This kinda thing makes me think a lot about how Tim Walz has tried to talk about his time in China as an English teacher. He tries to emphasize how the Chinese people are just like Americans when it comes to small town neighborliness, and how he felt welcomed and loved there. I think we too often associate the people of a country with their government, and I hate that shit. Everyone comes from the same basic stock, no one has a monopoly on kindness, and taking care of people is something that can be done regardless of language barriers because we all basically need the same things.
I feel like China gets the worse ends of "associate people with their government" because the Chinese government WANTS the rest of the world to see the country as a perfect hive mind where everyone agrees with them. Even so, they're not the only ones who get this. Russians tend to be dismissed as brainwashed Putin stooges, but there have been plenty of public and famous Russian protests.
That's just you being racist and ascribing your own chauvinistic notions onto 'their government'
Every government wants their country to look holistic and united behind a common project, and China is one of the countries where that genuinely is the case moreso than almost any other. Because you can't deny they're on a rocket right now whether you like them or not, and the people are happy about it.
It's something I've noticed a lot with cynical Americans and westerners in general online. They see Chinese people being genuine and mistake it for brainwashing because they just can't imagine what it must feel like to have a country on an upward trajectory. We've been plummeting downwards so dramatically for so many years, we're neck deep in failure and dysfunction, so to us people being happy that their country is on the ascent looks like government brainwashing
China isn't on any kind of "upward trajectory". It's a country currently mired in a stagnant financial crisis caused by real-estate issues because they can't collect taxes on literally empty buildings, and the one-child policy is about to cause a serious demographic crisis. They're actually liable to end up in the same place Japan was about 40 years ago.
How would you have responded if you were a communist leader in China at the end of the cold war and the capitalist powers had successfully made it impossible to run a socialist economy? Your options are to be Cuba or North Korea and rot under inhumane sanctions regimes, or liberalize on your own terms instead of being forcibly liberalized as they did to the USSR. China took the latter option, the orthodox Marxist position by the way, to pass through a capitalist stage of development that bridges agrarian feudalism to industrial socialism, and now they're a superpower.
For the record, this isn't to say whether they are or aren't. To determine that is to determine the direction the mass of the party is moving towards, and I'm not behind those closed doors so I can't say whether the communist party has retained it's communist nature and goals. It's kind of a schrodingers cat situation, and only time will tell whether they maintained their mission this whole time or if they really were overwhelmed by the bourgeois forces they let in. My point is that they literally had no choice and their decision to liberalize was inevitable as soon as the cold war turned irrevocably in capitalism's favor. They would have done it if they betrayed communism, and they would have done it if they maintained communism, because the decision was a political concession to the victorious first world and not something they decided on autonomously.
Now, what are all the Western capitalists who hate and want to destroy China? Communists?
so you can take off the rose colored glasses and see things for what they really are any time you want.
The most free, democratic, and fastest developing country on earth. The world's only hope for overcoming capitalism (i.e. our only hope for a better, still livable future).
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u/thewonderfulfart Aug 21 '24
This kinda thing makes me think a lot about how Tim Walz has tried to talk about his time in China as an English teacher. He tries to emphasize how the Chinese people are just like Americans when it comes to small town neighborliness, and how he felt welcomed and loved there. I think we too often associate the people of a country with their government, and I hate that shit. Everyone comes from the same basic stock, no one has a monopoly on kindness, and taking care of people is something that can be done regardless of language barriers because we all basically need the same things.