looking for is authoritarian, but that doesn't mean it was a dictatorship.

They were a one party system, that had regularly transitioned power at scheduled intervals for decades. Which means they were not a dictatorship, until Xi stopped those transitions of power.

The modern context of Japanese and Chinese expansionism in this particular area is similar in some ways, but very different in other ways.

Regardless, I agree that China doesn't have the legal right to seize territory, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't understand their perspective.

It also doesn't make the idiotic reductionist take that this is all "capitalism", any less idiotic.

All that said, I also understand that great powers tend to only talk about international law when they are applying it to countries they view as beneath them, or inferior.

In this case, China is coming into its own as a regional hegemon, assuming their relatively new status as an outright dictatorship doesn't fuck that up. To do that, it has to push out American naval power, there's no alternative for them.

So, if Xi's one man politburo figures out how to walk and chew gum, while also driving a successful regional expansion, I don't think yours, or my, quibbles about international law will make much difference.

Luckily, whether he's capable of juggling all that successfully, is still an open question with a lot of doubt.

That statement is so incredibly wrong in this particular context that it's actually impressive.

Well, maybe not impressive, but it does show off your ability to speak authoritatively on a topic that you know absolutely nothing about, except of course for your firm conviction that capitalism is clearly the only thing motivating it all.