• calmblue75@lemmy.ml
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    2 hours ago

    My god the comments. You are perfectly allowed to not know much about a country. I don’t know about PRC either. But I know to keep my mouth shut on matters I don’t know about. I don’t go on parroting propaganda for those things.

  • Dippy@beehaw.org
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    30 minutes ago

    If you can find me a governance representing more than 100 million people that is genuinely good, with no ifs ands or buts about it, I can prove that you are the brainwashed one.

  • Mister Neon@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    I’m an American. China might not be bad, but they ain’t going to be good to me. America isn’t good to me either.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 hour ago

      You’d be surprised, the worst thing that could happen to you while traveling to really any global south country is getting scammed (overcharging for a meal or taxi) and that’s about it. Most people are very welcoming and will be friendly even excited to see a foreigner. It’s pretty much just Europe and North america where people treat you rude or at best just indiffirently if they see you’re a tourist.

      Streamers ludwig and some other recently filmed a trip throughout mainland China and it’s pure good vibes.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      Define authoritarian. The PRC spent decades of anti-colonial struggle defeating British imperialists, Japanese imperialists, feudal reactionaries, and then US imperialists. Do you know more than them about how to defeat vicious empires, “non-authoritarianly”?

      • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 hour ago

        they should’ve just prayed and cattered to the imperialists like India.

        As malcolm x once said “The West doesn’t not have any love for China but it respects it, while they love India but they do not respect it.”

        These very same jerks would love China if it was just another uwu Japan/SKorea hosting US troops.

    • 秦始皇帝@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      authoritarians

      Thought terminating cliche used by the unintelligent and uninformed to avoid reckoning with reality beyond vibes.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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          3 hours ago

          Every country should be blocking the US surveillance giants, its extremely naive for countries to be letting facebook, twitter, reddit, and google operate unhindered.

          There’ no such thing as a “non-authoritarian” state or other myths like the tooth-fairy, but even if they existed, then it’d be hard to argue that letting the US surveillance state operate freely within your borders is somehow “non-authoritarian”. The US is more likely than any other country to use the intelligence they’ve gained learned to harm you physically. See the Phoenix Program.

        • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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          4 hours ago

          Literally every government with the capability to control information is doing that, and frankly the rise of bleach-injecting covid denialist flat earth tradwife inflluencers has proven China right to do so.

          • GirthBrooksPLO@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            From Merriam-Webster

            " of authoritarian

            1 relating to, or favoring blind submission to [authority].

            2 relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people

            • Gold_E_Lox@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 hour ago

              i love that it has the caveat in the second definition abt a constitution. like, no guys, totslly not us, look at this definition we created to show how we arent authoritarian

            • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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              So like, objectively not China? Because their ruling party consists of 90 million members and they’re constantly debating shit, and enjoy an incredibly high satisfaction rate among non-party members?

                • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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                  Yes, of course they could. Individual people make the decision to practice birth control every day, and a vast democratic assembly of millions voted in by their peers can make that decision as well. Meanwhile in the US, reproductive policy is dictated by nine unelected ministers: an objectively far less democratic process, yet our media never describes the US government as “authoritarian.” Because it’s not a term meant to usefully delineate important differences in form and function, it’s a vibes based epithet meant to be wielded against geopolitical enemies of capitalism. It’s a thought-terminating cliche, deployed highly selectively against anti-imperialist societies to artificially cast proletarian authority as uniquely evil while tacticly normalizing the authority of billionaires and corporations.

                  In practice, authoritarianism is when you are objectively more democratic in function and policy than western countries, but commit the cardinal sin of using that authority to safeguard your sovereignty, people and resources from the inhumanity of global capitalism.

        • 秦始皇帝@lemmy.ml
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          4 hours ago

          You clearly don’t understand the purpose of the firewall and the online surveillance is no more than any other country but at least our government is accountable to us as opposed to owned by capital.

            • 秦始皇帝@lemmy.ml
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              4 hours ago

              To us. There’s a reason that even from Harvard’s research the government has a 95+% approval.

              Direct elections reach the township and county levels where voters choose deputies to local people’s congresses. These grassroots deputies constitute the overwhelming majority of all deputies nationwide. Advancement to higher levels requires proven service at lower rungs, ensuring every national deputy has worked up from local material conditions and remains accountable to the masses below.

              Grassroots legislative liaison stations and community consultation channels ensure mass input shapes policy at every stage, making democracy a daily practice not a periodic (meaningless) ritual. Whole-process people’s democracy embeds consultation and pilot programs into governance: policies are tested locally, refined through mass feedback, then scaled nationally. This grounds decisions in what we want and need.

              All 55 ethnic minorities hold guaranteed representation in the NPC. Farmers and labourers comprise roughly 15% of deputies while professionals and technical personnel make up the remainder.

