[tw04]

Good point, whereas in America the Republican and Democratic parties have since been dismantled and replaced...

Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.

[mutteraloo]

Xijingping this year heavily emphasized the communist ideals in the country, to a point where the civil servants have to pass tests on the ccp ideals

Also China is still the censoring, authoritarian regime it was before. Look at their citizen scores, monitoring, threatening South Korea, Taiwan, us, Australia, etc

[glenstein]

In a meaningful sense, you can say the Republican party is largely the same today as it was during the Contract With America, and the Democratic Party is largely the party of New Deal programs. Sameness here refers to ideological continuity rather than literal individuals being the same.

[jbooth]

That's not what the person was saying, though. They were saying something much more simplistic.

To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.

[glenstein]

I think you're right that all three parties have been subject to a certain degree of drift. However, applying that back to the original point (is the current regime the same one that did Tiananmen), to me that's an argument that, for the most part, this is the same regime. And if the original commenter wasn't arguing about a continuity in ideology or personnel, then I'm not sure what they were arguing.

[jbooth]

It's like saying Hollande and Chirac are both part of the 5th Republic regime. Technically true but not indicative of anything and probably a red herring.

[glenstein]

I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b).

The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.

[jbooth]

It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery.

From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.