Marxism-leninism has routinely been shown to not work. China doesn’t have a command economy or worker-controlled capital. If China’s people were free, they could access the internet. Furthermore, how is secret police a tenet of the Chinese freedom I’ve had shoved down my throat by Marxist-Leninists? Furthermore, how are the Uyghur people bourgeois?
Let me simplify this. A lot of people in this thread were justifying oppression saying it was for the people. I’m not saying that Muslims are bourgeois, I’m saying that the Uyghur genocide is unjustified as they’re not antagonized to the proletariat, but rather an ethnic group.
Virtually everything you state is false. China does not technically have a command economy, but this is not necessary for socialism in the first place. China engages in plenty of economic planning, far more so than capitalist states. That is precisely why China can build 45,000 km of unprofitable high-speed rail in less than 20 years and install more solar generation capacity than all other countries combined in 2023.
Industries in China are also far more worker-controlled than they are in capitalist states. Estimates for the level of state-ownership range from 20-40%. Much of the remaining “private sector” is composed of worker cooperatives. Search up “Farmer specialized cooperatives”, which comprise of more than 100 million households (not people, households).
As for the Uyghur thing, even western media has largely abandoned that point since it was too easy to see that no one was being killed. I mean, you can buy a plane ticket to Xinjang right now and see for yourself. Now the smarter ones have downgraded it to “cultural genocide”. In a few years, when the Uyghur language and culture will still be around just fine, they will quiet drop the whole topic.
Have you not heard of the great firewall. Do you think Nike and iPhone factories are coops? Furthermore genocide does not explicitly have to be killing civilians. Xi did things such as forcefully reeducate children, force Muslims to eat pork, and forcefully sterilize them, thereby making them and their culture die out.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China
I’m sorry that some comrades here have been dismissive toward you, but you seriously need to educate yourself more on a subject before you speak on it thinking that you have understood it. There are plenty of resources that the Lemmygrad community can offer you to further your knowledge about China if you leave your preconceptions at the door and come at this with some humility.
Yeah, when i wrote that there were still fairly few substantial responses compared to mocking ones. But by now i see they’ve been offered plenty of good, comprehensive sources of information, and now that they’re banned and can’t waste as much time saying ignorant things here maybe they will have more time to read the material that they’ve been so helpfully provided with. Probably not though…they’re probably allergic to reading as most libs are…
Whether it prevents bourgeois propaganda or western propaganda, it’s not worth it when the people aren’t free. I also find it to be very opposite to Marx implying that the Chinese government wouldn’t try to control their people if they could.
Here’s a paper covering the topic from a few years ago.. It goes through the history, motivations, and effects of the Golden Shield Project. It also briefly covers the opinions from people on both sides of the firewall and tries to remain neutral as it’s a research communication. Download the PDF to read.
What the paper doesn’t cover deeply is what information the CPC has chosen to censor and why. Materials subversive to the stability of their country. From whom? Of what nature? What historical precedent exists that would have made them want to do this in the late nineties?
Exploring the history of interactions between socialist countries and liberal countries will shed light on this. I’d also suggest looking into examples of censorship in western liberal countries and contrasting them with censorship in China.
Your reply pointed to a lot of assumptions from the Western liberal perspective, which is actively antagonistic and hostile towards China. If the only perspective you ever consume is from states who consider China a threat to their power, then of course you will hold a negative bias towards China.
The more you study, the better you will understand. If you approach the topic wanting to demonize China, you won’t learn anything. There’s a lot more to unpack here including Western media bias and leftist theory beyond Marx. This is just a stepping stone to understanding.
If you don’t know the purpose and goals of the project that the firewall is part of, then you don’t understand why China has a firewall.
Tell me, are you really free or do you assume you are free because you’ve always been told you are free and you’ve only ever heard one definition of freedom? To me, the illusion of freedom of speech, the illusion of freedom of choice, and being told to choose between a handful of shitheads who don’t represent or act according to how I would like to see our society run is not freedom. It’s just authoritarianism from a different source. It’s who has power that matters to me. I’d rather be held accountable by my peers than by a bunch of chucklefucks who only see me as an expendable resource.
