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by gruez 2363 days ago
> The Communist Party has 90%+ acceptance rate by the populace.

That statement comes with so many questions. What is meant by “acceptance”? It definitely sounds like a weaker word than say “support” or “approval”. The least favorable interpretation would be that “acceptance” simply means “I don’t currently intend to overthrow the current government ”. If we’re using that definition, trump probably would have a 90%+ “acceptance” rating as well. Definitions aside, getting accurate polls on political topics in totalitarian countries is tricky because the respondents are incentivized/pressured to answer in support of the current regime.
1 comments
100011 2363 days ago
Ipsos pol from July 2019, 90%+ consider country on the right track: https://i.imgur.com/nBuccjq.png

"accurate polls on political topics in totalitarian countries is tricky because the respondents are incentivized/pressured to answer in support of the current regime.

Are we describing China or Brexit/Trump polls from 2016.

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gruez 2363 days ago
>Are we describing China or Brexit/Trump polls from 2016.

Snark aside, there's a huge difference between the two. In the case of brexit/trump, even if there was social pressure to not reveal your real preferences to the pollsters, everyone's real preferences are accurately represented at the polls. Moreover, nobody is risking getting sent to reeducation camps or getting their social credit scores ruined by saying they support trump or brexit. This is as opposed to China where the only measure you have are opinion polls, and the only cross-check mechanism is whether the CCP is still in power or not.

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100011 2363 days ago
It wasn't a snark; I have yet to witness a liberal definition of totalitarian state that's not a sand castle. A liberal state is a schizo state that has no positive theory of state so it doesn't have a theory of totalitarian state. It's delusions about how oppressive monarchy was, slightly before they started bloodshedding in the name of raison raisonnante, do not apply here.

What the Chinese have is a formal system, and I can't quite tell if the informal liberal system isn't worse. This was a point of contemplation for Andrei Navrozov as an emigrant from USSR to US in the 1970s in his book "The Gingerbread Race" [1]

> [1] https://archive.org/details/NavrozovAndreiTheGingerbreadRace...

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