I hope the CCP falls and gets replaced by a democracy. I wanna go back to revisit a childhood place for nostalgia purposes, but I can’t because I’m terrified of the government.
They’ve tried to kill me in the past. Maybe they aren’t as bloodthirsty anymore, but there has been a lot of Americans with Chinese ancestry that will think they are welcome in China because of their blood, but they get treated as a Chinese citizen in the eyes of the law while simutaneously being mistrusted because of foreign citizenship. What this means is that if you get in political trouble, or just doing something they don’t like (like using VPNs to access Youtube or basically any website outside of China), you can be harassed by cops or potentially even get arrested. But if you do get arrested, they do not let you contact your embassy because, again, they treat you like a Chinese citizen, where as a white American will be allowed to contact the embassy. Then, if things escalate to courts, they could prosecute you as a spy, and with 99% conviction rate you aint gonna be getting out any time soon. That’s where an actual Chinese citizen benefits, because if you are a citizen, might just demand an apology and let you go. So you get the worst of both worlds by being a non Chinese citizen, and being non-white. Even if nothing happens, they could already put you in an “exit-ban” and keep you from leaving indefinitely with no fair appeals process, for any political reason, or just a mistake in the bureauacracy. As a second-born during the one-child policy, I don’t even want to risk there being some “additional fines” that my parents haven’t paid off for some reason, which should already be cleared. China has a network of spies in the US, and you never know if someone walking by is a CCP spy while you were talking with friends about things critical of the CCP. My parents have this “Wechat” thing on their phone and they FUCKING GAVE PERMISSION FOR THE APP TO ACCESS THE MICROPHONE!!! Who knows if they have records of an argument about the CCP and my parents were STILL PRAISING THEM and I told them how much I hate them for trying to kill me. And I often have these arguments at home, when they have their phones near by. The Wechat app could’ve easily sent that conversation back to China and now I’m on their watchlist. Too much risk while CCP is in power.
The thing about being a Chinese-American, is that both shores are unwelcoming. The US is racist and becoming fascist, China thinks of us as traitors. There’s no safe harbor. Maybe Taiwan? I doubt that’s even safe since China wants to invade soon.
Considering that WeChat does video and audio calls it’s pretty reasonable that wechar asks permission to use the microphone. I think you’ve been caught up in fearmongering. China isn’t going to invade Taiwan any time soon. There has been little to any real indication they would or even could. You’ve gotta understand that the CCP is authoritarian but no government is that competent to be keeping tabs on a random Americans conversation that they had at some point at some time who may more may not be ever visiting China. I’m not saying China is run by good people, I’m saying no government is competent enough to actually 1984 anyone in real life.
It’s like the social credit system that doesn’t really exist. The CCP put out a vague instruction to have a credit system based on social stuff because many Chinese people don’t have banks thus don’t have access to regular credit systems. Random cities and provinces came up their own systems with random rules and regulations. Then basically all of them were walked back because they were stupid and random and overbearing, and the CCP delegating their vague orders gives them plausible deniability in that they blamed the stupid systems on local government and played the good guy when they ordered them walked back.
Cons: Not being able to revisit places I’ve been to that I always wanted to go.
Pros: Being safe from an authoritarian government that’s increasingly regressing back to totalitarianism
Visit China
Pros: I can visit places I always wanted to revisit
Cons: Being arrested in China, placed on exit ban, tortured, or executed. And if I somehow leave unharmed, upon returning to the US, I could be accused of being a communist spy due to rising US-China tensions, possibly spending time in prison because of a second red scare.
Do you not understand US-China tensions? Both countries fear each other, and someone who’ve lived in the US for practically their entire life suddenly wants to visit China? That’d definitely raise some alarms about a potential spy. Maybe nothing happens, maybe they falsely assume I’m a spy.
Same thing when I return to the US, those border agents are gonna ask me why I went to my China during these times of high tensions.
There are risks from both countries. Whereas if China was democratic and US-friendly, none of these would be an issue.
Do you know how many people in the US were falsely arrested? That’s in a democratic country. Think about those odds if it were an authoritarian one.
Harvard conducted a 13-year study of popular Chinese sentiment and found 95.5% approval of their government.
If you replace the Chinese form of democracy with the US form of democracy, what will happen when the US popular sentiment is 20% trust in government overall, 20% approval of Congress, and 40% approval of the president?
