Reddit reviews Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China

> If Ensnaring Tigers and Swatting Flies even partially cleans up the beaurocracy, then his five years was worth it. China will not move forward with corrupt institutions.

How many SOEs has the corruption campaign gone after? How many princelings has the recent corruption campaign specifically targeted? The answers to these two questions will tell you all you need to know about the intent of this campaign and its effect on China's economic future. In short, the CCP is the corrupt institution.

The CCP has used the campaign to enforce party discipline throughout its ranks as well as target powerful individuals in the private sector and outside of the party. Granted, these powerful individuals in the private sector also serve party interests and their targeting can also act as a tool for factional struggles within the CCP (as was noted in this apt comment from /u/piscator111 regarding the recent arrest of Xiao Jianhua). Corruption cases also occasionally target people high up in the CCP, as was the case with Bo Xilai and his security chief, Zhou Yongkang. But these high profile cases are never existential threats to the CCP and their purpose is not to root out corruption at the highest levels. They serve either to advance the interests of a particular faction or cow powerful individuals in the private sector (Zhou Chengjian and Guo Guangchang).

The iron triangle of the CCP itself, its control of the state banks, and its controlling interests in the SOEs will continue to stymie meaningful economic reform. This is readily apparent when observing the recent actions targeted at the shadow banking sector (which under normal circumstances would be a good thing), an industry which sprang up precisely because of the state banks' preference to issue credit to SOEs over private entities (third bullet point on first page). Instead of addressing the central problem, the SOEs disproportionate role in the Chinese economy, the CCP will either implement stop-gap measures or address the consequences of this persistent problem with measures that do not meaningfully threaten its economic power base.

The CCP is not primarily interested in China's overall economic health or the well-being of the Chinese people. These are secondary to its overarching interest: maintaining control. If the long-term economic health of the country requires the CCP to loosen its control over the economy (and thus loosen its overall control), it will opt not to do so while implementing other measures to mitigate the potential risks of long-term economic stagnation. This includes but is not limited to information control, ethnic nationalism, and economic interference.

This all leads to one realistic conclusion: China's long-term success cannot be attained while the CCP remains in power. I have no idea how the CCP would be "removed" and I'm not saying that its removal would be all peaches and cream, but I cannot imagine China realizing its full potential (or even a good portion of it) without taking the CCP out of the picture. Of course, Chinese people would look at this statement and accuse me of trying to weaken China, and I really can't blame them. I would do the same if I were in their position. The removal of the CCP would be akin to removing a brain tumor and China would be greatly weakened afterward. No doubt that China's geopolitical competitors (namely the U.S. and Russia) would try to take advantage of this situation. However, letting the CCP maintain its grip on China will continue to handicap China's ultimate potential.

To use a quote from your other comment:

> If you make it to the top of all the government testing, not only are you politically savvy, you are fiercely intelligent.

There is one more crucial aspect to take into consideration, here: individuals who make it to the top of the CCP have also had absolute loyalty to the party ingrained into their consciousness to the extent that it is utterly internalized and pervades their entire decision-making process. They are as much victims of their own control as are the people of China. There is a book on this psychology, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism that explores this thought process, although it is very out-of-date and focuses on a period where the CCP's control mechanisms were far more barbaric and heavy-handed.

This is all obvious when you look at the CCP not as a government institution but rather as a Marxist-Leninist organization with unchallenged control over the China. And no, I'm not talking about "communism"; I'm talking about the driving political philosophy behind the CCP.

To expand on the book mention, I am of the opinion that while the techniques and policies that took place back in mid-20th century China have fallen out of practice, they have been replaced by more advanced, subtle alternatives that still achieve the same effect: loyalty (in the case of party members) or obedience (in the case of non-party members) to the CCP. The Anaconda in the Chandelier is a great essay on modern manifestations of this concept.

Look up "exposure therapy," which has been around for 40 years, at least and IS a "legitimate" form of psychotherapeutic processing.

BUT... what's described in the article is more like what R. J. Lifton wrote about (in exhaustive detail) in the 1961 classic, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism about the "re-education" process in Red China in the early 1950s.

(Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai & #2 man to Mao Zedong for almost 50 years was himself subjected to "the process" on several occasions from the 1920s in Paris to the 1970s in Beijing. And now, it looks like current ChiCom Party Chairman Xi Jinping is bringing it back.)

Does it appear that L. Ron Hubbard might have been hip to what was going on there at that time or perhaps even in the 1920s and 1930s in Leninist "rehabilitation" programs in the Soviet Union? And that later gurus like Werner Erhard and Keith Raniere have "borrowed" it from Hubbard?

To me, anyway, the answer to both questions is, "Yes, indeed." It's what the "true-believing" cult member runs into when he moves into the fifth to eighth levels of A 10-Level Pyramid Model & Psychodynamics of Cult Organization.

>You can't No True Scotsman what represents the political Left Wing in this country, just because it doesn't fit your ideal of what "left" actually is or means.

This isn't No True Scotsman, this is the Overton Window. The political left wing has no representation in this country worth speaking of, as should have been made resoundingly obvious by DWS and the rest of the DNC having their thumb on the scale for Clinton during the primary. As long as the Democrats remain a center-right party that would rather lose an election than nominate a Democratic Socialist, describing them as "The Left" in any context other than their relative orientation to the far-Right Republicans will remain misleading.

>It's known as the left wing.

"Americans" know it as the left wing, but even Americans know that their "left wing" isn't even left-of-center.

>That's like someone else saying that The Right™ isn't really The Right™, since it's not full-blown national socialism

Have you not been watching the Trump election coverage lately? =3

>But, to add, it's not that I disagree with you, and it's really the reason I added the ™ to the end - to illustrate that it is more of a slogan or a brand-name than an actual representation of an ideology.

I get that, and I really appreciate the attempt to try and take back the nomenclature. Guess Poe's Law makes a fool out of me this time.

>They have enough in common, and certainly where it counts: intense, focused hatred of America, both as a concept and as a thing that exists, and hatred of what is currently the majority population of America, as if we're to blame for all the ills of the world.

See, it's comments like these that make me think that perhaps you really were sincere when you chose to describe The Other as "The Left™".

"They just hate America" is one of those thought-terminating clichés straight out of Robert Jay Lifton's 1961 text on the psychology of Chinese propaganda and brainwashing techniques:

>>The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

You're using the same language to describe Progressives, Liberals, Communists, and Anarchists as the American State used to describe the "Terrorists" from Saudi Arabia who gave us the excuse we needed invade Afghanistan and Iraq back in 2001. Not because it was true, but because anyone trying to actually understand their motivation runs the risk of developing empathy for those who have been declared "the enemy".

After all, wouldn't you consider violent retribution towards a distant foreign power who persistently meddled in your affairs (including overthrowing your democratically-elected government to install a puppet dictatorship) in order to foster a more favorable business environment for themselves to be justified?

>Not that I don't agree with your sentiment, but I think the last thing that's needed is another label to slap on a group of people

"Neoliberal" is not a new label, the term has been used to describe "Third-way Democrats" like the Clintons since the 1980's.

>>Marxist Libertarian

> Pick one.

I did.

>I don't see any valid way to reconcile those two ideologies without compromising and completely undermining both.

Marxist Libertarianism is a branch of Left-Communism that emphasizes the anti-authoritarian aspects of Classical Marxism. To be fair, though, I wouldn't expect that people from post-McCarthyism America would understand the difference between Marx's philosophy and those who abused it to justify a centralized command economy.