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.
Chinese healthcare makes American healthcare look good by comparison. It is mostly private and you’re expected to bribe the doctors, nurses, orderlies and have a family member stick around the hospital the whole time pestering them or you won’t receive care. Same with Education, which is like the American Ivy system times 1000. Housing in China is… well, just try googling Evergande. Upwards mobility involves either climbing the party hierarchy or “leveling up” from being a rural peasant to being an urban migrant worker with bad hukou.
You got me on transit though, the Chinese have built some amazing trains.
Nobody would deny this. On the other hand, it’s the same argument as “not all Russians support Putin” or even—dare I say—“not all Germans were Nazis.” It’s true that when you live under a despotic regime there’s not much you can do about it, individually. And most people would not willingly be complicit in the regime’s crimes except to the extent that they have no choice.
But it’s true that these regimes do have lots of internal support. They wouldn’t exist without that support. And to the extent that this support is manufactured by internal propaganda, people within that message-space will not be able to resist having their own perceptions shaped by it.
So while it’s undeniably true that the CCP is not the Chinese people, and that the Chinese people are the principle victims of the CCP, they also are complicit in a collective sense.
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.