The article you linked mentioned how that approval rating (for the central government - not the local ones) came to be for rural people: Censorship and propaganda combined with an attitude towards government similar to what you often see with religious people. If something good happens, the big guy far away did it. If something bad happens, it’s due to the corruption of men (in this case the corrupt local officials).
Edit: From the article:
“I think citizens often hear that the central government has introduced a raft of new policies, then get frustrated when they don’t always see the results of such policy proclamations, but they think it must be because of malfeasance or foot-dragging by the local government,” said Saich.
Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”
[…] This dichotomy is highlighted by a 2017 Gallup poll, where 70 percent of U.S. respondents had a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in local government.
The US has the longest running, largest, and most expensive propaganda machine in the world. The evidence doesn’t match the conclusion. The federal government of the US is very far away, the states are much closer. The evidence does not match the conclusion.
Further, claiming that 95.5% of a billion people are too incompetent to see through the ruse is laughably indefensible. It’s almost like the propaganda machine in the West is so effective that it managed to make a Chinese expat into an orientalist.
Wait, so you think that 40% approval is a result of the largest longest running propaganda machine, but 95.5% approval is accurate because China is constantly doing a #1 bang-up gold star job?
I’m saying if you think that Chinese propaganda convinced a billion people for 15 years to love their central government, but US propaganda can’t achieve even half that result for far fewer people, then you’re engaging in mental gymnastics.
The 40% approval rating in the US is because the US is fucking their people and the world, because the ruling class in the US believe that the only way to build a sustainable society is for the elite to maintain their interests over and above the interests of the masses. The 95.5% approval in China is because the Chinese government actually attempts to meet the needs of its people because it is fundamentally based on the theory that this is the only way to build a sustainable society.
If China used propaganda to get that 95.5%, it couldn’t have possibly used more propaganda nor more effective propaganda than the US has been putting out for over a century. Maybe the US doesn’t think they need popular approval and therefore they don’t propagandize domestically as hard, because they know the police will brutalize and murder anyone that tries to organize a resistance, but that is not the W you think it is.
Maybe… Just maybe… The media in the US is owned by capital, not the government. Profit based journalism is certainly different from government propaganda based journalism, no?
You’re right, the US government doesn’t give much of a fuck about public opinions so they don’t need to force the media to run only pro-government stories to stay afloat. The politicians are incentives to care more about their constituents than the country as a whole, and it functions, in a way.
If you want to talk about police brutality, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre wasn’t a China W. If you wanna go more recent, the Hong Kong resistance to CCP rule was a big inspiration to BLM.
Stop trying to sound smart, Godric. The US government is owned by capital. Profit based journalism is still 1/3 smaller than profit-based Public Relations. And that doesn’t cover the defense budgets for propaganda, the State Department, and other government agencies.
You’re right, the US government doesn’t give much of a fuck about public opinions so they don’t need to force the media to run only pro-government stories to stay afloat
They run constant pro-capitalist stories, orientalist stories, Russophobic stories, anti-Iranian stories, anti-south-american stories, and on and on and on. They’ve been manipulating their school curriculum across all grade levels for over a century. The West has been using manipulated narratives to justify invading foreign nations since at least the British launched the opium wars against China.
In a capitalist society, the government is literally the apparatus by which capital coordinates its global class warfare. You can’t separate them by saying “oh, capital owns the media, the government doesn’t”, when quite explicitly it’s both/and and also there is no difference between capital owning the media or the government owning the media.
The reason the ruling class needs to propagandize its own people is to prevent revolt. That’s why people think China propagandizes its own people, right? To make them content with their situation? Capital, since the merchant class launched the first tri-color revolution, has also needed to suppress revolt in its people, and they use domestic propaganda for the same reason. However, they also use violence.
The politicians are incentives to care more about their constituents than the country as a whole, and it functions, in a way.
Princeton University demonstrated that there is no real way to construe the US as a democracy, that is, a government run by the people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6w9CbemhVY
In China, however, the politicians have incentives to care about all the people in the country. The indigenous populations in China are given autonomous zones, similar to how the USSR maintained autonomy for different nations. In the US, there are many indigenous languages with fewer than 10 fluent speakers, not a single institution uses those languages, and the people who are trying to learn these languages are mostly extremely educated. In China, Tibetans speak their native language from grade school all the way through university. There is no ability for the majority ethnic Han Chinese to impose cultural genocide on Tibetans the way the US does to its native population because the Chinese government understands that maintaining the interests of the state, the nation, and all of its peoples are required for a functioning society to eventually become sustainable.
