Hello comrades, I’d like to tell you my story on /r/GenZedong. Initially, before I posted on GenZedong, I was a democratic-socialist (you can see my first posts on my Reddit profile are on very cringe western leftist subreddits) and I made a shitpost that I didn’t know where to post so I figured to post it on GenZedong even though I didn’t agree with China at all. My first post on the subreddit was a post mocking Hong Kongers who think that terminally screaming and seething online somehow amounts to praxis and genuine work dismantling the CPC’s power over Hong Kong. Although this post was pro-CPC, I was initially not a Marxist at all when I made my first post, I was a democratic-socialist at the time of my first post and still held anti-CPC ideas in my head. But what really enlightened me on the post was how they were clear and valid arguments against “Free Hong Kong” rhetoric in the comments and how GenZedongers didn’t think just “Hong Kong must be destroyed/ taken over by China,” but instead they focused on how pro-imperialist Free Hong Kong people are (I remember during the protests in 2019 a lot of Redditors were advocating for an American-led intervention in Hong Kong and even to kill Mainland Chinese or pro-China people who’re in Hong Kong currently).
It really opened my eyes to how the Community wasn’t the evil tankies I thought they were but instead genuine comrades advocating for socialism and anti-western narratives. After my first post, I started to participate and read the posts on GenZedong and I related a lot to the Marxist-Leninist content there. Eventually, I started reading Engels and Marx, and then a month later I started to read Lenin and Mao. 2 months after my first post on the subreddit I became a Marxist-Leninist, and I’m very grateful for this community for contributing to that. Mainstream Reddit may think that we’re just an irrelevant tankie community that hates freedom, but in reality, GenZedong did a lot of good work spreading theory and converting leftists such as myself to Marxism-Leninism. The subreddit may be banned soon, but its effects cannot be removed. GenZedong may soon be forgotten on Reddit, but I will never forget the good work that was done in that subreddit. Thank you, GenZedong
I first came onto GenZedong and Sino four or five years ago before I was politically active at all, I was just your normal baseline right-leaning liberal, not even a social democrat or normal lib, had voted for Trump at age 18. Someone on Reddit had called the place full of insane people so I wanted to see. I was SO uncomfortable seeing the stuff people talked about there. Fast forward some years, I’m a Marxist becoming a Marxist-Leninist, people keep talking about how despicable GenZedong is and I go back again and am met with the only sane forum on the internet. It’s so upsetting what’s happening to us on that website now.