It would be off the charts in Chinese media too if they had things like free press and didn’t arrest their people for posting things critical of the Chinese government.
Yeah, like Naomi Wu, famous in the maker community, who tried her best to provide a nuanced view of China before pissing off the wrong group of people and going radio silent for good.
Thanks for displaying your ignorance. You obviously don’t know her story, because she’s never been openly critical of China. Rather, she’s always tried to be an ambassador for China within her community. Unfortunately, some of her actions pissed off the wrong people.
And the fact that she was able to operate for years without issue
I used to watch ADVChina, which was a youtube series by an American and a South African who married Chinese women and decided to live in China with their families. For years they rode motorbikes around China, filming “day in the life” type content and occasionally saying something mildly critical.
Eventually the CCP decided they didn’t like them and they had to flee the country. The way they told it they had to lie their way through the border to HK to get out because the government put an exit ban on them. Now they live in California post angry anti-CCP rants.
Point being, the fact that Wu or the ADVChina guys were able to operate in China for a little while isn’t proof that the CCP tolerates independent media. It is proof that the CCP can be slow sometimes to shut down people who grow a foreign audience organically using information channels the CCP doesn’t yet fully understand.
You do realize that the CCP isn’t some top-down monolith… Right? If it takes years to crack down on independent journalists, that sounds more like “freedom until you say overstep some line.”
Which, sure, isn’t entirely free, but it’s not even close to as bad as what people suggest.
Better tell that to literally every government on the planet, then.
Jailing dissidents is government oppression, but it’s a type of government oppression that happens in every major government, democratic or not. Welcome to the real world.
While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we’re chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:
different trade interests
different geopolitical interests
different cultural interests
all while the usa government tries it’s hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.
There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both “sides” using us for their own ends.
When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.
There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.
Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.
As an American, I thought our cultures were relatively similar being both former British colonies. What different cultural interests are you referring to?
Not Australian or American, but hey it’s the internet so why not voice second hand knowledge: I heard Aussies pride themselves on being (relatively) egaliatarian, despising individuals elevating themselves above others. Seems to me about as antithetical to US mentalitity as it goes :)
AU and USA share in a foundation belief that they are “classless societies.” I think this is probably true of many ex-British colonies since class is such a dominant and suffocating aspect of British culture.
Australia, like the USA has severe inequality, and the rich there like to flaunt their wealth. A disproportionate number of the crypto grifters ended up being Aussie. And while Australia does have a better social welfare state than the US it is both 1) under attack and 2) was put together almost entirely by one socialist prime minister in 1975 who was taken out after only a few months by a coup.
A lot of the Aussies you’ll chat to on the internet don’t realise how recent there was heavy segregation even among people broadly considered white now.
If you look at the last names of powerful people even now you’ll find that while they’re general all white dudes Irish last names are underrepresented, despite being around as long as English ones. A lot of migrants from Greece/Italy/Poland etc were heavily sidelined too.
Lets not even get into treatment of native peoples and non white migrants cause we’ll fucking be here all day.
This country is definitely heavily divided by class, last oecd report I read found 4 generation median time for bottom quartile income to next quartile up. That’s bonkers.
we elected a socialist in the 70s. It ended in a constitutional crisis and his successor was groomed by the CIA. rhymes with certain things no?
we had a publicly owned transport system, telephony, healthcare system, a thriving public service. Then we started getting leaned on.
We had a collectivist culture, government funding for our own media with our own values, then we started getting leaned on.
It goes on.
Even our slang is being replaced, people are pronouncing things your way, the media of the usa is replacing everything and that’s intentional government policy.
We had a collectivist culture, government funding for our own media with our own values, then we started getting leaned on.
This is hilarious to point out when you consider Rupert Murdoch has done more to change American politics than probably anyone else in the last 50 years, but you’re gonna complain about the US “leaning on” Australia? Sorry but that just screams of shirking responsibility for your own country’s problems.
Everything is feedback cycles. Yes there’s homegrown bullshit but it’s naive to ignore how that is encouraged by for example the usa exporting neoliberalism and encouraging/bullying other countries to deregulate their own markets (like media ownership that lets people like Murdoch rise) for favourable political treatment.
It’s naive to ignore that when usa media, usa products, usa megacorps all arrive somewhere that they wont swing the culture.
The usa has almost certainly interfered in our elections ffs.
Being a country the usa has military interest in is incredible corrosive. It’s not just Australia where this has happened.
China is the one county that could just tell Russia to get out of Ukraine. Same with North Korea. Just look at who they hang out with and you know quite a lot.
Why would they? The Global South is completely unaligned with the West on the Russia-Ukraine issue. It’s an issue between Russia and the West, not a global issue.
Most of the global south is aligned in staying out of it as much as possible. Their self interest is to play nice to all sides and play all sides.
It is not the entire global south. I think Australia and Taiwan would both feel differently. Very convenient of you to forget that. From the original UN vote it showed that the Russian invasion was widely condemned through out the world including global south with some notable exceptions too.
