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As I said in the other thread, this is straight up hubristic history-ignorant chauvinism. The USSR tried the same thing: it was called Glasnost. This just led to the already pre-established interest groups, compradors funnelling Western propaganda that is, to set up the dominant media channels in the new “free and open” era. There is a direct lesson from the catastrophic consequences of Glasnost that is available to China to learn from and trying to pull something like this is straight up chauvinistic conceit: “Yeah the dumb Soviets tried the same thing, but actually, we can do better. Why, you ask? Just cause.”
At least Gorbachev framed Glasnost under a “socialists should be confident and confront all knowledge” idealistic narrative. This Shanghai Yakolev moron is instead blathering about “accessing the innovative ChatGPT” and how using “Facebook and Twitter will contribute to Shanghai as a global hub.”
Even if this lib plagiarized Gorbachev’s Glasnost talking points, it would still be a worthless idea. The West is so determined to shut out all dissident voices to its narrative control that it is banning and forcibly divesting TikTok. There is no realm of possibility that CIA and NSA freaks on the board of directors of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitch etc. are going to allow the much-fantasized scenario of “a billion Chinese shitposters to storm the keep and liberate the West from their propaganda” to take place. Imagine believing some shitlib anti-communist freak subreddit mod will actually allow Chinese people to come in and deprogram their sub audience or that Chinese editors could ever be allowed to bully Natopedia CIA rubberstamp editor admins to actually ban Voice of America and RFA as “reliable sources.” Those people are all simply going to be banned, easier than ever now thanks to algorithms and AI monitoring. The only people that would be allowed to stay are those that would toe the line and accept being lectured to without ever being able to talk back, you will never be allowed the high ground or even equal ground for any actual “freedom of speech” discourse. If this isn’t true, then ask why are leftists stuck on sites like Hexbear and Lemmygrad rather than being able to use the mainstream platforms. Because just on Reddit alone, places like chapo and genzedong were straight up banned and the only people that remain are defanged: either baby leftists on r/thedeprogram or useless ultras on r/communism.
Framing this as a Shanghai first policy would also be idiotic. It would make accessing the “international internet” as some kind of privilege and luxury rather than a “normal thing” that Chinese people could use if they wanted to and that same shit is why all Glasnost amounted to was people lining up to read Gulag Archipelago because that propaganda slop was so hyped up as a formerly nomenklatura-exclusive “Glasnost privilege” and that stunt just turned swathes of Soviet citizens into outright anti-communists.
Beyond all that, what a gift this would be to the CIA. The West itself bragged during Biden’s term that Trump Term 1 signed off on a covert influence campaign on the Chinese internet to turn Chinese people against their own government and now Trump Term 2 can just ChatGPT bot its own platforms even more because the targetted Chinese users are apparently going to be delivered straight to their front door for whatever new covert influence campaigns they’ll be trying to pull this time around.
The good news is that the SCMP article covering this tried to track down the original publication and alleged it was deleted. A hopeful sign that whatever libs on the Shanghai Party committee proposed this got shitcanned for this slop.
This sounds terrible. Please be misleading news
Terrible plan.
If this is enacted - Chinese citizens will not be interacting with the Western working class (who are notoriously mono-lingual); they will be interacting with CIA propaganda-bots en masse.
Please do not allow Perestroika 2.0, Xi.
chinese people are not stupid, the quality of their social media is already better than western ones, they vast majority will just leave the apps they try if they suck. At this point in time, chinese people being able to see what the americans have is a great way to shatter the ideallized version of americans that a vast amount of chinese people have.
People around the world use american social media because they dont have an alternative, chinese people do have alternatives.
it doesn’t matter how smart one is, america still has a powerful media monopoly. This is not china unleashing itself on the west but the reverse, since they aren’t making any rules to protect themselves from enemies.
Does Shanghai suck? Is that the discourse I have been unable to synthizie untill this moment?
From what I know, Shanghai is one of the most liberal infested parts of China where a lot of intelligentsia who got their education in the west congregate.
Oof. Please, Xi, no.
