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Background and Related Work

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What is a “tankie?”

Tankie was originally a pejorative term referring to communists who supported the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 [34, 50, 94, 100, 105 , 107 ]. Over the years, the context of the usage of tankie evolved. For example, it has been used to show derision towards pro-Soviet hardliners [ 43], to describe communists who support China’s policies [72] (e.g., supporters of China’s actions on Uyghurs [104 ] and the Hong Kong protests [10]), as well as young, online Stalinists in general [44].

The first cluster of sources (along with source 43) is the same as earlier in Section 1 (I have yet to interrogate all of them; TODO, though I suspect the overall thrust of the sources will accurately characterize the history and etymology of the term “tankie”). Source 104 has also already been briefly examined and leans heavily on Zenz, Radio Free Asia, and South China Morning Post in the sources that were examined from it. The remaining sources (72, 10, and 44) are:

• 72 is (online link): “Fabio Lanza. 2021. Of Rose-coloured glasses, old and new. Made in China Journal 6, 2 (2021), 22–27”
• 10 is: “Sebastian Skov Andersen and Thomas Chan. 2021. Tankie man: The pro-democracy Hong Kongers standing up to Western Communists. https://thediplomat.com/2021/03/tankie-man-the-pro-democracy-hong-kongers-standing-up-to-western-communists/”
• 44 is (This article is new enough that libgen doesn’t have the recent volumes from the journal; any active students in the audience, feel free to drop a PDF): “Dustin A Greenwalt and James Alexander McVey. 2022. Get Gritty with it: memetic icons and the visual ethos of antifascism. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2022), 1–22.”

The article from Made In China Journal is from someone who appears to be a Maoist.

On 18 September 2021, the Qiao Collective co-organised an all-day conference on the topic of ‘China and the Left: A Socialist Forum’ (The People’s Forum 2021). The speakers, who participated either in person or via Zoom, included scholars of China but also noted ‘leftist’ intellectuals, from Vijay Prashad to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Radhika Desai. The forum was co-sponsored by the Monthly Review, the People’s Forum, and Codepink. The Qiao Collective (2021)—a ‘volunteer-run group of diaspora Chinese writers, artists, and researchers working to challenge escalating Western imperialism on China’—has in the past two years evolved from a Twitter account to a full-blown online publication and has become a loud pro-China voice in the United States and in global political discourse. While the various presenters at the forum took different approaches, and some arguments were more nuanced than others, the overall tone was very supportive of the current regime in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and extremely critical of US policies in Asia as well as of Western media coverage of China. Events like this exemplify what seems to be an increasingly visible and vocal presence of pro-PRC positions within the so-called left, in the United States but also worldwide.

These positions, often subsumed under the disparaging moniker ‘tankie’—a term that was originally used to describe leftists who supported the line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, with specific reference to those who supported the deployment of Soviet tanks to suppress the Hungarian revolution of 1956—present historians with the second instance in which ‘China’ has featured as a politically significant conceptual category for activists around the world.

Consulting an author with opposing ideology (Maoism) to the ideology in question (“tankie”; more specifically here though, perhaps “Dengist”/“supporter of Reform and Opening Up”) is, charitably, an exercise in dialectical materialism of a sort, I suppose. Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninists do broadly support China’s policies, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or restraint, and Maoists broadly don’t. So that does at least offer some categorical boundaries for the authors to work with in forming cohorts around different far-left ideologies.

The article from The Diplomat, however, is a far less nuanced take:

When a still unidentified man stepped in front of a line of tanks that were leaving Tiananmen Square the day after the massacre that killed around 1,000 student protesters, it was at the risk of his life. The same cannot be said for modern day pro-democracy activists, who are standing up to modern day tankies — that’s Western, often young, supporters of communist, authoritarian regimes — considering most of the battling is taking place online.

There was no massacre of students in Tiananmen Square. There was certainly fighting in the streets --away from where the students in the square were-- and the CPC itself even lists the dead from this fighting at 241, a far cry from the “around 1,000 student protesters” given, both in terms of the number and in terms of who died.

Regardless, here, tankie is “young western supporters of communist authoritarian regimes.” This definition is, at best, orthogonal to the previous ones proffered. The article has some other choice bits:

Sophie Mak, a pro-democracy activist and student who does work digitally monitoring human rights at the Human Rights Hub at University of Hong Kong, has, many times over, gotten caught in fights with tankies online who criticize her work as a smear campaign against China. She told The Diplomat that tankies often pose an obstacle when promoting human rights. They attack and refute even the most well-sourced claims of China’s human rights abuses — something she has had to deal with in her own work.

The sources and claims either stand up to scrutiny or they don’t. That holds for all inquiry.

“And, of course, that worldview is fundamentally flawed. Because, as I always say, China does not present an alternative to whatever order that these people are upset with,” said Ngo. “China is an integral part of it.”

Again with citing those with opposing ideologies from the ideology in question. Though I suppose this does dovetail nicely with citing a Maoist.

Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “actually existing socialist countries” (AES); especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning. Although there is not really a concrete definition, recent work by Petterson [ 94] provides a succinct description of tankies:

“Tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China etc.”

Not a particularly objectionable definition to me, though also incredibly broad. From the introduction up until now, the paper has struggled to pin down what, precisely, constitutes a “tankie.” I’ll give the authors some slack, in that ideologies are fluid and dynamic things that, to some extent, certainly seem to intentionally defy neat categorization. And we can of course also recognize the nature of Contradiction more broadly and take a charitable overview of the authors’ frequent citation of an ideology’s opponents in coming to define it. No ideological framework can be entirely free of contradiction, after all. But that slack can also be used to hang oneself in later analysis. Specifically, I can think of two scenarios where that might happen:

1. One cherry-picks different facets of one’s collective definition at different times to paint a narrative that is self-coherent but at odds with the totality of the facts.
2. One doesn’t actually have a sound understanding of the ideology at play, and thus mis-identifies or mis-labels crucial early-stage data in the analysis pipeline that taints the resulting conclusions.

At this point, I’m strongly suspicious of the second option having occurred at least, especially given the quality and ideological leanings of the sources cited so far.