and the West lost its appetite
  • darkmode [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    54·
    3 days ago

    That’s three completely different universes of experience in one family, sitting around the same dinner table: from famine to facial recognition in 75 years.

    The way ppl write about China is infuriating, needlessly condescending. My regime would be locking people up for blogs in iron maidens.

  • Sos [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    46·
    3 days ago

    “But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.” also “The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.” What even is this?

    • ryepunk [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      37·
      3 days ago

      This is what happens when you can see the good things, but you don’t actually ask anyone about it. So they can see the better cars, technology, and so on, but don’t ask anyone. Like imagine if the author has bothered to ask anyone while he’s being a tourist “hey how does your government work, at various levels? It’s all just warlords and dictatorships right?” And they’d chuckle and say we vote on things and have elected officials. Like western condescension knows no bounds especially about things they can’t even be bothered to research a little bit.

    • bort [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      3 days ago

      prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.

      Do people not realise than prosperity and safety are freedoms in and of themselves? In China you have the freedom to walk down the street at night without worrying about violent crime. You have the freedom to eat out regularly because restaurants are affordable and you’re paid a fair wage.

      Personally I feel those are more valuable freedoms than the ability to screech into the void about why you don’t like the President.

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        And the fact of the matter is that people in China who don’t like the President do have the ability to talk about how much they don’t like him. They just don’t have the freedom to do so and collude with foreign governments, or plot against the government, which is pretty much exactly the same as here. I’d say the only real freedoms that the Chinese don’t have revolve around obscenity laws and how they are enforced, but everything has become increasingly more Victorian (with the exception of algorithmic content) regardless of Chinese market influence, because sex isn’t what sells, the implication of potential intimacy is what sells.

    • NPa [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Hey now, every once in a while they stopped doing genocide to build infrastructure (the infrastructure was for genociding more profitably)

  • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    43·
    3 days ago

    I noticed “famines killed 30 million people” and thought the writer probably has brainworms, then the end with “authoritarianism muh freeze-peach” confirmed it.

    • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      41·
      3 days ago

      Free speech is so fuckin great it’s why I can walk around telling everyone I’m a communist and suffer no negative repercussions

      It’s worth it to have this freedom, so much so that I’m willing to sacrifice not living in fear of getting shot, universal healthcare or really, any infrastructure

      • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        29·
        3 days ago

        The freedom to have to look all around to see if I’m being watched before I want to kiss my partner in public. Love it.

  • BeanisBrain [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    3 days ago

    And washing it down with liberal tears xi-lib-tears

    EDIT: lol the replies are pure liberal idealism

    China faces the same issue as any other authoritarian nation. It’s only as good as it’s leadership. A benign dictator may well be the most effective form of governance, yet so few dictators are in fact benign. On a long enough timeline, all dictatorships degrade into graft and systemic human rights abuse.

    It’s taken precisely one nationalistic ‘president for life’ to strip China of it’s emerging civil liberties, turn the nation inward, enormously increase xenophobia and create a prison camp from an entire region (Xinjiang). Where is the freedom of movement, let alone economic success for rural Chinese who cannot freely travel within the country, and need state approval to apply for a passport?

    Perhaps China seems so appealing because the United States is so evidently failing as a state. But if there is hope for the future, it should be in systems which decrease power distance, not those that deify glorious leaders.

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    22·
    3 days ago

    It’s funny that everyone is saying that the US lost its mojo, but nobody with power actually wants the US to actually have any mojo. It would involve the capitalists sacrificing their wealth in order to actually develop stuff I guess.

    Of course the US is still great at advanced technologies. Launching lots of rockets, doing fancy scientific research, designing integrated circuits, and so on. But that stuff mostly matters for military imperialist stuff, it doesn’t always come to the US directly in the form of improvements to quality of life.

    It’s okay, once the US launches the Third World War and wins it, we’ll have free healthcare and all that.