this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism, but I always found the China obsession on reddit to be odd. While I don't think it should be banned outright, I think y'all ought to consider what is motivating such a weird fetish (because frankly that is) for a specific government.
Yup, the flip side of the coin is that reddit really has a hate boner for China. The anti-CCP side has its own collection of nutty people, with a lot of the talking points tracing back to the ~~cult~~ nice people that send out all those Shen Yun flyers.
Shit's complicated. That said, banning all criticism of the Chinese government isn't the answer. We need to be smarter about the information that we digest.
It really isn't that complicated. If Chinese politics is to be taken seriously, then there is a ton of low hanging liberal fruit for the picking. There is no reason for the Chinese legal system to not have public trial, for starters. There is no reason for China to censor the internet or speech or free association the way it does. And most importantly, there is no reason for China to not confront the very real sins of Mao and Deng in public.
I agree there is complexity which exists beyond this kind of stuff. But these are first principles for free society, and political agency, and should be taken seriously.
I'm sympathetic to what you listed, and it would be nice to see those things come to pass. I'm just cynical about anything that starts to sound like "regime change" after watching the US campaigns in the middle east these past couple decades.
Even though Tiananmen was a long time ago, there have been more recent cracks in the facade like the unrest over lingering COVID zero policies. It's encouraging to know that people do have limits, but I don't know how popular those sentiments are across the broader population.
It's always nice to hear from someone else that recognizes how similar all this saber rattling is to the buildup to the first iraq war. All of a sudden after years of radio silence, everyone seems to care really deeply about the situation in another country.
it's also possible China censored the internet as a form of protectionism. social networks tend to form monopolies because people go wherever everyone else is. whichever state that network is based in then gets a boost to its tech industry
You're somehow implying that being an anti-ccp "fanatic" is basically crazy, and that people should reconsider their position... because... ? hate boner for china? what does disliking the CCP have to do with "hating china"?
You can dislike the CCP without hating China, or being fanatical about it. There are people that have trouble with it, though. As an example you could say that the CCP sponsors campaigns of corporate espionage on a large scale to steal technology from other countries. That one is pretty uncontroversial. But some people have trouble preventing themselves from taking it further and making generalizations about how creative the country's citizens are, as an example.
I haven't seen that. First time I see a suggestion such as that you're mentioning, that the Chinese could be uncreative. I read lots of Chinese books all the time and if anything I'd say they're more creative than western authors in many respects.
Glad to hear, I've been meaning to pick up some Chinese sci-fi myself now that more of that stuff is getting translated.
I'm not a tankie and have no love for the government of China (or any government) but there is an extent to which criticism of China is deployed by xenophobes and nazis as a kind of socially acceptable rallying call or dog whistle. So, I'm all for criticizing China, but remember the allegory of the crustpunk bar
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522
Exactly. Chinese capitalism is currently threatening American capitalism, so American media and american society more generally demonizes it. China is willing to offer cheaper loans to 3rd world countries than any western countries and banks like the IMF. Of course, this is still exploitative imperialism, but it is slightly less bad than the west. China. Of course, China treats its workers terribly, but it at least tries to reinvest the surplus it takes from those workers into domestic production and infrastructure. Tankies love to depict China as ontologically good because it opposes american hegemony and has a rapidly growing economy. They ignore its imperialism and domestic exploitation. Redditors, American exceptionalists, and their ilk depict China as ontologically evil, a threat to world peace, the most totalitarian country imaginable. They of course ignore the comparably bad conditions of America's puppet states and its domestic prison system. The reality is much more boring. Two capitalist nation states are fighting over their shares of the world market.
There are plenty of awful regimes around the world, but China is unique in how powerful and dangerous it is.
In particular, if China were to invade Taiwan, which it has a stated intention of doing, then the TSMC chip fabs—the only place on Earth capable of mass-producing modern electronic circuits—will almost certainly be destroyed in the fighting, and that will cause a global economic depression that'll make 2008 look like a minor inconvenience. That's a huge global threat.
There's a crazy amount of sinophobia on Reddit, but let's be clear, the people who fervently defend the Chinese government are being just as disingenuous.
It's not sinophobia to criticize the CCP. I haven't seen anyone saying anything about the Chinese people. What's more common is criticizing the CCP and its actions as the ruling party of China. I don't think there's generalized "sinophobia" as you claim.
The commenter above made it pretty clear that criticism of the government, i.e. the CCP isn't the issue. The issue at hand is that there most definitely is casual racism on some very popular subreddits that are tolerated more than I'd like. Redditors have blindspots, just like anyone do, but their particular blindspots include casually racist attitudes towards Chinese people. I hope that you're just lucky in the types of threads and subs you frequent, but I 1000% have seen more than just casual sinophobia that had nothing to do with criticizing their government.