This shift could significantly impact education, research, and innovation, creating more job opportunities across sectors. It could also boost the “AI + Entrepreneurship” boom, leading to a rise in companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Tesla, Google, Facebook, and X.
They really are terminally lib brainwormed if that’s the best examples they could come up with.
Yeah bro, I’m sure China wants to be full of neo-nazi corporate empires.
SCMP reported on this on the 17th, and says the post this article is based off of was removed on the 17th.
They might’ve not finalized the decision then.
The Shanghai clique is the greatest threat to socialism the world over. They need to be purged immediately before they can pull a Gorbachev.
You can say goodbye to China’s future as an AES country if this goes nationwide. America worship is still very strong despite everything and you can bet American feds and citizens will be pushing their bullshit propaganda everywhere.
There’s also the matter of American social media brainworms that infects every country addicted to it. China has been making great strides in a lot of areas but it’s soft power isn’t quite there to do something like this without a strong backlash.
At least on Rednote, billionaires like Elon and the US itself already seemed to be somewhat looked up to. I hear that’s the attitude most people have in places like Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Yeah I don’t see anything good coming out of this at all. I just hope this stays isolated to Shanghai.
At least on Rednote, billionaires like Elon and the US itself already seemed to be somewhat looked up to. I hear that’s the attitude most people have in places like Shenzhen and Shanghai.
That attitude existed before Rednote users interacted with Americans. The exchange seems to have done a lot to discredit the chinese-facing propaganda that lead them to believe these things.
Elon Musk throwing up a Nazi salute didn’t do him any favors either
Literally all I need to post in the “why do you americans hate Elon Musk so much” threads before they’re like “Oh.”
But before that, just describing how capitalists exert a malign influence on our government was adequate.
I’m still not sure what to do with the ambivalent feelings toward MAGA that they have. They keep saying we need to work with them to have a proletarian uprising, but I’m not sure if they realize that MAGA is the fascist vanguard
they don’t understand that america is a settler colony and thus there are inherently different (and more difficult, i would say) class dynamics to work with than there was in china. same mistake that pretty much all the great socialist leaders like lenin stalin mao etc made, that resulted in all the glowing writings about america that patsocs like to misuse, they did no real investigation so on a surface level they apply the basic “all workers of the world unite” lens to it, not understanding that white workers have very real material incentives to fight against socialism. specifcally for thinking we should try and work with MAGA people is they probably think it can just be twisted into “socialist patriotism”, like china or vietnam did, but they dont understand that patriotism for the US inherently means patrotism for a country whose reason for being was and still is the exploitation and genocide of POC around the globe.
On the other hand we can see from rednote that the Chinese getting mythbusted on the western Paradise is also a possibility. Though on foreign social media? Who knows what will happen.
XHS has already proven that the exact opposite is happening in practice.
conservatives are already beginning to flood XHS to peddle ‘everything is fine in america’ narratives and people are just eating it up
I think this is isolated because a small amount of westerners are going there and usually it’s because they are reacting negatively to something their government is doing. If only people who feel anti-american are there, it is a net positive, but if the average American is flooding China with average American perspectives, it could reaffirm the pro-musk, pro-america type posts. I’ve already seen a lot of Chinese putting notes like “some Americans seem to hate x but others say they are exaggerating, which is true?” Which shows that these Chinese users are open to either side being true and are surprised enough by the people saying negative stuff that they think it could be a lie
Given that CPC has managed to navigate these things successfully for many decades on end, I’m going to assume that they thought through these things as well.
if this actually is being pushed by the shangai clique i think you very much should distrust them
China has always allowed for experermination, and that’s why Shanghai clique is allowed to exist in the first place. This will be another useful experiment.
this is experimentation like Glasnost was
China has always allowed for extermination
did you mean experimentation here lol??? anyways, from everything i read shangai fucks up shit all the time, imo it’s time to prune those liberals
Oh yeah haha autocorrect fail
Exterminate the Shanghai libs - xi jinping
I hope so, but looking at situations like zero covid shows that they are also under pressure from less politically developed people, people who have capitalist desires. A lot of Chinese netizens talk about these issues in the party, saying that many people join as members through rote memorization and don’t fully understand Marxism, but do it to get social capital and better work prospects. Apparently Chinese schools teach introductory Marxism but it sounds similar to how politics and economy are taught in US schools- a surface level understanding which doesn’t practically instill how to embody the values and philosophy.
