this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Can we get the competency with out the whole... Everything else?
Or is our choice between awful and ineffective or awful and effective?
You can't say bad things about the government in China.
This might sound like an absurd restriction of free speech, but consider that it's also considered highly illegal in germany to loudly ask for the abolishment of democracy. Many far-right groups do this, and the Verfassungsschutz (basically a kind of special police force) keeps a close eye on them because of that, calls them "verfassungsgefährdend" (going against the constitution). Monarchies like england had similar laws around 1900, where you could say everything except talk badly about the monarchy in power. That was known as the "english liberalism" because in many other countries, you could say even less. China does the same today, just that instead of the german constitution or the english monarchy it's the Communist Party.
It is what it is. The world is arguably better with them than without
It's bad to do green energy when you're Chinese because... ?
What's the awful everything else? China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
As a Spaniard, it's hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government, everyone here hates our government and politicians.
Are you sure you're speaking for Chinese people when you criticize whatever "everything else" you refer to?
"When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds soon follow"
John Dean
So 1.4 billion Chinese are essentially suffering Stockholm Syndrome from the evil Chinese Government, and their satisfaction rates have nothing to do with the consistently increasing living standards?
As a Spaniard, you should ask your parents and/or grandparents if in Franco's day they would really tell their real opinions about their government to some random person doing a poll.
Government satisfaction data in an autocracy is always going to be poluted because people fear their words might reach the ears of somebody in a position of authority and them being punished in some way for being critical of the government, so they keep it to themselves and share it at most with family and close friends.
(And this is before we even count the effects from people's main information sources being highly controlled in such regimes, so literally they might think other countries are shitholes compared to theirs because that's what newspapes and TV tell them. Even though people are quite a lot more cynical about the "news" in such regimes - one of the Soviet times jokes was "There is no pravda [truth] in the Pravda [the newspaper], there is no izvestia [news] in the Izvestia [another newspaper]" - such total control in aggregate still pushes public opinion to be better than otherwise).
People have no such need to keep their mouth shut in Democracies. Further, I would even say that in Democracies people are incentivised to be loudly critical - those who support a different political party than the one in power tend to be loudly critical purelly out of tribalism, same as they would criticize the other team in a footbal match even if that team was playing well.
All this to say that we don't really know how much people in China are satisfied or not with the authorities there because smart people living in a autocratic regime know better than to voice criticism of those in power, which polutes the data, whilst in Democracies political clubism also probably polutes the data but in the opposite direction.
Your comment can be wholly ignored by explaining to you that the surveys I refer to are done by western institutions like Pew Research, the University of California or the Ash Center for Democratic Governance (source).
You, as a westerner, believe your western propaganda that China is an antidemocratic autocracy where people can't give their political opinions freely. Chinese people simply don't feel that way as per any serious study, and your opinion can be safely ignored because it's based on your misunderstandings as a misled westerner.
I happen to live next door to Spain, in Portugal, and I did ask my parents and older friends (some of which who are very leftwing and were Communists back in the days of the Revolution) and back then in our own Fascism (which ran parallel to Spain's) nobody would tell their true opinion about the government to a stranger, much less a stranger claiming to be doing a poll for some university in a country which is viewed and views itself as an adversary of your own country.
Hell, in such a setup people would loudly tell the foreigner (or local working for those foreigners) just how great their government was just in case that was some kind of sting operation by the secret police or what you said leaked out: back when even your neighbours could rat you out to the secret police for saying something critical of the regime, criticizing the regime to somebody claiming to be doing a "poll" like this was a good way to end up a political prisioner (and, unlike those hailing from the middle class, politicial prisioners from poorer families didn't get the velvet glove treatment, and most people were poor and working class).
So, it's strange you didn't ask such things from older people in the country you claim to hail from...
That and given how you phrased...
all sounds a lot like you're not a Spaniard. Which would make your earlier statement:
a lie.
Guess who would try and pass themselves as a "westerner" to seem more trustworthy in a forum mostly frequented by "westerners" when defending China?
A propaganda astroturfer.
(Funilly enough, there's a ton of anti-China propaganda in the West, especially in the US, it's just that this time you seriously overplayed that as a card when you tried to whitewash your own propaganda with it)
PS: Oh and just to point out how much that "westerner bias" bollocks applies to me, just after I made that previous comment on your bullshit, I made an equally critical comment on some other muppet from the "other" side talking about "China's attrocities", and that comment of mine definitelly sounds like pro-China to any simpleton tribalist moron or propaganda sockpuppet.
My biggest "bias" in this is against Hipocrisy and Propaganda.
