In the same vein, it’s reasonable to take a foreigner’s view with a grain of salt. For all its impressive progress, China doesn’t show off its problems.
The “West” had the same problem many times during the first Cold War, where things in the Soviet Union seemed really great from the outside. Only after the collapse did the truth become clear.
Now, I don’t think China is even remotely similar, but never forget that it is not a free society.
Try browsing Chinese social media (WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, etc). The internet is ripe with non-anonymous criticism of the gov't
People often point to the take down of Winnie the Pooh memes as censorship but I don't think people realize there's a long history of racist groups using Pooh as a slur about Asian people and Tigger about black people. The meme exploded in popularity from a picture of Obama and Xi being compared to Tigger and Pooh.
You can have whatever opinion you want about taking down racist content but I don't it's any different from Western platforms. But spending any time on Chinese social media will quickly dispel the idea of harsh consequences for speech (an especially silly idea coming from members of the nation that contains 25% of the world's prisoners)
So is it your position that, when the Chinese government imposes takedowns or worse on Chinese people posting Winnie the Pooh stuff, it's primarily because the Chinese government is opposed to anti-Asian racism?
> nation that contains 25% of the world's prisoners
Among the problems is not being able to look in the mirror. There are those that don't realize, "when you point one finger, there are three fingers point back at you".
>In the US it's practically a right of passage to be a young adult and very vocally hate the country, hate the government.
Well, unless ICE murders you at a protest for expressing your hate of the government's actions.
>In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.
That's very much not true. China isn't North Korea like Westerners imagine. Unless you riot, take to the streets, or become a big agitator or dissident, Chinese government and media actually does allow some controlled escape valves for regular people to vent about problems, no issue with that. This isn't Stalin's reign of terror.
You'll only get disappeared if you end up becoming a big fish to threaten the CCP, like Jack Ma, but otherwise the CCP don't end disappearing every schmuck who complains about the government.
You might not know this, but as a nation, you don't get very far economically, academically and technologically in the long run by consonantly oppressing your people under a culture of permanent fear of their government. You can't bleed a stone.
And China got where it is, due to its successful policies from the last half-century that brought prosperity and lifted millions of of poverty, it's government has earned a certain level of "buy-in" from the majority of the population, meaning the people are more likely to be cooperative and work with the totalitarian government towards a common set of mutually beneficial goals, rather than wasting their energy trying to mass emigrate out of the country or to fight for democracy.
And that's what so dangerous about this, because unlike the USSR who served in the west as THE model of inevitable failure for such systems, China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.
> China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.
They are certainly trying to copy some elements, but also some parts might be inevitable in the age of decentralised social media which are much harder to control using the old tools. China just enacted that first and the West had to go through all the turmoil to arrive in a similar place much later.
>due to its successful policies from the last half-century >that brought prosperity and lifted
Not because of the West giving China its industry, because - greed and China's blatant IP theft? Who cares if the communists make everything we consume, right? Stock price, yo.
"Apple in China" by Patrick McGee is a good read.
I like Chinese food, the arts, the folklore, they make my favorite bows (archery), but I don't want my grandkids have to learn Mandarin unless they want to.
Tangent, I always do a double take when I see CCP, as "USSR" is spelled "CCCP" in Cyrillic, it's charming (I am from a former USSR republic).
Sure, but in this case it seems spot on. China really does have a disturbingly high youth unemployment rate, along with a population that's aging and shrinking. I have no idea if they're headed for a major economic crash, but the track record of command economies controlled by a paranoid aging dictator don't have a very good track record.
For all the things China does well there are plenty of reasons for Chinese people to be concerned about their future.
