this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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It's very first-world of you that access to garbage like Reddit or Twitter is apparently more important than the single greatest reduction of poverty in human history—and even more typical that you are either ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the hundred years of precedent that says China is utterly correct in believing the West would abuse the lowering of the Great Firewall to try and foment reactionary revolt.
There are several countries that underwent a massive reduction in poverty and modernization over the same time period without having a Great Firewall and massive restriction of speech on the internet. South Korea and Taiwan come to mind. Started as highly impoverished dictatorships, now are wealthy and healthy democracies.
Occupied Korea is most certainly no more an example of a healthy democracy than the USA is.
Yeah that's not why the great firewall exists
If anything, access to Wikipedia and Youtube and Stackoverflow and the like almost certainly make economic growth easier, as your citizenry can access the sum total of global knowledge at their fingertips without a firewall in their way.
They're pointing out how weird the focus on internet access is. It's a child's view of the world.
Weirdo.