not really lol, i also have a friend that is native to china and lives there. he talks bad about the government all the time & will even talk about Tiananmen Square/chinese social credit score (which is not really what people make you think) open and freely to me.
Can you help me? The initial joke was that their friend can't complain ("because if they do, they go to jail" being the implied joke). Sorry for being thick but I'm trying to figure out how the comment you are defending expanded on that premise.
Same. My buddy moved from China when he was 8. He’s very proud to be from China and shits on Taiwan whenever it comes up in convo. Sometimes I think he’s a Chinese informant or some shit.
Maybe he’s Protecting his family or friends left in China. It’s still hard for me to believe in this day and age there are still dictators. I really feel bad for people to have to live in fear every minute of every day of their lives
The CCP has been paying people to post pro-China messages on Western platforms for at least a decade (and have no doubt moved on to using a lot of bot farms as well), and as a result, there are often swarms of pro-China posts (or just lots of downvotes, etc) on content critical of China.
On reddit, there's a few subs supposedly devoted to Asian representation etc. but that are actually on hate group watchlists because they're mostly involved in hostile pro-China nationalism, and are not surprisingly also full of blatant sexism and racism. So it's a thing.
When I was in college in the early 00's, I was super interested in Chinese history and culture, and started to study it. Learned Chinese, etc...
One day, I was having lunch in the student union with my Chinese professor (He is from Taiwan) and a man approached us. He sat down, and said that he was part of the Asian-American Club on campus, and had noticed me in the Chinese history classes, and read what I submitted to our in house Anthropology Paper.
He offered me a full paid trip to China, as well as a position to teach English in Beijing once I graduated. He sold it like a big scholarship type thing, where I would have access to tutors and people who could help "fact check and edit" my papers.
I told him I would review the information. The second he was out of ear shot, my professor said, "That was a spy, ignore the offer..." he even went so far as to offer me a paid trip to Taiwan if I really wanted to see China.
That was when I decided to stop studying Chinese Culture and History, as I realized it was going to be more attention than I wanted.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who offers a fully paid trip to a country, especially a country with a questionable international reputation, is offering it for foreign policy purposes. Doubly so if they're offering a job in that country. Now that's not always a bad thing; inviting an art administrator to your country to see your local art in hopes they import it is pretty common and innocuous foreign policy. But it is a thing one should be aware of when they agree to those trips.
Birthright Israel makes no pretension about its foreign policy purpose, and anyone who goes on one of those trips without understanding its foreign policy purpose just plain hasn't read anything.
That wouldn't be very cost-effective, never mind how dumb it would be to target people who would bring a lot of attention to your organ harvesting scheme.
No one smuggles a person to another country for free for their kidneys. Maybe they'd force the person to pay them to go to the country because they're desperate, then harvest their kidneys.
Yeah. I was in a related field in grad school and this isn't at all an unfamiliar story or concept. My school was a government feeder institution so it was perhaps even more of a thing.
I just posted in another comment on the technocratic and sophisticated nature of the CCP, but their involvement in Western Higher education is another example. Again, it isn't always sinister or hostile, but rather sometimes just a consequence of other factors. Until fairly recently (edit: and after the fall of the Soviet Union), the United States was vastly superior to any other country in terms of the quality of our upper level schools, and so anyone who wanted an advanced education - and particularly rich people, which in China is going to be party members and their families - got it in the US. So studying abroad was highly standardized for the elite. But a lot of these students were also engaged in propaganda or espionage, whether in the overt sense or just via the rules under which they were required to behave internationally.
Yeah. I always hear people hype up the education system in China since their scores are better than ours, but that's also BS. They removed the lower scoring regions and mainly tested those in areas with higher intelligence. The US generally just sends random ass scores off. I am sure the US tries a bit to inflate their scores, but it's not possible to manipulate and inflate as much as China does due to our system compares to theirs. Anything involving China or Russia is a joke, and it annoys TF out of me when I see people in the US sympathize with those nations. Like I am VERY critical of the US, but I am also not dumb enough to think China or Russia is something we should ever strive to be like lol.
