Breaking Bread with a Chinese Communist
A young Chinese dude walked into Paradise Alley bakery in Kamakura. He wore a brightly-coloured happi over top a baseball t-shirt. He didn’t seem to know what the fuck was going on so I invited him to join our table.
“Where are you from bro?” I asked.
“I live in Guangzhou, but I’m from Xinjiang.”
I didn’t hear him properly as my hopeless laowai ears struggled with the Mandarin sounds.
“Shenzhen? Or Xinjiang did you say?” I tried to clarify.
“Xin-Jiang! But everything you have heard about the politics is a lie. There are no problems there,” he said straight away and unprovoked.
It was early in the morning and I was not ready for genocide.
“OK,” was all I could manage to reply with a smile.
The kid could not have been older than 22 and like Pavlov’s pooch he had the party line on tap and on app, ready to go.
Just the other month I had sat at the The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan with Peter Langan and Johan Nylander, two China-focussed journalists. Both had been to Xinjiang before. Peter had broken the story on birth control policies against Muslims in the region and Johan spoke fluent Mandarin and had written extensively on China.
I was just a noob at the big boys table and these guy had seen the damn place with their own eyes. Peter had even quit his job at the South China Morning Post over the editor’s rejection of the Xinjiang piece.
“So how long have you been in Kamakura?” I asked the kid.
“A couple of days. I was in Kyoto before that.”
He was the fabled tourist enemy pillaging the ancient capital. He was the loud and boisterous Mongol hordes hiking through Kyoto and flooding the streets of Gion with big clattering suitcases and a sense of personal space calibrated for the wide berths of the Forbidden City rather than dainty Japanese streets.
“How was Kyoto?“
“I did not feel so welcome, people gave me some dirty looks you know.”
It was a shame. Though I was surprised that he was so perceptive. Of course I could not hate the guy for what he was. I had invited him to our table to literally break bread together. He was big and confident with a buzz cut and happy-go-lucky attitude that reminded me of my best buddy back in Christchurch who was also from China. In another life I imagined we might go and shoot a round of hoops together down by the beach or blow out our digestive tracts with some spicy Chongqing noodles.
The busloads of Chinese tourists in Japan are as inescapable as the summer heat, but I had seen enough to know that not all was lost. Every now and then I would see them fawning in awe at the small black and white wagtails birds or the swallows nesting under the shops eaves. They would stop to admire the small dogs dressed up in stripped t-shirts while slapping each other on the back and laughing like a bunch of middle kingdom villagers in search of a good time.
The real China was something like that. Beasts of burden, spicy noodles, family and hospitality, poetry and conversation in raised voices.
Like that real China, this kid was a victim, a victim of communism.
There is a pervasive myth that China is not commie but that they are just playing along with it. Some people think that the Chinese communists don’t really believe any of the rhetoric about the utopia at the end of all of this, etc. I used to think like that too until I started paying attention.
Frank Dikötter writes and speaks about this:
From the outside the ChiComs are nothing like their former Soviet buddies of whom I know quite a few. All the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians I have ever met have had a kind of PTSD etched into their face that is part Eastern European but for the most part is political. Even when they are at rest they carry a heavy weight around their neck like a concrete albatross.
The spectre of communism keeps haunting them as if somewhere deep down they might starve to death at the drop of a penny. They are sensitive and it makes them good friends, incredible artists, and people I deeply love. But they are still victims of the flawed and totalitarian ideology that is Communism.
I sometimes wonder if the Soviets produced the best gymnasts because there entire society was built upon mental gymnastics. Maybe the image of roid-raging Soviet bloc weightlifters from the Olympics is a mirror of the struggle under the burden of their own political contradiction?
Unlike my former Soviet friends, the Chinese I know are beaming with vitality and a lust for life. Even though this kid felt out of place in Kyoto for the most part Chinese visitors see life as an experience worth living, of consuming, of salivating. They love to travel and to go hiking, to visit Shibuya or Kamakura and take snapshots in the style of Slam Dunk and to cosplay as schoolgirls or ninjas or whatever.
The Chinese tourist hordes invading Kyoto in a shopping spree has replaced the mental image of the Soviet T-55 tanks rolling over into West Germany. The othering, the insectification of the engineered, post-political automata of the ChiComs is part in parcel of the communist ideology.
They seek to make themselves into the collective horde.
They are the ultimate consumers with everything on tap and on app. I can’t speak for the peasantry but when it comes to the city kids at least, they love buying stuff. They love their brands and of making money and being successful. They are driven and they are pushed to succeed. They are the ultimate capitalists studying engineering and science and tech.
But make no mistake, they are still communists.
