Even from an anti-China perspective, this is a ludicrous statement. Xi has executive authority, but he only has it because he has the support of the Central Committee, which itself only has power thanks to the support of the rest of the national government. Xi is not a wizard who can make a billion people bend to his whims and he cannot wrestle them into submission. If you want to develop an anti-China position that is more useful (true or not), you still need to accept the basic fact that states are run by classes. So the question is, is China run by bureaucrats, private capitalists, or the people?

You don’t need to answer that to me. My point is just that autocracy in the sense of one person controlling the state is genuinely a myth, whether it’s Xi, Trump, Hitler, or King Henry. They were all supported by and ultimately needed to answer to their respective states’ ruling classes (which themselves subjugated at least one other class and might be working cooperatively with one or more other classes).

but I also say that I still don’t like the Chinese state because I don’t consider that (and ML in general) a form of worker-owned means of production (whether or not you agree)

“Socialism is worker ownership of the means of production” is a syndicalist distortion of socialism. Workers should control the means of production, as in their operation should be based on popular consensus, but “ownership” suggests something like cooperatives (or, you know, syndicates), which operate on the same market system and a permutation of petite-bourgeois races to the bottom that we see under capitalism.

The people must control the state, “win the battle of democracy,” and via their control of the state dictate what happens to the means of production. Specific ownership is a secondary concern, though I agree with what I assume your position is, that the bourgeoisie have been granted too much power and authority in China.

Are you a free speech absolutist? Can I post your address with a rough outline of your schedule and say that you deserve to be murdered? Not telling anyone to do it, mind you, merely that you “have it coming.”

I don’t think that I (or anyone) should be able to do that, though I also believe that the process for “restricting” speech in this manner should be arrived at democratically, i.e. society itself should decide what is and isn’t permissible to say. Am I authoritarian on that basis?

No, they are saying that you’re diverting a conversation from who is correct to whether or not your interlocutor was rude to you as a waiver for disregarding the substance of what they said. You can disagree, but presenting yourself as having not been courted appropriately is not going to be taken seriously.

I do actually agree with you that they should speak more gently. Their current behavior is a maladaptive coping mechanism from being inundated with literally thousands and thousands of Redditors who say mostly the same things and won’t flinch before likening them to a Nazi or something.

There is no genocide in Xinjiang nor, as the accusation used to go, in Tibet. Frivolously accusing an enemy of the west that it’s committing genocide, the crime of crimes, when those accusations mainly feed into narratives used to try to balkanize that enemy of the west does present a certain impression. I have no opinion on your character, but I would gently suggest that if you don’t have a strong opinion then it doesn’t make sense to go around making confident assertions, as you clearly did in the case of Xinjiang (because you surely know the argument being suggested by Cowbee and company is not that the PRC is committing genocide and that such a genocide would be good).

Your statement on Taiwan is perfectly consistent with how you characterize yourself, however we might disagree, because it was expressed as supporting a side in an issue where there is some consensus on what the sides represent, though obviously I and other communists will say that if you want an independent Taiwan, you I guess want a global revolution because in the current world there is no possibility for an independent Taiwan, like there is no possibility for an independent Tibet, because it will either be part of China or it will be controlled by the US.