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I am not "pro CCP", nor am I "justifying all their actions". I am pro-"treat China fairly" and I am protesting wrong assumptions and projections. You miss the

I am not "pro CCP", nor am I "justifying all their actions". I am pro-"treat China fairly" and I am protesting wrong assumptions and projections. You miss the point regarding censorship and you focus too much on it. I am saying that protests, censorship and the changing of policies in response to protests (despite censorship) are all real at the same time. So no of course those events did not factually disappear because there was censorship. What I am protesting is your notion that the entire population is being fooled and has no idea what's going on and that there aren't any societal discussions about government and policies. This is false. If you check for example Whats On Weibo then you can see that there are very often very active discussions and that people are aware of government screwups. Even state media has reported on what went wrong in Shanghai. I am also protesting the notion that the existance of propaganda must mean everything is fake. No. Yes maybe a few staged food supply videos exist, but food supply is very real! My family and acquaintances have had them. Propaganda is more like marketing than some brainwash scheme with nothing real behind. You then proceed to make some big assumptions about how government works. No, not everything goes through central! Do you really think that the central government has time to micromanage the entire country? Chinese governance is very decentralized. Businessmen who have had contact with the central government often think that just because they got approval from the foreign minister that everything is then taken care of, because of their own misconception that everything in China is top-down tightly cobtrolled. They then get confused by why nothing happens. The foreign minister then gets confused about why the businessmen don't talk to local governments directly, because the minister doesn't control those things. Likewise you seem to have some implicit assumption that any censored Weibo posts have been reviewed by government. No: government sets some rules on what's not allowed and then platforms have to do the censorship themselves. Censorship does not equal direct government disapproval, and more importantly censorship has little relationship with whether government addresses grievances or not. Stuff can be censored and policies can be changed to address grievances, all at the same time. --- Again, I am not "pro CCP". I am pro-"treat China fairly". If CCP screws up then they deserve to lose legitimacy. You mention e.g. badly built quarantine camps as if I would be okay with that. Of course not. Of course beating people is not okay, but I protest the notion that beatings happen on a regular and systematic basis as opposed to incidentally. Here in the Netherlands police beatings also happen but nobody uses individual cases to paint the larger narrative that the Dutch police beats all protesters. When one makes assumptions about China based on stereotypes and downplaying what many Chinese people say, that is not being fair. When anti-CCP sentiment is being hijacked to attack Chinese people (we're in a cold war after all), especially when the reasoning was flimsy in the first place, that's not being fair. For ** sake, today's China is literally the best 30 years out of 3000 years. Can't westerners be happy for us for a change instead of continuing to perpetuate the stereotype that we're all oppressed? China is not USSR. China is not North Korea.

strogonoff 4y ago
It’s the best illustration of my point. As long as there is more food and toys than before, people stand by the regime that happened to be in power at the time and took the credit. People forgive lies, privacy and freedom violations, obvious policy failures and everything else.
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  This is a western perspective that I think is a bad fit for China. Valuing freedom and privacy etc as the ultimate goal is a western value, not a Chinese one. To most Chinese, those are merely nice to have, ranking below many other things such as unification, safety, order, health, etc. Chinese "forgive" govt privacy violations in the same way westerners "forgive" the govt for not introducing filial piety laws. People don't "forgive" policy failures, they just tend to have a more nuanced understanding of the whole than the west does. For example Mao is considered good in some ways, bad in others, whereas we in the west are fixated with painting a figure as wholly good or wholly bad, nuance be damned. On top of it all, the west has an implicit assumption that China will automatically become great if only we kick out all the bad guys (= CCP). No, things aren't that simple, just look at Chinese history.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    > ranking below many other things such as unification, safety, order, health, etc. I got a similar vibe from talking to some Russians. Freedom is not important, it’s warranted that it’s limited, we’re not the West, we value it less. I suspect it’s Stockholm syndrome, a consequence of a self-preservation instinct. Many Westerners don’t approve of their governments—their countries have comparatively prospered for a while, and now it feels like the growth has stopped. By contrast, in some other countries the generational memory of significant hardship and poverty is very fresh, and quality of life is still on an upward trend from historical lows. Of course people in these countries value things like safety, order, health very highly. Unfortunately, in some of these countries—this includes both Russia and China—the upward trend coincided with oppressive governments. This led to citizens rejecting values like freedom of action, thought and speech (which is a requirement for individual moral growth—if people live under strict rules imposed by someone else, they don’t have to form any rules of their own), considering such values “foreign” and “not suited to their culture”. > China will automatically become great if only we kick out all the bad guys (= CCP) I would never say it’s so simple. There would be a downturn due to uncertainty, and the unfamiliar degree of individual freedom combined with suffering moral values/inexperience in making choices (an outcome of oppression and surveillance) would certainly cause a dip in quality of life. However, I believe a society where everyone has access to information, a country that treats its own citizens as adults and trusts them, a country where policies are not set by a few self-selected humans with the first-order goal to maintain own power (humans are fallible, and power corrupts), would after growing pains prosper much more.

strogonoff 4y ago

It’s the best illustration of my point. As long as there is more food and toys than before, people stand by the regime that happened to be in power at the time and took the credit. People forgive lies, privacy and freedom violations, obvious policy failures and everything else.

FooBarWidget 4y ago
This is a western perspective that I think is a bad fit for China. Valuing freedom and privacy etc as the ultimate goal is a western value, not a Chinese one. To most Chinese, those are merely nice to have, ranking below many other things such as unification, safety, order, health, etc. Chinese "forgive" govt privacy violations in the same way westerners "forgive" the govt for not introducing filial piety laws. People don't "forgive" policy failures, they just tend to have a more nuanced understanding of the whole than the west does. For example Mao is considered good in some ways, bad in others, whereas we in the west are fixated with painting a figure as wholly good or wholly bad, nuance be damned. On top of it all, the west has an implicit assumption that China will automatically become great if only we kick out all the bad guys (= CCP). No, things aren't that simple, just look at Chinese history.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  > ranking below many other things such as unification, safety, order, health, etc. I got a similar vibe from talking to some Russians. Freedom is not important, it’s warranted that it’s limited, we’re not the West, we value it less. I suspect it’s Stockholm syndrome, a consequence of a self-preservation instinct. Many Westerners don’t approve of their governments—their countries have comparatively prospered for a while, and now it feels like the growth has stopped. By contrast, in some other countries the generational memory of significant hardship and poverty is very fresh, and quality of life is still on an upward trend from historical lows. Of course people in these countries value things like safety, order, health very highly. Unfortunately, in some of these countries—this includes both Russia and China—the upward trend coincided with oppressive governments. This led to citizens rejecting values like freedom of action, thought and speech (which is a requirement for individual moral growth—if people live under strict rules imposed by someone else, they don’t have to form any rules of their own), considering such values “foreign” and “not suited to their culture”. > China will automatically become great if only we kick out all the bad guys (= CCP) I would never say it’s so simple. There would be a downturn due to uncertainty, and the unfamiliar degree of individual freedom combined with suffering moral values/inexperience in making choices (an outcome of oppression and surveillance) would certainly cause a dip in quality of life. However, I believe a society where everyone has access to information, a country that treats its own citizens as adults and trusts them, a country where policies are not set by a few self-selected humans with the first-order goal to maintain own power (humans are fallible, and power corrupts), would after growing pains prosper much more.