What are the incentives that Chinese politicians have that US politicians don’t? Chinese politicians know they are nothing without the support of the people, while US politicians know they are nothing without the political will to launch wars of aggression and starve millions of people to death with sanctions. So, will China use domestic propaganda to increase the support of the people? Absolutely! And the US will use domestic propaganda for the same reason, because if the people revolt they won’t be able to continue war profiteering. And yet, despite the US having the most powerful and most effective propaganda in the world, they can’t convince even a simple majority of their population to support the government, whereas in China 95.5% of people support how their federal government governs the country.
I don’t know how much back bending you have to do to try to square this in your head. The Tienanmen Square incident is a classic study in US propaganda and if you actually read the news wires from the US reporters who were on the ground at the time you’ll see that you have to choose between the propaganda and the facts. And no one should forget that Hong Kong was literally a British colony until 1997, and under colonial rule Chinese were second-class citizens while Brits were immune to Chinese to law. The protests were literally about whether or not criminals in Hong Kong could be tried under Chinese law and the youth who were fighting were literally fighting within the historical context of maintaining British colonial structures, which is why the parents of the youth who were protesting would literally kick them out of the house because the parents knew that life under British rule was absolutely terrible and that integration with the mainland structures is critical for establishing a stable society. The youth, however, have no context for this and only see that the UK turned Hong Kong into a global financial center that creates narratives about the freedom to become land-owning millionaire financiers and rentiers. Again, it takes a special kind of gymnastics to look at a youth protest seeking to maintain British colonial structures that were imposed after the British completely destroyed China by getting 40% of their population addicted to opium and then launching a devastating war after the Chinese tried to outlaw opium and seize the drugs at the port. The results of the war gave Hong Kong to Britain, as well as other territories, and in all of those territories Chinese law was suspended for all foreign merchants (literal immunity) and China was required to legalize the opium trade. The protests in Hong Kong were literally against the incremental dismantling of those colonial legal structures. But go on about how China is bad because they had protests just like the US had a BLM movement.
Yeah, maybe read it again. The researchers are attempting to offer possible explanations. They don’t have any empirical evidence that domestic propaganda is the root cause or even a significant contributor to their actual empirical data. Further, they explain evidence later in the article that runs counter to that potential explanation - over the 15 years, the poor got more satisfied with the government. This tracks much more closely to economic and social progress in the country than it does to propaganda efforts, which were far stronger and more comprehensive in the early days of the revolution, necessitated by the presence of war both internationally and domestically.
Maybe don’t just skim the article for sentences that sound like they might jive with your preconceived notions and instead develop some critical thinking skills.
“Democracy” in China is significantly more democratic than in places like the USA. In the USA, you’re presented with a false dichotomy in the two-party system, where both parties are parties for wealthy interests. Neither party is a party of the people. In China, for example, elections are “non-politicized”. Paraphrasing Richard Boer,
‘Non-politicized’ elections means that elections are not a manifestation of class conflict in antagonistic political parties, but are based on qualifications, expertise, and merit for positions.
When your vote is between candidates based on their qualifications and is not some charade of us-v-them where neither choice actually benefits the people, that is a more democratic system.
The USA is democratic in name only. People in the USA have little to no real political agency, but have been lead to believe their superficial interactions with the political system are real agency.
What are you talking about? You think the CCP has removed basic political agency from workers but in the US political agency of workers is retained? You’re delusional. Communists are far and away more democratic than capitalists, in literally every communist project ever attempted. There is more involvement, more voting, more local agency, more ability to self-govern, more ability to solve local problems in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and Laos than in the USA, UK, Italy, France, Germany, and Spain.
Is that why the democratically elected Hong Kong legislators were arrested from the floor of their own legislative chamber for supporting democratic ideals? Is that why China still has non-public trials?
Also, China ranks poorly on democracy indexes, freedom indexes and human development index.
But yes, individual freedoms and civil liberties are foundational to political agency. You cannot engage freely with political issues you can’t freely discuss. This should be self evident.
The US has non-public trials, with secret evidence, and even secret charges. China is nowhere NEAR the top offender on these issues. Not even close.
