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The reasoning here is so tribal, myopic, and US politics centered. The Chinese Communist Party (not to be confused with the 91% of Chinese humans who aren't ab
by JPKab 5y ago
The reasoning here is so tribal, myopic, and US politics centered.
The Chinese Communist Party (not to be confused with the 91% of Chinese humans who aren't able to join it or participate in their own governance) is allied with Russia in this war. As reported by the New York Times, the CCP met with US leadership a few months ago regarding the coming invasion of Ukraine by Russia. They immediately left the meeting and shared all of the details with Putin's deputies. That's NOT the behavior of an ally, that's what enemies do.
The CCP is helping to prop up the Russian economy as well. They have bought up massive amounts of Russian assets, offered alternative banking/financial structures to offset sanctions, and are engaged in deals to purchase Russian energy exports on the cheap that are being blocked by EU/US sanctions.
The CCP (ignore all debate about a lab leak) deliberately attempted to minimize and hide the existence and severity of COVID from its own people outside of Wuhan. That is, after all, what authoritarian governments always do when a domestic crisis emerges, until they can't hide it anymore. The side-effect of hiding it from their own people was that they hid it from the world when the spread could have been halted. Flights continued out of China all over the world, and a virus that could have been contained was not.
The well over 900 million Chinese human beings who are not part of the CCP are the biggest victims of the Chinese government, and the rest of us are collateral damage. The idea that the CCP is not an enemy is absurd to anyone who has actually travelled to or lived in China and heard the common, everyday and casual jingoism and deliberate agitprop that the CCP unleashes and fans in the everyday population towards the US specifically and the West in general.
To the myopic, inward-focused partisans in the US, all talk of this reality is labeled as racially motivated. While a minority of that sentiment is certainly racially motivated, most is not. Most are simply based on the realities of President Xi being as bad as Putin (say what you want, but banning Winnie the Pooh was not the mark of a normal human being in a position of leadership) and the CCP's control of a massive, technologically superior nation-state.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoAnd yet 900 million people fail to overthrow their supposedly oppressive government? They're in on it.
- l33t2328 5y agoWhat an on-the-nose example of victim blaming
- JPKab 5y agoI have such a deep love of Chinese culture and the Chinese people that it really stung to see that comment.
- handsaway 5y agoI suppose US Citizens are all "in on" the US gov'ts various coups in Latin America, military interventions in the middle east, overzealous surveillance state, and lets throw Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in there because we haven't overthrown our government?
- JPKab 5y ago"Fail to overthrow"? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what happens to dissenters in China? My favorite artist of my entire lifetime (I consider him to be the greatest artist of the past 100 years, hands down) is Ai Weiwei. I flew to Prague (from the US) with the express intent of making his exhibit the centerpiece of a vacation there in 2017. The man is a living treasure to all of humanity. (I'm sure others will view my opinion of him to be absurdly inflated, but that's my subjective opinion.) For the crime of speaking out on CCP corruption and being somewhat famous, he was put under house-arrest and also directly detained for long periods of time. He's just an artist, not a soldier or revolutionary. What are they going to use to overthrow their government? What weapons do they have access to? How can they communicate when all internet traffic is directly controlled by CCP via infrastructure? They are not "in on it", even if many play the role of "useful idiots" the same way jingoistic Americans do when our government fans the flames of war, like Iraq in 2003. Our Chinese brothers and sisters deserve compassion and bravery, not the typical hand-waving and continuance of a relationship of convenience where the West gets cheap goods/labor while the Chinese citizens are crushed under the boot of a government that allows them no say in their destiny. I'm not foolish or naive enough to think that the US is remotely a true democracy/republic, but at least here we don't jail our dissenters without any form of due process. And when those forms of due process fail, we have the ability to speak out about them without getting jailed or having family members threatened. The same goes for the EU. I had a rather naive and complacent attitude towards the CCP until I travelled there, and more recently when a close friend of mine had her father in Beijing die early in the COVID pandemic. The authorities there claimed he didn't die of COVID, but it was blatantly obvious to all involved that his symptoms matched it. But at that point in time, the CCP's official talking point was that they had successfully contained COVID in Wuhan, and therefore the realities weren't allowed to be discussed. She had to speak in code with her family members over the phone. It's very hard for westerners who have never been there to understand the oppressive atmosphere that is present there. It's a very, very odd mix, because this oppressive atmosphere is overlaid on the unyielding optimism of the booming economy and the utterly wonderful and brilliant Chinese citizenry. They deserve far, far better than their current government, in my opinion as a foreigner.