This. Don't ever fucking root for China. It is as dystopian as it gets for large swaths of their own population.
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NYT: China Rules (part one of five article piece)
- Thread starter Deleted member 9838
- Start date
This. Don't ever fucking root for China. It is as dystopian as it gets for large swaths of their own population.
Interesting reactions to that article, I thought it was great. Taking a look at policies the west expected to be failures but ended up being successes is absolutely needed.
Do they mean rule as in "awesome" or rather as in primacy?
Oh, for a second I thought you were talking about the US there.
Oh, for a second I thought you were talking about the US there.
Next up, a NYT article detailing how SUPES AWESOME Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup is going to be, the kind of show that lamezor western countries simply cannot match with their workers' rights, non-slave labor & deaths probably in the single digits at most.
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Well, we know what a scummy government smells like, so you can call us experts and fuck off with the whataboutism.
Sometimes what about is actually a relevant form of argument. Fix your own shit before you shit all over a country that has moved an astonishing number of people out of poverty. The US has a worse human rights record than China. Democracy doesn't inherently mean your government isn't a piece of shit.
Lmao are people trying to equate (and thus deflect criticisms) China and the US? Unironic yikes.
Nah, born and raised in the US. I just understand that there isn't really an absolute argument re China. It's complicated. I don't think this is a bad article from nyt. Clearly people can't handle that though I guess.
I find the reactions to this article very interesting, especially since its thesis seems to be "Chinese government very successful at alleviating poverty despite policies we usually consider antithetical to growth".
China was an exceedingly poor country until very recently. Most of the people in it lived in squalor. It isn't blasphemous or some kind of a betrayal to acknowledge that that is no longer the case. Indeed, it makes you sound ignorant and partisan to ignore that fact. I know full well that the Chinese government is also doing plenty of evil on a nearly unprecedented scale (see: Uyghurs, Falun Gong, Tibet, the recolonization of Africa, Taiwan, the Great Firewall of China, etc etc), but that is precisely the article's point: China has grown a lot despite being that place.
At the end of the day, it's an interesting question to consider how this growth affects the Chinese people's perceptions of their own government. Extreme poverty is well within the living memory of the country, and now many Chinese are actually living pretty well by any standard. The western view that the Chinese government is simply evil does not hold a particularly large amount of weight over there, and this is a pretty big reason why.
China was an exceedingly poor country until very recently. Most of the people in it lived in squalor. It isn't blasphemous or some kind of a betrayal to acknowledge that that is no longer the case. Indeed, it makes you sound ignorant and partisan to ignore that fact. I know full well that the Chinese government is also doing plenty of evil on a nearly unprecedented scale (see: Uyghurs, Falun Gong, Tibet, the recolonization of Africa, Taiwan, the Great Firewall of China, etc etc), but that is precisely the article's point: China has grown a lot despite being that place.
At the end of the day, it's an interesting question to consider how this growth affects the Chinese people's perceptions of their own government. Extreme poverty is well within the living memory of the country, and now many Chinese are actually living pretty well by any standard. The western view that the Chinese government is simply evil does not hold a particularly large amount of weight over there, and this is a pretty big reason why.
I'm sure it helps that you disappear or get arrested if you hold the opposite view or even suggest reforms.
"they got money so they have to be doing something right"
aka "it sells well so it's a good product"
Country is trash
aka "it sells well so it's a good product"
Country is trash
Lol okay buddy. No reason to continue to engage with this blatant anti-American prejudice.
Yes because it was recently published and the last article tagged Uighurs was published four days ago?
The US has killed 20 million people since WWII but whatever right.
You could replace 90% of the instances of "China" with "America" ITT and you wouldn't even blink twice lmao.
I don't think most people are deflecting. I think seeing a China is anymore uniquely oppressive as opposed to other major powers is the issue here. That doesn't mean don't talk about the oppression, but the rhetoric used in China threads always make it seem like it's the only horrible country on earth. And presumably Americans wailing on it is a bit tone deaf
I don't think most people are deflecting. I think seeing a China is anymore uniquely oppressive as opposed to other major powers is the issue here. That doesn't mean don't talk about the oppression, but the rhetoric used in China threads always make it seem like it's the only horrible country on earth. And presumably Americans wailing on it is a bit tone deaf
If you want to make this about numbers I hope you've done your research. A minimum of 23 million people (up to 55 million) died in the Great Leap Forward alone. Between 1 and 10 million died in the following Cultural Revolution.
