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!
First thing to recognize that no country or system of governanace is perfect. China has its share of problems just like any other country, they do better in some areas and worse in others. That said, let’s take a look at the claims.
1) The whole Uyghur genocide narrative appears to be largely fabricated. Researchers in Italy just recently released a long report that concludes this narrative is geopolitically motivated.
George Bush’s chief of staff openly said that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitted to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:
Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerilla warfare by the mujahideen. When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Catli’s expert direction. Graham Fuller, CIA superspy, offered this explanation for radicalizing the Chinese Muslims:
The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan and against the Red Army. The doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter Chinese influence in Central Asia.
I think this is very important context for discussing the problems in the region. In light of the fact that there was a major terrorism problem it seems that China handled it very well, and certainly better than how western nations have dealt with terrorism.
2-3) China does have more restrictions on freedom of political speech than the west. However, it’s not as if there is absolute freedom of speech in the west either. For example, Germany prohibits any promotion of fascism and nazism. Most countries prohibit calls for violence or harm to individuals, and so on. Saying that the west got the balance fundamentally right while China got it fundamentally wrong is a chauvinistic perspective.
Furthermore, while political speech might not be banned in the west, it’s certainly heavily controlled. For example, western media loves to present two sides of any issue no matter how ridiculous the other side may be as in the case of climate change. Yet, strangely we never see a both sides discussion of economics where we get a communist perspective.
People are also uncomfortable expressing their political views publicly if their views stray from the mainstream because it can affect their employability. This is especially true in the domains of politics and economics.
As a result, western economic and political systems have become very rigid and dogmatic. Capitalism is axiomatically accepted as the correct system that’s beyond question despite mounting problems and regular economic crashes caused by this system.
On the other hand, China showed itself to be much more flexible in this regard. Deng reforms integrated aspects of capitalism into overarching socialist framework. This was done through debate and self criticism the sort of which is simply unheard of in the west.
China continues to show political pragmatism and agility that led to China outcompeting the west economically. This would not be possible if Chinese system did not allow and even encourage self criticism.
I think the core difference between China and the west is that Chinese people agreed that socialism and eventual goal of communism is the right approach for politics. There is lively debate within that context, but other political ideologies such as capitalism are rejects the same way Germany and other western countries reject ideologies such as fascism. Meanwhile in the west we still haven’t decided on any single political system and we have many parties trying to steer countries in different directions.
One clear downside of western approach of multiparty governments is that they’re directly at odds with any long term planning. A party might be in power for a few years and then get replaced by a different party. Any projects the former party might have started could be rolled back by the latter. This makes it extremely difficult to tackle large scale problems like climate change effectively.
4) Mass surveillance in China doesn’t appear to be any worse than it is in the west. There is plenty of documented cases of western governments deploying mass surveillance, face recognition, hacking, and other methods at scale. In fact, I would argue that western surveillance is worse because it’s largely done by private companies that sell the data to the highest bidder, including the government. With Chinese model it’s just the government that has access to the data.
I personally see mass surveillance as a negative in both systems, but it’s incorrect to claim that the problem is exclusive to China. This is an example of a popular propaganda tactic in the west where socialist countries are held to a different standard than western ones.
Propagandists will frame problems seen under socialism as being rooted in socialism. However, if these same problems are observed under capitalism then it’s clear that socialism cannot be the root cause. Reality of the situation is that no system is perfect and there will always be problems in human societies because humans are imperfect. All a particular system can do is discourage negative behaviors and encourage positive ones.
5) Both Hong Kong and Taiwan are historically part of China and it should not be surprising that China wants to repatriate them. It also needs to be remembered that US has surrounded China with military bases and regularly conducts military exercises in South China sea. It shouldn’t be surprising that China is concerned about its national security.
Again, it’s worth mentioning that this situation is not unique to China as exact same question can be ask in places like Scotland, Ireland, Catalonia, and Donbas where there are large portions of the population who would like to separate into independent countries.