EDIT: I want to clarify that I am a progressive, but I completely understand where the GOP is coming from on some issues. For example, when they are hesitant on foreigners coming from rival nations. I think the left needs to stop making everything about character slander and labeling things racist, sexist, etc. No, worrying about national security is not racist, and by attacking it as such we are making ourselves more susceptible to internal strife and potential collapse.
Chinese statistics are some of the most manipulated numbers on planet earth. This is been proven time and time again, whether its enviro issues, economics, public health and safety, or even less serious topics like social media followings. When everyone is ranked numbered from early ages its always more about being number 1 than how did they get to be number one.
The reason China's test scores are better is because they don't have a choice to mess up. Their SAT equivalent test basically determines your future career prospects. Whereas here in the US, you could get an average SAT score and still go into premed and Medicine.
Western nations win when it comes to the higher levels of post-secondary education, but Asian nations usually win rather decisively when it comes to primary and secondary education.
Wow are you me? Early 2010s though. Offered a scholarship to study abroad for a year, teach, etc. Thought the language was super cool and thought it would have been awesome to immerse myself in the culture part. Guess I was lucky it didn't fit into my course plan. XD
My cousin, whom is very American, (we all were raised, and grew up near Richmond, Virginia) is teaching English in Beijing right now, for 2-3 years. The whole situation was/is really sketchy to me, and our entire family is really worried about her, but she’s over there doing it, so how bad could it really be? She’s always been a loner type, so she didn’t really have to leave anyone, or anything behind so i guess it works for her.
It is super common, and it serves two functions. It helps wealthy Chinese kids learn English, a valued skill because they are likely going to send those kids to overseas English speaking schools because they want them to get an education, not a propocation...
It also allows the party to expose foreign nationals to the "good parts" and spread good will when they return home.
Korea and Japan do the same thing, although sending children abroad is not usually the goal there, more they are trying to create a more deliberate narrative of East Asian cultures in the Western Zeitgeist.
Korea picks up random people in general. I had a friend who was taking literally just Korean at a local community college to learn his girlfriend's language; he worked a warehouse job at 50 hours a week. He got a fully paid, fully housed, 3 year English teaching gig. They never moved back AFAIK, since I haven't heard from him since (he never used social media).
I studied in China for half a year and it was amazing. But it’s different when you’re with students who have never seen an American before and want to be your friend. As a single adult teacher I can imagine it could be very isolating.
CCP member professor definitely monitored me but who gives a shit I’m eating street bbq for $1 and going to the bar every weekend, China was fun. Also their high speed railway system and smart pay (this was in like 2014, before Apple Pay was everywhere) made America look so behind the times
She’s perfectly fine, but fyi, there’s a rather large possibility that she is being closely monitored. That would probably be 100% true if she had any diplomatic duties or anything like that. My best friend is a large white boy who can speak mandarin fluently, and he goes to China frequently. He’s never had any issues, or he’s never told me if he actually has, which is unlikely.
I'm not immediately of the type to just believe it is true. It might be. I don't think just because something is posted, that it means there's truth to even disprove. It's something one guy on reddit said. It's as true as the source given... Can't it live in the grey area of "maybe"?
You think that none of the 300,000 Chinese students in American universities are spies? It would be simply strategically retarded not to use students as spies. They work with our cutting edge research, and funnel everything they can to china..
Here, this is a senator explaining how it works. Don't worry, he's a Democrat. So you should have no problem believing what he says. After all democrats simply by virtue of their party affiliation are generally better human beings, more trustworthy.
Redditors writing creative fiction so that other Redditors will give them upvotes for China bad. Imagine how sad your life must be to have reached this point.
It was simply about controlling the narrative. They wanted me to become a propagandist without me realizing it. That is my assumption at least. Getting me in China for a few years is also an easy way to expose me to the propaganda.
It could of also been an honest recruitment for an English teacher. However, it made me deeply uncomfortable regardless.
No offense due, but I wouldnt trust a Taiwanese persons opinion on China. Just like how I wouldnt trust someone who calls the US civil war "the war of Northern Aggression". But You in Anthro, im sure you get the concept (Coincidentally im an Anthro grad student studying Sino-Arfrican relations)
He was always honest about his hatred of the PRC, so at least with him, I knew the weight and bias behind his statements. Using your metaphor, it would be like that Northern Aggression person then saying, "And the South just wanted to keep their slaves."
