yunqihao [comrade/them]

It seemed wildly poor form to gift tobacco obviously.

Culture clash will do that tobacco is still a huge part of Chinese tradition and life but it is changing with each year the rate of smoking decreasing as younger people are less and less interested. Basically none of the younger guys at my work smoke and smoking was never really big amongst women.

The gift thing is that apparently tobacco is considered a respectful and universal gift

High quality (premium) cigarettes are THE gift especially for major events (usually weddings). 中华, 南京, 黄鹤楼, 芙蓉王 being some of the most popular brands. I would genuinely not believe someone if they said they went to a wedding or similar event in China and weren’t offered/gifted at least one pack.

Edit: Other gifts are common too red packets, premium alcohol, fruit, premium tea and others but cigarettes are definitely one of the most common.

The 2024 Chinese CDC Tobacco survey findings:

Current Smoking Rate: The current smoking rate among people aged 15 and above in China is 23.2%, with men (43.9%) higher than women (1.8%), and rural areas (24.9%) higher than urban areas (20.9%). Compared to 2022, the current smoking rate has decreased by 0.9 percentage points, with a decrease of 1.4 percentage points for men and 2.1 percentage points for urban areas. (Figures 1-3)

Tobacco Control Information Promotion: 63.9% of respondents had seen tobacco control information in the past 30 days, with males (65.9%) higher than females (61.6%), urban areas (68.0%) higher than rural areas (60.6%), and the 15-24 age group (78.2%) higher than other age groups. The proportion of respondents who had seen tobacco control information online in the past 30 days was 40.1%, an increase of 5.1 percentage points compared to 2022. Urban areas (43.4%) were higher than rural areas (37.6%), and the 15-24 age group (64.6%) was higher than other age groups. (Figures 4-5)

And more interesting info in the full pdf:

The Findings PDF

finally managed to push through some reform doesn’t change the fact he was not able to for years, despite a concerted effort

The reforms were instituted in 2015? In 2015, China amended the Advertising Law to prohibit the distribution of tobacco advertising, while also initiating waves of tobacco control media campaigns. President Xi became president in 2013. 2 years. It took 2 years from him becoming president to this reform becoming law. Why are you doubling down so hard when you clearly are wrong? Did you not bother to read the link?

Also not to mind in 2013 there were already crackdowns on the tobacco industry. 评领导干部公共场所带头禁烟：为中国控烟行动破冰

Edit:

Another one from 2014 this time.

2014 total ban on smoking anywhere on school grounds and an increase on education put towards the harms of smoking

It’s fake 牡丹 don’t make packs with Marx on them. Also China tobacco is state owned.

The comment itself is unfortunately lost but the important bits can be picked up from context surrounding it.

https://hexbear.net/comment/7342449

Alapakala was trolling on !memes@lemmy.ml saying things like kittenzrulz was doing apolgia for “Salvador Allende’s genocide(whatever the fuck that means)” and is now parading around crashing out about being banned for a week.

What the fuck are you talking about?

You were banned for spouting incoherent nonsense about Salvador Allende committing genocide and other such clear trolling bullshit.

There was no spin they just stated it as a genocide being denied and moved on. A very strange pathetic person it seems.

The level of pathetic most liberals and “anarchists” strive to be is quite impressive.

But genocide apologetics nonetheless.

You haven’t managed to name a single genocide they did anything even approaching apologetics towards not to mind denial. Genuinely what the fuck are you talking about in this thread?

Salvador Allende’s genocide

They didn’t say they were a reactionary just that they have aligned with their side in this matter. Subtle but important difference.

I’m going to try to reset the tone and be clearer and without escalating this further.

I don’t support the Russian state, its oligarchs, or its internal politics. I’m Chinese, and my position is not based on liking or defending Russia. The issue is methodological. Disliking a government does not mean we can abandon serious analysis and replace it with moral labeling. Saying “this state is bad” is not the same thing as explaining how global power actually works.

I accept that I responded sharply at points. That said, the conversation deteriorated because any structural analysis I raised was immediately treated as propaganda or bootlicking. That reaction reflects a very common Western tendency to view people from the periphery as illegitimate speakers unless we repeat liberal conclusions. That dynamic matters, because it shuts down discussion before it even begins.

On China specifically: calling it “state capitalism” as a dismissal misunderstands Marxist theory. Lenin was explicit that state capitalism under proletarian political control is a necessary transitional stage in underdeveloped conditions. China has contradictions and real internal problems, but those are not the subject here. The discussion began with your claim that Russia is responsible for the rise of European fascism. Constantly shifting the debate to China avoids addressing that claim directly.

