(Preferably with sources)

I've overcorrected from "China bad" to "China is infallible." I know that's incorrect, but it's hard to decipher US propaganda from actual issues.

In discussions in the past, providing a positive counterpoint is plenty, but since more folks are already realizing the narrative about China is incorrect I would like to have more nuanced discussions where I can present both praise and criticism. I think it's also important that we don't end up in a USSR situation where Communism is synonymous with the actions of a single country.

  • I know they're trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that's very bad.
  • I'm unsure of what the internal restrictions look like in general
  • I saw that the "social credit score" was a small experiment in one province that got way overblown
  • Great firewall...? I know it's a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
  • Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?
  • Are they monitoring everyone? "You can't monitor 1.5 billion people" idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely
  • Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China's own capacity

Are there others? I'm happy if you also include justification for their policies, but I do want to know where you genuinely think they're making mistakes.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Not voting against the resolution 1973 allowing nato to destroy Lybia

Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China's own capacity

I can't get over how easy and funny it is that the answer to "How to seize the means of production" is just "bro they'll give it to you for free".

What are your legitimate grievances with China?

I was promised 70 years ago that China was going to show up and force communism on the US. ATM I'm starting to feel like a Game of Thrones fan waiting for the next book or for those dragons to actually do something. I'm getting tired of sitting around and doing nothing all day.

China seems to keep pressuring Iran to negotiate with the US.

My opinion is that China has a history of trouble during quick changes (cultural revolution, great leap forward, dengism) that made the CPC rather slow and momentuous, so it takes longer than it (IMO) should to react to many things.

China should have fully embraced and promoted local development of queer and feminist ideas long ago, through they're slowly moving in that direction.

China should have realized that the extent to which market socialism is useful is reaching its limits once the west has been made dependent and deindustrialized, and it should transition towards a democratically planned economy and reject neoliberal economic theory. They may be slowly moving towards Modern Monetary Theory but they should be moving much quicker.

China should realize that it's already in a cold war situation with the US and it needs to rapidly develop and refine its soft and hard power projection to contend against the increasingly hostile NATO, and it's slowly reacting but should be moving much quicker.

Ultimately, China is a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat and it tends to reach the correct conclusions, but it has a bit too much inertia and could seriously benefit itself and worker internationalism by adopting stronger and faster policy.

Drug policy. The war on drugs is bad. It’s bad when America does it, it’s bad when China does it.

I understand the history, in particular regarding opium. That doesn’t make it acceptable in a modern context, the opium wars don’t justify draconian policies on weed in 2026. Especially given that tobacco use is so prevalent while tobacco is more harmful than many other drugs.

America's war on drugs was a campaign to imprison and enslave minorities. China's war on drugs is nowhere as bad. Although they should relax restrictions on less harmful drugs.

Yeah also alcohol, arguably the most overall destructive drug in human history. Drug prohibition is 99% just cultural brainworms all over the world.

Not sure if it is cultural brainworms as much as it is colonial trauma

Trauma can turn to brainworms too, the material conditions of China today are vastly different than they were during the opium crisis.

I guess but when I think of drug policy brain worms I think of "the US criminalized drugs because of racism" which is much different than "China criminalized drugs because of a widespread colonial campaign to get chinese people addicted to drugs"

Sure it's different and you can (and should) say one is more understandable than the other but neither are really rational. I'm obviously not going to campaign in China for them to legalize weed or whatever but I can't really say it's a good idea to be so repressive.

i don't think it would too harsh to point out that China has more or less abandoned the idea of proletarian internationalism. i can see why they did it but i don't think it should be above criticism

Xi hasn't yet

Xi Jingping, while a great leader and impressive statesman has ignored foundational research (which i've repeated contacted his government to propose) with world-historical implications. Without figuring this out the CPC forestalls proletarian progress by decades, if not hundreds of years.

All because China hasn't established how many grains makes a heap.

