I hope the CCP falls and gets replaced by a democracy. I wanna go back to revisit a childhood place for nostalgia purposes, but I can’t because I’m terrified of the government.
I hope it’s not a stupid question, but… what are you worried would happen to you?
They’ve tried to kill me in the past. Maybe they aren’t as bloodthirsty anymore, but there has been a lot of Americans with Chinese ancestry that will think they are welcome in China because of their blood, but they get treated as a Chinese citizen in the eyes of the law while simutaneously being mistrusted because of foreign citizenship. What this means is that if you get in political trouble, or just doing something they don’t like (like using VPNs to access Youtube or basically any website outside of China), you can be harassed by cops or potentially even get arrested. But if you do get arrested, they do not let you contact your embassy because, again, they treat you like a Chinese citizen, where as a white American will be allowed to contact the embassy. Then, if things escalate to courts, they could prosecute you as a spy, and with 99% conviction rate you aint gonna be getting out any time soon. That’s where an actual Chinese citizen benefits, because if you are a citizen, might just demand an apology and let you go. So you get the worst of both worlds by being a non Chinese citizen, and being non-white. Even if nothing happens, they could already put you in an “exit-ban” and keep you from leaving indefinitely with no fair appeals process, for any political reason, or just a mistake in the bureauacracy. As a second-born during the one-child policy, I don’t even want to risk there being some “additional fines” that my parents haven’t paid off for some reason, which should already be cleared. China has a network of spies in the US, and you never know if someone walking by is a CCP spy while you were talking with friends about things critical of the CCP. My parents have this “Wechat” thing on their phone and they FUCKING GAVE PERMISSION FOR THE APP TO ACCESS THE MICROPHONE!!! Who knows if they have records of an argument about the CCP and my parents were STILL PRAISING THEM and I told them how much I hate them for trying to kill me. And I often have these arguments at home, when they have their phones near by. The Wechat app could’ve easily sent that conversation back to China and now I’m on their watchlist. Too much risk while CCP is in power.
The thing about being a Chinese-American, is that both shores are unwelcoming. The US is racist and becoming fascist, China thinks of us as traitors. There’s no safe harbor. Maybe Taiwan? I doubt that’s even safe since China wants to invade soon.
Considering that WeChat does video and audio calls it’s pretty reasonable that wechar asks permission to use the microphone. I think you’ve been caught up in fearmongering. China isn’t going to invade Taiwan any time soon. There has been little to any real indication they would or even could. You’ve gotta understand that the CCP is authoritarian but no government is that competent to be keeping tabs on a random Americans conversation that they had at some point at some time who may more may not be ever visiting China. I’m not saying China is run by good people, I’m saying no government is competent enough to actually 1984 anyone in real life.
It’s like the social credit system that doesn’t really exist. The CCP put out a vague instruction to have a credit system based on social stuff because many Chinese people don’t have banks thus don’t have access to regular credit systems. Random cities and provinces came up their own systems with random rules and regulations. Then basically all of them were walked back because they were stupid and random and overbearing, and the CCP delegating their vague orders gives them plausible deniability in that they blamed the stupid systems on local government and played the good guy when they ordered them walked back.
I can either:
- Not visit China
Cons: Not being able to revisit places I’ve been to that I always wanted to go.
Pros: Being safe from an authoritarian government that’s increasingly regressing back to totalitarianism
- Visit China
Pros: I can visit places I always wanted to revisit
Cons: Being arrested in China, placed on exit ban, tortured, or executed. And if I somehow leave unharmed, upon returning to the US, I could be accused of being a communist spy due to rising US-China tensions, possibly spending time in prison because of a second red scare.
Potential consequences are not worth it.
Tourism is not worth being tortured.
Being arrested in China, placed on exit ban, tortured, or executed.
What do you plan on doing in China? You must have quite the crime spree planned.
Just being Canadian is enough if the CCP is playing games.
The Chinese government is a democratic republic. The CCP is a democratic institution.
Harvard conducted a 13-year study of popular Chinese sentiment and found 95.5% approval of their government.
If you replace the Chinese form of democracy with the US form of democracy, what will happen when the US popular sentiment is 20% trust in government overall, 20% approval of Congress, and 40% approval of the president?
Your fears are manufactured by the West.
The article you linked mentioned how that approval rating (for the central government - not the local ones) came to be for rural people: Censorship and propaganda combined with an attitude towards government similar to what you often see with religious people. If something good happens, the big guy far away did it. If something bad happens, it’s due to the corruption of men (in this case the corrupt local officials).
Edit: From the article:
“I think citizens often hear that the central government has introduced a raft of new policies, then get frustrated when they don’t always see the results of such policy proclamations, but they think it must be because of malfeasance or foot-dragging by the local government,” said Saich.
Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”
[…] This dichotomy is highlighted by a 2017 Gallup poll, where 70 percent of U.S. respondents had a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in local government.
The US has the longest running, largest, and most expensive propaganda machine in the world. The evidence doesn’t match the conclusion. The federal government of the US is very far away, the states are much closer. The evidence does not match the conclusion.
