People as Property: Johnny Silverhand and the Chinese Party-State

By Orthogonal Proxy

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When Johnny Silverhand leans in and starts talking about what he has seen, the words are aimed like a punch thrown through several decades of Western anxiety:

I saw corps strip farmers of water, and eventually of land. I saw them transform Night City into a machine fueled by people's crushed spirits, broken dreams, and emptied pockets. Corps've long controlled our lives, taken lots… and now they're after our souls. This war's a people's war against a system that's spiralled outta our control.

Most players put this speech in a familiar box: a 21st-century howl against "capitalism" and megacorps. Night City becomes a neon remix of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, piled on top of Los Angeles and Tokyo, with corporate logos where flags used to be.

But if you stop listening to the labels and listen to the structure, the world Johnny describes begins to look like something else.

He is not just complaining that companies are too greedy. He is describing a system that believes, in its bones, that it has the right to: • take water and land away from the people who live on it; • repurpose an entire urban space into a single extraction machine; • and treat the inner lives of millions as raw material.

In our world, that blueprint matches less onto messy liberal democracies and more onto a very particular 20th-century invention: the Leninist party-state.

Seen from a Pan-Asian vantage point, the closest real-world twin to Night City is not New York or Tokyo, but the territory ruled by the Chinese Communist Party under the brand name "People's Republic of China."

Johnny thinks he is declaring war on capitalism. Structurally, he is describing a different enemy: a system that acts as though the land, the population, and even their organs are its private estate.

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Two blueprints: who owns the ground, who owns the life

To see the difference, you have to start with the blueprints, not the marketing.

The liberal-capitalist blueprint, in its ideal form, says: • individuals and firms own property; • the state protects those rights; • when the state takes property, it has to present this as an exception—"eminent domain", "public use"—and dress it up in justifications.

The practice has never been clean. There were enclosures, forced removals, colonial plantations. But the official story still matters, because it sets a baseline for what feels "normal" and what looks like abuse.

The Leninist blueprint turns this inside out. • The state, as the Party's instrument, is the ultimate owner of the land and the "commanding heights" of the economy. • Individual use of land and capital is conditional, time-limited, and revocable whenever higher goals demand it. • The Party is not a faction within the state. It is the spine of the state, and everyone else is an attachment.

The PRC was built on this second blueprint. In its legal structure, there is no such thing as private land ownership. Urban land is owned by the state. Rural and suburban land is owned by "collectives." Individuals and companies can only hold land-use rights for a fixed term. Those rights can be granted, traded, reshuffled—or taken back.

On paper, all this belongs to "the people." In reality, "the people" is an empty throne. The only actor allowed to sit on it is the Party-state.

So when a district is cleared for a dam, a tech park, or a new security compound, the internal logic is not "we stole your land." It is: your temporary access to what was always ours has expired.

Johnny's "corps strip farmers of water and land" assumes a world where someone else once owned those things, and where the stripping is a corporate coup against an old social contract. In the CCP blueprint, farmers never owned the land in the first place. Confiscation is not a deviation. It is the default.

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Night City's four locks, PRC edition

Cyberpunk 2077 revolves around a blunt question: who owns your life? Johnny's answer in Night City is simple: the corporations do.

Mechanically, you can break that ownership into four locks: 1. Control of the base – land, water, infrastructure. 2. Control of exit – who can move where; who has alternatives. 3. Control of narrative – what is sayable, teachable, thinkable. 4. Control of bodies and data – who tracks you, who can lay hands on you, who owns your records and biometrics.

In most liberal democracies, corporations can influence each of those layers, sometimes heavily. They can lobby lawmakers, sponsor propaganda, manipulate data. They can collude with parts of the state. But they usually cannot fuse all four layers into a single, coherent command system. Courts intervene, elections reshuffle ruling coalitions, media compete. People emigrate. The locks are leaky.

The CCP model is not leaky. It is an experiment in closing all four locks inside one structure. • Through the land regime, the state remains the permanent owner of the ground, above the heads of all nominal "owners" of apartments or factories. • Through hukou, internal passports, and border controls, exit is never a simple right; it is an administrative favor that can be denied, revoked, or priced. • Through school curricula, licensing of publishers and broadcasters, firewalls, keyword filters, and "guidance of public opinion", the Party reserves the right to define reality itself. • Through ubiquitous cameras, real-name SIM cards, platform-level surveillance, health codes, face recognition, "grid management," and an enormous internal-security budget, it keeps bodies and data in a single, searchable space.

