Hey there! I would consider myself heavily anti-china, possibly because I spent too much time listening to western anti-china propaganda. Since this community seems to be mainly pro-china, I thought this should be a good place to clear up some misconceptions I might have. There are some issues which are repeatedly used to draw the picture of Chinese dystopia. A few of these points are:
- The proclaimed genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
- Heavy restrictions of freedom of speech. It seems really dangerous to be publicly critical of the CCP; There is no chinese newspaper criticizing the works of the CCP, also it is forbidden to access foreign newspapers.
- Along with the freedom of speech go restrictions of political freedom. “The most recent major movement advocating for political freedom was obliterated through the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989”. (Wikipedia quote) There also are many recent examples of people disappearing after publicly expressing differing political views.
- Mass-surveillance of citizens. Anything the citizens do seems to be recorded. Appearently even saying anything anti-CCP on WeChat can have you imprisoned and a low credit score can make it impossible for you to leave the country (along with other restrictions of freedom).
- The planned occupation of Taiwan and Hong Kong. At least in the case of Hong Kong there is some justification due to the completely stupid 99-year-lease, but china being so offensive about annexing Taiwan seems odd.
I would be happy to see what the pro-china views on these claims are. I realized that one could argue that claims 1-4 are simply made up or at least presented overly problematic in western media. If this is your whole point, don’t bother to answer.
I’m looking forward to your responses!
I am in my residential compound’s WeChat group. I have the alerts muted. This is because every few seconds someone is saying something in it, addressing the compound’s cadres. And while yes some of it is the obsequious, grovelling nonsense you’d expect where some clueless twit grovels to the compound’s “leaders”, the vast majority of it is filled with people casting shade and dragging the leadership.
When they spent most of the summer of 2018 with all the roads in the compound torn up to “fix the water and sewage” only to have to tear up half of it all over again in 2019, there was a lot of people complaining that the leaders must have pocketed funds and hired substandard workers. And the leaders apologized, practically to the point of grovelling themselves.
In the broader scope, when the city of Wuhan passed an ordinance that allowed restaurants to prohibit patrons bringing in outside food and drink, this caused such an uproar, verging on open rebellion (and open rebellion in a city of eleven million is uncomfortable to consider), that it took less than two weeks for the city to reverse itself, rescinding its ordinance and passing one in its place that explicitly enshrined as protected the right of people to take outside food and drink into a restaurant (provided they were also buying food in that restaurant, naturally).
I lived a dozen years in Ottawa and never saw that degree of participation of authority figures in the lives of citizens. And never saw that much openness to input from the governed.
China is a weird place filled with unexpected things once you drop your preconceptions.