All the greatest marxist minds in the world and they're just moving tiny particles of silica back and forth while saying 'hrmmm'

Wrong! They're moving tiny particles of silica back and forth while saying, "Hrmmm… yes, quite…"

from the sino-soviet split onwards, china has consistently given material support to pretty much every regressive and reactionary force there was during the cold war, including but not limited to khmer rouge, the nicaraguan contras, the laotian anti-communists, the unita puppets of apartheid south africa, the afghan reactionary drug lords, the régime of siaad barre, the pro-israeli forces of the traitor saad haddad in lebanon, the greek military hunta, the dictatorships of augusto pinochet in chile and yahya khan in pakistan and many, many more.

chinese media covering the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the soviet union never misses to highlight the various real and imagined problems within the late soviet system. never does it however lose a word about the fact, that chinese foreign and domestic policy was a major contributing factor to the defeats the communist movement suffered during the late 80s and early 90s

I think the comments here have covered the big ones like foreign policy, Sino-Soviet split, etc very well. So I'll mention that the reform and opening up period has a lot of issues that I personally see as right deviationism, even through the lens of developing productive forces and integrating with the world economy by allowing limited capitalist relations. Specifically, dismantling communal farms, and dismantling welfare systems like the iron rice bowl. The state there does step in to manage things like healthcare costs, housing etc, but frankly a workers' state should always be able to guarantee the basic needs of life to the workers, and privatizing these resources into the hands of capitalists only restricts access and commodifies them.

xi left me on read overnight

How's the LGBTQ+ struggle over there? I always assume about the same as the rest of the region, possibly with hotspots of acceptance/prejudice, but that's just vibes-based

From what I’ve seen on Xiaohongshu, there’s a cultural attitude of “live and let live” when it comes to people’s romantic relationships. So gay couples exist, can live together, mostly accepted except for the usual reactionaries.

However, from what I’ve seen posted there, the state doesn’t want people/groups to try to convince people to be gay. Which on the surface seems silly, people are either gay or they’re not. Regardless, it means LGBT organizations need to be very particular in the language they use in order to avoid scrutiny.

However, from what I’ve seen posted there, the state doesn’t want people/groups to try to convince people to be gay

There go my plans to build a gay conversion camp (but, like, one that turns people gay)

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a struggle with the idea that being gay is some sort of "western luxury" or something to divide the people. Given the amount of communist from various places I've had to deal with this wild thought process. However that is 100% speculation on my part.

If it's not a capitalist luxury then why did so many men find out they're gay after looking at Margaret Thatcher?

I've seen a bit of that on WeChat fwiw

the exploitation in africa isn’t great, especially when SOEs are involved. Mining especially sucks ass for the local workers involved. obviously separate from the debt trap bullshit

Worker concerns are very legitimate, debt-trapping is mostly propaganda AFAIK. China has a history of restructuring and even cancelling debt in Africa that no western country can claim. I think it's worth separating the exploitation to workers and national resources carried out by private companies with the consent of the Chinese government, from the actual monetary and loan policy created by the Chinese government itself, helps explain the differences.

That is my understanding as well!

Can you go more into detail about this?

idk if they mean exploitation of people, but if they mean of land: stuff like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Sino-Metals_Leach_Zambia_dam_disaster not that western mines are good, but even if you argue the extractive processes are required to continuing building productive forces they could still do better, have better standards and regs at the cost of some portion of profit, which despite being a state-owned enterprise they are still profiting seeking

And workers could always be paid better and have better conditions in almost any industry in every corner of the globe

Thank you!

I was literally just reading an article about this. Again, extremely dubious source, imperialist framing, org funded by the Ford Foudation, this NGO has a whole section called "Planet China" that's hilariously fearmongering, but the fundamental issues exist. Also there's a digression about how bad China is lmao

As usual, this is difficult to research without running into sinophobic tendencies. the facts are, china needed/needs a shitload of minerals for 21st century technological development and the renewable energy transition (batteries). "According to recent estimates, approximately half of China’s total outbound investments in the years from 2005 to 2016 went into the energy and mining sectors of foreign countries. Of these investments in the resource sector, sub-Saharan countries attracted approximately one-third of the funds"

Mining in africa is fraught with abuse and ecological issues typical to the industry. There is a perception that China imports more Chinese expat labor than other nations, but I'm not sure if that's true. I mention the SOEs because they're theoretically the businesses over which the state has the most control. In reality though, a lot flies under the radar

"at best, the government in Beijing has limited capacity to monitor and regulate SOEs and their operations in Africa, let alone those small enterprises answerable to provincial or local governments or themselves. This is not an excuse for the ‘bad’ behaviour of Chinese firms in Africa but it does explain why increasingly Chinese involvement and activities in Africa are contradictory or even undermining the objectives of the central government"

A recent DC think tank piece on this that is more of an example of typical framing: https://africacenter.org/spotlight/chinese-state-owned-enterprises-market-capture-africa/

Cobalt mines in the DRC have attracted particular attention for how shitty the working conditions are

(It takes a fair point about corruption and labor issues, but with certain framing)

Thank you!