This weak ass liberal may not be reading anything, but I am eating up all these sources. Thank you, everyone. Also, God damn it, now I have hours more of reading any to do. At least I’ve covered some of these topics before, so some of them might be review.
Marx said that the state was inherently oppressive. But I guess I missed the part where he said that it doesn’t matter if the party brands itself as communist.
If you bake a cake and you have this magnificent idea in your head; do you gather all the ingredients and then presto magic you have a beautiful cake in front of you? Or is there some sort of process that’s missing? Some sort of transitionary period?
There’s a reason it’s called Marxist-Leninism too, older works can be superseded or reanalyzed by newer works in a more refined context.
You call me wrong, yet don’t bring a source to debunk me. You call me smug, yet speak of me as if I’m an animal. I will say the Communist tendency to hate liberals is why this movement has yet to succeed in the US. You seem incapable of knowing that liberals are just more mild versions of communists and if we want marxist movements we must move within a big tent party, since we don’t have large enough numbers to do anything within any democratic country.
First, I am a communist. Second, I’m not victim blaming, I’m saying that we can’t attain any progress in a democracy if we dont work with liberals, as we dont have have the number. I’m not saying “become liberal”, I’m saying that we need to work within a big teny party to attain power. While I do disagree with you, both as an ML and your specific viewpoint, I will not deny that I’d rather have communists I disagree with than the us’ spiral into fascism.
Also, you shouldn’t complain about sourcing your arguments. Even if you’re not arguing with me, you will argue with other people who, whether you’re correct or incorrect, will demand sources.
I don’t get how it’s controversial to say that communists are not the majority of people, and therefore can’t act on our own. If we were an established party and didn’t need liberals, I wouldn’t be saying that we should work with liberals. But if we alienate ourselves from liberals and vote for our own candidates, who won’t win due to our small membership, it will be the right that wins, thereby pushing our progress back.
Hmm, voting. I think you need to read up on Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder by V.I. Lenin. In fact, even State and Revolution and maybe even What is to be done? (I haven’t completed this one yet).
It seems like you’re rusty on what revolutionary socialism is.
I still don’t get how it’s controversial to say that to gain power, we need numbers, and we agree with liberals more than fascists, and therefore to get power to us and away from fascists we should unify until we can create a revolution, or a party that will be voted in.
Is it that hard to not treat me as if you’re a natgeo narrator. You’re not debunking the libs by not engaging with them, you just alienate your comrades who don’t agree with you on everything.
I’m going to stop now because you’ve also been chasing your tail, not engaging with my arguments, but rather calling me a lib because I disagree with you. You would call Marx a lib if he were alive today. Also, why do you treat libs as people below you, have you not thought of the idea that this could be why they disagree with you?
Don’t conflate liberals and the right. Liberals don’t actively try to fuck over workers like rightists are. Further, it doesn’t matter what liberals were 100 years ago, do you think Biden is as bad as Trump?
Liberalism only appears on the left if your political spectrum extends from “capitalism, but the poor get some scraps” to “capitalism, but the poor don’t get scraps”.
Liberals literally do fuck over the workers, the very structure they maintain, capitalism, is the exploitation of workers.
By voting for socialist leaders who won’t get elected, you allow the right to get elected and thereby deny them those scraps. And I think the homeless would rather have some scraps than none. Also, when in a contemporary democracy, this is the spectrum, no one else would get elected.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the state in capitalism. It’s not just by chance that the state has represented the interests of the capitalists, despite them being a tiny minority, since 1776.
The state giving more scraps isn’t a response to voters wanting it, if the state represented the people, we wouldn’t have capitalism. It’s a response to a threat to capitalism, a sort of safety valve.
But on the subject of electoralism, Biden got elected and had both houses. He did fuckall, is bombing yemen, and facilitating a genocide in Israel. If you cannot punish a politician for all that, your interests do not even begin to enter the equation.
Plenty of MLs will engage with you patiently. It just gets very annoying when you guys come in swinging with easily debunked or out of context factoids. Remember, this is an internet forum, not an organization of professionals.
