I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.
I’ve always felt the best way to define them as someone so against westernism that they support authoritarian governments like China and Russia while ignoring the hypocrisy of said governments. They’re not really communists, and they would violently oppose actual communism.
I don’t know what you mean by “hypocrisy,” communists support China as a socialist state and critically support Russia to the extent that they trade with socialist countries, oppose western imperialism, and have a populace increasingly sympathetic to socialism. Nobody supports Russia the same way communists actually support China, the USSR fell 3 decades ago. I also don’t know what you mean by saying “tankies” aren’t communists, “tankie” is just a pejorative for communist, nor do I know what you mean by the so called “actual communism” these supposed “tankies” would violently oppose.
Chinese citizens are, by all polls, much happier with their government and feel more represented by it than westerners. Being able to choose every 4 years the colour of the party applying austerity policy isn’t democracy. Germany ignored a referendum in Berlin to establish rent caps because an old fart with a wig said it was “un institutional”. The EU forced Greece to act against the state-wide referendum to revise sovereign debt. China is much more of a democracy than western countries.