~~not enough enorcement of anti-smoking regulations~~ not enough anti-smoking propaganda

What's worse is they clamped down on vaping or e-cigarettes, heavily regulating it and banning any flavor except tobacco.

Less about regulations and more about huge propaganda IMO, they should be using the latter

you're right and I updated my comment

Oooh glad someone else asked this. I've been dying to ask but was afraid I had been asking to much.

They won't give me citizenship and this is unforgivable.

Their support of the Khmer Rouge is a genuine stain on their legacy.

Their immigration policies are way too fucking strict.

I’ve heard homophobia can be issue among Chinese people too.

Their support of the Khmer Rouge is a genuine stain on their legacy.

its telling that the worst thing china ever did was to play along with american foreign policy objectives

the worst thing china ever did was to play along with american foreign policy objectives

Eh, it was a bit more than that considering they invaded Vietnam afterwards. It was more of a play against the Soviet Union's growing influence in the area than it was playing along with American foreign policy objectives.

One of the very few Chinese-born people I've known in real life moved to Norway as a young man with a business degree and big dreams of starting a dropshipping company to eventually build up enough capital to start a café.^[This never came to fruition, naturally: last I heard he's a cashier at a convenience store now.] He told me about how being a worker in China is awful, given the hours, the pay, the working conditions, and all that, and that that's precisely why he wanted to start a small business, "so that he wouldn't be working for anybody but himself." He confirmed to me that people in China do study Marx and Mao in school, yet he was himself also a bit anti-DPRK and claimed to be "disinterested in politics." He was also a huge anime fan — of course, I am too — but it was because of this young man's recommendation (plus my desperation to make friends at the time) that I made myself sit through Wataten, the anime about a young woman in college who one day discovers that she's a fucking pedophile, and this is handled with about as much grace by the writers as you would expect from a 2010s "slice-of-life comedy."

Now, of course, I cannot judge an entire country of one and a half billion people based on exactly one individual, and even with his brainworms he was still a nice fellow overall^[Methinks practical experience has probably beaten his small business tyrant dreams out of him by now.]… Yet I still have to wonder what sort of socialist society could produce such a man.

Yet I still have to wonder what sort of socialist society could produce such a man.

I think that's an interesting philosophical question. Can you build a society that does not produce bad people?

Or a more cynical version: can you build a society that does not produce people you disagree with?

In either case, to what degree is such a thing possible without running into dystopian power structures?

Either way, China is not trying to hide the fact that they're targeting to become a socialist country by 2050. You've essentially noticed a construction site and wondering why it's not a good place to get coffee.

Yeah, I know the reason why this sort of capitalistic thinking is not just allowed but effectively encouraged in China is because the country wants to develop its productive forces and all that, and the path ahead is still long and hard. That won't stop me from complaining, though! Because the kid in the backseat knows that the car cannot possibly be "nearly there yet," but the kid also knows that they're in a tedious situation they have little to no agency in. People in China as well make the same sorts of complaints about how much things still stink in their country, even if the things that stink are done in the name of socialism and communism: strife and violence done to no ultimate end as in the bourgeois states, and strife and violence done to a good end as in China, both hurt in their own way, right?

As for the philosophical question: I do think it's possible to build a society free of bad people. It's impossible to build a society totally free of struggle and conflict, but a society free of bad people? Absolutely.

probably he made some friends from the anime community and he got exposed to capitalist ideas

Given he could only speak Chinese and only used Chinese social networking services before he moved to Norway… Well, it's not "impossible" that he first got his small business tyrant dreams from ACG friends in "капстраны," given there are plenty of Chinese speakers in bourgeois states (not least Taiwan) and these are not blocked from using Chinese social media. But it's still a pretty lacking explanation IMO, given that mere exposure to an idea will not automagically make you believe it, if you've already been inoculated against the idea through theory, practical experience, or ideally both. The fact of the matter is that the young man in question went to business school and got his business degree IN CHINA, which means that, at the very least, regardless of where he got his original capitalist spark from, his education and lived experience did not do enough to inoculate him against it, and state-sanctioned institutions of higher learning were still standing at the ready to take him in and push him further down that path.