Freedom of a populace is not measured by access to the Internet but rather by what their government does to improve their material conditions, such as housing. I support the freedom to live inside a house, not the freedom to be homeless after a 1000$ misfortune, like in the U.S.
I personally view it as that if you can’t allow people to see other viewpoints, then material conditions don’t matter. As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, the person’s ability to choose for themself is more important than an alleged better living condition. Furthermore, I see that if China were so much better, they would let their people see the alternative. By not letting their people see something they allege is worse, they prove it is better.
I am right now very happy for lemmygrads taglines, a) I was reminded (all day) this quote exists, and b) I didn’t have to go far to find it:
It is difficult for me to imagine what ‘personal liberty’ is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible
Again, I do not argue for capitalism, I agree with Stalin on this quote. I’m saying that I can go into whatever forum I want, and say that Joe Biden is committing genocide, and I don’t disappear, I don’t “kill myself” in my hotel room. I’m not defending capitalism, as I am a communist. The condition in which the worker lives is irreconcilable the universal liberty, however if China is socialism, in terms of liberty, they would be the same. I believe that socialism could be so much better. I believe that China could be so much better and it will be someday. But the state will not allow it.
You have to be a troll. But - you’re a pretty funny one. A Boeing whistleblower ‘killed himself in a hotel room’ literally just last week. You can yell at Joe Biden however much you want, he’s still gonna commit genocide without blinking.
I know this guy’s already been banned and he can’t respond to this, but I just had to fucking say it.
What liberals don’t get is that you’re only allowed to exist and argue against the state if you are effectively not a real threat.
They don’t have to kill anybody in the CPUSA because they aren’t a very effective group at making political change (right now), but the Black Panthers? Well, that was a different story…
A regular old citizen of Germany was arrested for posting on a social media post “from the river to the sea”, They didn’t even have to finish it. That was the only thing they said. Capitalist states disappear people all the time, It just depends on how fascist they are. And Germany is pretty fascist right now. The United States is in fact trying to destroy TikTok for its freedom of speech (I’m sure for other reasons too, as they probably just want an American bourgeois to make money off of it.).
What even is your first sentence, that shit literally makes no sense. Oh yeah, I’d rather be able to have access to diverse viewpoints rather than affordable housing or sustinence or a good job lmao
Let me simplify it for you. It doesn’t matter if they allegedly have better material conditions when they can’t view information contrary to the state.
Hey y’all it doesn’t matter if you lift billions of people out of poverty and they never have to worry about certain material conditions and therefore improve their quality of life, what makes a society better is being able to “view information contrary to the state”.
Who the fuck gives a shit if they’re feeding their people and improving their quality of life? If billions of people support their government because they know they have the people’s interest at heart.
You seem to believe China is inherently lying about everything it does and says but can’t possibly think of any reason why (spoiler, it’s racism). You believe what the West says about China, which is why you believe in the Uyghur “genocide”.
Ha yes, I’m sure having fucking google make the homeless in NY city sooo much better off than the peoples living in nice cheap apartments in Beijing. Tell me you’ve never been poor without telling me you’ve never been poor. 🤡
Marxism-leninism has routinely been shown to not work. China doesn’t have a command economy or worker-controlled capital. If China’s people were free, they could access the internet. Furthermore, how is secret police a tenet of the Chinese freedom I’ve had shoved down my throat by Marxist-Leninists? Furthermore, how are the Uyghur people bourgeois?
I think it’s pretty cute that you try to use Marxist terminology without understanding it. I’m sincere 🥰
This is easily a top 3 all time dunk, i can’t stop laughing.
Let me simplify this. A lot of people in this thread were justifying oppression saying it was for the people. I’m not saying that Muslims are bourgeois, I’m saying that the Uyghur genocide is unjustified as they’re not antagonized to the proletariat, but rather an ethnic group.
Indeed, you didn’t say that Muslims are bourgeois, you asked if Uyghurs were bourgeois.
Why would Uyghurs be bourgeois?