Regarding the South China Sea, it is worth noting that this is partially due to China’s own violation of other country’s territorial claims based on some pretty suspect logic.
That is an issue which the countries in the region should resolve among themselves. The United States (located thousands of kilometers away), has no business to operate warships there. Imagine if China or Russia did “freedom of navigation exercises” near Hawaii or Puerto Rico.
Hmmmm. Imagine Hawaii was an autonomous, socialist state with it’s own government, openly demanding support from China or Russia. If the US threatened to invade Hawaii within the next five years, surely Russia and China would come to help, and rightfully so!
The USA already invaded Hawaii, overthrowing the legal head of state in a coup at the behest of American businesses. Bad example, dude. Astonishingly bad example.
American international policy is a shitshow, no question. I was just trying to say that supporting Taiwan in defending against china is justified.
It’s just with such a bizarrely selected example it baffles me. It’s kind of brazen to use a literal theft as the go-to example while illustrating the moral high ground.
Personally, I think China should support Hawaiian and Puerto Rican independence, funnelling money and arms to separatists there just for shits and giggles. And be as brazen about it as the CIA was in Tibet and is in Xinjiang without even bothering to deny it.
“You’re funding separatists!”
“Yes. It amuses us.”
Thanks a lot for your long and in-depth answer! The stuff you said in 1) really opened a new view on the Xinjiang conflict for me.
However, the arguments in 2-3 do not convince me. There might be no perfect freedom of speech in the west, but even in Germany you have to try really, really hard to get arrested for being a Nazi. Also, saying that “chinese people agreed on socialism” seems a bit awkward after admitting that there is no political freedom in China. Chinese communism might be more flexible than western capitalism, but IMHO this does not justify the means by which the CCP crushes opposition and individual freedom.
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I am glad that you see surveillance as a negative in both systems. I wouldn’t agree that it is worse in the west than in china, as in the west anyone still has the opportunity to avoid services which threaten to sell your data. Services like signal enable encrypted communication legally without threatening to sell your data.
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Hm, I guess we agree. Trying to forcefully make Hong Kong and Taiwan, countries which have decided against the Chinese system, a part of China is certainly not a nice thing to do. But I guess this is more of a tactical maneuver to present strength to the west.
I think the question to ask is what results we see from maximizing freedom of speech, and what impact that has on our society. Look at things like QAnon, antivaxxers, right wing movements and so on, all of these things are a direct byproduct of western style of freedom of speech. And this of course applies to corporate media as well with media channels like Fox that propagandize their audiences, companies using their freedom of speech to disseminate mass disinformation as fossil fuel industry did, and so on. Are these outcomes a price worth paying?
And I guess we’ll have to disagree on whether what CPC does is justified or not. I think the results they’ve produced speak for themselves. Communist party lifted a billion people out of poverty, and continues to improve lives for the majority of the people with every decade. The exact opposite pattern is seen in the west however as quality of life continues to plummet.
This is a great explanation of how the party is structured, and it shows that there is far more grassroots participation than there is in western democracies.
What matters to me the most is that the government works in the interest of the majority, and that people have input in the decision making process. CPC appears to do a much better job in that regard than vast majority of western democracies, and the improving material conditions for people in China are a direct result of that.
Compare this with a recent study analyzing decades of policy in US that found the following to be true:
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
People can use VPNs and services that avoid data collection in China as well if they put some effort into it. However, I would argue that for the vast majority of people it’s companies like Facebook that manipulate public behavior that are a far bigger concern. Only a tiny percentage of the population uses platforms like Signal and we see that most people have very little regard for their privacy making it easy to exploit them.
… there is far more grassroots participation than there is in western democracies …
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.
I wouldn’t agree that it is worse in the west than in china, as in the west anyone still has the opportunity to avoid services which threaten to sell your data.
You are talking from ignorance. Both ignorance of the nature and state of surveillance here (yes, I live in China) and of the ubiquity of surveillance in the west and how much of it the state has access to.
