this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Finally, the answer I wanted. Thank you very much for taking the time to respond, you helped me broaden my view on why things are how they are.
I see the point. Looking at it abstractly as a war between narratives, lies and propaganda, it does make sense. But it does feel like an admission of guilt in the first moment, because why censor when you can make counter-propaganda? But yes, it is logical.
I was just questioning my beliefs there because I felt like I have been conciously lied to by the CPC comrades, which has shocked me, because trust in the communist cause is endless.
EDIT: Still, I very much think that agitating a whole squad of wumaos to try to disintegrate the potential dissident for single post thing is too much
Counter-propaganda runs the risk of putting protest front of mind in the people because you're talking about a protest. It requires constant work to keep it up. And it can engender suspicion more than censorship. In a situation where people are already indoctrinated like in the US, you have to do counter-propaganda, reeducation, or cultural revolution to clear certain things up. But it's a lot easier to not need to do that in the first place, and that's what censorship can sometimes accomplish.
Like Covid, if enough people take the bait and a meme begins to spread, censorship can stop working. In this case counter-propaganda can become the preferred strategy. Something similar happened in China where Covid became so contagious that zero-Covid became too expensive or difficult to keep up. Containment was breached such that it became untenable. In the case of Covid the result was about a million deaths in China. In a lot of cases, these are not small consequences. Moving on from censorship is likely seen as too risky with not enough upside, although this is only my speculation.
So in short words, propaganda makers are lazy, want to work more efficiently, so they censor. Problem is China's image in the liberal west, they use this again as propaganda. endless circle...
It's not just a question of laziness IMO. Censorship can also take a lot of bureaucratic work. But it has a reliability advantage that counter-propaganda does not.
Plus, the domestic situation is more important than what some liberals in the global north think. They will always find a way to hate China if the geopolitical situation calls for it, including funding terrorist organizations to stoke a proxy war to help destabilize China and then blaming China for carrying out a successful and relatively humane counterterrorism campaign. There's no winning with these people. All you can do is your best.
Lazyness as in working more efficiently by working less with same or better outcome
To me, laziness that involves doing a lot of work hardly qualifies as such.
👍
I was just having a conversation about how in western regimes we have a two party system that uses each side to place blame on failures of the state. China as a one party government doesn't have that sort of fail safe built in.
They have full responsibility, rights and obligations as a party, that is, the highest form of class organisation of the proletariat, unity of strength and willpower.