I’m as big a china stan as they come and have a lot of hope that the CPC will keep China moving towards socialism, but it’s good to have a sober analysis of the situation beyond just hope.
Every approach has its risks. The downside of being closed off is that people develop their own theories about what the outside world is like. I imagine the rationale is that China feels confident enough to experiment with starting to allow some interaction which can build confidence if it lets people see that their country is doing well relative to others.
But the real concern are the US tech giants. We’ve already seen from our own countries how the youth go all in for American culture and allow English to become dominant. Then comes the white worship, liberalism, and insane conspiracies that get passed around. Hong Kong is a great example of what happens when you open up entirely to western social media.
I feel that this could lead to a Chinese perestroika or glasnost but hopefully It either won’t go nationwide or I’ll be proven wrong if it does.
I don’t know why people continuously assume that CPC doesn’t understand these basic things and that they haven’t weighed pros and cons themselves. The article has an important bit here
Mao emphasized that the “Internet+” era has brought about the success of companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Douyin, and Xiaomi, which have generated millions of job opportunities. Now, in the age of AI, as long as the cross-border flow of sensitive data is properly regulated, opening up computing power and restoring international internet access will have more benefits than drawbacks.
It’s not going to be unfettered free for all access, it’s still going to be mediated.
this seems to be work by a local clique to increase liberal reforms and liberal influence
If even a weak and defeated nation like Brazil can mess up some of the plans of the US tech giants, I assume the only reason the Chinese wouldn’t is because they’d make an explicit choice not to. Which, in turn, cannot arise from naivety but from policy. The question is whether people think Chinese policy is that foolish or not.
I doubt China will have an unregulated internet, not even in Shanghai.
Exactly, it’s still going to be regulated, but now people will be interact more broadly with the rest of the world. I think it’s a good thing overall.
In a place where we are on equal footing. On American social media, even TikTok now, the trigger words are too restrictive to properly critique anything and still get reach
I expect the goal is going to be to promote Chinese platforms globally, and opening up this way is a show of confidence on the part of China that their narrative is becoming dominant. This is the same rational the US had when it was not afraid of outside media, because its narrative was dominant at the time. Now the US narrative is faltering even domestically, and it’s an opportunity for China to start exercising soft power of their own in the media space.
Their soft power has been severely lacking, I am at least optimistic that this can help shift global perspectives towarda China. It would be really exciting to see the US be replaced as the world’s media and content hegemony
I see people being optimistic about this, but isn’t Shanghai already extremely lib?
The global social media landscape is still almost entirely controlled by the US. This feels like a very bad decision to make right now
I’m gonna to put my money on “the Shanghai libs pushed for this”.
Seeing how much they were willing to sabotage China’s economy by unleashing Covid into the entire country just to get what they want, I suspect even the central leadership is afraid of them. And it’s clear that the libs have been back in charge for a while now.
I suspect even the central leadership is afraid of them.
do you think they’re afraid of them specifically (as in they think they could lose the power struggle) or do you think they’re just overly afraid of instability?
This is what the government is afraid of:
Covid cases from March-April 2022.