Imperialism is not defined simply by warfare, territorial disputes, or influence. It is a system of global capital accumulation based on monopoly finance, reserve currency power, control of trade routes, sanctions, debt regimes, and international institutions. The US, EU, NATO, and Five Eyes bloc dominate these structures. They can impose structural adjustment, control global payments, freeze assets worldwide, and extract surplus value permanently from the periphery. Russia and China cannot do this. They do not control the IMF, World Bank, SWIFT, global shipping insurance, or the world’s reserve currency. This is a structural distinction, not a moral defense of any state.

Yes, Russia operates regionally. Yes, it funds political actors abroad. That is not disputed. What is disputed is causality. Fascism does not originate from foreign funding. It arises from capitalist crisis. Austerity, privatization, labor precarity, housing collapse, and the betrayal of social democracy create the mass base for reaction. External funding can intensify these contradictions, but it cannot create them. Fuel is not the same thing as ignition.

If foreign money were the cause, Europe would not have produced fascist movements long before Putin, long before modern Russia, and long before 2014. European fascism is not imported. It is homegrown, rooted in European capitalism itself.

I will reiterate our disagreement is therefore not about whether Russia engages in harmful behavior which was never in question. It is about analytical framework. You approach politics through liberal moral reasoning focused on bad actors and state behavior. I approach it through dialectical materialism, focusing on systems, class relations, and global hierarchy.

That is the core issue.

Your response perfectly demonstrates why this conversation is going nowhere. You are arguing in bad faith, constantly negging, and acting like European chauvinist intellectual royalty while showing a complete lack of understanding of imperialism, class, or political economy. You misrepresent my arguments at every turn, expand the scope endlessly to avoid engaging the core issues, and reduce structural analysis to moral outrage and citations.

You insist that Russian funding of far-right groups “proves” something, but you cannot distinguish secondary influence from primary causation. Fascism did not emerge because Russia wrote checks; it emerges from capitalist crisis, austerity, precarity, and social-democratic betrayal. You treat explanation as denial and causation as endorsement, which is a methodological failure, not a factual dispute. Providing links and photos does not replace analysis. Your reliance on these citations shows you mistake evidence for explanation.

Your definition of imperialism is liberal and superficial. Quoting Britannica and reducing it to military aggression, territorial expansion, or cultural influence completely misses the Marxist point: imperialism is structural, rooted in finance, unequal exchange, debt, and institutional control. Russia may act regionally, but it does not control global finance, the reserve currency, or systemic mechanisms of exploitation. Flattening all actors into moral equivalence erases hierarchy and avoids engaging the real causes of global inequality.

You also misinterpret Eastern Europe’s relative growth as a result of democracy or labor law respect, ignoring the fact that integration into EU labor chains relies on exploitation elsewhere Africa, Latin America, and the periphery pay the cost. You conflate comparative development with justice or institutional success. Similarly, expanding the discussion to China, NATO, the USSR, or historical 1939 events is a constant red herring designed to distract from the structural argument about capitalism, class, and imperialism.

You personalize structural phenomena, calling out oligarchs and naming small groups while refusing to address the system that produces them. You repeatedly accuse me of lying, being ad personam, or defending Russia, which is projection. You are emotionally anti-imperialist but analytically liberal: you moralize actors and events while refusing to analyze class relations, capital accumulation, and systemic causation. That is why your arguments collapse into moral equivalence, citation lists, and endless historical trivia.

A third party reading this should understand the real divide here: I explain why crises, fascism, and reaction emerge from capitalism itself. You obsess over who is bad and who “funded” what, never grappling with the system that shapes outcomes. That is the fundamental difference between liberal moralism and dialectical materialism, and until that is acknowledged, no amount of links, indignation, or historical examples will get beyond talking past each other.

This reply perfectly demonstrates the problem. You do not actually understand imperialism, so every time the argument moves into political economy you retreat into vibes, NGO articles, and moral equivalence.

You keep flooding links about Russia funding far-right groups as if anyone denied that. No one did. The point you keep dodging is causality. Funding does not create fascism. It exploits conditions that already exist. Capitalist crisis creates fascism. Foreign money only rides the wave. You are confusing acceleration with origin.

If Russian money alone created fascism, then far-right movements would not have existed before 2014. They did. They existed long before Putin was president. They surged hardest after austerity, privatization, housing collapse, labor precarity, and social-democratic betrayal. That is material causation. Your articles do not refute that.

What you are doing is substituting investigation with courtroom rhetoric. “Here are some links” is not analysis.

You still do not understand what imperialism is.

Imperialism is not “any country with power.” It is a system of global capital accumulation where monopoly finance capital extracts surplus value from the periphery through unequal exchange, debt regimes, trade control, sanctions, and military enforcement. Lenin defined this over 100 years ago. Russia does not control global finance, shipping lanes, reserve currency, payment systems, or international lending institutions. The US and EU do.

That is why Russia can act regionally but not systemically.

