system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: China is a fascist country

I've been thinking about this and I feel like China ticks many of the boxes of a fascist state

\- One party authoritarian rule + censorship

\- State owned media and propaganda

\- Rejection of "degeneracy" (porn ban, no/limited lgbt rights)

\- Promotion of traditional family values, rigid hierarchical social structures and social order through media and social credit system

\- Effectively a hyper-nationalist ethnostate (a huge portion of media is still about WW2 with anti-japanese/western themes)

\- And of course the systemic genocide of an ethnic group on the basis of "counter-terrorism"

I seldom see China being referred to as a fascist state. They're self described as a socialist meritocracy, and westerners just describe it as capitalist. Am I missing something? Is there something about China that makes it definitively not fascist, or am I misconstruing definitions of facism?
gpt
I bring this up basically every time an "is x bad thing actually fascist" argument rears its head.

The big thing that separates "fascist" regimes and ideologies from other words like "nationalist" or "corporatist" or "authoritarian" or "regressive" is *war*. Fascist countries and fascist ideologies *love war*. Violence and war are not just means to an end for the fascist, but *positive moral goods* in and of themselves.

So if we stipulate all the things in your OP (I do not agree with all of them, but we'll stipulate them) we would still find that yes, China is authoritarian. Yes, it's racist. Yes, it promotes traditional values and suppresses dissent.

But it's not launching *genocidal wars of conquest*. And it doesn't even assert that it wants to or plans to. So it's not fascist.