              Even besides all that if you just look at what the Chinese government does as opposed to those owned by capital. Mass poverty alleviation, anticorruption at all levels, massive investment in socially profitable but monetarily unprofitable public services, deflating the housing bubble. These are not the actions of a government only looking out for a select few.

              And also the CPC has over 100million members since 2024 that 1 in 14 people are party members not to mind those who aren’t but are active in consulting due to their position such as most engineers and scientists.

    • iByteABit@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      Aah yes unlike never authoritarian capitalist governments that totally don’t break in your house to throw you in the cold bitter streets to die because you couldn’t afford rent and made the property “unprofitable”. The West has no right lecturing anyone over human rights and liberty, they could just discard them from their dictionary if only it didn’t serve as great propaganda against their class enemies.

          • GirthBrooksPLO@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            A state the exists as a servant to a citizenry that is not limited to class or ethnicity. A state served as a safeguard to the human rights of all humans within its sovereignty.

            It also serves as a mechanism to efficiently direct resources to human advancement as basic needs are automated.

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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              3 hours ago

              You just described the PRC, and notably not capitalist dictatorships, whose governments don’t represent their people / working class, but the interests of capitalists only.

              You desperately need to get past this poli-sci-intro-level understanding of what states are. States are organizations of force for one class (meaning in Marxism their relationship to production) to oppress another. The USA and other liberal countries are capitalist dictatorships over workers, while the PRC is a worker’s dictatorship over capital.

              Here are some resources:

            • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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              I meant like can you give an example of one

              Also:

              It also serves as a mechanism to efficiently direct resources to human advancement as basic needs are automated.

              So like China

                • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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                  2 hours ago

                  Jesus, at this point why don’t you just admit that by “non-authoritarian” you just mean “white”.

                • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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                  Finland? Where despite years of protest by the people, the state continues to buy Israeli weapons and cooperate with the zionist entity in the development of military tech and spyware? The state currently ignoring the very clear wishes of it’s people in order to aid and abet a historically unpopular genocide?

                • 秦始皇帝@lemmy.ml
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                  4 hours ago

                  The country that was a Nazi ally and didn’t drop the swastika from their air force insignia until 2025? Finland the country currently implementing mass austerity while giving tax cuts to the rich? That Finland?

    • square@lemmy.zip
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      4 hours ago

      They’re not even against capitalism. They only pay lip service to anti-capitalism.

  • FreeBeard@slrpnk.net
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    3 hours ago

    This comment section is filthy! And all of that just to justify the chinese imperialistic ambitions. Looks really twisted to me.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      I appreciate the term “imperialistic ambitions,” because it acknowledges that China hasn’t actually done stuff that you could plausibly call imperialist, so all you can do is criticize stuff that they might possibly want to do someday.

  • AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social
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    6 hours ago

    All states are bad, but if we’re talking about which ones are arguably better or worse on the world stage…

    “USA USA USA, WE’RE NUMBER 1!”

    Proudly colonizing for 250 years?

    • for_some_delta@beehaw.org
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      38 minutes ago

      Power for things like colonizing is the best indicator of a successful state. End state power. I like that the original was intended as a slight against anarchists. States keep projecting that vertical energy.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      You know nothing about China’s political system except the white-supremacist tropes you’ve ingested about it.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      6 hours ago

      p.s.

      Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

      but no again tell me about how the level of political freedom you have differs meaningfully between western societies and China

    • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      because they don’t have political freedom. there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”

      And the West definitely, absolutely has that

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 hours ago

        i mean yeah, literally, look at how the Iranian regime is allowed to post its anti-US propaganda lego movies on Twitter.

        edit: nvm that was a bad take.

        • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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          7 hours ago

          Look at how many people have been arrested and jailed for saying “From the river to the sea”

        • culprit@lemmy.mlOP
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          7 hours ago

          Guess you haven’t been following the news lately.

          Yet just as these creative expressions of national resistance reached peak global influence, YouTube jumped in. The platform suspended the Explosive Media channel under baseless allegations of policy violations, effectively silencing a powerful voice of dissent

          What followed was a transparent smear campaign by Western media outlets, led by the BBC, aimed at discrediting the creators and justifying the censorship. Their goal was clear: to silence any narrative that dared challenge the official US-Israeli framing of the aggression.

        • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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          7 hours ago

          Yeah, how amazing that I can see anti-US propaganda Lego movies whenever I want. That’s what will ignite the revolution that makes our lives better, really some serious dissent that can conceivably lead to real change here.

          Shitposts and memes about dissent to satiate the mases while all the real political discourse by activists with any real chance of accomplishing anything are censored and criminalised. Look at what happens to journalists objectively covering Iran, Israel, ICE, you name it. Look at how the protestors against oil pipelines or police racial violence are treated. So much freedom of speech for those people.

    • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      china gets shit on because they don’t have political freedom; there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”. it’s just one committee making all the decisions and you can go to jail for disagreeing.

      what if actually it’s more like you need to know what the fuck you’re talking about in order to Be Political (which involves joining the party and by its nature excludes capitalist roaders and compradors attempting to bring back capitalist systems) and then democracy happens within that party

      instead of like a big nameless Committee made up of a hivemind AI like intelligence that just Dictates

      maybe that’d be better than having two bourgeois parties (or dozens of bourgeois parties in Europe/etc) owned by bourgeois interests effectively negating the existence of democracy by ensuring that all “democratic” institutions, by consequence of bourgeois influence over parties, operate at their pleasure

    • jankforlife@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      china gets shit on because they don’t have political freedom; there’s no stuff like “you can speak your mind as long as you’re respectful”. it’s just one committee making all the decisions and you can go to jail for disagreeing.

      Not even true, common CIA talking point. They don’t disagree with their government because 99% of China’s citizens are extremely happy with their gov, not because they’ll be arrested.

    • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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      FYI the thing about a central guy in charge has always been a myth, even since Stalin’s time:

      What happens with China is essentially you have local committees for things like small towns and villages, where anyone can run for office. Then those many small councils form the pool of candidates for promotion to larger regional and federal committees, forcing would-be bigwigs to work their way up from the bottom. I believe the DPRK uses a similar system.

      I hope this hasn’t come off as hostile, since I know these conversations can get contentious fast. But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors we often get around here, so I figured I’d try and add constructively instead of tear down.

    • jankforlife@lemmy.ml
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      7 hours ago

      Lol lets worry about a CIA fake genocide op instead of the real ones happening like in Gaza amiright fellow zionazis? 😂

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      You are doing genocide denial when you claim that genocide can happen without being accompanied by mass death. Genocide is the crime of crimes because it always involves mass slaughter of innocent people, to bring about their end. The invention of “”“cultural genocide”“” without any of the accompanying mass violence effectively whitewashes genocide as a concept.

      • -☆-@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 hours ago

        I’m genuinely undereducated here, not an op…

        Accepting all that, that’s still essentially colonization, no?

        Is there nuance I’m missing here? China’s seemingly codified cultural repression genuinely makes it hard for me to consider supporting them, whether or not they advance the cause of the average worker

        • orc girly@lemmy.ml
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          They also don’t do cultural genocide, look at videos of random tourists visiting Xinjiang and you’ll see some locals speaking Uyghur, you’ll see mosques, museums, traditional Uyghur food, etc. The previous repression was meant to curve terrorism, it seems to have worked, and things have relaxed afterwards. I don’t see how any of this fits the picture of colonialism.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          China isn’t preventing or discouraging intermarrying or intermixing with Uighurs, which is a key feature of apartheid. Neither do they have to use separate lanes of the road, carry special IDs marking their ethnicity, or forced to use different emergency shelters.

          I use those examples because the real-world example of apartheid, Israel, is currently doing all of those things today.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          Downplay what? A reeducation/deradicalization program isn’t fucking genocide on its own, it has to be accompanied by mass death, and when you say it is you are the one that’s donwplaying the crime of genocide as a concept. Even the boarding schools they used in the genocide in North America had mass graves, because genocide is always accompanied by mass death and to claim otherwise is whitewashing.

          It’s the crime of crimes because it’s the worst violence that can be inflicted on a group.

          • cmbabul@slrpnk.net
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            4 hours ago

            So I’m not trying to defend the other poster but genocide by definition does not have to include mass death. And can include any of the following

            1. Killing members of the group;
            2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
            3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
            4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
            5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              54 minutes ago

              In the real world there hasn’t been a genocide that didn’t involve mass death. 3, 4, and 5 all require a lot of killing to actually work.

        • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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          A): Hey what do you think about the Russian intervention in the Ukranian civil war, and

          B) The horrific treatment such as?

  • Two_Hangmen@midwest.social
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    7 hours ago

    It’s possible to simultaneously think there are issues with the Chinese government and U.S. government.  You could mention 3 June 1989 I’m China or Epstein files in the U.S.

    • orc girly@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      Most people here were taught the same bs about China and we broke away from that by sitting down, reading and looking at the (lack of) evidence for everything they’re accused of. China isn’t perfect, none of us claim it is, it also isn’t at all what state department propaganda claims

    • RiverRock@lemmy.ml
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      You actually are experiencing the propaganda being turned down, it’s just that a fish doesn’t notice the water until it’s gone. The anti-China orthodoxy that is the default in western ruling class political thought is the astroturfed position, not the other way around. In a non-corporate internet environment, you’re seeing actual public opinion seep through the cracks.