(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!
One of the very few Chinese-born people I've known in real life moved to Norway as a young man with a business degree and big dreams of starting a dropshipping company to eventually build up enough capital to start a café.^[This never came to fruition, naturally: last I heard he's a cashier at a convenience store now.] He told me about how being a worker in China is awful, given the hours, the pay, the working conditions, and all that, and that that's precisely why he wanted to start a small business, "so that he wouldn't be working for anybody but himself." He confirmed to me that people in China do study Marx and Mao in school, yet he was himself also a bit anti-DPRK and claimed to be "disinterested in politics." He was also a huge anime fan — of course, I am too — but it was because of this young man's recommendation (plus my desperation to make friends at the time) that I made myself sit through Wataten, the anime about a young woman in college who one day discovers that she's a fucking pedophile, and this is handled with about as much grace by the writers as you would expect from a 2010s "slice-of-life comedy."
Now, of course, I cannot judge an entire country of one and a half billion people based on exactly one individual, and even with his brainworms he was still a nice fellow overall^[Methinks practical experience has probably beaten his small business tyrant dreams out of him by now.]… Yet I still have to wonder what sort of socialist society could produce such a man.
I think that's an interesting philosophical question. Can you build a society that does not produce bad people?
Or a more cynical version: can you build a society that does not produce people you disagree with?
Either way, China is not trying to hide the fact that they're targeting to become a socialist country by 2050. You've essentially noticed a construction site and wondering why it's not a good place to get coffee.
Yeah, I know the reason why this sort of capitalistic thinking is not just allowed but effectively encouraged in China is because the country wants to develop its productive forces and all that, and the path ahead is still long and hard. That won't stop me from complaining, though! Because the kid in the backseat knows that the car cannot possibly be "nearly there yet," but the kid also knows that they're in a tedious situation they have little to no agency in. People in China as well make the same sorts of complaints about how much things still stink in their country, even if the things that stink are done in the name of socialism and communism: strife and violence done to no ultimate end as in the bourgeois states, and strife and violence done to a good end as in China, both hurt in their own way, right?
As for the philosophical question: I do think it's possible to build a society free of bad people. It's impossible to build a society totally free of struggle and conflict, but a society free of bad people? Absolutely.
probably he made some friends from the anime community and he got exposed to capitalist ideas
Given he could only speak Chinese and only used Chinese social networking services before he moved to Norway… Well, it's not "impossible" that he first got his small business tyrant dreams from ACG friends in "капстраны," given there are plenty of Chinese speakers in bourgeois states (not least Taiwan) and these are not blocked from using Chinese social media. But it's still a pretty lacking explanation IMO, given that mere exposure to an idea will not automagically make you believe it, if you've already been inoculated against the idea through theory, practical experience, or ideally both. The fact of the matter is that the young man in question went to business school and got his business degree IN CHINA, which means that, at the very least, regardless of where he got his original capitalist spark from, his education and lived experience did not do enough to inoculate him against it, and state-sanctioned institutions of higher learning were still standing at the ready to take him in and push him further down that path.
so youre telling me that shit is accessible to the chinese public and with translations too? libs were wayy too flattering with the censorship accusations
I'm surprised you didn't know — ACG culture is huge in China. In fact, back when I knew the man in question and first started using Bilibili^[A social media platform with 300M+ users, often called "China's equivalent to YouTube".] for his sake, the default profile picture for guest users on the official mobile app was actually a silhouette of Akaza Akari from YuruYuri, in reference to a running gag from that anime. I reinstalled the Bilibili app just now to check if that was still the picture, apparently in the years since it's just been replaced with the words "LOG IN", probably for copyright reasons.
Edit: I'm struggling to find actual footage of the old UI of Bilibili for Android, but I at least found this Duitang post from 2020 referring to the following picture as "{B站|B-site^[Nickname of Bilibili.]}{未|not}{登录|logged-in}{默认|default}{头像|avatar}（{阿卡林|Akarin^[Nickname of Akaza Akari.]}）", and this Bilibili video from 2021 about "{b站|B-site}{初始|initial}{头像|avatar}{的|'s}{出处|origin}", so I know I'm not hallucinating.