(09-24-2023, 01:10 PM)mega-mind Wrote: (09-21-2023, 12:14 AM)Eagle Wrote: (09-20-2023, 09:13 PM)mega-mind Wrote: (09-10-2023, 09:28 PM)Eagle Wrote: (09-10-2023, 05:38 PM)mega-mind Wrote: Their censorship model does look entrenched, unfortunately. For some reason Chinese do seem supportive of their system so far, despite restrictions.
Because they're fed relentless propaganda and blocked from truth. Dissident voices are harshly punished, it's an Orwellian pressure cooker
You're not wrong. The thought control and indoctrination are disturbing to Western sensibilities. But the stability and growth have increased quality of life for many.
though at the cost of truth and freedom and China uses economic leverage aggressively now to erode human rights standards worldwide.
They do aim to shape international rules in their favor. But the West also often imposes its values and interests abroad in the name of democracy or human rights.
You're not wrong, but the details don't really tell the big picture.
Yes, there is mass internet censorship in China, but people are not acquiescing to it, not by any stretch. There is a huge industry that can't even be described as cottage that is dedicated to getting around the GFW. China is quite open and does a ton of research and shares the research with the west when it comes to the sciences, medicine, and in fact gives western researchers more access to its archives than the average Chinese citizen who isn't a member of the CCP. Libraries in China are not generally open to the public, bookstores end up taking that role. You can find books that would be considered polar opposite to what the American left believes in, even though China defines itself as leftist. Left and right are relative to where you start, after all. As long as it does not pertain to China and in some way challenges the official CCP-dictated historiography, you can read it. Hell, you can even find Chinese versions of 1984, works of everyone from Milton Friedman to Friedrich Hayak, because they do not paint China in a bad light and China's "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is ultimately not socialism as one imagines in the west. The GFW is used to block breachforums because it displays weaknesses it doesn't want to show, as it undermines the authority of the central government. It doesn't prevent anyone from getting on the site through "scientific internet access", but let's be real, just as Google Translate is confused by the slang, argot, and everchanging use of words that both evades censorship and creates community, it also works the other way. Just like how Russian forums selling RDPs and servers would get translated into "grandfathers" (ded), the Chinese word for server and chicken are homonyms (ji) and sometimes translator services make it even harder to communicate. The GFW is mostly blocking porn because for whatever reason it has been illegal since 1949. In reality porn is as easy to get in China as anywhere else. But there are no courts to challenge in, and ultimately, it doesn't matter because there's no way to actually enforce a law that is so often broken that its existence makes zero difference. The GFW is also easily bypassed by westerners by something as simple as a Google Fi eSim whcih you can still get in HK and has a data-only option, btw, and apparently it doesn't even block UDP for the most part so, the censorship is in some senses designed as a prophylactic against an enemy that ultimately represents a small part of what it actually blocks. Most Chinese people do not think about the west nearly as much as the US politicians think about China, and the Chinese leadership circle tends to keep its thoughts very private and official statements are more important for what's unsaid, not what is said.
So, from their angle, they're not shaping international rules in their favor, they're simply shaping international rules to actually be international and not American/Anglocentric. Whether you think this is a good or bad faith argument, it is how it's viewed, and makes sense if you view things from their angle. Does it make it right? No, but that is a subjective, personal view. And one should not merely assume that America is somehow indispensable anyway, America's interests have caused a lot of harm for no good reason. China, on the other hand, does not send in armies of occupation - even when they have, in the one significant land conflict after Korea it engaged in, which happened in 1979 against Vietnam. The army marched to the outskirts of Hanoi and then went home. Both sides claim victory but um, I don't know how victorious Vietnam can really claim when their leadership had abandoned the capital and the withdrawal to status quo ante bellum happened 3 months after the start of the war, before attrition or sieges forced them to retreat. But again, we only know so much in terms of thinking, and all that is based on observed facts. China is far more intent on presenting an image of essentialism (in terms of CCP being in power) and unity (in terms of its population), but there's no single viewpoint, just that it's not visible and also, none of anyone's business in the west as far as the average person is concerned. It has a defined concept of what "China" is, and it is... mildly disingenuous, as the statement "Taiwan has always been a part of China" would only be true under the Westphalian model of sovereignty and even then, only by default as no other party claimed sovereignty over it. China at the time was going through the end of a regime change and the rebels under Konxinga took over the Dutch factory set up right around the time when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. I don't know if irony translates easily and the only country that sticks to the model had no part in what was a western conceptualization that even the west no longer really follows. Alas, technically true is the best kind of true, east or west, I guess.
