(Preferably with sources)
I've overcorrected from "China bad" to "China is infallible." I know that's incorrect, but it's hard to decipher US propaganda from actual issues.
In discussions in the past, providing a positive counterpoint is plenty, but since more folks are already realizing the narrative about China is incorrect I would like to have more nuanced discussions where I can present both praise and criticism. I think it's also important that we don't end up in a USSR situation where Communism is synonymous with the actions of a single country.
- I know they're trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that's very bad.
- I'm unsure of what the internal restrictions look like in general
- I saw that the "social credit score" was a small experiment in one province that got way overblown
- Great firewall...? I know it's a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
- Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?
- Are they monitoring everyone? "You can't monitor 1.5 billion people" idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely
- Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China's own capacity
Are there others? I'm happy if you also include justification for their policies, but I do want to know where you genuinely think they're making mistakes.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
The social credit score thing was mostly a way of policing small businesses, not private citizens.
The great firewall is overwhelmingly justified on the basis that it's better for China to have its own social media sites, etc. and it's not like people in China are in any way incapable of accessing the outside internet anyway, and people absolutely do get "illegal" VPNs without punishment.
They are too censorious on their intranet but people overblown it because gommunism 1984.
Do people literally ever get disappeared? Surely so, but every time someone doesn't appear in public for a few days in China that means they were "disappeared" according to liberal news, the same way people in the DPRK die and come back to life.
They functionally do monitor everyone (sort of), and they do this by basically the same means as any other even semi-advanced country does this.
There are other common complaints that have merit, like repression (not genocide) in Xinjiang, but of course it gets mischaracterized as worse than it was, as genocide, and also isn't given the context of being in response to a serious terrorism issue that does not justify the repression but makes it more comprehensible as them failing to figure out a better way to fight imported terrorist ideology that was mainly resulting in Uighurs getting massacred rather than the CPC just doing ethnic persecution because idk they were bored and just hate this specific group of Muslims.
You will get endless defenses on here of Deng and subsequent, uh, let's call them pro-market factions. If you want to get criticisms of this, you can for example read the old posts from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net, who I think has been banned for a while but for unrelated reasons. As they note, China is moving in a relatively more positive direction on this matter under Xi, but that's relative and the other comparison point was a time where the revisionism was so comically crass that people were trying to figure out how to smuggle Austrian Economics in with Marxist vocabulary.
in the West, only businesses are considered people.