Hong Kong was a literal British colony and China has allowed Hong Kong, a city that was stolen by Europeans and completely changed, to have its own system of laws and politics based on the British colonial project, and the politicians on Hong Kong that demand that freedom have Euro-centric financial interests since the UK made it into a global finance hub. The idea that these politicians were “pro-democracy”, but the Democratic People’s Republic of China was arresting them for being “pro-democracy” is about as smooth-brained a take as “they hate us for our freedoms”. It’s propaganda and the fact that you parrot it demonstrates you know nothing of the history or present of China, Hong Kong, and like Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The subversive activities of the “pro-democracy” politicians is primarily their alignment with a Hong Kong independence movement, which is effectively a secession movement led by a pro-European minority that wants to keep financial ties with London and the US. It would be like New York City trying to secede to maintain its ties to Holland.
Also, China ranks poorly on democracy indexes, freedom indexes and human development index.
Most of these are Eurocentric, meaning orientalist and anti-communist. None of them are unbiased. 95.5% of China’s own people support how their government is serving them and supporting them. Whatever the fucking fascist Euro-colonists think “democracy” is, it’s curious that includes apartheid states, genocidal states, and monocultural states but excludes incredibly happy, incredibly diverse nations that have managed to life 800 million out of poverty in 60 years.
But yes, individual freedoms and civil liberties are foundational to political agency
Do you think that Chinese don’t have individual freedoms and civil liberties? If they didn’t, do you think they’d have a 95.5% approval rating over 15 years that was increasing among the most poor in the country while also managing 5 separate a distinct autonomous regions where unique cultures speak their own language in the millions? If individual freedoms and civil liberties are so foundational to political agency, then what’s up with the entire Western hemisphere where the colonist have stripped everyone of their individual freedoms and civil liberties except the land-owning white people? How’re those Nicaraguan Death Squads and Haitian assassinations and US trained coups, and US and Canadian genocidal policies against millions of natives - how are they doing? Do they impact those “indexes” you mentioned?
You cannot engage freely with political issues you can’t freely discuss. This should be self evident.
It is. And you’d be surprised just how much dissent there is in China that’s open, written about, etc. There are protests, there are essays, there are factions. You’re getting confused by the US media painting legitimate government intervention with universal oppression. The fact that 95.5% of people approve of the government should tell you this, alone. But even just doing a little bit of research on your own would disprove everything you believe about China. For example, Winnie the Pooh is not banned, nor are products bearing its visage, nor are websites with the content, etc.
It’s really astounding how much projection you exhibit here. You say China does poorly on indexes, but you don’t question why those indexes look good for genocidal mass murdering settler-colonial states. You say Chinese people lack individual freedoms and civil liberties but don’t think about the binding arbitration epidemic, structural racism, deaths of poverty, the Princeton report demonstrating zero democratic influence in the USA, monocultural oppression throughout most of Europe, refusal of colonial states to repair the damage they did up to and including levying debt on all of Haiti for each black person freed because the slave owners need their money back (that debt is still generating profit through interests and fees and Citi is the one currently collecting that profit).
Just take everything you criticize China for, look at the North Atlantic, and you’ll see the North Atlantic does this so often and so thoroughly that OF COURSE China has to do it worse, and then actually research China and realize that every single source you’ve ever believed on what’s happening in China is just bald-faced lying to you, completely outright, shamelessly. It was fucking eye-opening when I did it. I’m sure it will be for you, too.
You do seem to know a lot about boot flavours and licking, it is suspicious, I wonder if that is related to leash you have on your neck that reads US property.
There is no productive conversation with you people. It is either we accept your notion of rules based ordes western imperialism or we are barvarians. You dont think outside whatever the us propaganda machine tells you to, even tje most simple things any of my politically uneducated third world friends would know is impossible to you.
You’re the one randomly commenting to defend a government. Plenty of governments and orgs find problems with the policies and actions of the CCP not just the US.
One I have a problem with is how people in China can’t really criticize their government without risking being targeted by the government. If I said the Pooh Bear comment in China the CCP would be on my ass because WeChat reported me.
On the other hand criticize my government all the fucking time including leaders in particular. Watch. Fuck Biden I don’t like his gun policy and I don’t think he should run again, he is too fucking old. Here, I’ll do it again. Fuck Trump, he has tiny hands and I’m pretty sure he did those crimes he has been to going to court over. Also the DMV sucks and inflation is bad.
I could get into more important things the CCP is responsible for like the genocide but you probably think those are lies or want to get into whataboutisms.
I hope the CCP falls and gets replaced by a democracy. I wanna go back to revisit a childhood place for nostalgia purposes, but I can’t because I’m terrified of the government.
I hope it’s not a stupid question, but… what are you worried would happen to you?