so youre telling me that shit is accessible to the chinese public and with translations too? libs were wayy too flattering with the censorship accusations

I'm surprised you didn't know — ACG culture is huge in China. In fact, back when I knew the man in question and first started using Bilibili^[A social media platform with 300M+ users, often called "China's equivalent to YouTube".] for his sake, the default profile picture for guest users on the official mobile app was actually a silhouette of Akaza Akari from YuruYuri, in reference to a running gag from that anime. I reinstalled the Bilibili app just now to check if that was still the picture, apparently in the years since it's just been replaced with the words "LOG IN", probably for copyright reasons.

Edit: I'm struggling to find actual footage of the old UI of Bilibili for Android, but I at least found this Duitang post from 2020 referring to the following picture as "{B站|B-site^[Nickname of Bilibili.]}{未|not}{登录|logged-in}{默认|default}{头像|avatar}({阿卡林|Akarin^[Nickname of Akaza Akari.]})", and this Bilibili video from 2021 about "{b站|B-site}{初始|initial}{头像|avatar}{的|'s}{出处|origin}", so I know I'm not hallucinating.

Chinese people can be stupid, racist and nationalistic and the government doesnt do enough to correct it

This doesn't feel productive. Everyone has these people. Which ones and why is more a valid criticism then generalizing like this. Not to mention the phrasing of this feels borderline racist. But I'm giving benefit of the doubt that maybe you don't realize how it comes across?

Spend anytime on XHS, I want China to do better on something that they could do better on. Its not a condemnation its just answerign the question

Unless somebody has more information, it doesn't seem that the chauvinism has a foothold in the upper reaches of the cpc, fortunately.

Hopefully but it wouldn't exactly be unheard of in a communist party. Yugoslavia's party was notoriously infested by nationalists pretty much since its inception and it never truly got rid of that nationalist current, ultimately resulting in the clusterfuck in the 90s.

The Soviet Union is another prominent example, I obviously wouldn't go as far as to uphold the common liberal narrative that the USSR was basically just a Russian imperialist project but to deny there wasn't any Russian chauvinism in the party leadership would also be naive.

I'm cautiously optimistic that China won't fall for this trap but I'm also not completely disregarding the possibility, after all they all but abandoned internationalism and their overall rhetoric is fairly nationalistic.

The Soviet Union is another prominent example

Nah, it's definitely not a prominent example. You'd be hard pressed to find one country in its time period more progressive towards its different ethnicities and cultures, sure they had a measure of Russian chauvinism leftover from Tsarism, but it's far far far from a prominent example.

It's prominent because it happened in one of the largest socialist projects on the planet at the time, I recognize it probably wasn't as extreme as it was in Yugoslavia but it was there and considering how fast the Russian Federation regressed into Russian chauvinism it shows it wasn't really close to being exterminated.

I think the root cause of all of this is that at the first half of the 20th century when all of these socialist projects were taking root there were too few actual honest ideologically committed internationalist communists to actual govern whole nations. Eventually you're going to fill the party up with people of dubious ideological commitment and agendas.

I fully disagree. The fact that Russian chauvinism popped afterwards is evidence that it was repressed earlier, not that it was a prominent tendency.

The country itself had no geographical or ethnic markers on its name (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), the presidents were mostly non-Russian (Stalin being Georgian, Brezhnev and Khruschyov being Ukrainian), minority languages got official status and people had a right to an education in them, most newspapers and books sold in non-Russian republics were written in the local language, Korenizatsiya campaigns fostered the recognition and celebration of formerly repressed ethnicities during the Russian Empire... For a 20th century country they did incredibly well, and calling it a prominent example of chauvinism just because "it was the big socialist country" at a time where France was happily murdering 2 million Algerians in its colonies and destroying its own minority languages such as Breton and Occitan, seems extremely excessive to me.

Is there criticism to be made with hindsight? For sure. Are there big, big blemishes such as deportations of Koreans and ethnic Tatars? Absolutely. Was the country still immensely progressive in national aspects for its time and its origins? Abso-fuckin-lutely. Stalin literally rose to prominence after performing well as the Comissar of Nationalities IN THE 1910 AND 1920s!!!!

The fact that Russian chauvinism popped afterwards is evidence that it was repressed earlier, not that it was a prominent tendency.