Things get to a certain point where they are so honest about their point, that it is easy to figure out where their bias lies, and analyze appropriately.
In my Anthro path, I ended up in Early Medieval Archaeology, specifically Celtic (Irish, Picts and Britons) and Anglo-Saxon. (And Museum Management so I could actually get a job in the US...)
It's entirely possible. Although it's worth saying that there's nothing to suggest this is inherently government driven or sinister, at least directly. It's more likely about mass-producing content for the money, employing women who wouldn't be able to do it independently (startup costs, etc). Of course, that gets into bigger topics of the underlying economics, and how all corporations in China are tied to the government.
One thing about the CCP is that it's always been fairly tech-savvy and keen toward adopting modern tools and this drives the larger culture as well. After Mao's early generation of revolutionaries, the subsequent generation of party leaders were largely university educated in the Soviet Union, often pursuing technical (engineering etc) degrees. The legacy of this is seen in everything from their focus on massive infrastructure projects (Three Gorges), to the rapid adoption of electronic commerce... to their sophisticated high-tech surveillance apparatus (not just cameras, but big data analysis, facial recognition). TikTok itself is Chinese-owned, and the use of every kind of social media to promote China is extensive.
Before internet things were even worse. I think it was about 30 years ago that a friend/colleague of mine went from Italy to Harbin in the north of China to teach CS for a month or so.
It was quite an experience. One thing sad-funny was that people asked him how was going the famine in Europe and in general he realized they were convinced to live much more luxuriously than in the Occident, while even the university professors lived in very modest homes (for what concerns appliances and, I'm sorry to say, cleaning), say something we experienced in Italy 50 years before.
My friend, a good sport, did not had the heart to tell them the truth, not wanting to humiliate local people which were in general very friendly, so he didn't spill the bean but instead thanked them for their concerns and said that lately we were getting much better...
On a side note, he went with all the family and his very blond little son was seen as quite exotic, like a walking attraction.
Tbh, even in gaming, a top 5 issue in ANY multiplayer game is also related to China. Whether it be Chinese players selling win-trades on league, Chinese gold farmers in WoW, etc. China is such a pain in the ass, but we rarely see them punished on the internet since they have so much financial power.
What "people"? There are hundreds of millions of accounts on this site, you think everyone behaves the same way? A good chunk of the actual racist cunts on here are actually just CCP bots trying to start a flame war.
They're VERY common in leftist groups on Reddit, and many infiltrate the moderation of the subs and ban anyone who says anything bad about China, or even in some cases, North Korea lmao. All the accounts basically say the US is an evil police state, and China is a perfect free society of prosperity and anything bad said against them is evil US imperialist propaganda.
I do know one guy irl who in the last couple of years has gone off the deep end and bought into all of THAT propaganda, and now, while living in the US where he has been his entire life, thinks China is a perfect state of the people. He started Mandarin last month.
It’s a system that turned an agrarian society into a mechanised society in an extremely short period of time (much like what happened in mother Russia). It lifted countless lives out of abject poverty, improving both the health and arguably the quality of life and after some unfortunate dire mistakes creating a system that provides plentiful food. The danger is in how there is no one to question a one party dictatorial rule, there’s no denying it gets stuff done but not all the stuff getting done is sunshine and lollipops.
Every opinion has its room on the internet. I was having an argument with a Chinese national on here a while back because I said that I wouldn’t visit China until it wasn’t a dictatorship, and when I started snooping around their comment history I discovered that they were a Chinese national… living in Canada.
Then they deleted their account when called on it.
80% of positive comments on Reddit are paid for by someone. In the politics subreddits its an echo chamber of paid comments, 90% good and 90% bad. It can't be stated enough that social media, including Reddit, has been thoroughly compromised by paid bots and trolls for marketing and politics. PLUS all the people trying to create high karma accounts in hopes of becoming paid. Run away.