That is why Russia cannot impose structural adjustment on Africa or Latin America.

That is why Russia cannot sanction half the planet.

That is why Russia cannot print the world’s money.

Calling every state “equally imperialist” is not anti-imperialism. It is analytical laziness that flattens reality until power disappears.

You accuse me of “skipping” China and the USSR in Africa. Again, you do not understand exploitation. Building infrastructure, providing loans without regime change, and exchanging commodities is not the same as imperial extraction. Unequal exchange means extracting surplus value through pricing power and financial domination. China gains commodities. The West gains permanent dependency. These are not the same relationships.

You keep repeating that Eastern Europe is richer now. Yes. Because you became part of the imperial core’s labor chain. Cheap labor, subcontracting, offshoring, and EU capital inflows integrated Poland upward while Africa and Latin America were pushed further down. Someone always pays. Your growth did not come from “democracy.” It came from position in the global hierarchy.

That is exactly what you refuse to confront.

You talk endlessly about oligarchs but refuse to name the system that produces them. Oligarchy is not a personality defect. It is the inevitable outcome of capital accumulation. That is why oligarchs exist everywhere capitalism exists, including Norway, including Germany, including the US.

Calling China “state capitalism” while praising Nordic capitalism just reveals which ruling class you emotionally trust.

Your hatred of “authoritarianism” is not political. It is aesthetic. You dislike governments that look rough while tolerating governments that politely manage exploitation.

You claim social democracy is closer to socialism. This is historically false. Social democracy preserved capitalism by pacifying labor while imperial extraction funded concessions. When that extraction weakened, social democracy collapsed and immediately shifted right. That is not socialism in transition. That is capitalism in disguise.

This is why social democrats sided with fascists against communists in Germany. This is why they crushed revolutionary workers repeatedly. This is why they manage austerity today. Not accident. Function.

You keep shouting “strawman” because you cannot answer structure with intention. Materialism does not care what you personally support. It examines what systems do.

You are emotionally anti-imperialist but analytically liberal.

You oppose empire morally while repeating its framework intellectually.

You believe imperialism is bad but refuse to analyze who runs the world economy.

You want socialism but reject every historical attempt because it was “authoritarian,” while defending systems that kill millions quietly through debt, sanctions, poverty, and privatized healthcare.

That contradiction is not incidental. It is social-democratic ideology.

You are angry at capitalism’s outcomes while defending its global architecture.

Until you stop replacing class relations with morality and geopolitics with headlines, you will keep mistaking symptoms for causes.

That is why you think Russia explains fascism.

It does not.

Capitalism does.

You are a child who lacks any understanding of the world beyond vibes if you don’t want to be called a liberal try moving beyond being one first before throwing a tantrum at it being pointed out.

I took some time to cool down despite your smug arrogance really pushing my buttons and realized something. We are approaching this from completely different frameworks. You are arguing from a liberal moral viewpoint that looks for bad actors, foreign interference, and individual state behavior. I am using a dialectical materialist analysis that looks at systems, class relations, and material causation. You focus on who funds what; I focus on why those movements gain mass support in the first place. You treat propaganda and foreign money as the source of fascism, while I see them as secondary factors that exploit conditions created by capitalist crisis. You define imperialism as any powerful country acting aggressively; I define it as a structured system of global capital domination based on finance control, unequal exchange, debt, and institutions. Because of this, you reduce politics to morality and geopolitics, while I analyze political economy and class power. Until that difference is acknowledged, we are not disagreeing on facts but talking past each other.

Just to clarify a few thing I don’t support Russia beyond them a pole against us imperialism at this current time. I also never claimed they were progressive please stop strawmanning me you shitlib loser and try engage with what I’m actually saying.