Blue line: Shanghai, orange line: Shenzhen
Shanghai: population 24.87M, density ~4000/sqkm, Western-style lockdown
Shenzhen: population 17.56M, density ~7000/sqkm, Zero Covid lockdown
By December 2022, the entire national Zero Covid policy had to be abandoned. Because one city refused to comply with the national policy.
yeah again they really like to stink it up in shangai, this doesnt explain to me why the central leadership didnt go ballistic against them for this and other fuckups other than fear of instability or (somehow?) being afraid shangai might actually have the loyalty of the military or something like that
Shanghai is the city with the highest GDP in the entire country and also its premier financial center. These people have a lot of power and seriously screw with the growth of the economy. One example is pension/retirement fund, which has become a hot topic recently. Because China cannot print money at will (and also the pension fund cannot be used in stock investment like you’d see in the US), it has to generate growth/revenues to finance the pension payout - there is some calculations floating around that the country will run out of its ability to pay retirement salaries to an increasingly aging population by 2035 if it cannot sustain a continuous growth at 5% over the next 10 years. This is why China is so obsessed with GDP growth even though we all know it’s just a number, and why they had to raise the retirement age recently.
All this can be solved by the central bank directly printing money, but that’s not the model they’re going after.
All this can be solved by the central bank directly printing money, but that’s not the model they’re going after.
it needs to be
I agree, after seeing how much regular Chinese folks in XHS idolize people like Musk, Alice Weidel, and US military/police/cowboys, I am concerned about increasing US influence. I know XHS skews higher income than average, so hopefully there is a strong basis of citizens who would be less enticed by this sort of stuff.
Right now XHS is great because the US people who have joined are mostly anti-musk and anti-trump, helping to shatter the illusions. Once it is flooded with US libs, there could be more people promoting this kind of idol than debunking them.
they gotta enforce the “defend socialism” part of TOS on Americans
Bad idea
Have you been following at all how interactions on XHS have been going?
the difference is that xhs is westerners entering chinese internet, not the other way around
The article mentions that moderation rules would still apply, there just wouldn’t be a blanket ban on foreign sites.
The westerners on Rednote right now are radlibs and leftists who already hate the US and capitalism. Completely different from the kind of people that populate most US-based social media.
And that’s precisely the kinds of people who’ll want to interact with people living in China going forward. Also, as the article points out, the opening up is still going to be mediated. This may surprise you, but CPC actually thinks these things through before putting them into action.
Yeah, I’m on there. It’s going great.
This is what I have been saying all along. The real goal behind banning TikTok is an equivalent exchange for American tech companies to enter China. These tech companies don’t care about TikTok taking their domestic market like many are suggesting - the ambitions of global capital are far greater: the exponentially growing Chinese market. And China needs that foreign investment to save its economy. So the timing is just right at the moment.
Read my comment here and here for the analysis. I think Trump will dangle the lowering of Fed interest rate to advance his case with China.
I don’t see how China needs foreign investment actually, nor is there any indication that China’s economy needs saving. The fundamentals look very good in fact.
Read the analyses linked in my comment.
China’s central bank does not have the mechanism to expand its monetary base (基础货币) directly through printing high-powered money as you easily could in the US (at least not at a scale large enough to drive up its consumption base), and has to rely on increasing accumulation of foreign currencies (through export or foreign direct investment) or through various refinancing instruments like MLF, repo etc (where the local government debt burden is already strenuous and would be greatly relieved by the US Federal Reserve lowering its interest rates).
Just because China’s economy not going to collapse doesn’t mean there aren’t significant challenges. This is why China has been opening up its financial markets in recent months because that’s how the leadership has decided to save the property market and the local government debt crisis.
This system seems pretty retrograde/self-defeating to me. From your descriptions, it seems like a gold standard system, just with substituting the US dollar for gold. Are there any proposals to reform the bank’s monetary powers?
You have described exactly the problem that China is facing - breaking from an ideological indoctrination imposed by the West.
Many critics from the left had hoped that the US sanctions, hostilities and the “de-dollarization” wave kickstarted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would push China towards reclaiming its monetary sovereignty, but instead we’re seeing doubling down on more exports, more integration with the global market etc. all of which actually render the Chinese economy more vulnerable to US imperialist control, not less. (I have written many many times about why China needs to transition into a domestic consumption economy and will not elaborate here)
At the same time, it should also be said that China’s economy itself is a force to be reckon with, so the US cannot and does not have the capacity to collapse China’s economy, at least without significantly damaging its own economy. What they’re hoping to achieve (through threats of tariffs and sanctions etc) is to get China to fully open up its financial markets so Western capital can enter and starting laying financial claims on Chinese assets etc.