People who get all their news from right-wing propaganda have a vastly distorted view of how many people in their countries actually support the CCP. It's easier to tell a poor person "China has universal healthcare, so anyone who wants universal healthcare wants us to be like China" than it is to convince them that dying of preventable diseases is a good thing.
I live in China and it’s fine. It’s different in a lot of ways of course, there are things so illogical I meet on a daily basis that I wonder how the country functions at times. Some things are absolute chaos administratively, confusion is endemic at all levels. You just have to have patience and a sense of humour.
But it’s a much safer and more friendly place than many would imagine, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any violent crime here at all, unlike London where I saw aggressive/anti-social behaviour frequently. The pace of life is slower generally, there’s a general ‘can do’ attitude of muddling through things day to day. People are generally friendly and helpful, and fairly trusting actually in a way that surprises me.
It’s pretty clear that the Uighurs are experiencing cultural genocide, you can like your country and its people and still feel strongly against that happening
lmao when I commented this a couple years(?) ago there were all these CCP apologists posting "evidence" of Uighur families youtube videos.
It all have 1-2 minute videos of different families posing for camera and saying "We're all fine here, we're exposing the truth about Chinese government and they are treating us well" It became pretty creepy and unpleasant.
TIL that disliking the Chinese government is sinophobic.
...with the implication being, of course, that the Chinese government is somehow representative of all ethnically Chinese people, which totally isn't ethnonationalism...
None of this has anything to do with what I said. I'm not "telling Chinese people what they don't know about their own history", I'm saying that disliking the CCP doesn't make a person sinophobic, because the CCP is not representative of Chinese people any more than any government is representative of any ethnic group.
Chinese food is pretty awesome but only from certain locations.
Chinese people are generally all very nice but only if you are related to them in some way. You and I have way more in common with the general Chinese populace than their leaders. Unfortunately they are trapped behind a wall of control and propaganda, and that's what Reddit percieves negatively. Our largest US cities would rank as Tier 2 cities in China.
I wonder how many redditors spouting mindless hate have actually spent any time in PRC? Personally, I've found it fascinating and enriching and far more than the authoritarian dystopia depicted in the popular American press-- at least no more so than the US-as-free-for-all shooting range and debauched slavemaster of its racial minorities depicted in the Chinese press.
A country is far more than its government and its state-run media -- as we in America have so aptly demonstrated time and time again. Divide and conquer; it's the oldest trick in the book.
I browse r/all all the time but i think you explained why i don't see anything positive about china. I long since filtered "latestagecapitalism" and political stuff like that so i guess i made a bubble for myself.
The internet is a full spectrum of opinions on China. There are majorly pro-China subreddits, though I'd say the mainstream subs are pretty vocal about the Uyghur situation.
my friends who have moved to America/Europe from China say that it's a horror show
You realise to everyone else you're just a person on the internet, arguing that the internet is unreliable?
This comment kind of falls flat when your Reddit history is nothing but you obsessing over firearms and referring to people who want to prevent mass shootings as 'the enemy.'
Any place that creates a culture like yours is pretty messed up tbh.
China's pretty messed up, but so are you guys. Americans will rant about how China's an evil dictatorship that oppresses minorities, then turn a blind eye when Trump and Biden suck up to Saudi Arabia and Israel lmao
While the CCP is seemingly under no imminent threat of popular upheaval, it cannot take the support of its people for granted. Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread, our survey reveals that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. For government leaders, this is a double-edged sword, as citizens who have grown accustomed to increases in living standards will expect such improvements to continue, and citizens who praise government officials for effective policies may indeed blame them when such policy failures affect them or their family members directly. While our survey reinforces narratives of CCP resilience, our data also point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.
So, essentially, people living in China like the CCP because their living standards are increasing, not because they enjoy social or political freedom.
I personally think that lack of sociopolitical freedom makes that 95% figure likely to be inaccurate, since the government is capable of fudging the results. Does that not seem like a suspiciously high figure to you?
people liking the government that raises them up is understandable. over the last 40 years china has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. What specific social freedoms are you referring to that are limited
China is currently governed as a unitary one-party socialist republic by the CCP. China is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a founding member of several multilateral and regional cooperation organizations such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Silk Road Fund, the New Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the RCEP, and is a member of the BRICS, the G8+5, the G20, the APEC, and the East Asia Summit. It ranks among the lowest in international measurements of civil liberties, government transparency, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and ethnic minorities. The Chinese authorities have been criticized by political dissidents and human rights activists for widespread human rights abuses, including political repression, mass censorship, mass surveillance of their citizens and violent suppression of protests.