It’s called a rhetorical question, glad I could help
Why would Uyghurs be bourgeois? edit: we shall never know 😔
you are saying very very silly things and i must ask you to stop
Virtually everything you state is false. China does not technically have a command economy, but this is not necessary for socialism in the first place. China engages in plenty of economic planning, far more so than capitalist states. That is precisely why China can build 45,000 km of unprofitable high-speed rail in less than 20 years and install more solar generation capacity than all other countries combined in 2023.
Industries in China are also far more worker-controlled than they are in capitalist states. Estimates for the level of state-ownership range from 20-40%. Much of the remaining “private sector” is composed of worker cooperatives. Search up “Farmer specialized cooperatives”, which comprise of more than 100 million households (not people, households).
As for the Uyghur thing, even western media has largely abandoned that point since it was too easy to see that no one was being killed. I mean, you can buy a plane ticket to Xinjang right now and see for yourself. Now the smarter ones have downgraded it to “cultural genocide”. In a few years, when the Uyghur language and culture will still be around just fine, they will quiet drop the whole topic.
They can
Have you not heard of the great firewall. Do you think Nike and iPhone factories are coops? Furthermore genocide does not explicitly have to be killing civilians. Xi did things such as forcefully reeducate children, force Muslims to eat pork, and forcefully sterilize them, thereby making them and their culture die out. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China
Citing Wikipedia is not the own you think it is.
I’m not trying to own you. I’m trying to get a meaningful argument which isn’t me being talked about as an animal.
I’m sorry that some comrades here have been dismissive toward you, but you seriously need to educate yourself more on a subject before you speak on it thinking that you have understood it. There are plenty of resources that the Lemmygrad community can offer you to further your knowledge about China if you leave your preconceptions at the door and come at this with some humility.
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Yeah, when i wrote that there were still fairly few substantial responses compared to mocking ones. But by now i see they’ve been offered plenty of good, comprehensive sources of information, and now that they’re banned and can’t waste as much time saying ignorant things here maybe they will have more time to read the material that they’ve been so helpfully provided with. Probably not though…they’re probably allergic to reading as most libs are…
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Do you understand why the firewall exists?
Whether it prevents bourgeois propaganda or western propaganda, it’s not worth it when the people aren’t free. I also find it to be very opposite to Marx implying that the Chinese government wouldn’t try to control their people if they could.
Here’s a paper covering the topic from a few years ago.. It goes through the history, motivations, and effects of the Golden Shield Project. It also briefly covers the opinions from people on both sides of the firewall and tries to remain neutral as it’s a research communication. Download the PDF to read.
What the paper doesn’t cover deeply is what information the CPC has chosen to censor and why. Materials subversive to the stability of their country. From whom? Of what nature? What historical precedent exists that would have made them want to do this in the late nineties?
Exploring the history of interactions between socialist countries and liberal countries will shed light on this. I’d also suggest looking into examples of censorship in western liberal countries and contrasting them with censorship in China.
Your reply pointed to a lot of assumptions from the Western liberal perspective, which is actively antagonistic and hostile towards China. If the only perspective you ever consume is from states who consider China a threat to their power, then of course you will hold a negative bias towards China.
The more you study, the better you will understand. If you approach the topic wanting to demonize China, you won’t learn anything. There’s a lot more to unpack here including Western media bias and leftist theory beyond Marx. This is just a stepping stone to understanding.
If you don’t know the purpose and goals of the project that the firewall is part of, then you don’t understand why China has a firewall.
Tell me, are you really free or do you assume you are free because you’ve always been told you are free and you’ve only ever heard one definition of freedom? To me, the illusion of freedom of speech, the illusion of freedom of choice, and being told to choose between a handful of shitheads who don’t represent or act according to how I would like to see our society run is not freedom. It’s just authoritarianism from a different source. It’s who has power that matters to me. I’d rather be held accountable by my peers than by a bunch of chucklefucks who only see me as an expendable resource.
This weak ass liberal may not be reading anything, but I am eating up all these sources. Thank you, everyone. Also, God damn it, now I have hours more of reading any to do. At least I’ve covered some of these topics before, so some of them might be review.
How is it opposite to Marx?
“Becuase Carl Mank is whatever I say he is. Have I ever read his work? No. But I’m sure he said something similar to my position somewhere.”