Further, claiming that 95.5% of a billion people are too incompetent to see through the ruse is laughably indefensible. It’s almost like the propaganda machine in the West is so effective that it managed to make a Chinese expat into an orientalist.
I just told you what the article you linked says. Now you tell me, it’s wrong? Maybe read your own sources next time.
Yeah, maybe read it again. The researchers are attempting to offer possible explanations. They don’t have any empirical evidence that domestic propaganda is the root cause or even a significant contributor to their actual empirical data. Further, they explain evidence later in the article that runs counter to that potential explanation - over the 15 years, the poor got more satisfied with the government. This tracks much more closely to economic and social progress in the country than it does to propaganda efforts, which were far stronger and more comprehensive in the early days of the revolution, necessitated by the presence of war both internationally and domestically.
Maybe don’t just skim the article for sentences that sound like they might jive with your preconceived notions and instead develop some critical thinking skills.
Please explain how you plan to liberate workers by removing their basic political agency. “You are just brainwashed. Please try to keep up.”
“Democracy” in China is significantly more democratic than in places like the USA. In the USA, you’re presented with a false dichotomy in the two-party system, where both parties are parties for wealthy interests. Neither party is a party of the people. In China, for example, elections are “non-politicized”. Paraphrasing Richard Boer,
‘Non-politicized’ elections means that elections are not a manifestation of class conflict in antagonistic political parties, but are based on qualifications, expertise, and merit for positions.
When your vote is between candidates based on their qualifications and is not some charade of us-v-them where neither choice actually benefits the people, that is a more democratic system.
The USA is democratic in name only. People in the USA have little to no real political agency, but have been lead to believe their superficial interactions with the political system are real agency.
Lol, you will have some hard time then Gringuito, it will outlast you and all of your white masters.
How do you keep your breath so fresh? Does the pooh bear use mint flavored shoe shine or do you just pop in a mint after going to town?
You do seem to know a lot about boot flavours and licking, it is suspicious, I wonder if that is related to leash you have on your neck that reads US property.
How is this productive conversation?
There is no productive conversation with you people. It is either we accept your notion of rules based ordes western imperialism or we are barvarians. You dont think outside whatever the us propaganda machine tells you to, even tje most simple things any of my politically uneducated third world friends would know is impossible to you.
So your conjecture is that the country with the heavily censored press is less susceptible to propaganda? Do I have that correct?
You’re the one randomly commenting to defend a government. Plenty of governments and orgs find problems with the policies and actions of the CCP not just the US.
One I have a problem with is how people in China can’t really criticize their government without risking being targeted by the government. If I said the Pooh Bear comment in China the CCP would be on my ass because WeChat reported me.
On the other hand criticize my government all the fucking time including leaders in particular. Watch. Fuck Biden I don’t like his gun policy and I don’t think he should run again, he is too fucking old. Here, I’ll do it again. Fuck Trump, he has tiny hands and I’m pretty sure he did those crimes he has been to going to court over. Also the DMV sucks and inflation is bad.
I could get into more important things the CCP is responsible for like the genocide but you probably think those are lies or want to get into whataboutisms.
You love licking Xi’s boot? Lmao
El gringo que se hace pasar por chino con la mente menos atrofiada.
Aren’t they doing this “let it rot” thing or whatever?
What’s “let it rot” if you don’t mind me asking?
It’s Chinese youth basically giving up on the prospect of the careers they were planning for , sometimes just staying with their parents and giving up on the job search. I think it comes from caving to too much family/societal pressure and instead adopting a “fuck this” attitude. The Chinese term is Bai lan (摆烂)
See also “tang ping” (lying flat, 躺平)
The media environment in China is murky at best so I’m honestly not sure how much of it is a real phenomenon and how much is propaganda of some sort.
*edited a typo
I only know about it from bits and pieces here and there, but it’s a large soft-style protest where they refuse to participate in the economy as much as possible. When they get a job, they do it as poorly as possible without getting in trouble. If they can not have a job somehow, then they don’t get one.
According to google, the Chinese words are pronounced Bai Lan in English.
Oh wow! So the same inequality is likely gripping China is what I’m gleaning from this.
I believe the youth in many places of the world are turning against the paradigms of their elders. Just wanna have a nice place to live, man. Don’t care about Taiwan or Chinese Pride or trillions of dollars or mighty armies or covid lockdowns, just want a house, job and maybe family, and be able to think that’s a safe thing to try and do. Some people are making that harder than it needs to be though, not in just any one place, but lots of places. And it’s clearly because they’re following old patterns that no longer work as well as they used to.
So take a page from Ghandi. Sit there and wait. They can’t vote or anything in any way that matters, they can’t rebel against a massively powerful authoritarian state, they’d just die or be tortured into re-education. This soft protest is a viable strategy though, similar things have worked before in history.
We at least can vote and bitch and moan about our leadership without being abducted in the middle of the night, taken away and “re-educated”. But even with that democratic alternative, we had our own “Great Resignation”, or so we called it.
Lying flat?
Youth unemployment of over 20%, let’s hope they can improve those numbers, that’s pretty grim.
Well at least we’re all going down together?
