• pineapple@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Waiting for Liberals to actually have a thought out response to the excellent resources the MLs of this community provide.

  • wakko@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    16
    ·
    16 hours ago

    China is still the world’s leading polluter, in a time where those so-called “scientists” most definitely know what they’re doing contributing to global climate change like they are. No country is innocent, but making no attempt to not be first isn’t a defensible policy position.

  • Loaf@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    20
    ·
    edit-2
    2 hours ago

    Ohh, so I get to pick which awful country is better? Cool choices.

    Edit: aaaaaaand the tankies show up.

        • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          11 hours ago

          China has democracy. Just not bourgeois liberal democracy. The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local levels are directly elected, and then these representatives from around the country elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Also due to the nature of things the vast majority of representatives are among those directly elected by the people. You should research things before you just say things. And we’re very happy with our system. Even Harvard puts the approval rating around 95%.

          • pie_enjoyer@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            7
            ·
            10 hours ago

            Perception != reality

            Functional democracy needs those things:

            • Opposition
            • Free media
            • Open voting
            • Free and fair electricions
            • Same law for everyone
            • Civil liberties

            As far as I’m aware, China doesn’t have any of those things.

            • Riverside@reddthat.com
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              24 minutes ago

              Functional democracy needs those things:

              No, nominal western liberal democracy pretends to have that checklist (I could go into details on how there’s none of that in the West). functional democracy means that, regardless of the mechanisms, the results are what people want. In this way, China is a lot more democratic functionally than what we have in the west by all polls of satisfaction with policy.

              Turns out that when you have a powerful minority capitalist class with diametrically opposed interests to those of the majority, the majority of policy is passed against our interests!

            • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              10 hours ago

              Perception != reality

              Correct. Which makes it strange that you ignored everything I explained in this reply to you and just went back to the same checklist again.

              Functional democracy needs: Opposition

              No. That is the liberal electoral model, not the universal definition of democracy. Democracy means political authority comes from the people and that they participate in governance.

              China’s system does this through whole-process people’s democracy. People directly elect local People’s Congress deputies, those bodies elect higher congresses, and the system scales upward to the National People’s Congress. Most representatives come from those directly elected levels. Officials advance after years working through those layers.

              It is a different institutional design. Pretending it does not exist because it is not your familiar Western party circus is not an argument.

              Free media

              Again you should read Michael Parenti on “inventing reality.” In the West media is not magically independent. It is owned by a tiny number of massive corporations and billionaires. Those owners decide what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives disappear.

              Calling that “free” while pretending ownership power does not shape information is extremely naive.

              Open voting / Free elections

              China holds direct elections at the grassroots level where the majority of representatives originate. Higher levels are elected by the bodies below them. Again, a hierarchical representative system instead of a national campaign spectacle.

              Different design. Not absence.

              Same law for everyone

              This one is especially funny coming from systems where billionaires routinely dodge consequences while corporations treat fines as operating costs.

              Civil liberties

              China prioritizes social stability and development as core measures of legitimacy. Over forty years it lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and massively expanded infrastructure, education, and living standards.

              You may not like that model. Fine. But dismissing it with slogans while ignoring the outcomes is not serious.

              As far as I’m aware

              Yes, that part was obvious. Your entire argument is basically “it doesn’t look like my system therefore it isn’t democracy,” plus a “citation” from the eagle burger institute of goodness democracy index in your other comment made it abundantly clear.

      • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        9 hours ago

        My Chinese friends living in New Zealand as dual citizens are afraid to criticize the Chinese government even in private online conversations. That says a lot, I think.

        • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          10 hours ago

          And my aunt living in alabama is scared of muslim inflltrators, sometimes people worry about things that are fictional and/or unfathomably stupid

        • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          12 hours ago

          That says a lot, I think.

          It certainly does but mostly about them lmao. If you ever end up living in China you’ll come to realise criticizing and debating about the government is like the second most popular conversation topic. We love it, it’s almost a national pass time.

        • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          12 hours ago

          Well for a start 996 is illegal so I don’t think I need to justify that.

          And censorship can be annoying but is far less pervasive than you people imagine. The amount that is censored is probably on par with that of the western world, China is just open about where the lines are. Even then it’s entirely confined to the digital domain/media you can still talk about whatever you want which becomes very clear if you ever get a taxi lmao. Some amount of censorship is good anyway, fascists should be censored for example.

        • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          edit-2
          16 hours ago

          Previously:

          No one will deny that China has censorship. We do as well, but it’s more subtle, covert, informal, and sophisticated, which Michael Parenti and Noam Chomsky have explained in great detail. China’s censorship is largely out in the open. It’s made clear where the lines are. The press freedom in bourgeois democracies, A.K.A. social democracies, is the freedom of the media owned by the capitalist class and by the government, a government which is run by the capitalist class.

          “996” was never legal nor pervasive, and the state cracked down on it years ago. Western media will always make a mountain out of a molehill to maximally smear China, because the Cold War never ended.