I’ve come back to this thread like five times and this makes me crack up every time
Marx said that the state was inherently oppressive. But I guess I missed the part where he said that it doesn’t matter if the party brands itself as communist.
If you bake a cake and you have this magnificent idea in your head; do you gather all the ingredients and then presto magic you have a beautiful cake in front of you? Or is there some sort of process that’s missing? Some sort of transitionary period?
There’s a reason it’s called Marxist-Leninism too, older works can be superseded or reanalyzed by newer works in a more refined context.
Baking doesn’t cook down the ingredients and claim it’s heating them up.
Where did he say that? Can you quote the passage?
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You call me wrong, yet don’t bring a source to debunk me. You call me smug, yet speak of me as if I’m an animal. I will say the Communist tendency to hate liberals is why this movement has yet to succeed in the US. You seem incapable of knowing that liberals are just more mild versions of communists and if we want marxist movements we must move within a big tent party, since we don’t have large enough numbers to do anything within any democratic country.
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The “art” part of your username is certainly true. Incredible comment!
Man this was some David Attenborough type of reading 😭🙌🏿
Edit: went back and read this in Steve Irwin’s voice I’m dying 💀
Another name added to the victims of communism, if only he hadn’t already been braindead
I love your username.
First, I am a communist. Second, I’m not victim blaming, I’m saying that we can’t attain any progress in a democracy if we dont work with liberals, as we dont have have the number. I’m not saying “become liberal”, I’m saying that we need to work within a big teny party to attain power. While I do disagree with you, both as an ML and your specific viewpoint, I will not deny that I’d rather have communists I disagree with than the us’ spiral into fascism.
Also, you shouldn’t complain about sourcing your arguments. Even if you’re not arguing with me, you will argue with other people who, whether you’re correct or incorrect, will demand sources.
…
Didn’t they say earlier in the thread that communism “didn’t work”? Lol can’t even keep consistent
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I don’t get how it’s controversial to say that communists are not the majority of people, and therefore can’t act on our own. If we were an established party and didn’t need liberals, I wouldn’t be saying that we should work with liberals. But if we alienate ourselves from liberals and vote for our own candidates, who won’t win due to our small membership, it will be the right that wins, thereby pushing our progress back.
Hmm, voting. I think you need to read up on Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder by V.I. Lenin. In fact, even State and Revolution and maybe even What is to be done? (I haven’t completed this one yet).
It seems like you’re rusty on what revolutionary socialism is.
I still don’t get how it’s controversial to say that to gain power, we need numbers, and we agree with liberals more than fascists, and therefore to get power to us and away from fascists we should unify until we can create a revolution, or a party that will be voted in.
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Comrade, I’m telling you, you should pursue making documentaries after the revolution, this is amazing 😭😭😭
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Is it that hard to not treat me as if you’re a natgeo narrator. You’re not debunking the libs by not engaging with them, you just alienate your comrades who don’t agree with you on everything.
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I’m going to stop now because you’ve also been chasing your tail, not engaging with my arguments, but rather calling me a lib because I disagree with you. You would call Marx a lib if he were alive today. Also, why do you treat libs as people below you, have you not thought of the idea that this could be why they disagree with you?
I am begging you, please read a book, any book by anyone on the left written in the last 180 years.
Liberals support capitalism, communists and everyone else on the left seek to abolish it.
Don’t conflate liberals and the right. Liberals don’t actively try to fuck over workers like rightists are. Further, it doesn’t matter what liberals were 100 years ago, do you think Biden is as bad as Trump?
Liberalism only appears on the left if your political spectrum extends from “capitalism, but the poor get some scraps” to “capitalism, but the poor don’t get scraps”.
Liberals literally do fuck over the workers, the very structure they maintain, capitalism, is the exploitation of workers.
By voting for socialist leaders who won’t get elected, you allow the right to get elected and thereby deny them those scraps. And I think the homeless would rather have some scraps than none. Also, when in a contemporary democracy, this is the spectrum, no one else would get elected.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the state in capitalism. It’s not just by chance that the state has represented the interests of the capitalists, despite them being a tiny minority, since 1776.