That makes no sense honestly. If it really was as severely repressed as you claim it wouldn't be able to pop up again so suddenly.

After all Putin himself was a KGB agent for a long time before the Soviet Union fell, he wasn't some rando from some backwoods that randomly popped in and took power, he was part of the former establishment. This is a pattern that can be seen throughout Europe in all former socialist states when they fell, the previous political establishment largely turned coat and turned into nationalists or at best meek social democrats.

Putin was a fucking secretary at the KGB, not the supreme leader of the organization. You're literally judging the country for the sins committed after its dismantling. Like, what's your criticism, that Putin happens to be born in the USSR as opposed to spawning out of thin air in 1991? Should the president have instead come from one of the republics that stopped forming part of the same country after the dissolution?

Also, great job of disregarding the entire rest of my comment and overfocusing on the usage of the word "repressed". Seriously, what are you comparing the USSR to when you talk about being a "prominent example of chauvinism" during the 20th century?

There are definitely liberals in the upper reaches by my analyais, so it definitely isn't out of the question.

China daily just recently posted a video depicting Filipinos as monkey's getting duped by Japan and the USA.

While the overall idea of the message may or may not hold water, I think it's an issue to show state owned media (or any media for that matter) to post videos depicting one group of people as monkey's and having everyone else be people. Suffice to say, they might be pretty chill on racism sometimes.

(I'm not super familiar with this situation and it is developing)

As a general response to this, consider that they don't claim to be infallible. Regarding Xinjiang, for example, the CPC to my knowledge openly acknowledges their part in the development of poor material conditions in the region that ultimately was a major driver in the terrorism problem of the early 21st century.

One child policy was also IMO a pretty appalling piece of legislation, although that's a situation where I have to concede there really was a problem that needed to be solved and I wasn't there and am not an expert, so...

I don't think they are really on path to become a classless society. But I guess it might just be necessary to out develop and outproduce the empire to avoid the faith of the soviet union.

I think some of the restrictions on what can be shown in media content are a bit silly. Like depictions of skeletons being off-limits, it’s not “protecting” anything and just adds more fuel to the liberal narrative of “Ebul China 1984 censorship!”

i don't recall all the details but some of it is localizers being overly cautious, and some of it has had restrictions relaxed 10+ years ago. e.g. skeletons, there's some older magic the gathering cards with modified art for the chinese localization and then by 2010ish they had stopped having to bother.

This is true, but also sometimes misreported. Like with the video game Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, that changed it so the evil and historic Han general bosses in the game can no longer die and instead just faint, wasn't a change requested by the government. But all of the internet cries "CCP censorship!!" when it comes up. The devs just caved to a weird online niche of nationalists who don't want their precious dynasty besmirched. So I'm betting there are elements of both in a lot of those situations, where the government has made legitimate requests, but also people just caving to general sensibilities and norms.

They put too much milk in coffee

my solution is to add an extra shot of coffee to balance it out

That's it, I'm joining Prager U

The USA still exists.

They won't pay people to do revolutions

They probably wouldn't let me become a citizen

Chinese is like hard (don't tell me how easy it is or i'll just be like "good for you")

我布知道汉语.

you want 不 for no, the 布 there means cloth

Fuck. I am vindicated but at what cost?

To have a grievance with China I would need to be aggrieved by China. I don't think I or anyone in this comment section are aggrieved by China. Like what you bought a cheap imported toy and the quality was slightly lower than your preference?

I don't think that's really a fair point, you can hold a grievance against someone on other people's behalf. I hold a grievance against the US and Israeli over their treatment of the Palestinian people, I'm not Palestinian.

I think folks' behavior, particularly in the West, is to exaggerate their criticisms of designated enemies and personalize to an unhealthy degree, even just out of habit or common lexicon. So while it makes sense to condemn the US and the Zionist entity for their settler colonial genocide of Palestine (among other things), I don't think it makes much sense to say, "I have a grievance against the state of Israel" in this context. It has a strangely personal transformative impact that elevates one's personal feelings alongside genocide. Not that you are doing so, just the language itself insinuates it on your behalf, surely unintentionally - and some would probably not perceive it at all. Even as it suggests an exaggerated personal connection it ends up undermining the seriousness. Hopefully this makes sense, I think I'm repeating myself to try and explain better.

