Okay, so background: I’m your average pro-gun fuck-the-police, fuck-trump zoomer honed by years of unsupervised internet access and I’ve just discovered this community and started lurking for a while. But I still hold extremely negative views on China, which I still think are justified.
“Which views?” I’ll throw them out real quick: child labor! internet censorship! media censorship! anti-LGBTQ! uygher genocide? positive and pro war relations with russia! (because fuck putin)
So I get really confused anytime I see people expressing pro-China sentiments. Have I been spoonfed by the media or are some of these points actually justified?
Before I answer this I want to point out an interesting contradiction your concern raises. You propose that the Chinese government is lax in enforcement. Well, is the Chinese government an authoritarian monster who punishes citizens over the tiniest infraction or are they lax in enforcement of some of the most obvious violations of the law? When discussing China with people I notice things like this. “China bad” wins over common sense. Propaganda works, folks.
Yes, China has actually been working to reduce child labor. The thing with China is they are actually concerned about their image to the rest of the world. Child labor is a blot on them. They still have about twice as many children in the workforce as the USA or UK, but the days where they worked them like they still do in Bangladesh are over and the situation improves year by year. This is not to mean we shouldn’t be critical. We should be critical of China, the USA, the UK, and everywhere were children are abused and exploited.
It’s possible that it could be not that different from here, though. The US is an incredibly authoritarian state if you’re black, for instance. And the state will take every change it gets to enforce its laws against you. If you commit financial crimes or wage theft, though, if you are prosecuted at all, it’s with kid gloves.
It’s entirely possible for a state to be inconsistent with its enforcement of the laws.
Entirely true, but that exposes the core of what I was getting at: China’s contradictions and problems are really not that unlike us. They are painted as otherworldly authoritarian monsters; a system entirely separate and alien to ours. Yet, if you accept what you just said, you must reluctantly admit that they are not so different after all. If you can admit that they are like us in many ways then it starts to really become obvious to you when they are painted as so different. The veil of Western propaganda lifts slowly.
This is not to say the US is the same as China or whatever. Just that they are not as different as the imperialists say.
Holy fuck you’re right lmao I didn’t even realize I was contradicting myself
One last thing I’d like to say in regards to “freedom” that has little to do with China:
Freedom is an interesting concept. There is an idea in the West that freedom is universal. That it’s definition is so obvious and essential to us as human beings that we must all surely think that it means the same thing to everyone. In America we even wrote down that our rights are divinely imbued to us. However, it doesn’t take much reflection on the idea to realize that this simply isn’t true. Take our free speech example early. The Japanese have plenty of people who defend the laws. For them there is an oppression in the idea that anyone can just go spreading lies and rumors about you. Or that your private mistakes, like unfaithfulness, could hurt you professionally. Any woman in the USA can explain to you what it feels like to be alone in a big city. They cannot walk down the street at 3am alone without knowing there is real danger all around them. Is that freedom? To be gripped by fear because you walked home alone after a night out? If you ask a woman in Havana if she shares this fears it is alien to her. Unheard of. The idea that she might be assaulted walking around the city at night by herself is so rare that it simply does not even cross her mind. So is freedom based around what you can do as an individual, or is it liberation from being prevented from doing normal human activities, like simply existing somewhere late at night while you are a woman? Maybe there are other views of freedom. That’s the catch, what freedom means to most Westerners is not what it means to other peoples around the world. We aren’t wrong and they aren’t either. The imperialist mind hasn’t caught up to this yet.
None of us are immune to the propaganda we internalize our whole lives. Not me nor you.
I would also note that as the American public is currently discovering, there are far more children working in slaughter houses, factories etc than they thought. And this doesn’t even include things like the troubled teen industry which runs work camps for teens who often haven’t committed a crime or juvenile prison labour.
You also have the fact that several US States are currently passing or pushing bills to re-legalise children working in these dangerous places. So you have all of China pushing in anti-child labour direction and a significant proportion of the US pushing in a pro-child labour direction.