They’ve tried to kill me in the past. Maybe they aren’t as bloodthirsty anymore, but there has been a lot of Americans with Chinese ancestry that will think they are welcome in China because of their blood, but they get treated as a Chinese citizen in the eyes of the law while simutaneously being mistrusted because of foreign citizenship. What this means is that if you get in political trouble, or just doing something they don’t like (like using VPNs to access Youtube or basically any website outside of China), you can be harassed by cops or potentially even get arrested. But if you do get arrested, they do not let you contact your embassy because, again, they treat you like a Chinese citizen, where as a white American will be allowed to contact the embassy. Then, if things escalate to courts, they could prosecute you as a spy, and with 99% conviction rate you aint gonna be getting out any time soon. That’s where an actual Chinese citizen benefits, because if you are a citizen, might just demand an apology and let you go. So you get the worst of both worlds by being a non Chinese citizen, and being non-white. Even if nothing happens, they could already put you in an “exit-ban” and keep you from leaving indefinitely with no fair appeals process, for any political reason, or just a mistake in the bureauacracy. As a second-born during the one-child policy, I don’t even want to risk there being some “additional fines” that my parents haven’t paid off for some reason, which should already be cleared. China has a network of spies in the US, and you never know if someone walking by is a CCP spy while you were talking with friends about things critical of the CCP. My parents have this “Wechat” thing on their phone and they FUCKING GAVE PERMISSION FOR THE APP TO ACCESS THE MICROPHONE!!! Who knows if they have records of an argument about the CCP and my parents were STILL PRAISING THEM and I told them how much I hate them for trying to kill me. And I often have these arguments at home, when they have their phones near by. The Wechat app could’ve easily sent that conversation back to China and now I’m on their watchlist. Too much risk while CCP is in power.
The thing about being a Chinese-American, is that both shores are unwelcoming. The US is racist and becoming fascist, China thinks of us as traitors. There’s no safe harbor. Maybe Taiwan? I doubt that’s even safe since China wants to invade soon.
Considering that WeChat does video and audio calls it’s pretty reasonable that wechar asks permission to use the microphone. I think you’ve been caught up in fearmongering. China isn’t going to invade Taiwan any time soon. There has been little to any real indication they would or even could. You’ve gotta understand that the CCP is authoritarian but no government is that competent to be keeping tabs on a random Americans conversation that they had at some point at some time who may more may not be ever visiting China. I’m not saying China is run by good people, I’m saying no government is competent enough to actually 1984 anyone in real life.
It’s like the social credit system that doesn’t really exist. The CCP put out a vague instruction to have a credit system based on social stuff because many Chinese people don’t have banks thus don’t have access to regular credit systems. Random cities and provinces came up their own systems with random rules and regulations. Then basically all of them were walked back because they were stupid and random and overbearing, and the CCP delegating their vague orders gives them plausible deniability in that they blamed the stupid systems on local government and played the good guy when they ordered them walked back.
I can either:
Cons: Not being able to revisit places I’ve been to that I always wanted to go.
Pros: Being safe from an authoritarian government that’s increasingly regressing back to totalitarianism
Pros: I can visit places I always wanted to revisit
Cons: Being arrested in China, placed on exit ban, tortured, or executed. And if I somehow leave unharmed, upon returning to the US, I could be accused of being a communist spy due to rising US-China tensions, possibly spending time in prison because of a second red scare.
Potential consequences are not worth it.
Tourism is not worth being tortured.
What do you plan on doing in China? You must have quite the crime spree planned.
Just being Canadian is enough if the CCP is playing games.
Do you not understand US-China tensions? Both countries fear each other, and someone who’ve lived in the US for practically their entire life suddenly wants to visit China? That’d definitely raise some alarms about a potential spy. Maybe nothing happens, maybe they falsely assume I’m a spy.
Same thing when I return to the US, those border agents are gonna ask me why I went to my China during these times of high tensions.
There are risks from both countries. Whereas if China was democratic and US-friendly, none of these would be an issue.
Do you know how many people in the US were falsely arrested? That’s in a democratic country. Think about those odds if it were an authoritarian one.
Singapore? The place has its issues but rule of law isn’t one of them and they totally get the “Han but no love for China” perspective.
The Chinese government is a democratic republic. The CCP is a democratic institution.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
Harvard conducted a 13-year study of popular Chinese sentiment and found 95.5% approval of their government.