Facebook tracks you if you have an account or not. Twitter tracks you if you have an account or not. Phone systems track you if you have any kind of mobile phone at all. In extreme cases, you can be surveilled from other people’s phones. While it is in theory possible to live free of surveillance in the west, it would involve actions and activities that would be extremely impractical.
Surveillance is surveillance, whether done by corporate entities who cooperate with actual nation-states or directly by the government. (And, by the way, most surveillance in China is … exactly this variety, just like the USA.) Abrogation of free speech is abrogation of free speech, whether, again, done by corporate entities (and, again, the major source of censorship in China is exactly this variety, just like the USA) or by governments directly.
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Here’s a list of links to some reading material: https://lemmy.ml/post/62052
… the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 …
Ooh! I missed that one!
There was no Tiananmen Square Massacre. At all. This is hinted at in the very title of the piece you quoted: 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. There’s a few “facts” you’re going to find out, to your likely intense shock, surrounding that.
1. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Citing the same source you quoted:
Several people who were situated around the square that night, including former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post Jay Mathews and CBS correspondent Richard Roth reported that while they had heard sporadic gunfire, they could not find enough evidence to suggest that a massacre took place on the Square itself.
Taiwan-born Hou Dejian was present in the square to show solidarity with the students and claimed that he didn’t see any massacre occurring in the square. He was quoted by Xiaoping Li, a former China dissident to have stated, “Some people said 200 died in the square, and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say I did not see any of that. I was in the square until 6:30 in the morning.”
Want non-Chinese sources? How about The Columbia Journalism Review? Read that and a few more similar sources (the finding of which is left as a learning exercise) and upon completion ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?
2. No matter what you think you remember, Tank Man did not get run over.
I have met people utterly SHOCKED (indeed shaken to their core) when faced with the evidence that what they “clearly remember”—Tank Man being squished into pulp under the treads of merciless Chinese tanks—never happened, but … it didn’t. If you remember seeing Tank Man killed, you are the victim of very skilled propaganda using carefully timed editing, skillfully worded suggestion, and flat-out lies.
The full video exists showing the aftermath of the famous, iconic shots that shocked the world. It’s a good exercise to seek it out. When you do, ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?
3. The real story of what went on is far darker.
Not only because of what it implies for the Chinese people but also because of what it implies for western people. The truth is that there was protests aplenty in Beijing in 1989. And there was a massacre. It’s just that the protests the Chinese government was nervous of were worker protests, not student protests. The thing is that the western press didn’t want to do the actual work (and dangerous work!) of covering these. The children cosplaying revolutionary were far more photogenic and could be covered within a brief walk from the popular journalist hang-out hotel.
Further, the corporate masters of most western media really did not want to be broadcasting stories of workers rising in rebellion against cruel masters. It would have struck far too close to home, that would have. Much better to focus on the cute kiddies playing revolutionary! D’aw! They even have a mock Statue of Liberty they call the Goddess of Democracy! Aren’t they cute!?
The real massacre was near Muxidi. It was a massacre of workers who’d finally had enough and snapped. Who’d rioted and attacked police and PLA. Who were subsequently mercilessly gunned down by machine gun, run over by tanks and APCs and generally slaughtered. It was the low point of governance in the modern era of China and it sparked quiet reforms that continue to this day: some good for the people, some … not so good.
In retrospect the press story never really made any sense. The students at the protests came from all the top universities in Beijing and environs. They were the scions of the most powerful and wealthy people in China. They were the sons and daughters of Chinese leaders! I know that people have been trained for their entire lives into thinking that the Chinese are unthinking, unfeeling robots, but do you seriously believe it extends to the point that Chinese leaders are going to order the massacre of their very own children!?
Ponder that for a while, and ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?
