Are you sure? Something tells me that their conclusion that there's nothing worthwhile in a country of 1.4 billion people that covers nearly a quarter of the largest continent on earth, with 5,000 years of history, and incredibly varied ecosystems, architecture, cultures, and landscapes might be biased. But I don't want to be uncharitable.
FunkyStuff
joined 2 months ago
It seems like the user who posted that article makes similar posts attacking China exclusively, day-in and day-out. 4000+ posts in the last year.
This particular post is a summary from a report from a large European think tank that's obviously quite pro-NATO and worthy of skepticism from any anti-imperialist audience. The report itself seems to cast an extremely broad net as to what should count as nefarious Chinese meddling:
However, China’s efforts today are about shaping public opinion at scale. In a wider casting of the net, Chinese FIMI now relies on a busy ecosystem of other actors. For example, Beijing uses research partnerships, business associations, cultural exchanges, diaspora networks and social media influencers—who may or may not recognise their role in communicating CCP narratives. These locally based people and organisations (such as, for example, a Polish influencer talking to Polish audiences) provide familiar cultural and linguistic references and possess legitimacy that Chinese authorities lack. They help embed Beijing’s narratives into debates that, at first glance, may seem unrelated to China, such as the future of European industrial policy, global governance or the economy.
The underlying logic runs as follows: influence the wider information environment first, allow preferred narratives to become familiar and “common sense” in everyday online discourse and then let those narratives travel—with the help of local intermediaries—into mainstream media agendas and, eventually, national politics.
According to this report, a Chinese academic who's just participating in a research program in Europe is part of China's "FIMI" (their buzzword for disinformation/propaganda) efforts. But that, and the examples cited throughout here (except maybe AI which I'm willing to say is a different kind of phenomenon) is just a normal part of a country integrating itself in the globalized world.
If Algerian students start coming to European universities, and Algerian traveling influencers start talking about how cool it is to travel to Algeria, and Algerian artists make media that is consumed in Europe, European people's opinion of Algeria will improve. And I think that it would be perfectly OK for that to happen, and for the governments of Algeria and Europe to try to cultivate that cultural exchange and bringing down of barriers. Same with literally any other country on earth (especially the ones that I'm very critical of, e.g. USA and Israel, because it still is cool for people to be less ignorant, although with the US particularly I think people are already extremely familiar with their culture and it dominates everything).
Why is it any different with China? Why are Chinese people treated with this suspicion? Why are we contributing to sinophobia by acting like it's crazy that young people kinda want to be Chinese?
Is it Chinese propaganda that living conditions and future prospects in the Western world are really bleak and young people are coping by imagining how much better life would be in the biggest country in the world that doesn't seem to be suffering from those problems at quite the same level?
It's not just a TikTok thing, though. And isn't the fact that TikTok has gotten as large as it has (despite its current status of being run under US oligarchs for US users), and how many USAmericans decided to start using RedNote when it initially was banned in the US, also evidence to the claim that China is having a big cultural moment?
I can at least say anecdotally that random people I've met who aren't politically involved have been getting more into specifically Chinese cultural products. Games, movies, etc. And among my inner friend group (who, admittedly, are definitely much more inclined to support China politically, not just culturally) we make jokes about Chinamaxxing too.
Also, there is no equivalence between the relationship between TikTok and Chinese culture as a whole versus YouTube and Google products. "TikTok is to China as YouTube is to Google products" is not valid because TikTok is to China as YouTube is to the United States. And while checking how people feel about a country based on trends on social media wouldn't be the ideal way to gauge things (polls are obviously better) it still seems reasonable.
Yeah you're exactly right, as I said we live in completely different and irreconcilable realities. The fact of the matter is, given the option between sitting down with people like myself (Hexbear user) who have extremely different views, or just hitting the button that makes us all go away, the vast majority of people will just hit the button. It's not really even a liberal thing, people behave that way regardless of ideology (although I think there's something particular about how atomized and depersonalizing the current state of social media is that makes that kind of behavior more common).