Stepping back from the wording, I think there is also a tendency among the Western left to feel entitled to opinions that weren't earned, and chauvinism towards other socialist projects, particularly in the global south, is a common venue for this. That entitlement leads to an exaggerated criticism, or a hypocritical criticism, or often just incorrect criticism. It's possible to have a well-earned criticism of China, a correct one, but that's rare even here. Most people know almost nothing about the nation-state, its governance or policies, nor can they correctly place it in the world context. Most Western leftists will call China imperialist and be unable to explain what imperialism is. That particular example is less common on this site but I don't think the depth of analysis usually goes much deeper. So then when asked to list a series of complaints I ask: what do you expect to actually get out of the exercise?

In the end it's a semantic dispute, for me personally I wouldn't really interpret someone having a grievance as someone being personally aggrieved by another party. That's more of a formal/legal interpretation that's not really appropriate in the given context.

So then when asked to list a series of complaints I ask: what do you expect to actually get out of the exercise?

Dialogue is an important enough reason by itself. If you are claiming that western leftist are too ignorant to form valid criticism, then I think this forum would be a great place to share your reasons why and add to the discussion.

I personally do not think it's beneficial to divide leftist against each other and claim one part of the hemisphere is particularly chauvinist. As someone who now lives in the West and is originally from the East, everyone is a bit chauvinist about their own locality, and everyone is going to be more familiar with their own locality. I think open communication between and about different cultures serves humanity a lot more than scolding.

I was agrieved when they didn't let me drive the train.

Gave too much ground to capitalists both internal and external.

They could show more solidarity with anti-imperialist movements all around the world, stop trading with the zionists for example

Also they need to curb public smoking

2 issues of equal importance

i bet that the soviets set an example that showed the world what happens if you extend significant resources and effort in intervening to help anti-imperialist movements -- the epstein oligarchy control global north will spend any amount to draw you in further.

besides fully camptured western media has created brainwormed westerners to the degree such that they will never allow help to come from china; help can only come from within now. either that or climate change kicking our collective asses into accepting help.

my opinion: people rejecting nationalism as bad when it hurts them vs accepting it benefits them. workers rights are not stellar and there are age limits to certain jobs but i get conditions impact them.

if youre going to criticize china for trading with israel, you should move to a heavily sanctioned country and see what its like. sure, homophobia and racism are an issue but who imported western style racism and moral codes to them?

the core of the issue is, its none of your business what a country does. many people forget that china also suffered colonization and they have the right to do whatever they want without anyones approval. they dont have to meet the moral standards of any foreigners.

China signed international treaties forcing it legally to do it best to stop genocidal state like israel

Some of us are curious for several reasons.

  1. We have recently undone propaganda but are trying to arrive to a realistic view on things.

  2. Some of us are doing our best to build people power in a local areas. China to us have become similar to a parental figure. In that we look up to them to learn. But like any parental figure its important to know what shaped who they are and what things will and not work for us. This goes back to point one. Curbing hope and enthusiasm with realism to stay grounded.

  3. Curiosity of our fellow human beings. When one has been deprived of knowledge it is common to become insatiable. I personally love learning about other people.

  4. There was probably more but I got interrupted and the train of thought is completely derailed.

if youre going to criticize china for trading with israel, you should move to a heavily sanctioned country and see what its like.

I'm failing to see the connection here, can you explain what you mean by this?

the core of the issue is, its none of your business what a country does.

oh come on

yeah? why should china or any non-western country care about what you think?

i work for the state department is why

it's not about them caring about what some jackasses on the internet think, it's about us caring about what goes on in the rest of the world.

It's none of my business that slave labor built world cup stadiums in qatar? it's none of the rest of the worlds business what's going on in the united states? might as well watch the match and not have a thought in my head about the conditions of the people.

guess we should've just let apartheid keep going.

we shouldn't have an opinion on other countries criminalizing homosexuality.

obviously china isn't doing anything so abhorrent, but if we just left it at "none of your business" we wouldn't even check in.

comparing china to countries conducting colonialism is wild. idk if youre a westerner but it gets to a point where we really dont want you in our business because nothing really changes

obviously china isn't doing anything so abhorrent

the comparison is that we see china developing technology, building shit, and not starting wars and even people who aren't highly politically aware have started to develop positive views of china and what they're accomplishing. And that's despite the western propaganda effort.

it's more important to me that we care about international injustice than acknowledge international success, for i hope obvious reasons. That huge dam ethiopia self-funded seems cool. There's some cool self-financed development going on in the sahel.

and again, caring about the rest of the world isn't for them, it's for us as people.

