When a government, regardless of political orientation, "disappears people" that's a sign that something is rotten to the core.
Historical attempts at socialism in their country are exactly what set up the conditions for the rotten core you speak of to come about.
So if these students had their way, they would simply (albeit indirectly, inadvertently, over time) recreate the same rotten core.
This doesn’t excuse the current regime but it is worthy of attention.
I’m assuming there can be no perfect (reality matches theory) implementation of socialism, but I think that’s a good assumption.
And rather than pay attention only to the symptoms instead of the root causes, I think it’s good to pay attention to both.
Obviously the Chinese government is rotten to the core. It's a late-stage communist government, it's how all such governments turn out. The very important question which needs to be answered (and so far, nobody is even trying to answer it in this thread), is why does a student who lives within that system want to double down on it?
I suspect the answer is simple and doesn't need much analysis. One of the most common stereotypes about communists is they always claim that the failure of communist states is because they didn't do it right - that they were just fake or hijacked socialist revolutions. Qiu is making that very claim in the article. But there have been many attempts to do communism right, so why do these people not accept that the lack of any success cases means the ideology is wrong?
Can you point out some groups of people who "got suicided/..." in France/US/UK in recent years because of their political views?
More interestingly, while some have voted communism in, nobody seems able to vote communism out, without serious military involvement. I wonder why...
President Trump is actually a good example that everyone could agree on: considering the amount of dirt thrown at him it a clear sign of system failure because either: - he’s still not impeached or - his aides go down by presumably made up cover stories