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.
But stand up they do. Some pro-democracy activists from regions under siege by the Chinese government have begun picking fights with these so-called tankies, who dismiss well-documented human rights abuses and crackdowns on freedom in the name of stability, such as the re-education camps for Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. The people who’ve been dubbed “tankies” by critics often identify as Marxist-Leninists by ideology and are fiercely against U.S. imperialism and interference in foreign politics, especially in countries that are socialist.
These fights often take place on social media, where they can span from heated debates in Twitter comments to targeted harassment campaigns and verbal abuse, sometimes by what seem like bots. Accounts like “Hot tankie takes” or “Spicy Tankoid Takes” post regularly to ridicule “Twitter tankies” and “Stalinoids” and expose the “hottest takes” from tankies. Others go into the comment sections of posts to “nuance” the statements made, and hopefully sway a scrolling person or two against supporting them.