#This post has been deleted by the chinese government

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amber gust
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What are your thoughts on China? Not like, the current situation. But everything that makes China better off left alone, wanting to hear the thoughts of people about that.

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Didn't Discord make a deal with Tencent? What do you think about that?

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I've heard that they did, but I don't think it would help them in any way. Discord is blocked off by the chinese firewall anyways

fiery stream
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No comment

quick seal
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Why is China be better off left alone? We should be exchanging culture and friendship and commerce as much as possible to avoid the unthinkable.

fiery stream
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in all seriousness, I think the authoritarian experiment going on is actually very useful for seeing some of the benefits like their covid 19 response (whether you believe the numbers or think they over did it or whatever) was clearly pretty good and only possible due to authoritarian rule, their impressive infrastructure projects similarly only work because of this to the best of my knowledge, and they can control their media which you can argue is or isn't beneficial (banning youth from playing online games too much by taking servers down on weekdays and forcing educational content into their tiktok feeds [I think I just saw fucking joe rogen mention this last one once so take that with a grain of salt])

The downside of course is the obvious reason we did away with dictatorships long ago which is just they'll do bad things that a majority of their people don't agree with like genocide and the people can't fight back even if the government pushes against them so their country may not reflect at all what the people want done to themselves. Of course you get that in democracy as well but there's clearly a lot more checks and balances along the way limiting the scope of it

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I think in general businesses deal with china as if it was any western country which makes sense, I don't think there' s much economic incentive in our globalized world to treat them that much differently (asides from a lot of tariffs and whatnot). I think tencent is a massive media conglomerate but so are things in america like google and microsoft. The main difference I think is google and microsoft may be more open with their information and more controlled by american regulation that you agree with and understand while tencent will likely share less information and be controlled by chinese regulation which we often don't agree with as we don't agree with many of china's non-democratic decisions. For example they could choose to spy on the all the users of discord and ban them if they said something anti-chinese and this likely wouldn't be acceptable from a US company but a chinese company may be be able to get away with it.

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overall china is extremely dystopian and unfortunately difficult to get a nuanced opinion on because of how secretive their gov is

tame shoal
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[COMMENT REDACTED FOR GOING AGAINST US INTERESTS]

amber gust
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China's society is populism and fascism with a 21st century twist tbh

rancid frost
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im from china and drunk i will respond when i get home from drunk

plush verge
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I have.... things to say about this that, as a relatively normative american whitey with an obvious penchant for eastern metaphysic, would largely egress without any firsthand experience to color the logic. All i have is classic theory or anecdotals from friends I've made, and modernist china wishes to divest itself from the fantastic.

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'Essentially' tho it boils down to Lao Tzu was right and Confucious has become the basilisk.

rancid frost
plush verge
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@quick seal do you worship teh lobster lord?

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Cause like, its specious

rancid frost
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@amber gust one (of many) strain of thought among chinese people is that xi jinping's authoritarianism and esp foreign posturing is a reaction to american desires to restrict china's growth

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whether or not this was necessary is up to your political views (im more optimistic of a better solution)

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but i do believe that foreign antagonism against china isn't really helping

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for instance repression against queer media, foreign media, and other things seen (propagandized) as "foreign" only became a real problem in china in the last year or two. repression against uyghurs also intensified in recent years; xi jinping is on record for saying that his predecessors tried to play nice but it didnt work. now this is ofc extremely suspect, uyghurs were always disadvantaged, but it is true that the govt used to try a more tolerant, development-centered approach

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under xi's predecessors hu jintao and jiang zemin, china was still pretty authoritarian yes but there really was a lot of hope that we were taking steps towards an open society

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there was hope that e.g. building good relations with hong kong and taiwan would also bring compromise reforms to the mainland

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i think a lot of chinese people think that foreign media treats china as irredeemably corrupted from mao onwards, when actually we were and still might in the future go in a better direction

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its important not to caricature the chinese govt as a totalitarian, centralized, monolithic thing. it's actually quite decentralized (provincial governors have quite a lot of power), there are lots of internal factions, and of course theres a lot of corruption and private interests. xi jinping has tried to centralize the govt + party but his power is nowhere near absolute

fiery stream
rancid frost
fiery stream
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The former part

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That china is corrupt

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I think that it's pretty accurate to say that's how the media postures it here as well

rancid frost
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well, it is corrupt, but not irredeemably so

fiery stream
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There's an implicit irideemable aspect to that corruption I think in a lot of people's eyes too, I think most people see the CCP as corrupt fundamentally and they will likely never step down

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But I don't know at all, like you say there's a lot of decentralization too

rancid frost
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finally i think westerners tend to take a lot of institutions for granted in western society. im not going to say that china precludes openness but its underdevelopedness does make things a lot harder.

for instance many chinese people support social credit because they think that chinese society has no credit. people used to (and still do, i think) get away with an insane amount of fraud. like in the US everyone has a baseline trust of the FDA, despite antivaxxers, but it was a lot worse in china because you actually couldn't trust anything you ate. so people wanted a strong intervention against that.

