Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.

A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.

Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.

Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.

Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.

    • @EldritchEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      They are. Technically. It’s the most warped twisted definition of socialism. But being socialist isn’t what’s important in ML Communist regimes. They, like their mirror on the right. The fascists. Are all about authority and authoritarianism.

      The biggest problem for most of us westerners trying to understand this. Is that we are propagandized and indoctrinated to view left and right as being about social issues. And that thou shall have no economy before God but capitalism. And that socialism does not exist as anything other than a boogeyman to scare us with. We are not taught in schools what socialism actually is beyond Marxist-Leninist communism bad. And as a socialist while I do agree that Lenin’s monster he is indeed quite bad. And that while reading the philosophy and theory of Marx he managed to make all the worst possible interpretations. His version of communism doesn’t even define all of communism let alone all of socialism. But it is still technically socialism.