All that being said, you are reciting liberal mythology and pretending it has any weight as serious analysis. “Russian propaganda” is doing all the intellectual labor for you. You invoke it whenever reality contradicts the story you were taught. It just goes to show how deeply invested in western chauvanism you are. You keep pretending the West is some fellow victim of neoliberalism alongside Russia. That is absurd. Western Europe and the US were not passive sufferers. They were the architects and beneficiaries of neoliberalism. IMF structural adjustment, World Bank debt traps, privatization schemes, EU accession shocks, and global financial domination were imposed by Western capital on the rest of the world. Russia and Eastern Europe were looted. The Global South was super exploited. Western corporations made record profits. Your welfare states did not fall from the sky because “democracy was chosen.” They were built on imperial extraction. Western Europe funded its middle class through the super exploitation of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the periphery. Cheap resources, stolen labor, unequal exchange, and military domination paid for your social benefits. When that imperial margin began shrinking, austerity became the name of the game. That alone proves it was never moral capitalism. It was imperial rent-sharing. Social democracy that you seem to hold in such high regard is not socialism. It is capitalism bribing one section of workers with wealth extracted from the rest of the world. That is why your welfare collapsed the moment the USSR fell and anti-imperialist movements were crushed. The money stopped flowing. So the mask came off. You keep saying oligarchs controlling society leads to collapse. Correct. That is capitalism. Not “Russian authoritarian culture.” Capital accumulation produces oligarchy everywhere. The US has oligarchs. Germany has oligarchs. Poland has oligarchs. Elections do not remove them because capital owns the economy before voting even begins. Calling Western capitalism “democracy” and Eastern capitalism “authoritarianism” is childish. You talk about minorities as if hatred originates from Russian propaganda. No. Reaction grows when material security collapses. People turn toward nationalism when housing, wages, healthcare, and stability disappear. Liberal identity rhetoric cannot substitute for bread. When capitalism fails to reproduce life, fascism appears. This is basic historical materialism. You also keep pretending Russia is some unique imperial monster trying to resurrect the tsar. Meanwhile the US maintains 800 military bases, sanctions half the planet, invades countries openly, and dictates economic policy across continents. But somehow Russia is the singular threat to world stability. That belief did not come from analysis. It came from Western media saturation. You are angry at oligarchs yet defend the system that produces them. You want revolution in Russia while defending the same capitalist structure in Europe that would crush such a revolution instantly if it ever threatened property relations. That contradiction is not accidental. It is social democracy. Social democracy is not the alternative to fascism. It is its moderate wing. It preserves capitalism during stability and collapses into repression when crisis returns. Historically, social democrats disarmed the working class, defended private property, and handed power to fascists rather than allow socialist transformation. Germany already taught this lesson once. You are not describing material reality. You are repeating the moral language of the empire. You replaced dialectical materialism with NATO talking points and think that makes you progressive. The far right is not rising because Russians whispered in Europe’s ear. It is rising because capitalism is decaying, imperial privilege is shrinking, and liberalism has nothing left to offer but blame. Until you confront that, you will keep chasing villains abroad while fascism grows at home.

You are replacing real analysis with a boogeyman handed to you by Western media. That is the core problem here. The far right in Europe is not the result of Russian influence. It is the direct outcome of decades of neoliberal restructuring. Deindustrialization wiped out working class jobs. Austerity destroyed social services. Housing became financialized. Wages stagnated while productivity rose. Social democracy collapsed after fully integrating into neoliberal capitalism. When liberal parties administer capitalist crisis, fascists fill the vacuum. That is not theory. That is observable history. The EU itself is a machine for producing reaction. It enforces privatization, bans state planning, attacks labor unions, suppresses national development, and subordinates weaker economies to German and French capital. Greece was economically strangled in full public view. Southern and Eastern Europe were reduced to cheap labor pools. This is what radicalized people, not Russian Telegram posts. In the United States the situation is even clearer. The US state has backed far right extremists for nearly a century. Nazi collaborators were absorbed and given prestigious positions through Operation Paperclip. Anti communist fascists were installed across Latin America. Death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala were trained by the US. Apartheid South Africa was supported until the very end. The Mujahideen were funded and armed, directly creating modern jihadism. None of this was hidden. It was official policy. NATO itself was built by integrating former fascists across Europe as long as they were anti communist. This is documented history. The so called liberal order has never opposed fascism. It opposes threats to capital. When fascists serve capital, they are tolerated or funded. Even today the West openly arms far right formations when geopolitically useful. Ukraine is the most obvious example, where ultra nationalist militias were integrated into state forces with full NATO support. No one in Brussels suddenly discovered a moral objection to extremism then. So the idea that Russia uniquely “pushes far right ideology” while the West defends democracy is fantasy. The far right does not rise because people are tricked by foreign propaganda. It rises because capitalism is failing to reproduce social stability. This obsession with Russian interference serves one purpose only. It shifts blame away from Western ruling classes. It turns systemic crisis into an external conspiracy. It tells people that nothing is structurally wrong with capitalism, the EU, or US empire. The problem is always an outsider. That is not analysis. Russia today is not socialist. It is not progressive. It is a capitalist state formed out of imperial collapse. Its actions are driven by security and market interests, the same as any other capitalist power. Treating it as the prime engine of global fascism is analytically unserious. Fascism is not imported. It is produced internally when capitalism enters decay. If Russia vanished tomorrow, Europe would still face collapsing living standards, demographic crisis, housing shortages, declining energy security, and an economic model that no longer works. Those conditions would still generate reaction. Blaming Russia is comforting because it avoids the real conclusion. The crisis is not geopolitical. It is systemic.

First authoritarian is a useless buzzword.

Second Europe and the west has had an issue with far right freaks for centuries. Regan, Thatcher, The Nazis, and the list goes on and on. Putting all the blame on Russia is not only wrong it’s just infantile bullshit.