Johnny's corps own the city not just because they pay salaries, but because they own the ground, the air, the information, and the enforcement. That is what makes Night City feel suffocating: there is no real outside.

On that axis, Beijing is closer to Arasaka than Washington is.

The CCP system is not just an authoritarian variant of capitalism. It is a total project of ownership. It claims, as a matter of right, the power to decide where you live, what you see, whom you can gather with, and how your physical and digital traces will be used.

Night City is a machine for turning "crushed spirits, broken dreams, and emptied pockets" into corporate profit. The PRC's Leninist party-state is a machine for turning land, labor, and loyalty into the continued life of the system itself.

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From land to organs: when property logic reaches flesh

Once you accept that "the system," rather than the person, is the true subject of rights, the logic does not have a natural stopping point.

If all land, all strategic assets, and all major flows of value are ultimately "ours" (meaning the Party's), then it takes only a half-step to treat bodies the same way: as resources to be allocated, disciplined, and—when useful—harvested.

This is where the ugliest allegations about the PRC come in.

For years, human-rights researchers, journalists, and an independent tribunal have argued that prisoners of conscience in China—especially Falun Gong practitioners and, more recently, Uyghurs and other minorities—have been killed to supply an organ-transplant industry whose volume and waiting times are otherwise impossible to explain. Legislatures in multiple countries have taken these claims seriously enough to restrict or condemn "transplant tourism" to China.

Beijing rejects all of this. That is predictable. No regime that needs such a system will admit to it.

The point here is structural.

If you build a system in which: • the state is the ultimate owner of the ground; • individuals have only conditional use over their property; • political and legal protections depend entirely on obedience; • and detainees are stripped of even that conditional protection,

then you have created the perfect environment in which organs can be treated as just another "public resource" to be managed. There is nothing in the blueprint that clearly says "stop" at the boundary of skin.

Land is reassigned with one kind of form. Bodies are reassigned with another.

In both cases, the people concerned are treated as entries on a spreadsheet: valuable, substitutable, and expendable.

Johnny's line about corps "coming for our souls" sounds theatrical in a world where the worst corporate crime you see is a predatory subscription or a toxic office. In a world where political prisoners may be blood-typed, tissue-typed, and lined up as a reserve of spare parts, the line becomes descriptive.

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Feeding the machine: foreign money, domestic deals

Johnny calls his war "a people's war against a system that's spiralled outta our control." Systems do not spiral by themselves. They are fed.

In the case of the Chinese party-state, the feeding chain of the last four decades has been crude but effective.

First link: external buyers. Capital from the United States, Europe, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere poured into China. Investors saw a huge labor pool and low wages; politicians saw a cheap workshop and a convenient way to pacify a former Soviet-aligned state.

They told themselves a story: economic growth will bring a middle class, the middle class will demand rights, and the system will gradually liberalize.

Second link: the Party and its factions. The CCP saw something else: fuel.

New tax revenues and foreign-exchange reserves went first into hard power and internal control—military modernization, domestic security, state-owned champions, prestige projects. Key blocs inside the system—provincial machines, security organs, technocrats—were cut into the spoils so they would see their future inside the regime, not outside it.

Third link: the population's foam. Only at the tail end did ordinary people see benefits—factory jobs, wages lifted from starvation to strain, apartments whose prices climbed so fast that paper wealth seemed to appear out of nowhere.

From outside, this could be read as "economic legitimacy": a regime that makes people richer earns their support.

From inside, it functioned more like a buy-off chain: • The Party bought loyalty from the blocs that could threaten it. • Those blocs bought quiet from the people under them. • Millions accepted a simple deal: do not ask what stands underneath; enjoy the foam on top as long as it lasts.

None of the links in this chain is fully innocent.

The Party designed it and took the largest cut. Foreign firms and governments chose profit and convenience over structural honesty. And inside China, people did more than suffer in silence. Some actively cheered the idea that Beijing could keep "playing" outsiders for money and technology, so that their own slice of the mirage could last a little longer.

That does not mean every citizen is equally guilty. It does mean that the machine is not sustained only by a small circle of rulers. It runs on millions of small decisions to cooperate, look away, or participate.

