(Preferably with sources)
I've overcorrected from "China bad" to "China is infallible." I know that's incorrect, but it's hard to decipher US propaganda from actual issues.
In discussions in the past, providing a positive counterpoint is plenty, but since more folks are already realizing the narrative about China is incorrect I would like to have more nuanced discussions where I can present both praise and criticism. I think it's also important that we don't end up in a USSR situation where Communism is synonymous with the actions of a single country.
- I know they're trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that's very bad.
- I'm unsure of what the internal restrictions look like in general
- I saw that the "social credit score" was a small experiment in one province that got way overblown
- Great firewall...? I know it's a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
- Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?
- Are they monitoring everyone? "You can't monitor 1.5 billion people" idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely
- Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China's own capacity
Are there others? I'm happy if you also include justification for their policies, but I do want to know where you genuinely think they're making mistakes.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Drug policy. The war on drugs is bad. It’s bad when America does it, it’s bad when China does it.
I understand the history, in particular regarding opium. That doesn’t make it acceptable in a modern context, the opium wars don’t justify draconian policies on weed in 2026. Especially given that tobacco use is so prevalent while tobacco is more harmful than many other drugs.
America's war on drugs was a campaign to imprison and enslave minorities. China's war on drugs is nowhere as bad. Although they should relax restrictions on less harmful drugs.
Yeah also alcohol, arguably the most overall destructive drug in human history. Drug prohibition is 99% just cultural brainworms all over the world.
Not sure if it is cultural brainworms as much as it is colonial trauma
Trauma can turn to brainworms too, the material conditions of China today are vastly different than they were during the opium crisis.
I guess but when I think of drug policy brain worms I think of "the US criminalized drugs because of racism" which is much different than "China criminalized drugs because of a widespread colonial campaign to get chinese people addicted to drugs"
Sure it's different and you can (and should) say one is more understandable than the other but neither are really rational. I'm obviously not going to campaign in China for them to legalize weed or whatever but I can't really say it's a good idea to be so repressive.