So last year while I was in China, all my vpns were super busted, so I spent a long time watching bilibili. And I was able to soak up quite a bit of knowledge about the average user there by doomscrolling the comments.
Contrary to what one might think, the average Chinese person isn’t actually an expert in Marxism-Leninism and dialectical materialism. Most people, as in the west, don’t care much about coherent ideology and just go off vibes. And as anywhere, that can lead to some pretty wacky beliefs. In this tierlist, I’ll go over some of the more common ones I’ve seen/heard about, and rank them based on their wackiness and stupidity, and place them in a tier. Keep in mind I’m approaching this mostly as an outsider, and apologize in advance for any mistakes or oversights, and welcome any corrections. With that being said, let’s get into it.
F tier
First we have the conservative westhaters. As you might imagine, these people hate the west, which is good. They also hate gay people, trans people, feminism, etc., which is… not good. Despite the existence of the firewall they seem to have somehow gained access to jordan peterson, and proceeded to mental gymnastics themselves into a maga position, but from the standpoint that America is bad precisely because of ‘wokeness’. Granted, they’re not as hyperfixated on minorities as western rightoids are; it’s more of a casual thing, but can still be annoying. They get a 7 in stupidity, and 1 in wackiness. Pretty basic stuff.
D tier
D tier is where things get a bit more interesting. We start off with a kind of lib that may be familiar to many of us, of the thermonuclear variety. Chinese ultras are every bit as insufferable as western ones, and pretty common. They cite statistics such as the top 2% in China owning 98% of the wealth, without ever giving a source. Quite convenient how 98 and 2 add up to 100 for the dramatic effect, doesn’t it? In contrast to western ultras, these don’t really fixate on Albania or Catalonia as much. Mostly they just bash China and talk about how shit it is for the poor farmers in the desert and how everything the government does is just self-interest of capital. I hate them so fucking much but they’re pretty boring honestly. I give them an 8 in stupidity and 3 in wackiness.
Next we have western bootlickers. Now believe it or not these are actually quite rare; I’ve almost never seen one in the wild. These people are basically run-of-the-mill bootlickers who say that the west is great, china bad, in the most generic sense. They seemingly mostly died out a decade back and have never recovered since. Good riddance. 6 in stupidity, 0 in wackiness.
C tier
The first entry in C tier are mingcels. These people love history, kind of like western crusadebros. Similar to crusadebros, mingcels love the Ming empire and think it was the best thing ever, and they hate the Qing dynasty for ending it and, in their opinion, ruining China. Unable to let go of beef that’s almost 400 years old, you can still find them angrily screeching in comment sections of any qing-related content to this day. 5 in stupidity, 7 in wackiness.
The second entry for C tier are professional Japan haters. In China, the public consciousness of the European holocaust and Japan’s crimes are flipped, so while many understandably harbor a distaste for Japan given its history with China and refusal to offer any sort of apology, some take it a step further and essentially make hating Japan their entire personality. The closest analogy I can think of is professional pedophile haters. Obviously, pedophiles and japan are bad, but… dial it down a bit, geez. These people support showing nsfl war crime documentaries to children in order to ingrain hatred for Japan (and ptsd) into the next generation so they can nuke it to dust. I get the idea but the execution here is just… not great. Stupidity 5, wackiness 0.
B tier
Finally, B tier, where things really get going. All of these are super funny, so I had a hard time ranking, but I had to make a decision in the end.
First entry in B tier are the conspiracybros. While some conspiracies are mostly apolitical, such as brains being extraterrestrial parasites, others are significantly more out there. For instance, the existence of japanese technical schools in China is irrefutable evidence to these people that there’s some sort of Japanese Great Replacement plan to… replace Chinese people with Japanese people? Yeah it doesn’t make that much sense to me either. They also may believe that GMOs are a western plot to poison Chinese people. Honestly this is just generic conspiracyslop with an anti-west spin, and it’s really just sad once you get past the novelty. 7 stupidity, 6 in wackiness.
Next we have han nationalists. While pretty rare, I have seen one in the wild. There are some truly bizarre flavors of ethnonationalism given the sheer volume of internet-using people in China, and these are perhaps exemplified by the very real belief that China should like, un-annex every territory that’s not a han homeland. This is so unfathomably stupid I can’t even put it into words. They don’t seem to rag on about minorities as much as save europebros do, but they do really hate black people for some reason. 9 stupidity, 7 wackiness.
A tier
We start off A tier with one of my personal favorites, sarcasmbros. I’ve never really known a counterpart in the west to these people, and while they’re pretty far from being an ‘ideology’ per se, they’re definitely noteworthy enough to be included here. If I had to say, they’re like personifications of the ‘erm akshuwually’ soyjak. I’m not even kidding, they talk exactly like the stereotype, but in Chinese. They also really love using the doge emoji, though not related to musk as far as I’m aware. They generally don’t seem to like China very much, and they make this clear to everyone by sarcastically hinting at how China is actually terrible because of [insert nonissue here]. They’re super super insufferable and have the most milquetoast ultra takes. It’s like if anarchists spent way too long moderating discord and reddit and tried to model themselves after the strawman smugjack, I really don’t know how else to describe it. They get an 8 in stupidity, and a 4 in wackiness.
S tier
Finally, S tier. We have the king of all wacky ideologies, the undisputed most moronic and absurd of them all: Chinese fascism.
Remember when I said in China, public consciousness of the Holocaust and Japanese atrocities are flipped compared to in the west? And you know how some people in the west will simp for imperial Japan and overlook or even glorify their crimes?
Yeah.
