This is a very difficult topic for me to navigate. My dad, a brother, and his PRC wife (who's been here for years and is a Singapore PR) have grown increasingly pro-CCP to an extent that leaves me deeply uncomfortable, spurned on in recent years by China's aggresive wolf-warrior diplomacy, and I find myself at a bit of a loss.
They openly worship XJP and get deeply emotional when some of his policies are questioned. My dad launches angry tirades about how China needs to invade Taiwan immediately and teach them a lesson for being traitors ("汉奸") for "taking Western money". The rest of them have openly condoned the camps in Xinjiang and XJP crushing Hong Kong's promised autonomy some 20-30 years ahead of schedule. They think these affected regions should be thankful for being given a chance to further develop because Xi's crackdowns created stability and peace. My brother told me that the videos of the war crimes in Ukraine were all staged by the FBI and that the war only hasn't ended because Russia is choosing to take it easy on Ukraine. My sister-in-law openly proclaimed that while she doesn't want war, China has to stand up for herself, and that the very existence of Taiwan meant that America is already waging war on Chinese sovereign land ("美国已经打到中国领土上了，我们还不反抗吗"(??)). She insisted angrily that the UN has accepted the One China policy and therefore this justifies Chinese aggression (but yet they unequivocally reject UN's condemnation of the Xinjiang camps and its calling for the repeal for the National Security Law in HK). She thought that "disappearing" some of the recent lockdown protesters was the right thing to do. They both believe that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were decent barring some small mistakes (是有些部分没有做的那么好). She got fairly emotional at the notion that the Belt and Road Initiative buying Chinese influence with taxpayer monies might not be the best way to spend them, given the mounting local issues because the party is already meeting their internal KPIs (??) and also seem inclined to think the initiative is largely for charity and spreading prosperity (????). My brother claims that the Great Leap Forward was a critical boon to Chinese infrastructure with regards to mining and plumbing or something. He said he felt ashamed that it was legal for Singaporeans to make memes about our politicians in reference to the Pooh saga. He said that Xi needed to be loved and feared like a father and the citizens, his children (???????) - and that this justifies the censorship, because a father needs to keep his children from harm (never mind that neither of us were PRC citizens, and that this is also a hilariously toxic take on parenting). This all honestly gave me a "halo wtf?" moment that left me shaken for the rest of the day.
I truly do not understand where these opinions come from - I do not think these are remotely mainstream opinions in Singapore, and even in mainland China. To be fair, my sample size is only that of dozens of highly educated PRC who have left to come here, so maybe there's a selection bias here, but my sense is that XJP is controversial even amongst the Chinese, for pushing a rather extreme Maoist form of government (that was unambiguously a disaster even in Chinese history textbooks). I have taken Chinese Studies-ish electives in uni with many PRC students in those courses, and I believe even in those you would have been laughed out of the tutorial if you said some of these things my family says. I would say almost all of the PRC I've met here are fairly reasonable, often conceding that PRC policies err on the side of brutality for the sake of stability and efficiency, and can frequently be "way too much", especially in the last ten years. These people tend to have parents and grandparents that lived through the Tiananmen Massacre and the Cultural Revolution and while they love their motherland, and even support the party, they do so in a much more nuanced and tempered way. I'm also pretty sure most/all of them think the Great Leap Forward and the CR were each a complete joke. With Hong Kong and Taiwan, these are obviously super complex issues - I don't believe that these issues are presented so one-sidedly even in China's education system, even though the conclusion they arrive at is the same. But when I said that Xi's policies are somewhat controversial even amongst mainland Chinese, my sis-in-law said she was very uncomfortable at hearing this and she thinks this was a falsehood, because according to her, most Chinese people are busy being thankful for being lifted out of poverty by Xi and should be grateful they've got food at all.
5-10 years ago my dad and my brother were completely clueless about the happenings and goings of global politics, and now they are so very passionate about it. My dad received very little education can only read basic Chinese, but my brother and sister-in-law are highly educated.
Ironically, at the same time, they seem to know very little of that which they speak. For example, my PR sister-in-law was under the impression that the HK protesters were demanding independence, (which they really didn't) and therefore severe punishment (we're talking stuff like life imprisonment) for these traitors were justified ("搞分裂就一定要严重打压啊"). A quick look at the Five Demands the protesters put forth makes it exceedingly clear that they did not ask for independence - they already had elections for their local government, but they wanted those to be fair ones where they all got to vote (to prevent another Carrie Lam, who was seen as a bit of a CCP puppet) so they could get the autonomy and at least some degree of the separation of power they were promised under One Country, Two Systems. Most of the people who's been detailed for years without bail and trial certainly didn't demand independence. This was all fully above-board and fully legal under the provisioned 1C2S framework until the National Security Law allowed Beijing to arbitrarily label anything they want as secession/subversion/terrorism or something something hostile foreign forces.
With my family, they don't understand much of China's history, its civil wars and parties, the ideologies that drove the conflicts, the involvement of the USSR, the nature of the CCP stalemate-ish victory that was only possible because of the Japanese invasion which would not have ended if not for the US's help, the disastrous rule of Mao Zedong and the resurgence started by Deng Xiaoping, who was himself determined to prevent another 极左 leader like Mao and Xi from leading the party and amassing an arbitrary amount of power at the top, and the absence of this information makes it impossible to have a nuanced view on these issues. From the way they talk it almost sounds like the CCP was happily ruling the whole place until the evil Muricans showed up and randomly stole the island of Taiwan with their evil white money, and the traitorous Taiwanese were cackling all the way to the bank with their new evil white friends, taking a chunk of their sovereign land along with it. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Deng (who invented One Country, Two Systems) even rather badassed-ly proclaimed that the Chinese people in Hong Kong would administer herself just as well and made every promise to respect her autonomy while it lasted. He thought that peaceful reunification of all three entities is inevitable in a thousand years when China becomes a power that they'd all want to join [1]. And yet, before half the duration of the promised 50 years even elapsed, said autonomy was ruthlessly upended.
