Both tbh
American failures are being used to prop up Chinese successes. This is particularly true in urbanism discussions. China is by no means perfect and thinking that they are is harmful to progress.
The USA is less than 5% of the world’s population but has 24% of the world’s prisoners. Who is authoritarian?
Prisoners in the USA produce over $11Bn worth of goods for for-profit corporations unde slave labor. Who has slave labor?
The USA has camps that concentrate native Americans and South Americans into very small space where they die diseases of poverty and neglect. Who has concentration camps?
The US Congress, upon revelations that the US military was spying on every single American citizen by recording every single phone conversation, text message, and all internet traffic, granted retroactive immunity to all the companies that helped the military do this. Who has an unfettered domestic spying apparatus?
The USA produces almost nothing, yet, the per-capita carbon footprint of America is vastly larger than the per-capita carbon footprint of China. Who spews more carbon shamelessly?
The purchasing power of the average Chinese person is higher than the purchasing power of the average American. In 70 years, China lifted 800 million people out of poverty. In those same 70 years, the US has gotten worse on life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality. Who exploits their people more?
The USA sterilized black and brown women well into the 1970s under eugenics programs that they started well before the Third Reich.
Everything you think you know about China has come from a wide array of news sources, all of which publish that exact same political line, and all the opposing viewpoints are crushed before they even make it to the editors. Forbes magazine is part of a media empire built by the fortune of the Forbes who built a financial empire funded by the Forbes who built a railroad empire funded by the Forbes that made his fortune selling opium to China when the British literally forced the Chinese to reverse their laws banning opium at gunpoint. Who controls their media?
Your perspective is so thoroughly saturated with centuries of propaganda that you can’t even imagine the idea that it’s wrong. You literally don’t even know what would constitute evidence that you are wrong.
The mere act of public protest is illegal
What do you mean public protest is illegal. Public protests against the zero-covid policy forced the government to ease up on restrictions. I don’t think a single person was sentenced for that tantrum yet somehow China’s prohibiting protests?
Their entire economy is built on the backs of people who are paid pennies per hour.
Yeah Chinese laborers were paid pennies per hour by mostly Western capitalists (and increasingly internal Chinese capitalists). How is that the government’s fault? Chinese law mandates minimum wage increases so they are trying to do something about it and mostly succeeding.
I don’t know why I bothered to even respond. You’re literally a CCP bot who makes these weird allegations against the CCP to make anti-China people look crazy. Be gone from lemmy and make your 50 cents somewhere else. I banish you.
动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门
Edit: Where are all the haters and doubters now? Never, ever underestimate my banishment magic again. It was specifically designed to counter CCP energy back in the 12th century by my landowning ancestors.
For the record, though, any nation-state that got big did all of that. That is literally what industrialization has more or less always looked like. The US used to run sweatshops and disappear/murder activists of any kind, especially the ones who pushed back against the pennies-an-hour sweatshops. It wasn’t until the 20th century that US courts even started reading the First Amendment to mean the government had an obligation to not fuck you up just for your political beliefs (see this title since that’s a larger historical argument than can fit on Lemmy).
You don’t get social freedom and rights in an industrial society until it hits a very high point of development. This has been true of more or less anywhere.
While we could argue China should have looked for a better way to develop, the United States also helped create an international system in the middle of the 20th century where the only real option was to aggressively industrialize in an even worse way than the US did, or just be subject to outright neocolonialism (and then develop your industry also in a bad way, also likely without rights, and then not have a rounded enough economy to do anything other than be exploited by richer countries), and then, when China decided to just take a heavy state-led path that employed capitalism and tools of standard industrial nation-building to set themselves up as a powerful capitalist nation-state, like they were “supposed” to, Western countries, the US in particular, bought in hard and financed everything they’re now recoiling against.
China’s great sin, in this context (and while I’m being slightly sarcastic there, sure, the way they’re industrializing/running shit is bad), was choosing to use their enormous land-mass, resource base, and population to not just be on the very bottom. If America/the West had wanted to see the world industrialize better and more humanely, they should have tried at literally any point to help the world industrialize better and more humanely. At this point, it’s a little absurd for Westerners to complain a situation they created and financed extensively for decades.