The state giving more scraps isn’t a response to voters wanting it, if the state represented the people, we wouldn’t have capitalism. It’s a response to a threat to capitalism, a sort of safety valve.
But on the subject of electoralism, Biden got elected and had both houses. He did fuckall, is bombing yemen, and facilitating a genocide in Israel. If you cannot punish a politician for all that, your interests do not even begin to enter the equation.
fuck over workers like rightists do*
Plenty of MLs will engage with you patiently. It just gets very annoying when you guys come in swinging with easily debunked or out of context factoids. Remember, this is an internet forum, not an organization of professionals.
It really also gets annoying to me that you call them out of context, but don’t give context.
I replied to you in a different comment.
Ah, I didn’t see it at first. Thank you!
Freedom of a populace is not measured by access to the Internet but rather by what their government does to improve their material conditions, such as housing. I support the freedom to live inside a house, not the freedom to be homeless after a 1000$ misfortune, like in the U.S.
I personally view it as that if you can’t allow people to see other viewpoints, then material conditions don’t matter. As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, the person’s ability to choose for themself is more important than an alleged better living condition. Furthermore, I see that if China were so much better, they would let their people see the alternative. By not letting their people see something they allege is worse, they prove it is better.
I am right now very happy for lemmygrads taglines, a) I was reminded (all day) this quote exists, and b) I didn’t have to go far to find it:
– J. V. Stalin, Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard
Again, I do not argue for capitalism, I agree with Stalin on this quote. I’m saying that I can go into whatever forum I want, and say that Joe Biden is committing genocide, and I don’t disappear, I don’t “kill myself” in my hotel room. I’m not defending capitalism, as I am a communist. The condition in which the worker lives is irreconcilable the universal liberty, however if China is socialism, in terms of liberty, they would be the same. I believe that socialism could be so much better. I believe that China could be so much better and it will be someday. But the state will not allow it.
You have to be a troll. But - you’re a pretty funny one. A Boeing whistleblower ‘killed himself in a hotel room’ literally just last week. You can yell at Joe Biden however much you want, he’s still gonna commit genocide without blinking.
Again, when I say Joe Biden commits genocide, I don’t get disappeared the next day.
That’s because you’re a nobody.
I know this guy’s already been banned and he can’t respond to this, but I just had to fucking say it.
What liberals don’t get is that you’re only allowed to exist and argue against the state if you are effectively not a real threat.
They don’t have to kill anybody in the CPUSA because they aren’t a very effective group at making political change (right now), but the Black Panthers? Well, that was a different story…
A regular old citizen of Germany was arrested for posting on a social media post “from the river to the sea”, They didn’t even have to finish it. That was the only thing they said. Capitalist states disappear people all the time, It just depends on how fascist they are. And Germany is pretty fascist right now. The United States is in fact trying to destroy TikTok for its freedom of speech (I’m sure for other reasons too, as they probably just want an American bourgeois to make money off of it.).
Where do you get disappeared for saying Joe Biden commits genocide?
What even is your first sentence, that shit literally makes no sense. Oh yeah, I’d rather be able to have access to diverse viewpoints rather than affordable housing or sustinence or a good job lmao
Let me simplify it for you. It doesn’t matter if they allegedly have better material conditions when they can’t view information contrary to the state.
Hey y’all it doesn’t matter if you lift billions of people out of poverty and they never have to worry about certain material conditions and therefore improve their quality of life, what makes a society better is being able to “view information contrary to the state”.
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“This society is great. I’m glad every source is monitored by the Chinese government, that’s how you know they’re factual.”
Who the fuck gives a shit if they’re feeding their people and improving their quality of life? If billions of people support their government because they know they have the people’s interest at heart.
You seem to believe China is inherently lying about everything it does and says but can’t possibly think of any reason why (spoiler, it’s racism). You believe what the West says about China, which is why you believe in the Uyghur “genocide”.
This but unironically
Hey, I’ve seen this one before
Ha yes, I’m sure having fucking google make the homeless in NY city sooo much better off than the peoples living in nice cheap apartments in Beijing. Tell me you’ve never been poor without telling me you’ve never been poor. 🤡
Said by someone who has never really been hungry,