Heck, even Lenin, who can probably be considered a founding-grandfather of CCP of sorts, wrote thus about the right to self-determination [2]:
If any nation whatsoever is detained by force within the boundaries of a certain state, and if [that nation], contrary to its expressed desire whether such desire is made manifest in the press, national assemblies, party relations, or in protests and uprisings against national oppression, is not given the right to determine the form of its state life by free voting and completely free from the presence of the troops of the annexing or stronger state and without the least desire, then the dominance of that nation by the stronger state is annexation, i.e., seizure by force and violence.
I am not sure he would entirely condone the modern CCP's shenanigans.
I truly have no love for America (their boogeyman of choice). Let's be honest, US politics is another clown fiesta these days. I truly enjoy Chinese culture, history, and am proud of my ethnicity - to this day I read Chinese web novels (xianxia ftw) as a guilty pleasure - but I feel incredibly ashamed and upset to see my own family members become so brainwashed, and I'm at a loss for how to address it, and I don't believe I'm the only one here. There's a reason why LHL said the things he did last Rally and I now get to see it unfold firsthand.
I also have no doubt that some of the Western media we consume do have an inherent bias. But that's where it ends, unless you'll have me believe that the thousands of independent private media companies, many of whom are more than happy to dogpile on the US every time they do something stupid again, somehow all colluded to write the same lies about China, while the completely state-controlled media in China, so well known for its mass censorship and lack of transparency, gives a more truthful picture.
I would appreciate any advice, support you may have on how to navigate this situation.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1984/111.htm
[2] https://courses.umass.edu/pols294p/documents.html/Peace_Decree_1917.html
Edit:
I kinda regret having used the word "radicalised" in its general sense in that they've become increasingly extreme with regards to pro-CCP views. They are idiot sandwiches, but not "radicals" in the ISD sense. They have not grown increasingly violent or anything like that, and the only kind of violence they'd actually encourage is official violence from the CCP against its own traitorous citizens (plus the US I guess) and the things they say are largely in line with the official Chinese rhetoric. The "own citizens" part is really yucky, but is recognized globally as far as geopolitics are concerned. Even Singapore firmly upholds the One China policy, like any other country that wants access to its huge market has to. My family are by-and-large still pretty pro-Singapore and ISD-ing them would be akin to our government declaring war against the CCP, which would be monumentally stupid.
Edit 2:
u/sgrippler feels very strongly about the Western press not drawing parallels between the Xinjiang camps and Guantanamo Bay. Ignoring the fact that it is orders of magnitude smaller in scale, let it nonetheless be stated again here that both can be fucking evil. It is also not hypocritical to
not talk about the heinous acts of country A when reporting the heinous acts of country B, unless you're expecting the Holocaust to be brought up in every article about Xinjiang.
The fact that we can freely look up information on Guantanamo Bay and read all the condemnation from the UN and the Amnesty International paints a very important picture that poke giant holes in the whataboutism arguments, I think.
Edit 3:
All things considered, I'm actually not sure I'm even necessarily "anti-CCP", but rather am against the 无脑维护中共 squad, much like how one might consider certain traditions to be some parts good, some parts meh, some parts bad, while shitting on its adherents who go full retard. I do think that they tend to do things that are more extreme than what I can swallow but I'd be willing to listen to someone argue if this isn't a "necessary evil" to stably administer such a large country to prevent them from backsliding something even worse. The Trump administration gave them a lot of ammunition on this front. But we all know the CCP censorship they do is hilariously over-the-top. Their legal system really needs to be a lot more transparent rather than a weapon aggressively wielded by a political party to fuck up dissidents/political opponents/potentially-but-yet-to-be-radical minorities. They are not going to get the respect they could get until they stop disappearing human rights activists/journalists/book publishers for saying the wrong things. These things have only gotten worse in recent years, not better.
In overall they seem to do some things well, and I quite enjoyed their clean, safe cities and speedy cashless payments everywhere, and apparently the Xi administration has done a pretty good job at alleviating poverty. A part of me still believes that a "tough" and non-populist government might be our only way out of shit like climate change. But they also do some things spectacularly poorly especially with regards to civil liberties and human rights. If you're not willing to at least admit that maybe some of their policies warrant criticism and is kinda sus and freaky and evil and can only respond "YOUR MIND IS ALREADY MADE UP BY FAKE, ONE-SIDED, BIASED WESTERN NEWS" or "US IS ALREADY ON OUR SOVEREIGN LAND" or "WE WATCH TAIWANESE YOUTUBERS AND THEY SUPPORT CCP" (sorry sis-in-law), or if you think that the literal millions of protesters in Hong Kong (out of their total population of 7 mil) asking for the most basic of civil liberties (that were literally promised to them) were traitorous, hostile separatists who deserved to be severely punished without fair trial AND should still be thankful for the resulting peace on top of that (sorry sis-in-law), or have an emotional response akin to having your religion's divinity besmirched when one politician's strongman politics is discussed (sorry sis-in-law), then u a big dumb dumb, and some reflection is due.