"There are no innocent snowflakes in an avalanche." In this avalanche, the snow includes overseas investors, diaspora nationalists, local officials, and neighbors who decide that loyalty is safer than memory.

The direction of extraction is clear. The net flow of benefit goes upward, toward a system that treats the population as an asset pool. The harder people work, and the more the outside world "helps" that system, the more efficiently it can squeeze those living on that territory.

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Why there is no Johnny Silverhand in Beijing

Johnny's answer to the system is: "Do whatever it takes to stop 'em, defeat 'em, gut 'em. If I gotta kill, I'll kill." He imagines a "people's war" in which the oppressed blow up corporate towers and reset the world.

Why is there no visible equivalent of that in today's China?

Not because the population is satisfied. If consent were as solid as propaganda claims, Beijing would not need a security apparatus of this size. It would not need to jail labor organizers, censor grieving parents, or panic over independent religious movements.

The absence of a Johnny-style insurgency has other causes, and they are structural. • Monopolized violence. From 1949 onward, the Party systematically crushed or absorbed all independent armed forces. There is no corporate army, no private militia, no serious rival. Every gun ultimately belongs to the same chain of command. • Depth of surveillance. What Cyberpunk sells as futuristic—cameras everywhere, biometric tracking, behavior prediction—is already banal in many Chinese cities. Real-name phones, platform-level monitoring, health-code infrastructure: you don't need implants when the phone in your pocket does the job. Organizing an underground war under that panopticon is not romantic. It is suicidal. • Erasure of independent organization. Unions, NGOs, religious communities, even hobby groups—all can exist only within narrow bounds. Once they grow too large, too autonomous, or too connected across regions, they are domesticated or destroyed. • Narrative fusion. The Party has wrapped itself in the word "China" and the vague image of an ancient civilization. To oppose the system is framed as "hating China" or "betraying your roots," not as resisting a recent Soviet-derived experiment. For many people with little else to lean on, that symbolic identity is worth defending even at their own expense.

Johnny fights in a world where corporations are monstrous but still, in some sense, external. They are not the only source of identity. In the PRC, the Party is not just the landlord; it is also the main author of the story people tell themselves about who they are.

The result is that the conditions for a classic "people's war" have been removed in advance. The machine did not wait for an uprising. It was built to ensure that any uprising serious enough to matter would be detected and crushed long before it reached critical mass.

People inside live in a double role: they are targets of extraction, and at the same time, they help maintain the machine in countless small ways because rebellion looks both hopeless and lethal.

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The real enemy Johnny missed

Johnny Silverhand mislabels his enemy because "capitalism" is the easiest villain in his culture's script. It is the story people already know how to tell.

But the structure he is screaming at is not unique to capitalism. It is the structure of any system that believes it has a structural right to treat human beings as property—land that works, assets that vote, flesh that can be reconfigured.

In 21st-century Asia, the clearest and most advanced example of such a system is not a messy democracy full of corrupt politicians and crooked developers. It is the Leninist party-state in Beijing: a Soviet-descended operating system running on the hardware of a conquered imperial space.

That system: • claims land and water as its default property; • treats people's labor and time as instruments for its own survival; • can, in some cases, treat their organs as a usable stock; • and covers all of this with a story about "the people" and "civilization" that was written yesterday and sold as eternal truth.

The people living under it are not holy victims. Many are complicit. Many more are simply calculating: they accept the role of fuel because refusing it looks worse.

Johnny is right about one thing: you cannot negotiate with a machine that thinks it owns your soul.

He is wrong about where that machine lives.

Sometimes it does not wear a logo or answer to shareholders. Sometimes it wears a red flag, prints constitutions in which everything already belongs to it, and calls its experimental estate a "people's republic."

For people outside China, the first step is to stop pretending that "helping China" in the abstract automatically means helping those who live there. Very often, it means upgrading the extraction capacity of the system that feeds on them.

For people inside, the choices are harsher and narrower. There are no elevator rides to rooftop boss fights. There is only the slow, dangerous work of refusing to believe that being someone else's property is the natural order of things, and of acting—however modestly—as if you were, in fact, your own.

Night City is fiction. The land registries, security budgets, biometric databases, and prison quotas of the CCP are not.

That is where the real cyberpunk story is happening: not on a screen, but under the feet and inside the bodies of people who were never meant to own themselves.