I noticed this one time. Me and my tight-knit group of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean friends were having a hotpot party at my house back in NZ. We were drunk as skunks and going through the karaoke classics: Leslie Cheung, Teresa Teng, and then I had the bright idea of throwing on the Chinese national anthem for a laugh. Suddenly it was like the air had been sucked out of the room as I woke the Manchurian candidate.
One of my Chinese friends commanded me to stop it.
She had spent years repressing that lifetime of propaganda conditioning but something about those opening trumpet blasts suddenly summoned that deep contradiction that lives inside every Chinese person like a parasitic larvae.
New Zealand was her new home at the bottom of the world but the programming that had taken place during her formative years was now suddenly manifesting. Our joyous singing and laughing and sharing of spicy Sichuan mala hotpot was put on pause as she took on that exact same look that I had seen in the faces of all those other oppressed peoples.
She was also a victim of communism.
Communism is really about trying to make better humans
I was with my British friend at that bakery in Kamakura as we witnessed our new Chinese comrade figuratively bust out his Little Red Book and explain to us the situation in the motherland.
Afterwards I tried to sketch an outline of just how deeply communism tried to corrupt the human soul but it’s a hard thing to explain. The best I could come up with was:
“Something is lost along the way with all that progress.”
To be a communist you gotta learn the right ideas, and you gotta learn the right answers.
There is something fundamentally different about the communist system that at the same time fails to recognise that we are all the same: We are all human.
The emphasis on STEM, on engineering and “building” and “designing” is the exact same affliction the Soviets had. It reveals the deeper symptom of the state which sees that it can “design better people and a better society”.
I am not here to make any economic judgement. I ain’t the New York Times or some armchair critic who thinks 你好 and guanxi makes me a China expert. I don’t know shit except maybe how to handle spice.
I am just a Bitcoiner and an artist looking through the periscope of the Truth Machine. As far as I am concerned all the nation state governments can go screw themselves.
But it is true that some states and some systems are better than others. The Chinese Communist Party is a different kind of red menace. The Soviet economy basically underproduced. The whole thing was a sham. In contrast the ChiCom economy overproduces (but the whole thing is still a sham). These are both symptoms of central planning, which is a symptom of Communism.
I am not going to tell you about the endless fields of state-of-the-art factories or the high-speed rail or the 5G or the electric cars. We all know about that already. The only thing that matters ultimately is that the Communist party state needs the people to be “better” kinds of humans, to become a kind of secular functionary - little pieces of machinery that produce widgets, export them, and consume.
The Party States necessarily sees people as programmable and as changeable, as improvable tabula rasa upon which to inscribe their ideology.
They are still human bodies in the biological sense but in the eyes of the Party State they are bodies in need of a software upgrade. The communist party state has inseminated itself deep within the soul of every Chinese person. They are programmed differently, to respond with the party line in a kind of call and response. Their tempering is forged not in a struggle session in a circle in the middle of the village but in every single school, company, and organisation in China.
The order of nature is different. Despite the misleading name The People’s Republic is not by the people or for the people, it is by the party and for the party.
The party state must exist above all else.
The party is God.
It is the Party to which we must give thanks and praise for lifting us out of poverty even though it was the one who put us there in the first place. It is the party to which it is right to give thanks and praise for building up a strong and prosperous nation as the father of the Confucian family
The communist party is not half-assing it, they are not Cosplaying as commies. They are commies.
They are set on a ride-or-die course of communist ideology, state control, and central planning and they believe what they say. The uber Capitalism and consumerism of China today is still just a step on the way via historical materialism towards the Chinese communist utopia.
The current economic configuration is tolerated while it is useful but the moment it stops being useful then they will be done away with.
In the words of our new comrade: “Everything you have heard about the politics is a lie. There are no problems in China.”
Amongst all of this I reminded myself that the western liberal order is the historical exception. Something about the Western tradition is the aberration of history. To be able to even ask the question itself is a kind of fluke.
The ultimate end game of communism is not about punishing those who ask questions but to no longer be able to ask the question in the first place. The final state is to have the right answers and right ideas on tap and on app!
A respect for the individual, for the unique specificity of the moment, an understanding and acknowledgement of the infinite spirit that exists within every single human soul is the ultimate target of communist ideology.
Utopia on earth is not possible, but they will push the people to the limit and beyond to try and make it happen.
Maybe I am actually the inferior human? I cannot do maths to save myself. I don’t know how to programme a computer or how to be a ruthless capitalist.
I am a fucking artist eating bread with a Chinese communist in a bakery in Kamakura. But man does not live by bread alone.
More reading!
Read Chinese fitness club (I don’t “do” the NYT but worthwhile to consider) - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-china.html
Frank Dikötter | China Since the Communist Revolution