(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!
I think some of the restrictions on what can be shown in media content are a bit silly. Like depictions of skeletons being off-limits, it’s not “protecting” anything and just adds more fuel to the liberal narrative of “Ebul China 1984 censorship!”
From what I'm aware, the 'not allowed to depict skeletons' thing was more of a cultural taboo rather than an actual prohibition? Either way, it's pretty normalised nowadays to see skeleton characters even in family friendly donghua like "So you're raising a warrior" (Chinese adaption of a Korean Webtoon about a dragon demon raising a baby human) where one of the characters is a friendly uncle skeleton demon that helps with housework and babysitting, or donghua for older audiences like "A Herbivorous Dragon of 5,000 Years Gets Unfairly Villainized" (Chinese adaption of a Japanese light novel about a friendly vegan dragon who is confused for a terrifying and powerful demon) which has monster corpses rising from the dead to become skeleton monsters.
i don't recall all the details but some of it is localizers being overly cautious, and some of it has had restrictions relaxed 10+ years ago. e.g. skeletons, there's some older magic the gathering cards with modified art for the chinese localization and then by 2010ish they had stopped having to bother.
This is true, but also sometimes misreported. Like with the video game Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, that changed it so the evil and historic Han general bosses in the game can no longer die and instead just faint, wasn't a change requested by the government. But all of the internet cries "CCP censorship!!" when it comes up. The devs just caved to a weird online niche of nationalists who don't want their precious dynasty besmirched. So I'm betting there are elements of both in a lot of those situations, where the government has made legitimate requests, but also people just caving to general sensibilities and norms.