• FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    Can you enlighten us as to how China is authoritarian in a way that Europe isn’t? Because as far as I can tell, even if literally every single thing China is accused of by anyone is true, this is what their major crimes amount to:

    • Killing 10,000 protesters in Tiananmen Square
    • Imprisoning 1M Uighurs in Xinjiang
    • Sterilizing, abusing, and killing some number of Uighurs in Xinjiang, I’ve never seen numbers accompanying this claim
    • Suppressing Tibetan religious identity
    • Lack of queer rights
    • Not respecting Taiwan’s sovereignty
    • Suppressing political speech that goes against the government
    • General religious persecution of several religious minorities other than those mentioned above; Falun Gong, Christians, other Muslims, etc
    • Aggression toward their neighbors like India and the Philippines
    • Support of Russia during their invasion of Ukraine
    • Support of Myanmar during the Rohingya genocide

    Let me know if I missed any.

    Meanwhile, (mainly Western) Europe definitely has done the following in the past 50 years:

    • Funded and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, killing anywhere from 50,000 people per the Health Ministry to 500,000 per Donald Trump
    • Mostly refused to recognize a Palestinian state until quite recently
    • Exploited peripheral European states economically
    • Continued to hold assets belonging to former colonies in the Global South
    • Collaborated with the US to destroy the USSR and strip it for parts, causing one of the largest peace-time drop in life expectancy in history, and unleashing rampant economic and sexual exploitation
    • Allow thousands of immigrants to die in the Mediterranean to prevent them from reaching the continent.
    • Joined the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan
    • Joined NATO actions to destroy the Libyan government, leaving the country in a state of utter chaos and making it one of the only places on earth with open air slave markets
    • NATO actions against Yugoslavia and Serbia (granted, to intervene in a genocide, but in a way that was not done to intervene in the Rwandan genocide; this suggests the intervention was primarily motivated by an extractive, imperialist interest)
    • Islamophobia; Hijab bans, rampant hate speech, racially stratified economies.
    • Backsliding queer rights in some countries, total lack in others.

    I think there’s probably more I could go into, but I think that’s at least enough to make my case. If you want to believe China is authoritarian because you believe every point in the upper half is true, then I won’t stop you. But you’re on some craaaazy wypipo logic if you think the points in the bottom don’t mean that the same label ought to be applied to Europe.