• upperleft@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • scrollbars@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • socialjusticewizard@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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.