this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
268 points (92.4% liked)
sh.itjust.works Main Community
7584 readers
17 users here now
Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
I'm not a tankie and have no love for the government of China (or any government) but there is an extent to which criticism of China is deployed by xenophobes and nazis as a kind of socially acceptable rallying call or dog whistle. So, I'm all for criticizing China, but remember the allegory of the crustpunk bar
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522
I've always loved this allegory, but it can be applied to redfash as much as it can to xenophobes.
Thank you for posting that link, it was a good story.
There are plenty of awful regimes around the world, but China is unique in how powerful and dangerous it is.
In particular, if China were to invade Taiwan, which it has a stated intention of doing, then the TSMC chip fabs—the only place on Earth capable of mass-producing modern electronic circuits—will almost certainly be destroyed in the fighting, and that will cause a global economic depression that'll make 2008 look like a minor inconvenience. That's a huge global threat.
There's a crazy amount of sinophobia on Reddit, but let's be clear, the people who fervently defend the Chinese government are being just as disingenuous.
It's not sinophobia to criticize the CCP. I haven't seen anyone saying anything about the Chinese people. What's more common is criticizing the CCP and its actions as the ruling party of China. I don't think there's generalized "sinophobia" as you claim.
The commenter above made it pretty clear that criticism of the government, i.e. the CCP isn't the issue. The issue at hand is that there most definitely is casual racism on some very popular subreddits that are tolerated more than I'd like. Redditors have blindspots, just like anyone do, but their particular blindspots include casually racist attitudes towards Chinese people. I hope that you're just lucky in the types of threads and subs you frequent, but I 1000% have seen more than just casual sinophobia that had nothing to do with criticizing their government.
idk maybe i am indeed very lucky cuz i have not seen that, and instead have seen a lot of criticism against ccp being re-purposed as "sinophobia" by the genzedong community.
notice, for example, how we ended up talking about racism in a thread about criticizing the CCP. coincidence? i think not.
Yeah idk what could possibly be the motivator for that, I mean it's not like they're currently in the middle of any genocides right? Or posturing about invading a certain island neighbour? Nah no way, they'd never do that!
As i stated: "The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism"
There is a point at which the criticism becomes a weird fetish though, and that is something that was a common occurrence on reddit. Likely moreso tied to nationalist politics and rabble rousing foreign policy that I personally have a disdain for.
As someone who lives in China, I’ll tell you your perspective on that isn’t wrong. People abroad too easily conflate what the Chinese govt. dues with Chinese people and “China”. Their concerns are all valid, but people grossly overestimate how much impact regular Chinese folks can have on their own govt.
How happy are people in the US with their govt and how much control they have over it? Not enough right, well the Chinese have even less. They’re even less engaged, though, oddly, but because the stakes for caring and speaking up are so high. People abroad probably rightly wish the average citizen constrained their own govt more, but the reality is they don’t have a way to do it, so they just focus on daily life. Also, they are in a misinformation bubble like crazy.
I think this is the best take in the thread.
Also, as someone who's from there, it's just pretty weird seeing folks on there saying "f the ccp" to each other, sometimes adding a "but not the chinese people tho". Like what is the point of yall repeating this shit to each other. It makes me feel like I'm sort of excluded, and I think I cannot really have a more in-depth conversation with those people because I do not think they will really understand my situation and the world around me.
You’ve really hit the nail on the head.
Do the anti CCPers really care about people? Or is it just a hate boner/we love freedom meme?
The way it comes off it’s like there really just isn’t any depth too it and it seems really performative with little real substance.
Having been subscribed to r/hongkong for the past few years, it was like seeing the government quash the voice of the people in real time. 😢
Aye everything about Hong Kong is and was sad, I love that place so much.
Preoccupation perhaps? I'd say a lot of people on the have a preoccupation with US-focused criticism. Though I agree it makes sense that countries like the US and China garner a lot more attention than say, Czechia or Kyrgisistan.
It's the extent of it that can get weird. It's everywhere. A thread about a knife attack in France is not an appropriate place to dunk on American shooting statistics.
I will say that I am personally more critical of the US, as I am an American, and therefore I feel personally responsible for the actions of my own government (even though I realistically have no personal control over it).
It's the largest nation in the world, I think that tends to bring a lot of attention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're somehow implying that being an anti-ccp "fanatic" is basically crazy, and that people should reconsider their position... because... ? hate boner for china? what does disliking the CCP have to do with "hating china"?
You can dislike the CCP without hating China, or being fanatical about it. There are people that have trouble with it, though. As an example you could say that the CCP sponsors campaigns of corporate espionage on a large scale to steal technology from other countries. That one is pretty uncontroversial. But some people have trouble preventing themselves from taking it further and making generalizations about how creative the country's citizens are, as an example.
I haven't seen that. First time I see a suggestion such as that you're mentioning, that the Chinese could be uncreative. I read lots of Chinese books all the time and if anything I'd say they're more creative than western authors in many respects.
Exactly. Chinese capitalism is currently threatening American capitalism, so American media and american society more generally demonizes it. China is willing to offer cheaper loans to 3rd world countries than any western countries and banks like the IMF. Of course, this is still exploitative imperialism, but it is slightly less bad than the west. China. Of course, China treats its workers terribly, but it at least tries to reinvest the surplus it takes from those workers into domestic production and infrastructure. Tankies love to depict China as ontologically good because it opposes american hegemony and has a rapidly growing economy. They ignore its imperialism and domestic exploitation. Redditors, American exceptionalists, and their ilk depict China as ontologically evil, a threat to world peace, the most totalitarian country imaginable. They of course ignore the comparably bad conditions of America's puppet states and its domestic prison system. The reality is much more boring. Two capitalist nation states are fighting over their shares of the world market.
I'm not an American but it's hard to equate these two countries. While I don't love the US, you can't deny that the CCP literally runs concentration camps...
What would you call the places where the US detains immigrants? What would you call the enhanced interrogation techniques the US uses in guantanamo bay and CIA blacksites? What would you call the prisons where the US forces people to work without pay?
The US has used heavily militarized police and even tanks to crush civil unrest. The US doesn't just threaten to invade a neighboring island (like china threatens to invade taiwan), the US actually has invaded neighboring islands such as Cuba, Haiti (multiple times), the Dominican Republic, etc. None of this justifies any of China's actions, but it is important to know that nominally democratic nations can also act authoritarian.
I tentatively agree. The key to avoiding whataboutism is to make clear that you're willing to call out abuses and human rights violations for both sides.
The US also runs concentration campus, has slave labor, forced sterilization, torture, genocide, violently repressive police, persecution of religious minorities, etc. etc. etc. Hence why it's a red flag (no pun intended) when people in the west have A Lot To Say about China and just China.
::slaps top of any country:: you can fit so many human rights violations in this bad boy
(I have a lot more complaints about the US than China, but that's because I live in the US, not because I think other imperial powers are exempt from criticism.)
We do too. I'm sorry, but just because ours are callous and depressingly bureaucratic instead of passionate and angry, not having the intention of reeducating anyone, it doesn't excuse the fact that even though Trump is no longer president we have refugee children dying in cramped cages, women and children being violated by ICE agents, and other human rights violations constantly and ongoing.