This third world fetishism is getting in the way of serious analysis. If we look at China, its problem isn’t sanctions. Chinese industry is essential to the global system. Their strategy for the last few decades has been letting western capitalism destroy itself through deindustrialization. Which leaves them complicit in the pollution and exploitation of feeding western consumerism. It’s not a moral failing. China being Isnt’rael’s 2nd biggest trading partner is fundamental to this strategy.

What’s actually useful and meaningful, rather than scolding China for doing “bad” things, or being a westerner who scolds other westerners (“Some crimes can never be forgiven”) for the position in the world system, is to ask relevant questions. How has chinas strategy worked so far? What does it mean for socialist movements today? How can China’s late 20th century anti communist foreign policy be understood within this plan of socialist development? (Topic another person brought up here)

We are socialists/communists, this is a global movement to liberate the workers of the world, and build a new future for humanity that will go beyond any currently existing nation-state.

No, we should not senselessly invoke our moral standards when we analyze other countries , especially for those who are from the global north. This is a form a of liberalism.

However, those of us who have demonstrated that we can build a fair analysis of a nation can also offer some criticism as a treat, in my opinion. I think Hexbear has been on the bleeding edge of being "china-pilled". It's fine to have like two threads a year where we discuss criticisms of one of the most powerful countries on earth. It isn't that China should care what we have to say, but that as socialists we need to apply lessons from both their successes and failures when leading our own communities elsewhere in the world.

are you from the west?

What a shibboleth

they haven't taught me how to read

The social credit score thing was mostly a way of policing small businesses, not private citizens.

The great firewall is overwhelmingly justified on the basis that it's better for China to have its own social media sites, etc. and it's not like people in China are in any way incapable of accessing the outside internet anyway, and people absolutely do get "illegal" VPNs without punishment.

They are too censorious on their intranet but people overblown it because gommunism 1984.

Do people literally ever get disappeared? Surely so, but every time someone doesn't appear in public for a few days in China that means they were "disappeared" according to liberal news, the same way people in the DPRK die and come back to life.

They functionally do monitor everyone (sort of), and they do this by basically the same means as any other even semi-advanced country does this.

There are other common complaints that have merit, like repression (not genocide) in Xinjiang, but of course it gets mischaracterized as worse than it was, as genocide, and also isn't given the context of being in response to a serious terrorism issue that does not justify the repression but makes it more comprehensible as them failing to figure out a better way to fight imported terrorist ideology that was mainly resulting in Uighurs getting massacred rather than the CPC just doing ethnic persecution because idk they were bored and just hate this specific group of Muslims.

You will get endless defenses on here of Deng and subsequent, uh, let's call them pro-market factions. If you want to get criticisms of this, you can for example read the old posts from @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net, who I think has been banned for a while but for unrelated reasons. As they note, China is moving in a relatively more positive direction on this matter under Xi, but that's relative and the other comparison point was a time where the revisionism was so comically crass that people were trying to figure out how to smuggle Austrian Economics in with Marxist vocabulary.

The social credit score thing was mostly a way of policing small businesses, not private citizens.

in the West, only businesses are considered people.

Great firewall...? I know it's a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?

I used the same Mullvad VPN I use in the US the whole time I was there, it worked fine. The real purpose of the "great firewall" isn't keeping people in, it's keeping western tech companies (facebook, google, etc) out so that Chinese companies can fill those niches.

Poor working conditions for many workers. Long hours, low pay, often dangerous conditions etc.

Still have a wealthy capital owning class.

Crackdowns on non approved religions - not religious myself but I think people should be free to worship how they please (within reason - no human sacrifice lol).

Chinese foreign policy is often disappointing. But I don’t have any experience of navigating the global stage as China so I guess I’ll leave that to the experts I.e. the Chinese.

What if they use "religion" like a Trojan horse. Here in Latin America we have a big problem with evangelicals. Surely one cannot allow those types. What about things like bahai?

Crackdowns on non approved religions - not religious myself but I think people should be free to worship how they please (within reason - no human sacrifice lol).

What have they cracked down on that isn't a cult like falun gong

iirc christian missionaries, but those guys are lucky they don't get the north sentinel island treatment everywhere they try to go.

