this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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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.
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.
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
The CCP is literally rounding people up, putting them in camps, harvesting their organs, and working them to death. Wouldn't they be the nazi in that story?
I'm referring to literal nazis, it's not a figure of speech.
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.
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.
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.
I don't really know who they are, but it's still important to consider even if some bad actors also bring it up disingenuously. The alt-right likes to call everyone groomers now, that doesn't mean grooming is a convenient smoke-screen that isn't real.
i don't know what you're talking about here. what's important to consider? that criticizing the ccp may be racist? and what does the alt-right calling ppl groomers have to do with the topic? sorry i don't see the connections here.
I'm saying that it's important to consider that just because disingenuous people call attention to something as a way to dismiss your argument, it does not mean it's not real. It just means they know how to dismiss your argument really well.
What does that have to do with the alt-right? Because lately any time someone says that it's not evil to be gay and that pride month isn't some national holiday to turn everyone gay, instead of trying to defend their insane stance they just call you a pedophile or groomer and leave it at that. They don't actually care about pedophiles or groomers, otherwise they'd actually do something about the church or conservative congress members either being investigated for or charged with sex crimes against minors. All that matters is whatever works to shut you up.
dismissing criticism of ccp as sinophobia is not a "dismissing the argument really well", it's just bad faith argumentation
the fact that the alt-right has an agenda when they criticize the ccp, due to political reasons or otherwise, is
if your argument is that there's ppl who criticize genocide due to geopolitical reasons instead of actually caring about the genocide, and that thus, we should not align ourselves with them, and to do so, we should refuse to criticize the genocide...
now if you're saying "there's ppl with an agenda, so you should question their information", fo sho, we should question all sources, biased or not, but the biased sources even more.
however, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't mention problems where we see them, criticize things we think are wrong, or that we should endlessly hesitate about shit and worry about everything we say because, maybe despite the fact that it's very credible, it could have a remote chance of being wrong, and maybe it's better to think that the holocoust may not have happened because maybe we're victimizing the germans and maybe there's a jewish conspiracy to fabricate.. do you see where i'm going? lmao.
ultimately, you're biased, i'm biased, everyone's biased, and i like free speech and will practice it whenever i want, and i invite you to visit !fucktheccp@sh.itjust.works because why not. /out
I feel as if you missed the entire point of what I'm saying to be honest, and I don't know how else to rephrase so that you do so I'm just gonna give up on that. I'll check out the community just for the sake of charitability.
Yeah tbh I didn't very much understand what the point was regarding alt-rights criticizing gays and queers with an agenda, and how you were plugging that into the CCP criticism. I don't personally think that alt-righters doing anything should affect the way I do things cuz why should I let them lead my life, same as commies or any other ideologues. I am me and I do what I want.
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.