Quit giving feedback to the astroturfer man. Don't improve their talking points. Lol
You are free to travel to China and ask people. What you learn will surprise you. They do not feel like they are living in an evil authoritarian nightmare and are generally actually pretty satisfied
I very much doubt it's an authoritarian nightmare (that would be North Korea or China back in the days of Mao).
China does however have a system of "social points", so people are well aware that if they don't do and say the right things, it might negativelly impact their lives (you don't set up such a system for anything other than push people to behave in certain ways).
Further, only an idiot would deny that during about 3 decades (though that was mainly over about a decade ago) China has pulled up from poverty more people than the rest of the World combined, by a huge margin, even while in the West social mobility went into reverse and inequality started growing (especially after 2008).
Equally only an idiot would deny that in a single party system being openly critical of the Party is likely to have negatives consequences for that person and even the mere concern that it might happen will make people just say nothing, just in case. (I mean, shit, people will naturally just do this at work in supposedly free countries with work-at-will legislation were they can just be fired for no reason, so it takes quite a lot of naivety to think people will not "keep their mouths shut, just in case" when it's actual authorities with no independent oversight over them keeping a keen eye on a persons sayings and doings, as they have the power to fuck your life up far more than merelly firing you).
Finally, it takes are a very (very, VERY) special kind of idiot to think that there are only two ways to govern a country and if you're critical of one of them, then you must be a brainwashed tribalist supporting the "other" one. There is no bigger kind of political moron because the very mental architecture the use to judge things hyper-simplistic and ultra reductive.
If people's life was amazing, the authorities there wouldn't need a Great Firewal of China, a social points system or a giant civil society surveillance system, just like in the supposedly free West you see the increase in civil society surveillance and the Propaganda machine (around here using immigrants and even people with non-normative sexuality as scapegoats) going into overdrive, all coinciding (by "an amazing coincidence") with the time when quality of life stopped improving and started going down and the first generation in a century who is expected the have a worse life than their parents started coming of age.
(Against, this kind of shit should be familiar to Spaniards, at least those who were adults during the days of Franco, because very similar tools were used).
Those kind of mechanisms aren't deployed against a people which supports by 90%+ the current government, and they're generic rather than a China-only thing and some are just as much used in supposed Democracies as in Autocracies - similar techniques, just with different excuses justifying their use.
Whilst the country is not an absolute dictatorship, Chinese "we love the Party" data is highly poluted by a "it's best not to say certain things, just in case" concern, information control and internal Propaganda in a similar way to, say, the public opinion in Hungary is shaped by that regime's control of the Press and a certain insecurity so if you work for the State over there you won't be critical of Orban and his party because that's just not good for your career (and a similar thing happens in, for example, Turkey) so their data on it is going to be highly poluted (unsurprisingly, if you personally know people form those countries, its the more well informed people who think worse of the government, hence typically even with all the information control and even iron first, they have worst polling in the larger cities)
What shocks me is that somebody supposedly from a country which had a dictatorship until 75 can't recognize certain kinds of mechanisms which I'm pretty sure their parents or grandparents are familiar with and their impact.
That doesn't mean that most people in China aren't content, what it does mean is that poll data showing a 90%+ stated approval of the government must be taken with a large pinch of salt.
Hablamos en Español si lo prefieres, campeón. De verdad que es la actitud más imbécil posible asumir que cualquiera que te contradice es un astroturfer.
Again, all your comment can be wholly ignored because the polls I referred to are done by western institutions. You will not find a response to Pew Research polls in North Korea because they can't freely carry out their polls there.
I've had the pleasure of directing the Master's and Bachelor's theses of a plethora of Chinese students during my time as a PhD candidate in a German university. I've had discussions of politics with all my Chinese students regarding topics as controverted as Taiwan, the Communist Party, etc, and I've received a plethora of different opinions, the majority of which were supportive of the Chinese government, yes, even after tasting the glorious "European political freedom" that kept them scared because AfD Nazis threaten to get first place in government and make their lives impossible as migrants. Most of these students now, after spending 4-5 years in Germany on average, moved back to China and live happily there, I have frequent conversations with some of them still. Only one of my students decided to stay in Germany.
You're taking out of copious amounts of western propaganda if you seriously don't believe Chinese people can freely give an answer to a Pew Research anonymous survey on government satisfaction, and you obviously haven't discussed politics with a normal Chinese person in your entire life.