Various Christian denominations, and big crackdowns on the house church movement for one.

Sounds like cult shit China is fully justified in cracking down on

not religious myself but I think people should be free to worship how they please (within reason - no human sacrifice lol).

How dare you be intolerant of the Falun Gong!

The toilet situation.

Great Firewall is really annoying, 1 chinese told me the police spend more time going after people with VPNs than real crime.

The LGBT+ struggle seems stalled.

Socially regressive traditions in more rural areas like bride prices.

Motorcycles are banned or heavily restricted in many cities, while ICE cars are free to clog traffic and the air.

Many chinese feel like their voices aren't heard and they have no influence on the government.

Some members of minority groups outside China fear returning.

Local languages aren't taught in school and many chinese don't seem to understand the importance of preserving their own unique culture.

The government isn't doing enough for youth un/under employment, 16 year olds working 40 hours a week struggle to live independently.

The toilet situation? I've visited China and every 150m in every city there are public toilets for drew because guess what, pissing and shitting is a basic human need! It's literally one of the things I loved about China. What's the toilet situation even?

Motorcycles are banned or heavily restricted in many cities

Honestly good, those thing are death traps. I understand why people use them especially in poorer countries as they're cheaper to fuel/maintain and are more practical in dense traffic but honestly a well developed society should just not have them.

Great Firewall is really annoying, 1 chinese told me the police spend more time going after people with VPNs than real crime.

Not that I particularly like the proscription of VPNs (the great firewall itself has done a brilliant job of fostering a strong tech sector), but people say this about pretty much everything they think shouldn't be banned, everywhere on earth. "They spend more time writing parking tickets than chasing criminals!!!" is a sentiment you can find wherever you happen to be.

Local languages aren't taught in school

There are lots of places where this is a serious problem, but you phrase it like local languages aren't taught in schools anywhere in China

Toilet situation is improving at a clip, with the Toilet Revolution highlighting the importance of public sanitation and amenities: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5937855/

I remember when that policy was launched there was the usual 'Wow China is so weird' stories but it has legitimately been a good policy, and public toilets in China in the cities that I've visited (admittedly mostly tiers 1 to 3) have been perfectly sanitary, and usually even have a western style toilet available.

while ICE cars are free to clog traffic and the air

Electrification of public vehicles is also outpacing other countries with 35% electric vehicle penetration

https://worldmetrics.org/china-electric-vehicle-industry-statistics/

04 Global electric vehicle market share reached 14% in 2023, up from 8% in 2022

05China accounted for 60% of global EV sales in 2023

06 Europe's EV market share was 12% in 2023

Electric scooters are commonplace, I cbf getting those stats though

I think a few of your grievances could be allayed with proper research

I think a few of your grievances could be allayed with proper research

I think half of them are straight up fabrications

I was in China 2 months ago and will be there again in 4 or so, if there's any you want further information on, I can just message chinese friends or wait until I'm back.

Its good people are buying EVs. That doesn't change the fact that ICE bikes are prohibited in a way ICE cars aren't and this negetively impacts traffic. I would be bothered less if cars faced similar restrictions.

I am aware of the situation with electric scooters and the situation with public toilets, I spent like 8 of the last 24 months in China.

Yeah fair enough, in the short term I guess it's a double standard and I can see how that increases pollution and congestion, electric scooters are filling a gap that ice bikes are being prohibited from and petroleum vehicles are being removed from the road at a faster rate than any other country, so I'm confident that it's improving much more rapidly than where I live, which is a dumping ground for american style pickup trucks like the ford raptor and the Chevy idontknowcarmodelnames

For the 'toilet situation', if both you and I are aware of how it's improving and targeted, is that on your list of grievances as not enough is being done? 'the toilet situation' is a bit of a vague complaint, so I'm not really sure what grievance you're raising here

Tbf motorcycles tend to be especially loud and smelly.

midwest.social

Rules

  1. No porn.
  2. No bigotry, hate speech.
  3. No ads / spamming.
  4. No conspiracies / QAnon / antivaxx sentiment
  5. No zionists
  6. No fascists

Chat Room

Matrix chat room: https://matrix.to/#/#midwestsociallemmy:matrix.org

Communities

Communities from our friends:

Donations

LiberaPay link: https://liberapay.com/seahorse