We’re probably going to see a new equilibrium reached with both sides satisfied with a new status quo. The dollar hegemony will be retained and China can continue to grow its economy and bring prosperity to its people. Europe will be (and has been) the biggest loser and unfortunately if the dollar hegemony isn’t challenged, the Global South won’t see a better deal for themselves either. China can continue invest in Global South countries to help development (which is good) but because the US continues to control the global market through dollar, they still have a lot of reach into the global supply chain (and able to lay financial claims on to their assets through IMF etc.).
A completely new economic order is needed to challenge the Washington consensus and its imperialist power.
I disagree with your analysis. First of all, Chinese central bank can print as much currency as it wants for domestic circulation. There’s literally nothing stopping them. Second, there’s little indication that they actually have to. The property market will continue. to be wound down, and it’s no longer central to the economy. What will happen is that a bunch of investors will lose money, and that’s not really a problem in China where the role of private sector continues to decline.
If it is as you said, then you also have to answer the following three questions:
- Why does China need to accumulate $3.3 trillion foreign reserves (money they can’t use) when they can just print the money for domestic need? Even if we leave $800 billion reserves as a safety measure (which is still far more than actually needed), there is still a massive $2.5 trillion surplus that Chinese labor had effective gifted in real goods and services to the West.
- Why, in spite of the fact that China’s purchasing power parity (PPP) has already exceeded the US, the average Chinese worker’s income is still one quarter of the US worker? The government could literally print the money to raise the wages of the workers to boost the much needed consumption right now.
- Why is China still so strongly reliant on an export economy (just made a $1 trillion trade surplus this year) when it could have just printed the money to drive internal development instead? Why not allocate the labor and resources to actually give people, like free universal healthcare and free higher education, instead of utilizing them to make cheap goods for the West to consume while getting junk papers in return?
There is no way to answer any of the above questions if China is behaving exactly like you said.
There is no way to answer any of the above questions if China is behaving exactly like you said.
Actually, there are obvious and simple answers to all these questions.
China is using US foreign reserve to fund BRICS projects and to issue bonds that compete with the US. The fact that you think this is money they can’t use shows that you haven’t bothered to actually research the subject even a little.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGko26GHGf8
- https://internationalfinance.com/banking/china-mandates-banks-usd-billion-bond-issuance-saudi-arabia/
Why, in spite of the fact that China’s purchasing power parity (PPP) has already exceeded the US, the average Chinese worker’s income is still one quarter of the US worker?
Talking about income without considering the context of cost of living is meaningless. PPP is the measure of how far income goes within the country. Why would the government print money and create inflation when incomes are rising on their own.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
Chinese households had stashed away in savings by the end of 2023, hitting yet another record high, data from the People’s Bank of China shows https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
Full year results of household survey for 2024 in China just posted. Real household income and consumption rose faster than overall GDP growth. Gains to rural households are higher than urban ones.
Why is China still so strongly reliant on an export economy (just made a $1 trillion trade surplus this year) when it could have just printed the money to drive internal development instead?
China has been pursuing dual circulation for a while now, and they have been redirecting their exports largely towards the Global South
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Why, in spite of the fact that China’s purchasing power parity (PPP) has already exceeded the US, the average Chinese worker’s income is still one quarter of the US worker? The government could literally print the money to raise the wages of the workers to boost the much needed consumption right now.
something ive been mulling over in my head recently, how much more should china even actually boost consumption? a lot of american consumption is shit that china really does not need, like spending tons of money on cars and funko pops and shit (hell, there’s already too many cars in china, im so anti car i think you should only be able to drive a vehicle if you need it for work.) I honestly think what’s needed is just better working conditions and less hours while receiving the same pay. is this similar to what you have in mind when you say they need to boost consumption?
Because low consumption is really just a symptom to a much more fundamental problem. The real problem, and the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, is wealth inequality. Huge wealth disparities that have widened over the past two decades.