Many countries included in the Global South are in the northern hemisphere, such as India, China and all of those in the northern half of Africa. Australia and New Zealand, both in the southern hemisphere, are not in the Global South
Time Magazine
It was generally agreed that the Global North would include the United States, Canada, England, nations of the European Union, as well as Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and even some countries in the southern hemisphere: Australia, and New Zealand. The Global South, on the other hand, would include formerly colonized countries in Africa and Latin America, as well as the Middle East, Brazil, India, and parts of Asia.
I know all this. The global south is just pretty inaccurate name for the developing countries aka the third world. It is not at all clear that China should be included. It is also a collection of some pretty much despotic countries though that varies widely. There are also some very questionable trade policies too including cartels, trafficking of all sorts, bribery, corruption, often high population growth, you name it.
Higher oil prices are motivating people to move away from oil, hopefully toward electrification & renewables. Or at the very least, motivating people to lower their fuel consumption.
Electric vehicles are better than sticking with internal combustion, but there's still so much energy wasted in designing infrastructure around everyone getting around by cars in the first place. Everything gets spread further apart to accommodate them on roads and in parking lots, which means you have to travel farther to get where you're going. Our city designs need to shift toward density way faster than they currently are.
With what happened in Hong Kong recently I imagine it can’t be too effective in the short term, but at the same time the slow trickle of disinformation and whataboutism and bots online preaching their BS can have a way of radicalizing and turning people.
And it’s not like the US’ trackrecord doesnt make it easy to show examples of us doing wrong around the world.
He compares democracy in Hong Kong and the USA by looking at who nominates who eventually rules.
The people in China are terrible, and the people in USA are terrible. The vast majority of them are greedy, omnicidal, mass-extinction causing monsters. One is worse than the other, but both are so amazingly terrible that we should be boycotting both, and all the other dictatorships and oligarchies.
As soon as I heard about the source of ignition I thought about a similar catastrophe that happened in the USA about twenty years ago. This is terrible, but it is probably good to share it widely and in as many languages as possible. I am not sure of the best words, but it would be good to help this tragedy save others.
This has been happening since the invention of fire. People will cut corners and use cheaper flammable material where they shouldn’t (e.g. Grenfell 2017) or some stupid with a flare gun will set it off inside (e.g. Montreux 1971).
Fire codes and building standards improve with time, but human stupidity is forever.
Westerners? I’m foreign-born Chinese, and you couldn’t pay me to enter China. My anti-ccp sentiments combined with their sense of ownership of all Chinese people regardless of birth nation means I’m probably on a low priority list somewhere.
Given enough exposure to propaganda you can get the working masses to believe whatever you want.
I’ve seen this first hand in Hungary. 20 years ago everyone was pro EU. Kids such as myself were dreaming about eventually becoming part of the US of Europe & while that was never realistic, the adults were also hoping for a better future in the EU. Before Covid we finally -kind of- got that better future, things have improved tremendously, but slowly over time propaganda completely turned the public opinion around. I’m convinced most people really don’t like thinking on their own about issues… Now even my 10-12 year old nephews know & believe that Brussels is the worst city on Earth with all the people being certifiably insane there. These days whenever I hear people talk politics It always starts with ‘EU bad’… (Though I too am reluctant to talk about my views openly nowadays, so no chance of anyone hearing that)
Perhaps Taiwan or even the US should invest more in more targeted western propaganda to counteract the Chinese influence, but this just sounds horrible, I effin hate propaganda.
What reference do you have then, though? You’ve basically eliminated every country of reasonable size: India, China, America obviously, but also Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and Nigeria, Bangladesh are in similar states.
Yeah and? I don’t want to live in an oppressive shithole, doesn’t matter to me if they became oppressive because they were copying China, the USA, Nigeria, the UK or whatever - they’d still be oppressive!
I honestly didn’t think that saying “I don’t like authoritarian capitalism” would be such a controversial statement…
I’ve legitimately got no idea how they can fix their countries (or if they can even be fixed) as I’m more focused on my own country. I do not want my country to copy either the USA or China, and I resent the close relationship my government maintains with both of those oppressive states.
The USA pressured our government into performing illegal searches/arrests to favour their corporations, and the CCP has repeatedly been caught infiltrating our parliament. Those big authoritarian countries just bully smaller states to get what they want, and we need to stop pretending that it’s morally justified and normal. It’s not okay.
Actually I’m not from the Americas (though one of my ancestors did decide to leave Florida in the 1830s or 40s cos he had very dark coloured skin).
And I disagree that there’s a need to “pick a side” - both “sides” will stomp on smaller countries no matter what because that’s what authoritarian imperialistic powers do.
International sentiment generally negative about country actively committing genocide.
More at 11.
Jokes aside - yeah? Of course there’s propaganda about China. I would wager its hard to find a big international power that doesn’t have some level of propaganda being spread about it by the other big international powers. But between the propaganda you still find a bunch of real reasons to have negative views toward China’s leadership and actions.
Uyghur genocide (ongoing)
authoritarian rule with huge censorship of outside media I really don’t need to go on
news
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