Chinese fascists, disturbingly common (though still very minute in quantity), slurp up 1930s German propaganda about price-inflating Jews in complete earnestness, and still believe the US is controlled by the Israeli Jewish shadow government. They also came up this bizarre fanfiction about Hitler where he was saved from drowning by a Chinese guy, and he then vowed to share the world with China after he finished conquering it because he loved Chinese people so much and owed them such a great debt. They actually believe this stuff, too, which is just…
Don’t write wet dream fantasies about your favorite fascist dictators please…
They also think that Japan somehow loved Jews and wanted to make part of China into a Jewish homeland, which doesn’t make sense even in the context of their ideology. Is the axis your brave anti-semitic vanguard or is it a Jewish shadow plot? And the answer is neither, because their entire worldview is just nazi fanfiction they made up in their head while gooning to fascist boat women in azur lane. Needless to say, these people get 10 in stupidity and 10 in wackiness as well.
That’s all for this tier list. Again, please correct me if I’ve gotten anything wrong.
Chinese antisemitism in a place where there are virtually no jews is crazy stuff, tbf i would easily fall into the professional japanese hater pipeline, im halway there already and im not chinese.
This is the type of content I log on for 🫡
Tbf to Ming bros the Qing fucking sucked.
Honestly the Ming bros were snubbed in this tier list, they should be at least A tier.
For instance, the existence of japanese technical schools in China is irrefutable evidence to these people that there’s some sort of Japanese Great Replacement plan to… replace Chinese people with Japanese people?
Wouldn’t this require Japanese people to have kids?
The funniest thing about Han nationalists is that they really hate that ethnic minorities get an easier time on the gaokao and job applications, and one point they keep complaining about is how well Uyghurs are treated in academia. I’ve seen comment sections collide on XHS where brainwashed westoids are asking about the Uyghur genocide stuff and some guy who probably has a portrait of Jiang Jieshi in his bedroom chimes in that Uyghurs should be treated worse because they’re being too coddled💀
Yep they have a level of affirmative action for ethnic minorities over the Han majority. Not exactly the “muh yogurt genocidal fascist dictatorship” that white westerners chime on about every day lol
A decade ago and even further back libs were almost the mainstream, you’d get completely flamed and borderline harassed for posting anything positive about the country or party online. Liberals like Gao Xiaosong were in mainstream media and entertainment, exclaiming how civilized the US was.
Libs and by extension their western funded separatists, including the latest flavour of Manchu restorationists tend to be more common when democrats are in power (more funding as opposed to the recent cuts to USAID and others lmao).
Wehraboos are completely nuts lmao, as if we wouldn’t be sent to camps as well because of the whole… not being “aryan” thing. Even more messed up are those who still try to whitewash what the imperial Japanese did to them (throw them in the SS tier), some of them were even teaching trying to teach that shit in school.
On bilibili users also mention there’s some sort of Japanese influence there, where they tend to get a tonne more rabid bot comments flaming them when they post things that are anti-Japanese as opposed to anti-West stuff.
I guess I must be hanging around the right parts of town lmao, I personally haven’t seen much Japan apologia or Manchu restorationism, which I guess I can chalk up to the election cycle at the time and seeing mostly backlash.
This was very entertaining to read. Also completely unsurprising. This is pretty much what i expected. Basically a normal, diverse society with diverse viewpoints and varying levels of historical, scientific and political literacy. As communists we should not expect that everyone in a socialist society is going to be a Marxist. It was not the case in the USSR and it is not the case in any of the AES states today. You’re always going to have a certain percentage of wackos. What matters is that support for the socialist project has sufficient critical mass (which has a lot to do with the performance of the government in delivering tangible material results for the people) and that there are still enough people being properly educated in Marxism-Leninism to form the next generation of vanguard cadres.
It’s interesting how the totalitarian argument falls apart when you look at the actual reality. The people isn’t composed of mindless drones that follow the state discourse. They are confusingly different from each other, many even reactionary.
You forget the casual anti-Indian racism that is all over the place.
Not really coherent enough as a worldview/ideology for the tierlist, but I would lump it in with conservative westhating.
The only time I’ve seen any positive comments about Indians were under videos about Indian communists in Kerala or the Naxalites.
glad to know that people are basically the same everywhere.
I’ve seen the S tier fascists online quite a bit. And I’ve met quite a few of the D tier western boot kickers in real life. They are exclusively the kids of rich parents and who have studied abroad. They are insulated from the hardships of life and pretty much love the west because they have access to drugs and therefore “freedom”. Also, being rich they see more opportunities to exploit and get richer in the west than in China.
Yeah, my experience being limited to bilibili has kinda narrowed the scope of this tierlist. There seems to be a tendency online to overcorrect for the unapologetic bootlicking that was going on decades back, but frankly I’m just glad they’re being obnoxious in person where I can’t see or hear from them, ever.
Ooh I met a professional Japan hater once. He was a mathematics graduate student at my university. He was given another exchange student as a roommate, who happened to be Japanese. A shitshow ensued, I was asked by some white people what to do (“Aren’t you Asian too? Is this a racism?”), and I just kind of shook my head.
Was deeply unserious.
This sounds like a sitcom plot ngl
Now this is the type of posting I come here for.
commiespammer slopmaxxing era has just begun, comrade.
Incredible things are happening in China. Thank you for sharing!
This is very entertaining, especially for someone who knows feck all about China (me). Thank you for this.
I’m assuming that you spend a lot of time online with non leftists? Tbh nowadays I’m only on Hexbear and my super curated feed on Twitter, so I couldn’t do this level of analysis for anywhere even if I tried very hard.
Only for a few months lol, since I had no good vpn and was stuck browsing Chinese media for better or worse (lemmygrad traffic is a bit too slow for my taste). But yeah, I do spend most of my time on reddit and especially youtube, so I’ve seen… things.