This is why you see everything looks so good on paper, amazing development in China that is truly out of this world, and yet most average people find themselves running out of money to spend, company layoffs, youth unemployment reaching double digits with like one third of university graduates last year not able to secure a job, local governments are heavily burdened in debt and need the interest rate to be lowered so they can keep refinancing themselves out of the outstanding debt (instead of, you know, just having the central government cancelling the debt).
Also China’s tax system is weird in that a disproportionate amount of its revenues came from value added tax (VAT), with personal income and corporate taxes comprising only a small fraction of it. This means the excess wealth of rich people and corporations are not being effectively taxed away, when taxation is one of the most powerful tools a government can use to reduce wealth inequality.
There are many ways to solve such economic problems. One is to revamp your financial and monetary system, which would give the government the power to directly inject money into people’s pocket and fix the wealth distribution problem. Another is to double down and keep selling more to earn foreign currencies, attract foreign businesses to bring their currencies over to save the economy etc.
gonna reply to both recent comments you made to me in this one:
Shanghai is the city with the highest GDP in the entire country and also its premier financial center. These people have a lot of power and seriously screw with the growth of the economy. One example is pension/retirement fund, which has become a hot topic recently. Because China cannot print money at will (and also the pension fund cannot be used in stock investment like you’d see in the US), it has to generate growth/revenues to finance the pension payout - there is some calculations floating around that the country will run out of its ability to pay retirement salaries to an increasingly aging population by 2035 if it cannot sustain a continuous growth at 5% over the next 10 years. This is why China is so obsessed with GDP growth even though we all know it’s just a number, and why they had to raise the retirement age recently.
All this can be solved by the central bank directly printing money, but that’s not the model they’re going after.
i guess my confusion comes down to why it seems like the libs are making a comeback. are the central leadership really unaware that they could reform their finances and then probably just have free reign to purge shangai? but if libs are actually making a comeback, why did the party tell all those property developers to go pound sand? why are they still pushing through with the poverty alleviation initiatives? it’s why i keep harping that i think they must just be overly afraid of instability or something like that, it’s the only explanation that makes sense to me with my relatively limited knowledge and am trying to see if you have a better idea? i find it even more unbelievable that they are simply unaware of this idea.
also, i dont disagree that wealth inequality needs to be combated, but again im wondering how much actual consumption can/should be boosted, really the technically best way to quickly rectify these problems you’re mentioning would be to move back to a fully centrally planned economy but uh i dont think thats anywhere close to being on the books lol.
Was just telling a friend about this and he said some cities are already like this in China. He said when he was last in Shenzhen he was on YouTube and google without a VPN.
He was probably using data roaming. I was there recently and us carriers ping you back to the US when you use data roaming. Makes using alipay and weixin annoying bc your data has to ping across the ocean a couple times.
Also wifi in western hotel brand usually have a VPN built in
Ahh that was probably it.
I was in Shenzhen last year and Google didn’t work.
Yeah another user pointed out that roaming plans allow for it automatically, I think that must have been the case
Now that the Chinese tech and internet industry has largely surpassed the US, the GFW is not as necessary as it used to be.
Hard disagree. I don’t want to see Chinese people exposed to the pure hate and filth that is Instagram and Facebook.
Western racists will not be able to deal with the flaming from a billion keyboardwarriorsIts hard to agree with this when we’ve all seen the sway america has over media.
I think overall people from China and the west interacting more is a net benefit. Sure a lot of them will probably be shocked by the crap they see on western social media but also I don’t think they need to be babied, maybe limit how minors access the Internet but that’s about it.
Now observe the US start to implement their own version of the GFW as it continues to decline.
Tiktok ban is exactly that
Im not so sure. I worry alot about how the US uses social media to disseminate propaganda and radicalize people
Another big factor is that it’s becoming clear that the standard of living in China is growing while it’s declining in the US. Opening up allows China to increase its soft power by making it possible for people around the world to see what life in China is like for themselves.
Japan does very well with soft power from its cultural exports. I imagine China leveraging their own production along the same lines.
exactly