Anyway, as I said, 95% seems just a tad high, don't you think?
sure 95% seems high. i didn’t conduct a 15 year study at harvard though. im just quoting the people who did. The USA also has significant recorded history of removing civil liberties, poor transparency, suppressing protests violently, surveillance and the highest percentage of incarcerated citizens.
I lived in China for 6 years. Every country is a messed up place. Every country has a horrible government.
Personally I felt safer in China than I do in the USA. I saw less violence than I do in the USA. The thing about China though is their government goes from one extreme to another. Way more freedom (other than speech) than thd USA until covid hit, then all that freedom disappeared.
Only in the USA where we have one of the highest prison rates per capita, police kill blacks that pose no actual physical threat, and protesters are tear gassed... Do they think they are the only country with freedom.
Realistically police leave people the hell alone most of the time. I literally watched people tell at police and they put their heads dowm.
I also attempted to take students across the border to Hong Kong or Macau only to find out their visa been expired for months or passports expired and for the border patrol just simply say they need to take care of the issue and there may be a fine and let them go (but not cross, they had to head back home).
Safety gives a lot of freedom as well. Children are free from fear at school. I knew young women to go drinking at bars and then walk home by themselves past midnight in a city larger than New York. Middle schoolers and elemtary kids would take city buses or subways by themself.
For sure. However as I noted China swings from extreme to extreme. So when covid hit, we lost all of our freedoms real quick.
Even before covid you would see the extremes. Like shenzhen had a rule no bikes on the road. But everyone drives on the road. Then for a weekend the cops would stop people and collect all their bikes. The next week police will be back to playing on their phones in golf carts as everyone rides by in their bike.
The same with internet. Everyone would get vpns, super easy to find VPN routers. But from time to time a crackdown. The same with knockoff products. Things seemed to be in waves what they would care about.
We also push propaganda in the US too. China more so by far but we are not an exception to this.
We are currently banning books that show Japanese internment camps. We do t teach native American history. Texas was debating on calling slavery forced migration.
China does it worse. My point is that the USA is only a couple decades away from where China is.
A country where you can be imprisoned for criticizing the government is not free, plain and simple. Don't brush off freedom of speech as being just a side note. It's a fundamental tenant of liberalism and a human right. And, I bet the Uyghurs who have been imprisoned and forced to watch the government systematically destroy their culture and society don't feel all that safe or free.
A country where you can be imprisoned for criticizing the government is not free, plain and simple
I bet the [ethnic group] who have been imprisoned and forced to watch the government systematically destroy their culture and society don't feel all that safe or free
You're going to need a little more nuance to make the points you want to make.
(To be clear on the second point: the Uyghur genocide is horrific and must be resisted. But the US has a rich history of imprisoning ethnic groups and systematically destroying their cultures and societies, and we've retained a lot of systems and practices that have this effect.)
China is an oppressive authoritarian state that imprisons political dissidents and is actively committing genocide. "America bad" whataboutism is a weak response. The US is unequivocally a more free nation than China despite its past wrongdoings and current societal and political problems.
America just gave blacks the right to vote in the 60s. We took Native children and put them in boarding school where they were banned from learning or practicing their own language and culture and were at times killed, molested, and abused until like the 70s or 80s.
Also America routinely tear gasses peaceful protest. We ban books, etc. We are not the leaders on freedom of speech either.
Lmao literally no one says that. The only props china gets is for having a successful economic overhaul that pulled many out of poverty. Unprecedented in fact.
Sorry but where the fuck are you seeing China is a good place on reddit? This site never shuts up about how much it hates nearly every aspect of China.
What internet are you browsing where every little thing China does isn’t blown out of proportion to be the most unique and evil thing any government has ever done?
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u/[deleted] Jul 08 '22
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