If you replace the Chinese form of democracy with the US form of democracy, what will happen when the US popular sentiment is 20% trust in government overall, 20% approval of Congress, and 40% approval of the president?
Your fears are manufactured by the West.
The article you linked mentioned how that approval rating (for the central government - not the local ones) came to be for rural people: Censorship and propaganda combined with an attitude towards government similar to what you often see with religious people. If something good happens, the big guy far away did it. If something bad happens, it’s due to the corruption of men (in this case the corrupt local officials).
Edit: From the article:
The US has the longest running, largest, and most expensive propaganda machine in the world. The evidence doesn’t match the conclusion. The federal government of the US is very far away, the states are much closer. The evidence does not match the conclusion.
Further, claiming that 95.5% of a billion people are too incompetent to see through the ruse is laughably indefensible. It’s almost like the propaganda machine in the West is so effective that it managed to make a Chinese expat into an orientalist.
Wait, so you think that 40% approval is a result of the largest longest running propaganda machine, but 95.5% approval is accurate because China is constantly doing a #1 bang-up gold star job?
I’m saying if you think that Chinese propaganda convinced a billion people for 15 years to love their central government, but US propaganda can’t achieve even half that result for far fewer people, then you’re engaging in mental gymnastics.
The 40% approval rating in the US is because the US is fucking their people and the world, because the ruling class in the US believe that the only way to build a sustainable society is for the elite to maintain their interests over and above the interests of the masses. The 95.5% approval in China is because the Chinese government actually attempts to meet the needs of its people because it is fundamentally based on the theory that this is the only way to build a sustainable society.
If China used propaganda to get that 95.5%, it couldn’t have possibly used more propaganda nor more effective propaganda than the US has been putting out for over a century. Maybe the US doesn’t think they need popular approval and therefore they don’t propagandize domestically as hard, because they know the police will brutalize and murder anyone that tries to organize a resistance, but that is not the W you think it is.
Maybe… Just maybe… The media in the US is owned by capital, not the government. Profit based journalism is certainly different from government propaganda based journalism, no?
You’re right, the US government doesn’t give much of a fuck about public opinions so they don’t need to force the media to run only pro-government stories to stay afloat. The politicians are incentives to care more about their constituents than the country as a whole, and it functions, in a way.
If you want to talk about police brutality, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre wasn’t a China W. If you wanna go more recent, the Hong Kong resistance to CCP rule was a big inspiration to BLM.
Stop trying to sound smart, Godric. The US government is owned by capital. Profit based journalism is still 1/3 smaller than profit-based Public Relations. And that doesn’t cover the defense budgets for propaganda, the State Department, and other government agencies.
They run constant pro-capitalist stories, orientalist stories, Russophobic stories, anti-Iranian stories, anti-south-american stories, and on and on and on. They’ve been manipulating their school curriculum across all grade levels for over a century. The West has been using manipulated narratives to justify invading foreign nations since at least the British launched the opium wars against China.
In a capitalist society, the government is literally the apparatus by which capital coordinates its global class warfare. You can’t separate them by saying “oh, capital owns the media, the government doesn’t”, when quite explicitly it’s both/and and also there is no difference between capital owning the media or the government owning the media.
The reason the ruling class needs to propagandize its own people is to prevent revolt. That’s why people think China propagandizes its own people, right? To make them content with their situation? Capital, since the merchant class launched the first tri-color revolution, has also needed to suppress revolt in its people, and they use domestic propaganda for the same reason. However, they also use violence.
Princeton University demonstrated that there is no real way to construe the US as a democracy, that is, a government run by the people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6w9CbemhVY
In China, however, the politicians have incentives to care about all the people in the country. The indigenous populations in China are given autonomous zones, similar to how the USSR maintained autonomy for different nations. In the US, there are many indigenous languages with fewer than 10 fluent speakers, not a single institution uses those languages, and the people who are trying to learn these languages are mostly extremely educated. In China, Tibetans speak their native language from grade school all the way through university. There is no ability for the majority ethnic Han Chinese to impose cultural genocide on Tibetans the way the US does to its native population because the Chinese government understands that maintaining the interests of the state, the nation, and all of its peoples are required for a functioning society to eventually become sustainable.
