u/Dry_Can869 — reddlx

I don’t speak English, so in order to communicate with English speakers and avoid censorship, I rely on ChatGPT to translate, organize, and refine my Chinese content. I also have another intention: I try to reduce my use of Chinese and avoid direct posting in order to prevent others from identifying me through my writing patterns or any subtle traces in my language style. At the same time, I am using a VPN and taking on the potential legal risks that may arise in China. Recently, Chinese internet regulators have increased efforts to restrict and block VPN usage. I need to acknowledge something. My parents rely on pensions and my wages to pay for their cancer treatment. I am not able to fully detach from these constraints or completely escape these systems. I am worried that because of my actions, the financial resources my parents depend on for their treatment could be affected or even lost.

Symbolic radicalism vs. essentialist attitudes

Many adopt revolutionary symbols — figures like Che Guevara, Karl Marx, or Mao Zedong — yet express views that contradict those traditions.

For example, some associate refugees or minorities with crime while ignoring the structural conditions that marginalize them, such as barriers to employment, housing, and legal status.

In many cases, survival strategies adopted by marginalized groups are judged more harshly than large-scale corporate exploitation, or even the tyranny of the majority exercised by legally empowered citizens, both of which are often downplayed or normalized.

This reflects a lack of intersectional analysis. Class, ethnicity, gender, and migration are frequently treated as separate issues rather than interconnected systems of power, which allows certain forms of oppression to remain invisible.

From my perspective, one reason for this limitation is the absence of a historical experience comparable to civil rights movements, which elsewhere helped develop a more complex understanding of how different forms of oppression overlap and reinforce each other.

👉 In addition, within many of these same political spaces, feminist struggles are often dismissed or deprioritized under the same class-reductionist logic, even when they involve direct experiences of structural violence and inequality.

Class reductionism and conditional solidarity

When marginalized groups raise cultural or racial concerns, these are often dismissed under the claim that “class is the primary contradiction.”

In practice, this can:

downplay or erase ethnic and cultural oppression

label minority claims as “divisive” or “reverse discrimination”

indefinitely postpone their demands

In more extreme cases, state narratives such as “separatism” or “terrorism” are used to delegitimize dissent.

This creates pressure toward silence or assimilation, while discussions of race and ethnicity are avoided or treated with hostility. As a result, solidarity becomes conditional rather than universal.

👉 Within this framework, LGBTQ+ groups are often included only in a conditional way — tolerated or symbolically supported when convenient, but instrumentalized rather than fully recognized as autonomous political subjects. Their lived reality is frequently one of “segregated equality”: formal inclusion without full social or political integration.

Alignment with cultural nationalism (with added contradiction on minority assimilation)

Some self-identified leftists accommodate or even support revivalist cultural narratives centered on dominant-majority identity.

In recent years, this has been visible in several widely discussed phenomena:

Hanfu revival (汉服): often presented as cultural pride, but in practice sometimes tied to ideas of cultural purity and historical continuity, implicitly excluding non-Han identities. It can function less as cultural expression and more as a boundary-making tool.

“Guoxue” (国学) revival: selective promotion of Confucian traditions as moral authority, while downplaying their historical role in reinforcing hierarchy, patriarchy, and obedience. What is framed as “tradition” is often a curated version serving contemporary ideological needs.

Traditional martial arts (传统武术): promoted as symbols of national strength, yet repeatedly exposed in public controversies where practitioners failed under open challenge. Despite this, the symbolic narrative persists, suggesting its function is largely ideological.

Traditional Chinese medicine (中医): strongly defended as cultural heritage, sometimes positioned beyond empirical or scientific critique, especially in public debates where cultural identity overrides evidence-based evaluation.

👉 In parallel, these cultural revival narratives are often accompanied by the historical assimilation, marginalization, or cultural erosion of non-Han minority traditions, where local languages, identities, and practices are either absorbed into a dominant cultural framework or gradually weakened through standardized national cultural discourse.

These phenomena are often justified as “cultural revival” or “popular demand,” but they frequently align with exclusionary nationalism and reproduce hierarchical thinking under the language of tradition.

In this sense, culture is not simply being revived — it is being selectively reconstructed to serve contemporary power structures.

Victimhood narratives, implicit nationalism, and flexible ideology

Another pattern is the portrayal of the dominant ethnic group and the nation as perpetual victims or indigenous subjects.

Within this framework:

historically subordinated groups may be depicted as outsiders or in need of “civilizing”

history is selectively interpreted

analytical tools are applied inconsistently

In other contexts, they shift toward cultural chauvinism or nationalism in more implicit ways. They rarely state this openly, because maintaining a “leftist” identity also serves as a source of moral legitimacy.

Class analysis is also used selectively.

This flexibility creates a position that appears coherent on the surface, but is internally contradictory.

Detachment between theory and practice

There is also a gap between theoretical engagement and real-world practice.

Some individuals consume large amounts of theory without meaningful application. Others turn political identity into performance — through online personas, aesthetics, or commodified “leftist culture.”

On the opposite extreme, some engage with theory in a rigid and repetitive way, treating it as doctrine rather than a tool for critical analysis.

Closing reflection

Taken together, these patterns reflect a tension between stated ideals and actual practice.

For me, the key issue is not whether someone identifies as “left,” but whether their analysis and actions genuinely challenge all forms of hierarchy — including those based on ethnicity, gender, culture, and power — rather than reproducing them in new forms.