If Nixon had never normalized relations with China I would think there could be a collapse a la Soviet Union

National People's Congress can make whatever laws they want in regards to HK, it's in their Basic Law.

However given that China has enough capitalist influences and has diversified beyond pretending to pay their workers I don't foresee a collapse in an imminent

Yeah it probably would have been the opposite. USSR would remain, and PRC would fall.

That was part of the motivation to warm up to China, because it was a deterrent against Russia after the Sino-Soviet Split

And now ironically, Russia and China are very tight

Well Putin knows what he's doing that's for sure

We sometimes forget here that not everyone can be just given free reign

I've seen them fuckers standing in line and then what happens when the door finally opens

Freedom is not for everyone

And there's also old grudges. The Red Guards, similar to Antifa but without gays and drugs, hurt a lot of people way back. 99% of them were teenagers too. So they're still alive. A lot of people have grudges about that and haven't forgotten.

Certain societies have serfdom so ingrained in the psyche of the average citizen

They were like those people who think owning two houses means you're literally killing people because it makes them homeless

Some people are too stupid to be left to their own devices

Xi's dad was arrested and tortured by Red Guards, despite having fought in the revolution. That's how extreme they were.

So the saying goes, if you legalize guns in China today, half the population will be dead tomorrow.

Are the Red guard the ones that did the whole purging that happened in the '70s

Yes

Always forget what that's called

And they got ballsy enough to actually attack the PLA. Only one of the two still exists today so you can see how that turned out.

Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution

More like great leap backward

Yes

It kind of feels like antifa wants to do the same thing

Yes

Mao came up with the Hundred Flowers Campaign, some poetic shit about basically letting people criticize the party because it would motivate self-improvement and all that shit. Yeah it was a trap. They went to jail, a lot got killed.

It was actually a crime back then to plead not-guilty in a court

When the only people with guns ask you to criticize them it might be a trap

Prime example was Lin Zhao, a communist revolutionary who took part in "land reform" after the revolution. What land reform means in communism is to kill anyone who owns it.

They believe it's inherently exploitative and since land is a "means of production" (food etc) it should be socialized

So yes people got killed for the horrible crime of owning a small house

And yet here we are today with people espousing the tenants thereof

She criticized the government's policies that caused the famines, and so she got 20 years in prison, and converted to Christianity. When she refused to recant her "crimes" she was sentenced to death. Her family's "death notification" was a bill for the bullet used to execute her.

I guess I'm a bad person but that's kind of funny

In a morbid way yeah.

I mean it's not haha funny

I know what you mean

More like trollolol

She was officially pardoned by Deng Xiaoping in 1981 when he took power and reversed most of Mao's shit

Not that it does her much good, she's dead

Out of tens of millions of people who died, damn near everyone has a relative who was either killed or arrested back then, if I were them I'd still be pissed, you don't just get over shit like that