What are the incentives that Chinese politicians have that US politicians don’t? Chinese politicians know they are nothing without the support of the people, while US politicians know they are nothing without the political will to launch wars of aggression and starve millions of people to death with sanctions. So, will China use domestic propaganda to increase the support of the people? Absolutely! And the US will use domestic propaganda for the same reason, because if the people revolt they won’t be able to continue war profiteering. And yet, despite the US having the most powerful and most effective propaganda in the world, they can’t convince even a simple majority of their population to support the government, whereas in China 95.5% of people support how their federal government governs the country.
I don’t know how much back bending you have to do to try to square this in your head. The Tienanmen Square incident is a classic study in US propaganda and if you actually read the news wires from the US reporters who were on the ground at the time you’ll see that you have to choose between the propaganda and the facts. And no one should forget that Hong Kong was literally a British colony until 1997, and under colonial rule Chinese were second-class citizens while Brits were immune to Chinese to law. The protests were literally about whether or not criminals in Hong Kong could be tried under Chinese law and the youth who were fighting were literally fighting within the historical context of maintaining British colonial structures, which is why the parents of the youth who were protesting would literally kick them out of the house because the parents knew that life under British rule was absolutely terrible and that integration with the mainland structures is critical for establishing a stable society. The youth, however, have no context for this and only see that the UK turned Hong Kong into a global financial center that creates narratives about the freedom to become land-owning millionaire financiers and rentiers. Again, it takes a special kind of gymnastics to look at a youth protest seeking to maintain British colonial structures that were imposed after the British completely destroyed China by getting 40% of their population addicted to opium and then launching a devastating war after the Chinese tried to outlaw opium and seize the drugs at the port. The results of the war gave Hong Kong to Britain, as well as other territories, and in all of those territories Chinese law was suspended for all foreign merchants (literal immunity) and China was required to legalize the opium trade. The protests in Hong Kong were literally against the incremental dismantling of those colonial legal structures. But go on about how China is bad because they had protests just like the US had a BLM movement.
I just told you what the article you linked says. Now you tell me, it’s wrong? Maybe read your own sources next time.
Yeah, maybe read it again. The researchers are attempting to offer possible explanations. They don’t have any empirical evidence that domestic propaganda is the root cause or even a significant contributor to their actual empirical data. Further, they explain evidence later in the article that runs counter to that potential explanation - over the 15 years, the poor got more satisfied with the government. This tracks much more closely to economic and social progress in the country than it does to propaganda efforts, which were far stronger and more comprehensive in the early days of the revolution, necessitated by the presence of war both internationally and domestically.
Maybe don’t just skim the article for sentences that sound like they might jive with your preconceived notions and instead develop some critical thinking skills.
Please explain how you plan to liberate workers by removing their basic political agency. “You are just brainwashed. Please try to keep up.”
“Democracy” in China is significantly more democratic than in places like the USA. In the USA, you’re presented with a false dichotomy in the two-party system, where both parties are parties for wealthy interests. Neither party is a party of the people. In China, for example, elections are “non-politicized”. Paraphrasing Richard Boer,
When your vote is between candidates based on their qualifications and is not some charade of us-v-them where neither choice actually benefits the people, that is a more democratic system.
The USA is democratic in name only. People in the USA have little to no real political agency, but have been lead to believe their superficial interactions with the political system are real agency.
What are you talking about? You think the CCP has removed basic political agency from workers but in the US political agency of workers is retained? You’re delusional. Communists are far and away more democratic than capitalists, in literally every communist project ever attempted. There is more involvement, more voting, more local agency, more ability to self-govern, more ability to solve local problems in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and Laos than in the USA, UK, Italy, France, Germany, and Spain.
Is that why the democratically elected Hong Kong legislators were arrested from the floor of their own legislative chamber for supporting democratic ideals? Is that why China still has non-public trials?
Also, China ranks poorly on democracy indexes, freedom indexes and human development index.
But yes, individual freedoms and civil liberties are foundational to political agency. You cannot engage freely with political issues you can’t freely discuss. This should be self evident.
The US has non-public trials, with secret evidence, and even secret charges. China is nowhere NEAR the top offender on these issues. Not even close.
Hong Kong was a literal British colony and China has allowed Hong Kong, a city that was stolen by Europeans and completely changed, to have its own system of laws and politics based on the British colonial project, and the politicians on Hong Kong that demand that freedom have Euro-centric financial interests since the UK made it into a global finance hub. The idea that these politicians were “pro-democracy”, but the Democratic People’s Republic of China was arresting them for being “pro-democracy” is about as smooth-brained a take as “they hate us for our freedoms”. It’s propaganda and the fact that you parrot it demonstrates you know nothing of the history or present of China, Hong Kong, and like Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The subversive activities of the “pro-democracy” politicians is primarily their alignment with a Hong Kong independence movement, which is effectively a secession movement led by a pro-European minority that wants to keep financial ties with London and the US. It would be like New York City trying to secede to maintain its ties to Holland.
