It’s always funny to me when Westerners can’t even conceive of why anyone would support the Chinese government. Imagine being a middle-aged Chinese person who watched all this happen. Within living memory, you went from the tail end of the century of humiliation, emerging from under the heel of Western hegemony, and now you’re a world superpower of unprecedented independence from that hegemony. For the first time in the history of the colonial world, a country of the oppressed has risen up by its own power to challenge the oppressors that have spent the past 400 years immiserating every non-white country on earth. They went from ox carts to high speed rail in one lifetime. From colonial humiliation, to unprecedented pride and dignity for the first counterhegemonic force outside the West in the history of capitalism. They can look around themselves and see several examples of countries like India and Myanmar that didn’t choose communism, couldn’t challenge the West, didn’t have a cultural revolution (it was a mixed bag of very good and very bad) and they can see, clear as day, where their path led them vs the path the West would have preferred for them. Vassalage. Poverty. Exploitation. Rural idiocy, as Lenin put it. The path the West still wants to put them back on.

credit to u/Gravelord-_Nito

Interesting that the guy in the 2nd picture has an M1941 Johnson, wonder how that ended up in PLA inventory. I guess maybe captured by the Japanese and then captured from them by the PLA? Or maybe US military aid to the KMT, weird that they’d send such a rare rifle though, but maybe they were just getting rid of inventory to whoever would take it