China currently brutally occupies a sovereign nation (Tibet), has thousands and thousands of their Muslim minorities in extermination and reeducation camps, allows their citizens no civil rights, and forces the disappearances (executes) dissidents and the politically inconvenient.
So please tell me how the US has a worse human rights record.
I am talking about the ability of that viewpoint to hold water for the vast majority of Chinese people who are not political prisoners of the Chinese government.
Again, the point is that it would be difficult to convince the Chinese population that their government is evil when most of them can see very plainly that their lives have improved dramatically as a result of their efforts. That is not to say that the Chinese government is not doing plenty of evil - it is - but that they've also turned the country into a decent place to live.
I think what this post is doing is conflating the Qing dynasty with the entire history of China, since you missed the many years where China was well ahead of the curve, both domestically and in terms of international influence. Your characterization of China as being dragged into the 20th century, ostensibly by western powers, is also wholly incorrect. It is difficult to summarize exactly why China entered the 20th century as undeveloped as it did, but it isn't because the government was simply committed to being backwards. China was being led at the time by an ethnic minority government whose position at the helm of the kingdom was predicated entirely by instability. Their rule was typified by that instability; during the Qing dynasty China was routinely brought to its knees by domestic strife. The nineteenth century alone contained the Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest events in history, and the two opium wars. The effect of the former was to decimate the country's already relatively weak ability to sustain itself; the effect of the latter was to completely undermine sovereignty and the rule of law while transforming the economy into one that suited foreign interests instead of one that suited the Chinese.
In short, saying that China was dragged into the 20th century by the west is like saying that Europeans helped Native Americans get over smallpox.
I'm not sure why this is any more permissible here than saying "Mexico is trash" or "Germany is trash". I'm not talking about "the rules", either - why do people think that this is an okay thing to say? China is a country comprised of a truly overwhelming number of people. It is not its government. Few places in the world can lay a claim as extensive as China's to having contributed to human culture and society. It is a country filled with beauty, both natural and man-made. It is certainly not trash.
Besides, the point of the article isn't "they've got money so they must be doing something right", it's "there are several hundred million less Chinese poor people today than there were 30 years ago".
It's definitely cheaper (but then again everything is).
Serpentza has done some Youtube videos on it. It's sort of like the DMV, and they give you antibotics for pretty much everything.
Its not a china puff-piece at all, despite the framing of it as such by the OP.
Here is some of the closing paragraphs
I always find it funny to see people pulling whataboutisms between China and the US on human rights in these threads. If this were a Chinese message board and you were Chinese citizens you would quickly be censured and maybe kidnapped for reeducation or worse. But sure, both the same...
You can't possibly know the validity of your claim when the average person probably doesn't want to go to jail over a few sentences. They banned the use of "I disagree" online, pooh bear memes, and N > 2. People don't like Xi's power grabs. The government is not monolithic and neither are people, and the average person can be glad that their standard of living has risen while being pissed off.
This is like saying oh the US economy has been doing great the last year, people are really happy. No, no they're not.
I'm pulling a "whataboutism" of US citizens declaring China 'shouldn't' be a super power based on behaviours the US itself particpates in.
Yellow Peril never died.
Your views on China are so off-based and delusional. In many ways now China is a much better place to live then the US now. Most of the stuff people bash about China is embraced by people because it provides a better way of life. Most here see the negative aspects of things there and what they can potentially be and not the facts of how it's run nor the results.
Just a quick reminder that posts should be in English on the main forum.
It's fine in community/hangout threads ofc.
Thank you.
No, it is not like saying that. Thirty years ago, the standard of living in China was very low. You would have to go back very far to get to a point in US history where the standard was that low. And in much the same way that people in the US believe that their government institutions are legitimate because they are no longer living in the squalor they once were, people in China are at least partially justified for believing that their government institutions are legitimate because they are no longer in overwhelming poverty. The key difference here is that China's standard of living rose very quickly in a very short amount of time, which is completely not comparable to the American example.
I am not justifying the evil things that the Chinese government does. Indeed, part of my argument (and NYT's, for that matter) is actually predicated on a mutual understanding that the Chinese government does many evil things. The point is that these evil things affect Chinese living far less than being able to eat does, so any challenge to the competency of the Chinese government must necessarily deal with the fact that China is in a much better place than it was.