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i dont think social credit is necessary or good. but its important to remember that china is still building a lot of these institutions. this immaturity justifies heavy-handed governance to a lot of people.

fiery stream
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Ya I think that's true, that's sort of part of why I was saying authoritarianism in some of these aspects is sort of a grey area where it's arguably good. A social credit system is pretty dystopian but we've never had that system so hey maybe under the right conditions it's not so bad

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There's a certain kind of vibe to china that I think westerners dislike which is this kind of idea that china is closed off, authoritarian, and overly aggressive. It makes a lot of people feel like china is an unpredictable critter that could attack at any moment

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Which is also exaggerated by our media relying this same fear

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I think a lot of Americans feel like china as a government is almost looking down at america as an advesery to overcome instead of a potential ally

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These are kind of just "vibes", it's hard to convey what I mean very objectively

rancid frost
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i think thats worryingly true of xi jinping's china, sometimes it seems like he wants to confirm all of the stereotypes which were untrue under hu jintao and jiang zemin.

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but i also havent lived in china for a bit less than a decade, only talked with relatives, so maybe my perception is warped

fiery stream
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I think it comes from the difference in values, Americans see authoritarianism as kind of fundamentally immoral and over controlling. They think that authoritarian governments are kind of soldiers that will keep trying to take more and more of the world for their own like Russia or the Soviet union.

A lot of this I think is leftover from the red scare, because in those times we really were kind of fighting over modern democratic capitalism and authoritarian communism as the "morally correct" ideology in a sense

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China has basically replaced the Soviet union there in a lot of people's heads

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anyway I think a good takeaway here is it sounds like a lot of things have really only changed recently. I think the general vibe here is that china was "always like this" but hiding it until now or something

rancid frost
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i think my generation (90s kids) was genuinely more liberal (in the very broad sense of the word) than some younger people

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we had open internet!

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we had more and more foreign imports and foreign media, relations with taiwan were warming, the govt seemed to admit faults. we had pride parades in the big cities!

fiery stream
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Not an expert but maybe kind of the American perspective from a similar period

From what I recall there was a free trade agreement that went in at the time which was supposed to be good as free trade let's each country specialize and whatnot but what america found out was this really destroyed out manufacturing industry due to china having cheaper labour and Americans have been bitter about this ever since

I'm not sure what the vibes were in the 90s since I was barely alive then but the aftermath was this idea that china had gotten the better side of the deal which ticked people off especially those who had manufacturing jobs or related jobs. my understanding is it rocked the boat in terms of these free trade relations. Of course it gave Americans a massive decrease in price of a lot of goods and manufacturing cheaper and cheaper goods took off. But the loss of an entire industry was not unoticed

This is basically why trump added tariffs on Chinese imported tech, to try to get manufacturing jobs back / prevent china from taking more jobs / prevent china from spying on the US through their tech (this was always just a somewhat unjustified paranoid speculation). but of course it's kind of silly thinking were going to magically get factories again in America and people are just going to accept more expensive goods again.

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Interestingly due to covid and chip shortages companies are opening up manufacturing in America again as back up for if shit hits the fan again

plush verge
fiery stream
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I guess I can see that

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I'm more or less rambling about things I don't know about here so feel free to correct me

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I probably have a passionate middle schoolers idea of American history

plush verge
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Same more or less

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We're all mostly undereducated in America.

fiery stream
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I'm Canadian but we naturally absorb a lot of American history and politics from it's content

Probably most people my age know more about American politics than Canadian honestly

restive copper
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@rancid frost are you familiar with the vloggers serpentza and laowhy86? I watched a bunch of their videos awhile back trying to get sort of a familiarity with the envrionments in more parts of the world if that makes sense. The first guy is from south africa and the second is from the US, they moved to China in the mid to late 2000's iirc and have expressed that the vibe was a lot more open when they first were there but things changed with the new head of state there. I think they also expressed that present day vietnam feels sort of like china did back then as well at one point? Anyway I was curious what your opinion on them was if you were familiar.