4. The protests (and suppressions) didn’t just happen in Beijing.
One of the huge problems I have with the ZOMG THEY KILLED ALL THE STUDENTS IN THE SQUARE!!!1111oneoneoneeleventyone!!! narrative is that not only does it suppress the worker uprising and subsequent bloody suppression in Beijing, it also hides the same uprisings and suppressions that happened all over the place! There were protests in Shanghai. In Fujian province. In Hubei province. In all kinds of places. Workers protested. Low-level Communist Party officials protested. PLA SOLDIERS PROTESTED! This was a nationwide political disaster brewing and all of that is erased in the official western record of cute kids cosplaying counter-revolutionary.
What possible motive could the press have for not reporting this? (It was known to them. You’ll find sources detailing that quite easily once you drop down that particular rabbit hole.) Ponder that and ponder this: what other things have you been lied to about over the course of your life?
5. Things have actually improved since then.
You don’t last as long as absolute dictators as the Chinese government has, over a population as unruly as the Chinese have historically always been, if you’re stupid. While the Chinese government did clamp down and clamp down hard (the better term is “brutally”) on the uprisings (note the plural) they also recognized what led to them and started to, get this, fix the problems.
Jackasses from the west bemoan that the locals don’t want to talk about 1989 with them. There’s three major reasons for this, however.
- Nobody trusts the west. There’s a long, ignoble tradition of the western press putting sources at risk and then topping it all off by lying. Of fucking course they’re not going to want to talk about politically-sensitive issues, knowing that western reporters are sociopaths who’ll put them and their families at risk all for the fucking clicks.
- Most of the time people use the wrong language. They assume everybody calls it the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre for instance. Which is not the term used here. Quite often, I suspect, the people being asked have no idea what they’re being asked. It would be like me going up to an American and asking them their opinion on Santa Anna’s Grand Victory or whatever.
- 1989 is over 30 years ago. Most of the people being addressed weren’t even born for it. Many of the rest were in middle school. They don’t know, and don’t care, what you’re talking about. Kind of like how most Americans alive today don’t know or care about the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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This is a great write-up, as all of your comments have been so far! I had never heard of any massacre in Muxidi during those time. Do you have a link to somewhere I can read about it without worrying about it being too distorted by the Western press? Thank you so much!
I’m about to hit the hay. I’ll dig up some references tomorrow. (I may have the wrong bridge. I’m going from memory here.)
No problem, I appreciate all the insight you’ve given, since it’s all needed more than ever right now when the US is so anti-China. Have a goodnight!
OK, I’m going to temporarily walk back Muxidi. I think I got it from Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement, but I’m not able to find this (book, I mean) anymore. I just remember a stark description of a clash at a bridge (which I thought was Muxidi) where civilians with molotovs and the police clashed before the PLA started moving in and mowing down people. It included interesting details like how some Party officials wound up as collateral damage because stray machine gun rounds went through where they were standing on their home balconies and such.
The 1989 protests were a massive clusterfuck at every level. The government was intransigent and paranoid after watching dictator after dictator fall in Europe. The main instigators of the protests—students—were, like most young people, stupidly impatient and unwilling to work on gradual change. (They were also seemingly intent on martyrdom rather than negotiation.) Further, since they all came from China’s upper crust, practically, they did zero coordination with the worker protest groups going on at the same time, disdaining them as uneducated, unimportant peasants.
Tragically, the people who bore the brunt of the clapback were those very same workers, struggling with the PLA to prevent their approach to the square.
And while I can’t find the book anymore, I found this: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/files/munro_who_died_in_beijing_and_why.pdf
It’s by one of the co-authors of the book. Page 813 (3rd page in the PDF) has a section entitled “The Bloody Road to Tiananmen”. It names several neighbourhoods where violence erupted, including Muxidi. I’m walking back my temporary walk-back. 😉
Tiananmen Square is just a place, it isn’t a source of controversy and arguing like it is to western folks
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js&local=true <- excellent source on the Uighur issue. The TL,DW is that it is systematic cultural erasure, and not a physical genocide. Note that a systematic effort to destroy a culture should be considered a genocide in my books (and the creator of the term “genocide” agrees), but that’s just not how the term is used unfortunately.
