this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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I think this is a worthless argument. There are no shortage of Chinese citizens who have strong disagreements with the current CPC, and also there is some substantial difference in opinion within that 90 million besides. Furthermore, pretending they are a monolith for the sake of argument, you obviously don't believe 90 million people can't be wrong because we can point to reactionary populations that size or larger in the US, in India, and many more especially if we look at cross-national allied groups.
I think a better argument would be talking about how the current Chinese government regularly has an approval rating higher than 90%. The average Chinese person seems at least satisfied with the current state of domestic political affairs. I know there's widespread youth disillusionment with employment though, but I think that was inevitable with how quickly China industrialized, now the youngest generation of workers perhaps feels too much pressure to keep up competitive production.
The 90 million members of the CPC should still be brought up, because my understanding is that it's more like a job than simply something with voluntary membership. You have to apply and most people get denied. It's my understanding that being a party member comes along with job-like duties, paying dues, keeping a clean public character and stuff like that. And yet despite that there's still a lot of members.
I agree that the approval rating is a much better indicator, even if there are still problems with it.
You are right that membership is much harder to get and maintain, though I think the dues are pretty cheap, at least for poorer members (which is a good thing!), but I don't think people going through the trouble of getting the membership on its own is a great argument either, since even the crassest China detractors can tell you (and by coincidence, be correct in this case) that it's beneficial to many types of careers to be a CPC member.
Yeah, if we were in 1910's Russia there wouldn't be a massive population to point to as communists as reinforcement, but it wouldn't make them any less correct for being communists. All ideologies start out as a minority. Liberalism was also a minority when it was first emerging but it still became the dominant ideology.
To try to steelman the point in the meme though, there is probably some value to seeing that 90 million people support something and then looking into it to see if there's anything valid there. It should raise some concern that you could be wrong, but it doesn't mean you are.