Most of these are Eurocentric, meaning orientalist and anti-communist. None of them are unbiased. 95.5% of China’s own people support how their government is serving them and supporting them. Whatever the fucking fascist Euro-colonists think “democracy” is, it’s curious that includes apartheid states, genocidal states, and monocultural states but excludes incredibly happy, incredibly diverse nations that have managed to life 800 million out of poverty in 60 years.
Do you think that Chinese don’t have individual freedoms and civil liberties? If they didn’t, do you think they’d have a 95.5% approval rating over 15 years that was increasing among the most poor in the country while also managing 5 separate a distinct autonomous regions where unique cultures speak their own language in the millions? If individual freedoms and civil liberties are so foundational to political agency, then what’s up with the entire Western hemisphere where the colonist have stripped everyone of their individual freedoms and civil liberties except the land-owning white people? How’re those Nicaraguan Death Squads and Haitian assassinations and US trained coups, and US and Canadian genocidal policies against millions of natives - how are they doing? Do they impact those “indexes” you mentioned?
It is. And you’d be surprised just how much dissent there is in China that’s open, written about, etc. There are protests, there are essays, there are factions. You’re getting confused by the US media painting legitimate government intervention with universal oppression. The fact that 95.5% of people approve of the government should tell you this, alone. But even just doing a little bit of research on your own would disprove everything you believe about China. For example, Winnie the Pooh is not banned, nor are products bearing its visage, nor are websites with the content, etc.
It’s really astounding how much projection you exhibit here. You say China does poorly on indexes, but you don’t question why those indexes look good for genocidal mass murdering settler-colonial states. You say Chinese people lack individual freedoms and civil liberties but don’t think about the binding arbitration epidemic, structural racism, deaths of poverty, the Princeton report demonstrating zero democratic influence in the USA, monocultural oppression throughout most of Europe, refusal of colonial states to repair the damage they did up to and including levying debt on all of Haiti for each black person freed because the slave owners need their money back (that debt is still generating profit through interests and fees and Citi is the one currently collecting that profit).
Just take everything you criticize China for, look at the North Atlantic, and you’ll see the North Atlantic does this so often and so thoroughly that OF COURSE China has to do it worse, and then actually research China and realize that every single source you’ve ever believed on what’s happening in China is just bald-faced lying to you, completely outright, shamelessly. It was fucking eye-opening when I did it. I’m sure it will be for you, too.
The US criminal justice system does not have closed trials. Almost all trials in China are closed.
Lol, you will have some hard time then Gringuito, it will outlast you and all of your white masters.
You love licking Xi’s boot? Lmao
Please be normal.
El gringo que se hace pasar por chino con la mente menos atrofiada.
@[email protected] english
Translation
The gringo pretending to be Chinese with the least atrophied mind.
This text was translated using DeepL.
How do you keep your breath so fresh? Does the pooh bear use mint flavored shoe shine or do you just pop in a mint after going to town?
You do seem to know a lot about boot flavours and licking, it is suspicious, I wonder if that is related to leash you have on your neck that reads US property.
How is this productive conversation?
There is no productive conversation with you people. It is either we accept your notion of rules based ordes western imperialism or we are barvarians. You dont think outside whatever the us propaganda machine tells you to, even tje most simple things any of my politically uneducated third world friends would know is impossible to you.
So your conjecture is that the country with the heavily censored press is less susceptible to propaganda? Do I have that correct?
You’re the one randomly commenting to defend a government. Plenty of governments and orgs find problems with the policies and actions of the CCP not just the US.
One I have a problem with is how people in China can’t really criticize their government without risking being targeted by the government. If I said the Pooh Bear comment in China the CCP would be on my ass because WeChat reported me.
On the other hand criticize my government all the fucking time including leaders in particular. Watch. Fuck Biden I don’t like his gun policy and I don’t think he should run again, he is too fucking old. Here, I’ll do it again. Fuck Trump, he has tiny hands and I’m pretty sure he did those crimes he has been to going to court over. Also the DMV sucks and inflation is bad.
I could get into more important things the CCP is responsible for like the genocide but you probably think those are lies or want to get into whataboutisms.