When it comes to human rights, well, it's not simply whataboutism when it's pointing out obvious hypocrisy is it? The kind of human rights the west advocates doesn't even exist in America. The whole Black Lives Matter movement was meant to point out said obvious and evident inequality and relegation to second class citizenship, and the undocumented in the US are permanently relegated by law to second class citizenship. Voting rights can be stripped routinely by arbitrary felonies that one is coerced into pleading to in all but 2 or 3 states and those are not major states in terms of size or population but the likes of Vermont and New Hampshire. From their view, locking up Uygurs looks a lot like mass incarceration in the US. What Americans think of as human rights feels a lot like a targeted singling out and an way to marginalize Chinese autonomy. Their fears in that respect is backed up by actual western actions that perpetuated extraterritoriality and all sorts of shittiness imposed on the country over the course of 150 or so years. The US is not lacking in experts who know all this, but at least the ones I know categorically refuse to work for the government on a host of grounds - moral, economic, or ideological. It encompasses those on the American left and right. It was exacerbated to a huge degree by Trump's lack of knowledge in how economics work and his blatant and unapologetic racism. The tariffs he imposed made little sense to so many in the country and affected the livelihoods of so many that depended on trade that it essentially backfired in way where it only strengthened the CCP's arguments with a case study that is real. There's a widely spread and believed conspiracy theory that Trump is a CCP agent on their payroll.. in China, and the Chinese censors are either at a loss or unable to stamp it out entirely. My personal opinion is that it's idiocy instead of malice or collaboration, but then again, Justin Amash, who founded the Liberty Caucus, jumped before he was pushed for stating the obvious - that Trump doesn't understand how the exchange for goods and services for money works. His successor, Peter Meijer, lost his seat for voting for impeachment. If that's considered democracy, I think China generally is ok with the sort of spontaneous order that has long been understood as self-stablizing through the experience of overseas Chinese in SE Asia and case studies conducted by scholars like James C. Scott at Yale. Besides, mass surveillance is costly and difficult. Everyone who needed to handle a few giant dbs from this site would have that experience I'm sure. Scott started out a "crude Marxist" in the 70s but ended up being a theorist whose writings are widely talked about outside of academia mostly by anarchist/libertarians and extreme progressives as it led him to resistance theory. China is far more worried about organized resistance a la 1989 since it knows that the infrapolitics that is by definition hidden and spontaneous cannot be seen or quantified except through a change in society, and not something that can be effectuated from without.
The fact is the ordinary citizen in China thinks a lot less about the US than the average American thinks about China. Politics is separated and professionalized in China - without the right family background one can't even become a politician. There's no 24 hour news cycle - the half hour news at 7pm that ran on CCTV1 was watched widely but had little substantive matters, and TV remains localized by large. Remember that China historically is unified only by writing, Mandarin differs in Taiwan and China because it was essentially a creation and amalgamated from northern dialects which anyone beyond won't understand. Simplified Chinese was not set in its current form until 1985. In a sense almost nobody is a native Mandarin speaker until very recently and even then, it's really just the official language. From their view, the sort of artificial sense of unity is necessary because without it, it is vulnerable to outside incursions, and history shows that it's not a possibility but an inevitability. I do not want to give off the impression that I'm pro-CCP - I'm not, that's why I'm here, because my world view, a socially liberal and economically liberated one driven by choice - is heterodox to mainstream thought in just about everywhere. But critiques that start from assumptions that are overly simplistic tend to fail to grasp things that end up integral to the calculations made. For a long time China banned what I consider the most comical and telling novel written in Chinese - A Fortress Besieged - which didn't criticize the CCP but really, made fun of society and all centralized power and the pretension of control. Pirate it, buy it, and read it and you'll see that sometimes the most innocuous is actually the most threatening. But in the end, China is not out to conquer anything except what it thinks as Chinese, and a lot of that, well, happens to be held by Russia. There's no consensus amongst the public about Russia and historically the animus against Russia, who committed atrocities and taken Chinese territories and provoked skirmishes since Nerchinsk signed in 1689 and didn't end until 1968. Putin's expertise was Germany, not China, and the CCP at best can only attempt domestically to claim that it's not a priority, but tell that to those whose families were ethnically cleansed in the early 1900s after Russia reneged on a treaty that promised protection and ended up killing thousands with the British witnessing the event inadvertently. America mainstream media is not made up of experts in such things because it's not easy to explain and takes a long post like this just to get into the essentials, but that doesn't negate that all this needs to be considered. It's not religion, but science, in the sense that religion disappears when you don't think about it or believe in it, but science studies things that exist beyond subjective belief. What I never have been able to figure out is why there seems to be a genuine lack of understanding in China that Communism and socialism are not Chinese but as imperialistic as any other western thought beyond "utility", and I can speak freely to many in China in a way that few if any Americans can. It never quite crossed their mind, I guess. Everyone has blindspots.