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they would ride motorcycles around the chinese countryside and cities while chatting with each other basically, in the older videos

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they got out due to worries of being vaporized and don't plan on going back any time soon bc worried they wouldn't be able to leave again

normal ferry
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On a serious note, I genuinely like to ask what's China foreign policy apart from the west? Like the eastern ones. Because basically, people here have strong reasons to believe China wanted a military dictatorship in my country.

rancid frost
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idk vloggers or vietnam tho

rancid frost
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that said if china is going to do imperialism i wish it welcomed more immigrants in the process. this is already happening a bit but i want to see people of african descent make up like 10% of the population in shanghai or smth

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at least

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thatd be great

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the chinese govt loves to talk about how china is a beautiful diverse country with 56 ethnicities living in harmony but it really is overwhelmingly han so it needs some fresh blood you know

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like westerners like to compare china to nazi germany but imperial japan's co-prosperity sphere is really more appropriate, because everywhere in china the propaganda says that "we're all one big family, respect ethnic minorities and cultural differences, look at how wonderfully diverse we are" so it comes as a genuine shock to people that atrocities are happening to uyghurs and imperialism is happening to africans

rancid frost
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not sure how true that is lmao

fiery stream
rancid frost
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it was a lofty goal to unite all of the fracturing parts of the former qing empire in peace

fiery stream
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I see

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based attempt I guess

rancid frost
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yes, but when one of the ethnicities decides they dont want to be chinese, well...

fiery stream
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Maybe their idea of diversity is just different from the one I'm used to

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like it sounds like they're pro diversity in that they'll accept anyone who assimilates

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Well I guess americans also only like people who assimilate just the bar for assimilation is generally lower

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ie. being okay with the laws, not being against basic liberal freedoms and whatnot

rancid frost
# fiery stream like it sounds like they're pro diversity in that they'll accept anyone who assi...

it's more specific i think. at the end of the qing dynasty, liberal revolutionaries needed to thread between unification and national self-determination. to do this, all of china's ethnicities needed to belong to the same nation (or civilization), so all of them would self-determine to be china. and this was not entirely false -- there were many members of ethnic minorities who joined this revolution. china was already collapsing into warlordism by then so people recognized the necessity of unification to prevent senseless warfare.

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so part of this ideology is that the chinese nation/civilization is uniquely heterogeneous. theyd point to the mongol and manchu dynasties and say, see at first they weren't chinese but they became chinese because that's the special character of our people

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in propaganda, the ethnic minorities dont need to assimilate per se. they can keep their traditions and languages and that all adds to the beauty of the chinese civilization. but they do need to accept that they are chinese

dim compass
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This post is up by the Chinese government

fiery stream
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that does sound a lot more similar to American assimilation without too many massive differences honestly, like they have a more specific story within it but honestly the idea sounds even better than what you get in america

rancid frost
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oh yeah, melting pot and whatever

fiery stream
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so is there a way in which the uyghurs are "not accepting" that they are chinese? Or is the government just kind of breaking it's own implicit rule on diversity

rancid frost
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its hard for an outsider to tell whats actually going on there, how strong the independence movements actually are, etc

fiery stream
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I see, okay that is at least a little consistent on their part then

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It does seem a lot more salvageable when I hear about how accepting of other diverse cultures the government is

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I thought they were kinda han chinese facsists but it sounds like a lot more complex than that

rancid frost
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yeah no there are han supremacists ofc but that's not the official story at all

fiery stream
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It does start to sound a lot more like america with a goal of diversity and inclusion with racism just messing it all up

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very roughly speaking

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give or take some slavery and whatnot

rancid frost
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sort of yeah. like america, china is dealing with the legacy of a failed liberal (and also later socialist) project

fiery stream
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There's also like some kind of caste system right?

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Which is a big differentiator

rancid frost
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in china? not really

fiery stream
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Something about country people and city people being serperated into zones or something I can't really remember exactly what it was

rancid frost
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ohhhh yeah, there's regulation on internal immigration

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it's called hukou

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but calling it a caste system is a bit of a stretch, esp in comparison w like india

fiery stream
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That does sound like a more reasonable way to put it ya

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I guess the way I heard of it made it sound like it was purposefully trying to divide people from different origins or status

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but it sounds more like it just so happens that these things correlate with location

rancid frost
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its defs bad tho i hate it

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oh theres a wikipedia article that covers what i said about chinese nationhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhonghua_minzu

Zhonghua minzu

Zhonghua minzu (Chinese: 中华民族; lit. 'Chinese nation', chung-KHWA min-tsoo) is a political term in modern Chinese nationalism related to the concepts of nation-building, ethnicity, and race in the Chinese nationality.Zhonghua minzu was established during the early Beiyang (1912–1927) and Nationalist (1928–1949) periods to include Han people and f...

prime mulch
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There are good and bad things in China, and a lot of weird/facepalm shit, but their content is outright biased

restive copper
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Yeah i always watch their stuff with a grain of salt

prime mulch
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Tbf I really wish covid would just end here

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So tired of travel restrictions BS

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Every time I leave Beijing I run the risk of being stranded for up to a week, or being quarantined for a hotel

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A friend of mine was illegally detained for 7 days in the name of disease control

amber gust
prime mulch
amber gust
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None

wispy inlet
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This was such an interesting thread to read through! Thanks so much lillian

amber gust
rancid frost