I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
I found r/GenZeDong through r/Sino. And I first heard of r/Sino from some Vietnamese gusano on r/AsianMasculinity (liberal brainrot sub) complaining that the sub is “becoming r/Sino.” I was in these pro-Asian subs like AsianMasculinity and AznIdentity because of the spike in anti-Asian/anti-Chinese racism in 2020.
‘Identity politics,’ as some Marxists like to pejoratively put it, was what put me on this path and is what still keeps me here. I reckon a lot of the more dogmatic Marxists out there won’t like this, but fuck them… I worry the fuck out of what will happen to me or Chinese people in general within the next few years.
Identity politics is not a bad thing, but I prefer the term intersectionality.