But you see my point — you're perfectly within your rights to think that everyone who's a socialist/Marxist/whatever has gone too far or whatever, and not wish to interact with them. Replicate similar preferences across a whole community, though, and it ends up isolating them and creating the situation that the root comment of this thread is lamenting. We're just little echo chambers siloed off from each other because the cognitive dissonance of experiencing each other's versions of reality is too much.
It’d also be nice to see a few more viewpoints.
Unfortunately, hasty defederation has made this impossible. It's too easy for people in a community to ask for defederation instead of confronting other people's viewpoints. Not to mention that when very contentious topics are brought up and there are whole communities full of people who dedicate a lot of time to reading about and thinking about those topics, it can create a poor situation where that community suddenly starts an outburst of too many disagreeing viewpoints. Compound that with the extremely fractured state of information and media where people live in completely different realities. It gets to be too much, and it's exceedingly difficult to have a civil conversation when the gulf between 2 communities is so large.
I mean, yeah
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf
tldr build parallel power structures under the purview of a revolutionary socialist organization outside of the current bourgeois democracy. Strengthen them and grow them out as long as the bourgeois state allows, then in a moment of crisis seize state power to oversee a transition from capitalism to socialism.
There's also the anarchist strategy which is similar in essence but with the crucial difference of laying out the parallel power structures horizontally such that no central power nor state organs exist.
Bernie is a Zionist and not a socialist at all. He sucks and if he was in a general election in 2028 I probably would still vote for the PSL candidate because I don't live in a swing state.
But he absolutely was screwed out of the 2020 nomination in a concerted effort from the Democratic Party establishment to get anyone but Bernie to win.
Elizabeth Warren stayed in the race until Super Tuesday to act as a spoiler while all the other moderate candidates dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. The media consistently downplayed Bernie's early lead.
Pete Buttigieg had shady connections to the owners of the app used to conduct the Iowa Caucus. That same Iowa Caucus held "votes" that were based on how loud the audience's cheers for each candidate were.
The media buried the Tara Reade story (CNN even took down an old episode of their radio show where Tara Reade's mother called asking for help because her daughter had been assaulted by her boss who was a politician in DC).
Recognizing the reality of the situation, calling it out as a shit sandwich, and encouraging others to act in the way that reduces harm the most with an actual chance to succeed
Yeah I agree, more people gotta join Hamas
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-comes-to-power
There are some misconceptions about how Hitler came to power. It is important to understand that:
Hitler did not seize power in a coup; and Hitler was not directly elected to power.
Rather, Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power through Germany’s legal political processes. According to the 1919 German constitution, the position of chancellor was appointed by the president.
Guess Germans should've voted harder then. Oh wait, there was a Communist Party who attempted a revolution before Hitler came to power and they failed because the Freikorps killed them? Well I wonder who started the Freikorps...
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You're right that the grass always looks greener on the other side. I'm sure a large number of the Gen Z people who post Chinamaxxing memes only do it in jest and/or wouldn't do it if they knew a bit more of what they would have to give up to live in China (especially if they're queer, but otherwise moreso in the realm of access to cheap foreign goods that people in imperialist countries get than "free speech" which anyone on TikTok of all platforms has already learned is never guaranteed in a capitalist country). Yet Western countries seem to be backsliding on those aspects, while the older generation in China that's stricter and more conservative is aging out of politics. I think you don't have to be pollyannaish to think that in ~20 years, China will have surpassed the largest issues you might have with it, but it gets harder and harder to think Western countries will do the same.
Quite literally anyone in China is capable of grabbing a VPN and have unsupervised access to the same internet as you and me. The so-called "great firewall" only exists as a means of making it more difficult for Chinese internet users to patronize Western (mostly American) internet services. If there was no firewall, companies like Meta and Google would have access to the Chinese market and it would be hard for local Chinese companies like WeChat or BiliBili to grow.