Ten Chinese air force aircraft entered Taiwan's air defence zone on Wednesday accompanying five Chinese warships engaged in "combat readiness" patrols, the island's defence ministry said, the second such incursion this week.
    • randint@lemm.ee
      148·
      1 year ago

      Expressing how you feel about China is fine. Calling someone else a “paranoid weirdo” is not. That’s just plain rude and disrespectful.

      Edit: I feel like I should make it extra clear that I am not defending myself because several people think that I’m whining for myself. The one called a “paranoid weirdo” was not me.

      • brain_in_a_box [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        615·
        1 year ago

        Insisting that everyone who disagrees with you is a paid agent of spooky foreigners is being a paranoid weirdo. Not to mention, plain rude and disrespectful.

        • randint@lemm.ee
          54·
          1 year ago

          What do you mean by “me”? I wasn’t even the one being disrespected. I was merely speaking out for someone else. BTW no one on this thread was ever disrespectful to the 1.3 billion Chinese people. They were disrespectful to their government.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
          33·
          1 year ago

          There’s 1.3 billion people in this thread who are supporting the PRC? There aren’t even 1.3 billion people in China supporting China. How is talking about all the nonsense in this thread being disrespectful to anyone, let alone 1.3 billion people?

            • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
              31·
              1 year ago

              You are cherry picking.

              For the survey team, there are a number of possible explanations for why Chinese respondents view the central government in Beijing so favorably. According to Saich, a few factors include the proximity of central government from rural citizens, as well as highly positive news proliferated throughout the country.

              This result supports the findings of more recent shorter-term surveys in China, and reinforces long-held patterns of citizens reporting local grievances to Beijing in hopes of central government action. “I think citizens often hear that the central government has introduced a raft of new policies, then get frustrated when they don’t always see the results of such policy proclamations, but they think it must be because of malfeasance or foot-dragging by the local government,” said Saich. 

              Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”

              Again, the U.S. reveals quite a different story. “American trust surveys over time show a clear distinction between low levels of trust towards the federal government, but a strong belief and faith in the power of local government — at the most local level, those positions may be filled by part-time volunteers who are a part of your everyday life,” said Cunningham. This dichotomy is highlighted by a 2017 Gallup poll, where 70 percent of U.S. respondents had a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in local government.

              Saich contends that the lack of trust in local governments in China is due to the fact that they provide the vast majority of services to the Chinese people. This trust deficit was compounded by the 1994 tax reforms, which garnered a substantially larger share of total national tax revenues for the central government. Local governments, despite being faced with declining revenues, were still on the hook for providing the bulk of public services throughout China.

              “Local governments were caught between dropping tax revenue and rising expenditures,” Cunningham said. “Many local governments then had to turn to ad-hoc extra budgetary fees to close the budget gap. I think that has consistently undermined trust at the local level.”

              The national government leaves the local government responsible for providing services, fucks them over, then convinces the people that it’s the local governments fault because they control the media. Of course they approve of the national government, though not the local at all so…

              Also, a large part of the approval that this article states is because most of the people of China “are only a generation removed from an era of chronic food shortages and significant social and economic instability.” Its easy to improve people’s lives if they’re starting from a shitty position. We’ll see how that changes now that they’re playing in the big leagues.

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                291·
                1 year ago

                Its easy to improve people’s lives if they’re starting from a shitty position. We’ll see how that changes now that they’re playing in the big leagues.

                When’s capitalism planning to do that for everyone in the global south then? If you remove china from the statistics on poverty alleviation poverty has been almost stagnant for the last 50 years. China is responsible for almost all of the vaunted “improvement” in poverty. And they’ve done it without bombing dozens of countries per decade!

              • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                271·
                1 year ago

                So you were really going to tell someone they’re cherrypicking and quoting a survey that said only 11% of people were “very satisfied” and just hope no one looked through your wall of text, huh?

                China just went through a period where in a single generation they eliminated more poverty than any other country in history (save the USSR). Why is it so hard for you to believe that children born subsistence farmers would have a positive view of their government when they’re middle classed and middle aged?

                • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Wall of text? Why link an article if you aren’t going to read it? The wall of text was a quote from the article.

                  I literally included your reasoning in my comment. Why did you comment?

                  • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                    82·
                    1 year ago

                    1. Why did you accuse me of not reading when my ability to humiliate you for being a GUTLESS FUCKING LIAR hinged on my ability to point out something in the middle of that text? Are you stupid?

                    2. Why are you accusing me of not reading and then making it clear that you aren’t reading well enough to know who the fuck you’re talking to? Are you stupid?

                    3. Out of all the people who replied to you and humiliated you for being an unread and incurious LIB including myself, why are you ignoring literally everything everyone said and clinging to just three words of only my comment “wall of text”?

                    Take your L

              • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                241·
                1 year ago

                What I see is a lot of cope

                You said there weren’t 1.3 billion people in China who supported the PRC. Harvard says you were wrong. We’re not talking about the minutiae of Chinese governance here, we’re talking about foreign policy.

                PS: If you dig into the numbers (page 3 of the report, aka page 6 in the PDF), 70% of people are fairly or very satisfied with their township governments, so don’t be taken in by the Harvard cope–it really is bullshit.

              • randint@lemm.ee
                21·
                1 year ago

                I advise you to not waste your time arguing with these people. It’s a total waste of time. You can’t win an argument with stubborn people. Don’t be like me who wasted hours arguing with hexbear tankies. Just downvote them then go somewhere else on Lemmy.

          • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            281·
            1 year ago

            There’s 1.3 billion people in this thread who are supporting the PRC?

            spongebob-i-fucking-love I fucking love pretending to be stupid when I’m called out for my chauvinism towards one eighth of the human race

            • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
              21·
              1 year ago

              Chauvinism? Wrong word choice. It’s chauvinism when you go around supporting one group from a position of prejudice, not when you attack some group, which wasn’t happening anyway. Questioning if something is happening organically isn’t the same as saying it’s bad. Skepticism is usually a virtue. Don’t accept everything you see and are told, and don’t accept that it’s happening by accident.