Amazing how people can read an article like this and just automatically assume it's a China puff piece. Here we have a country that in the span of less than a decade has managed to pull an unprecedented amount of its citizens out of poverty and is now in position to dictate politics on a global scale. The point of this article is to elucidate why and how this came to be. And predictably, the only talking points are backhanded statements about how corrupt the government is, oppression of ethnic minorities, social ranking system...and yes I agree all these things are evil but the discussion is always used to shut down any proper discussion on why China is where it is today (and it's always from a position of Western moral superiority as if people in the East don't understand their own situations). We've heard Western political commentators for bordering on decades with proclamations of China's collapse because of its reluctance to embrace democracy. "It's despotic so it doesn't count" is a completely unproductive and ignorant stance.
Prior to Qing, Ming dynasty China had a huge projection of international power with a strong navy and large reach. Coupled with a market that Western countries sought highly, China was definitely one of if not the biggest global power at the time. Of course the Chinese empire saw the other nations as behind and failed to recognize potential wealth in other lands, they disbanded their navy. This coincided with the European colonization of the new world and the discovery of many silver mines in South America, finally allowing European nations to access the Chinese markets (silver was the Chinese currency). Once those mines dried up, there was opium introduced into a chaotic Qing dynasty. Think about what kind of lesson China learned from imperialism. The country went from being at the top in terms of wealth and power to near the bottom because they allowed foreign countries to enter their market pretty much freely. They did not expand their own territories because they saw nothing outside of their borders. Ultimately, they were driven into the ground and invaded by the West and by Japan. How does that apply to China today? You can't do business in China without either the government or involving a Chinese company. China now is fiercely protective of not only its borders but the area surrounding it and there's now economic expansion into Africa. These are all lessons learned because as a country it still remembers how badly they fell. But this is the discussion no one ever wants to have...
Prior to Qing, Ming dynasty China had a huge projection of international power with a strong navy and large reach. Coupled with a market that Western countries sought highly, China was definitely one of if not the biggest global power at the time. Of course the Chinese empire saw the other nations as behind and failed to recognize potential wealth in other lands, they disbanded their navy. This coincided with the European colonization of the new world and the discovery of many silver mines in South America, finally allowing European nations to access the Chinese markets (silver was the Chinese currency). Once those mines dried up, there was opium introduced into a chaotic Qing dynasty. Think about what kind of lesson China learned from imperialism. The country went from being at the top in terms of wealth and power to near the bottom because they allowed foreign countries to enter their market pretty much freely. They did not expand their own territories because they saw nothing outside of their borders. Ultimately, they were driven into the ground and invaded by the West and by Japan. How does that apply to China today? You can't do business in China without either the government or involving a Chinese company. China now is fiercely protective of not only its borders but the area surrounding it and there's now economic expansion into Africa. These are all lessons learned because as a country it still remembers how badly they fell. But this is the discussion no one ever wants to have...
I don't quite understand the hatred for the NYT here either. They have really smart people and thorough researchers working over there. Their reporting is usually first class.
Which it also covered?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-detention-camp.html
You guys have a strange vendetta with the paper. China's rise is absolutely important news to cover.
I feel like many of you don't really understand journalism at times.
A couple bad Op-Eds and the NYT, among other papers, not delivering Twitter-style hot takes in their articles, and the meme embarrassingly gained enough steam around here through repetition.
Also, amusingly, it's evidence that the idea of "right-wing talking points impact left-wing thinking" is true even among those who cite that same concept to criticize others on other topics (i.e. demonization of Nancy Pelosi).
It's funny when you see threads like the Facebook expose, the Trump family tax evasion expose, etc. without a comment on the source, though.
I couldn't deal with the lack of freedoms, but seems like most of the populace there doesn't have a problem with it. I guess it would be helpful if you are an ideal Chinese citizen and had good standing within the government and social credit system.
its an establishment paper with a left wing bias. emphasis on 'establishment'. i don't think it swings far enough left for some people here for it to ie. censor right wing voices for its op-eds, etc.
That was a really good read, can't wait for the next parts.
Seeing the hot takes in this thread suggests to me that many haven't read the article yet, I strongly suggest that you do (at least if you're interested in the subject), it's tone and content are not what you might guess from the title.
Seeing the hot takes in this thread suggests to me that many haven't read the article yet, I strongly suggest that you do (at least if you're interested in the subject), it's tone and content are not what you might guess from the title.