Putin has been more often than not genuinely popular with Russians; he was very successful at creating a persona that worked in his culture to secure and maintain power.
And while Maduro wasn't charismatic, Chavez certainly was
If Europe grows a back bone and actually starts a full on Trade War with the US, I wouldn't be surprised if China joined in. I could see them carefully timing their action to maximize damage.
Weeeeeelll, the Nazis had illegally taken out a bunch of loans and hidden that fact with financial trickery. That's how they managed to pay for rearmament. All those loans were coming due, the Nazis couldn't pay and didn't want to admit what they'd done so yeah, they invaded Poland. I mean, it wasn't purely distraction, they also hoped to seize gold and foreign currency in Polish possession but distraction was a huge part of it.
Just years of reading. That you bring up the anti-corruption campaign means you're at least familiar with allegations that Xi unevenly applied the campaign against his political opponents. As a side not, I'll say the anti-corruption campaigns in China are definitely popular and also one clear situation where improvements in computer technology made a major advance in society and peoples quality of life. Corruption of low level officials was hard to root out when the people would be making complaints to other corrupt low level officials and risking retaliation in the process. Computer technology helped bypass that.
I didn't seriously consider that they would just like I wouldn't seriously consider White Americans in the 1950's launching a revolution. China has high propaganda and they're at the part of both industrialization and capitalism where average people see benefit from both.
Marx overly focused on one criteria to describe class. It's ok to accept ownership/working classes as a useful tool for understanding the world but other systems also offer useful lessons for understanding the world in different ways and contexts.
A permanently better world is possible so why settle for a temporary better situation with little hope for further improvement? Why insist people have to lose fingers when no one losing fingers is achievable and not at all far fetched?
They have a Strongman because Xi went to great efforts to sideline people or policies that served as a check to his power. Something that would have been unthinkable in China at any point after Mao and before Xi.
What a bizarre accusation. Are this hostile to everyone with any knowledge of history? If I'm knowledgeable about more obscure concepts like Greater Germany or the politics of the Anglophone world, it's a stretch that I don't know that the Civil War was, according to the confederacy, entirely about slavery.
Protestors remaining docile and submissive, especially thru social media posts like this one, are the end goal of the regime. Martial law would be a shitshow and hurt the regime more than the resistance.
It's more like offering someone a weight loss pill that will work for a couple months and then make you gain more weight than you started with.