Vindo de alguem que acusa aqueles que duvidam de inquéritos que mostram 90%+ de taxa de aprovação do governo num país de "Partido único" de serem "ocidentais com o cérebro lavado pela propaganda ocidental" é uma ironia de ir para o Livro de Recordes do Guiness.
Se fores mesmo Espanhol, sugiro que fales com pessoas que viveram no tempo do Franco para veres como as coisas funcionam em sistemas onde o Estado controla a informação e tem poder arbitrário.
Alternativamente, vai trabalhar para grandes empresas durante uma décade ou duas e aprende como é que os jogos de poder e a pressão funcionam até mesmo em ambientes muito mais pequenos que um país: as pessoas quando já são crescidinhos e têm de se preocupar com por comida na boca dos filhos absolutamente não dizem certas coisas abertamente se pensam que estão a ser vigiadas e podem sofrer consequencias por isso.
Não leves a mal mas tu soas como alguns dos jovens no pequeno partido de Esquerda de que sou membro no meu país - ignorante e com uma visão simplística do mundo e da política.
Sigues con la misma cantinela comparando los tiempos de Franco con el gobierno de China. He viajado a China y la gente vive vidas normales y felices sin represión del Gobierno. Y te repito que he hablado con muchos estudiantes de China fuera de China, y la mayoría de ellos, en contra de lo que piensas, apoyan al gobierno de China. Me decían que no podían entender cómo el gobierno Alemán dejaba morir a cientos de miles de personas de COVID y que les parecía horroroso. Uno de los estudiantes me llegó a decir que antes era crítico del gobierno de China, pero que cuando llegó a Alemania y vio lo que hay allí, se volvió mucho menos crítico de China.
Si tanto te preocupa el gobierno de Franco, te deberían preocupar en primera instancia los sistemas de gobierno de Europa. Te asusta el gobierno comunista Chino, mientras que en Europa asoman la cabeza los fascistas por todas partes. En España estamos cagados con VOX, en Alemania llegan los nazis de AfD, en Italia tienen a Meloni...
It's great being comfortable while your government is committing atrocities. Cozy cozy!
Waiting for the day someone finds a government who doesn't commit atrocities.
In a field of shit, pointing at a specific turd and shouting "Look at that shit" is at best redundant, at worst sleazy propagandistic and hipocrite bollocks.
China's present day level of support for atrocity is nothing compared with most of the West's active support (diplomatic, economic and even with weapons) for the the present day equivalent of the Nazis committing a Genocide in Gaza.
Even what Russia is doing in Ukraine (with the support of China) is nowhere close to that shit if measured in terms of civilian casualties as a percentage of the population (even if including military casualties, it's still well below the levels of bloodshed in Gaza).
We would need to go back to the time of Mao to find China supporting atrocities at such a level.
That "atrocities" flag is best waved from the top of the moral high ground, not from the top of a pile of Palestinian children's bones.
Are you talking about the EU-supported genocide of Palestinians?
They might've meant USA.
You're so close to tripping over the fact that authoritarian governments can't be trusted to provide honest answers. Who wants to say you're unsatisfied when doing so could get you vanned?
I mean I would be skeptical too of any piece of info that comes from China, but how does that coincide with only 44% of "Township" people being satisfied 10 years ago?
I've given my sources in other comments and they're all western institutions. Your inability to believe them comes not from reasonable skepticism, but from western propaganda giving you cognitive bias against anything positive coming from China.
One of the biggest government contractors in China is the company that conducts polling.
How do you tell the difference between an authoritarian government and a government that is responsive to public sentiment but also happens to be on diplomatically shaky ground with your own leaders?
China has literally a fascist government. Authoritarians that seize corporate control for nationalistic interests while still deferring to original private property owners.
Cult of leadership is typical too. Which includes the satisfaction of citizens.
Makes me laugh when people here laud China. Especially when they're commies who fell for the lie that China is communism.
Remind me. What happens when you speak ill of the government there? You think that might affect polls?
Ill freely admit China has many strengths... but it is definitely authoritarian also.
Polls carried out by Pew Research, University of California and other western institutions. Too communist for you?
For the most part nothing, you may argue there's a degree of censorship on Chinese social media, but if there were political prisoners for having "the wrong opinions" in China we wouldn't hear the end of it. There's nothing like Russia's Navalny in China.
Surveyman: Hello random Chinese friendo, how is life under the glorious CCP?
Random Chinese friend: Can't complain.
Surveyman: China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
You can question the methodology, I've already given the sources in other replies if you're interested (which links to several different studies, all carried out by western organizations such as University of California or the Pew Research Institute). You're just not really interested, and you will reject the information because your cognitive bias tells you to.