Since urban and rural areas rely critically on each other for resources, it is unlikely that an urban-rural war could be logistically feasible.
People keep saying this as an argument for why we won’t have a civil war, but it seems pretty weak to me:
1. Logistical problems mean a war would end quickly, not that it would never happen at all. And a civil war that ends quickly would IMO be almost as bad as one that takes longer to end.
2. The previous US civil war was not an urban/rural divide. But plenty of modern civil wars are; it’s pretty standard, in fact, for a central government controlling the major cities to wage war for several years against insurgents controlling much of the countryside.
As for the cultural revolution: As far as I can tell it wasn’t actually very top-down organized. It was sparked and to some extent directed by revered leaders like Mao, but on numerous occasions even the leaders couldn’t control the actions of the students. There were loads of cases of different sects of Red Guards fighting street battles with each other—not the sort of behavior you’d expect from a top-down movement!
What I’d like to learn about is the culture in china before the massacres began. Were people suspected of being rightists, counter-revolutionaries, landlords, etc. being deplatformed, harassed, fired, etc. prior to the massacres? Was there an uptick in this sort of thing in the years prior to the massacres?
I agree that the urban/rural divide as opposed to clear cut boundaries is not a significant reason to discredit the possibility of civil war, however, there are other reasons to think that civil war is unlikely.
This highly cited article provides evidence that the main causal factors of civil wars are what the authors call conditions that favor insurgency, rather than ethnic factors, discrimination, and grievances (such as economic inequality). The argument is that even in the face of grievances that cause people to start a civil war if the right conditions are not in place the civil war cannot even get off the ground. A huge caveat here is that political polarization is not measured in this article, so this article does not rule it out as a significant factor.
The conditions in America do not favor insurgency. America has huge military, intelligence, and surveillance resources that she can use to counter insurgency, and there are few underdeveloped regions where the insurgents could hide.
People keep saying this as an argument for why we won’t have a civil war, but it seems pretty weak to me:
1. Logistical problems mean a war would end quickly, not that it would never happen at all. And a civil war that ends quickly would IMO be almost as bad as one that takes longer to end.
2. The previous US civil war was not an urban/rural divide. But plenty of modern civil wars are; it’s pretty standard, in fact, for a central government controlling the major cities to wage war for several years against insurgents controlling much of the countryside.
As for the cultural revolution: As far as I can tell it wasn’t actually very top-down organized. It was sparked and to some extent directed by revered leaders like Mao, but on numerous occasions even the leaders couldn’t control the actions of the students. There were loads of cases of different sects of Red Guards fighting street battles with each other—not the sort of behavior you’d expect from a top-down movement!
What I’d like to learn about is the culture in china before the massacres began. Were people suspected of being rightists, counter-revolutionaries, landlords, etc. being deplatformed, harassed, fired, etc. prior to the massacres? Was there an uptick in this sort of thing in the years prior to the massacres?
I agree that the urban/rural divide as opposed to clear cut boundaries is not a significant reason to discredit the possibility of civil war, however, there are other reasons to think that civil war is unlikely.
This highly cited article provides evidence that the main causal factors of civil wars are what the authors call conditions that favor insurgency, rather than ethnic factors, discrimination, and grievances (such as economic inequality). The argument is that even in the face of grievances that cause people to start a civil war if the right conditions are not in place the civil war cannot even get off the ground. A huge caveat here is that political polarization is not measured in this article, so this article does not rule it out as a significant factor.
The conditions in America do not favor insurgency. America has huge military, intelligence, and surveillance resources that she can use to counter insurgency, and there are few underdeveloped regions where the insurgents could hide.