After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?


I’d argue that they functionally don’t exist.
Sure, here you run into them here in this universe…not a great sample size. I’m a really social person who spent years in deep leftist Canada…and I’m one of the most radical socialist (whatever you want to call it…all the terms are fraught) folks I’ve met. I’m definitely nowhere near a tankie.
I’ve met exactly one true “tankie”. Good friend…always making excuses for atrocities…it spills over into radical support for modern day Russia etc…but dude is also a silver spooner who works for his dads investment firm.
I honestly wish there were more tankies…and among the lower classes where they should be…but many of the poor people I know are conservatives or nihilists/anarchists.
that friends sounds more like bourgeois, oligarchy than a leftist. kinda like how “hasan” pretends to be a leftist on his streams, hes a grifter.