China’s Censors Ban Winnie the Pooh and the Letter ‘N’ After Xi’s Power Grab
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I also love the freedoms I have in the States even more now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus
He was also known to the early Americans, who respected him so much they named the city of Cincinnati after him.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_I_of_Spain
that's the topic for a great series if you want to write it. figuring out who's better is a hard thing.
it's not actually a competition though. what we (i) want is more peace, more compassion, more comfort.
the US is (in effect) the oldest democracy on the planet, and arguably, the most likely place for the population to affect national change.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-is-whataboutism_us...
I cannot believe you are anything but an agent of a foreign power, or a naive, misguided adolescent, to suggest that the political structure of China is more liberal and achieves a better ends than that of the Unitd States.
North Korea GDP per capita: $500
There's definitely some aggression going on against the North Korean people.
I'm making a similar point and showing why "speaking up" is hard by showing how the Americans haven't done so in the same conflict, where they are actually to blame rather than the Chinese.
Note the difference between the observation that they don't care, and the claim they shouldn't care. I'm just making the first one here. You may believe that is wrong, but it won't change the facts on the ground.
As a result, it's not a relevant comparison, because there's no coercion in the case you cite.
In practice the local police have really screwed up protecting people's rights in recent years but it doesn't change the fact that achieving big goals like changing US foreign policy is HARD.
The difference is in the US change like this is HARD. Not necessarily DANGEROUS. If you can achieve political action and change you are RESPECTED because it is HARD. You are not FEARED because you are DANGEROUS.
https://youtu.be/tzY7qQFij_M (for the reference)
marketing is the best thing that has ever happened to humanity.
Right now people in China are mostly content with the current ideology.
This design actually matches reality very well: while US apparently chose Freedom ideology, China chose Order ideology. China would finish impressive large project faster and more efficient, with the cost of dictatorship.
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Ideology_(Civ5)
(Civ5 got a lot of these right, including a technology called "the Great Firewall" to counter the cultural influence from other civilizations http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Firewall_(Civ5) )
It's an abstraction to allow for fun and balanced gameplay.
It doesn't match reality at all in fact. The exact opposite is true for nearly all cases (China being the sole exception).
The major liberal economies are radically more productive than countries like China, much less the other 'order' type nations. The order economies, save partially for China (which is still extremely poor in the bottom 2/3), are on average impoverished, backwards, and with very low productivity. Even China is still shockingly backwards at a lot of common economic tasks, such as farming (they have ~1/40th the farming productivity of South Korea).
The liberal economies have dozens of major success stories, from Germany to Canada to the US to Sweden. The 'order' group has one, and only insofar as China liberalized its economy and moved away from a rigid command & control economy.
Autocratic doesn't get you a superior military. It typically gets you an economy that is bled and debased to feed the military, which ultimately is self-destroying. See: Russia, whose people are very poor ($8k GDP per capita; $4,000 median net worth). Meanwhile Putin diverts vast resources they can't afford at all, into military spending.
Liberal economies produce superior militaries pound for pound, because they can afford to sustain them over time.
[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=YQOhVb5Fbt4C&lpg=PA92&ots=...
[2]http://theweek.com/articles/757554/china-now-just-another-au...
[3]http://www.observa.it/the-technocratic-trend-and-its-implica...
With the lengths that it goes to censor information, how could we know that? Lack of civil war / turmoil does not imply full consent or approval.
The last time there was a big organized push for democracy was the Student Protests which led to the Tianimen Square massacre "US Government files declassified in 2014 estimated there had been 10,454 deaths and 40,000 injured. This figure was from internal Chinese government files obtained from the Chinese government headquarters in Zhongnanhai."
edit: I am not saying its impossible to fight for individual liberties there but it is definitely nothing like the west.
A lot of speculation is that Xi is doing this because it's now basically impossible for him to retire now. Through the anti-corruption campaigns, the taking down of so many tigers, and pushing out vested interests as China tries to avoid the middle income trap, Xi has made too many enemies. If he were to retire as planned, there are too many in the party who would then move on him.
move on him, how?
> surveys suggest Mr. Xi has an approval rating of more than 80 percent
If _all_ your media (including news, private messages, encyclopedias, history) hide this fact from you, how can one possibly tell - or understand what it means?
Of course, it's very difficult to protest and make a change even after you get to view everything past the Great Firewall of China, but there must be a growing amount of Chinese people that know of the propaganda and the lies.
(I literally personally know not one but TWO guys who tried to intervene in an obvious battering but were then set upon by BOTH members of the couple... Black eye for one and a broken tooth for the other)
Chinese everyday life is as free or unfree as it is here. It's funny how average Joe is so proud of living in a free country when all his life he is working his ass off to pay the bills never going anywhere, never being the heroic activist changing anything.
That handful of people who are like that definitely are better off here than in China, but the general public in China is just as happy with life as long as they get their steady income, a shiny iPhone and whatever the Chinese clone of Netflix is. And They certainly don't care that WhatsApp or some other app/website with zero market penetration in China is blocked over there.
Are you sure that's the case? It certainly seems like they to it to keep control over the relationship.
Still even if, its not like people in China feel threatened or even abused. Like I said, everyday life is almost completely unaffected. The occasional political rant on social media gets deleted sure, which people are annoyed by, but there are no consequences to that unless you really push for it, which brings us back to activism.
Anyone who has read any history would know that is most certainly not a good thing. Perhaps China will censor all of human history next, so that those pesky young university students quoting George Washington's farewell address don't get any "revolutionary" ideas.
To maintain a dictatorship you have to terrify the people from time to time. Every dictator - that we have a recorded history of behavior for - of the last century has frequently used fear to maintain their power. Read the history of dictators as diverse as Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Pinochet, Franco, Ceaușescu, etc. They all used the seeming random application of terror/fear upon the population and their competitors to retain control.
Xi has been using frequent applications of fear the last five years. That's how he acquired the power he now has. He implemented a "corruption" purge, targeting powerful opponents seemingly at random. They never know who is next. The same thing has been going on in the economic sphere, as they arrest people for "economic crimes" - nobody in the business sphere knows who will be disappeared or charged next. This behavior will get a lot worse now that Xi has formally consolidated power.
nowhere nearly as "free" there as it is here. I can blame all the presidents I want for my misfortune, and don't have to go to jail.
Sure, technically not as free as most places on this planet, I don't even question that: just go read my initial post again. The point is that it doesnt matter to 99.999% of people. It simply never interferes with everyday life. And I must say, during my time there I rarely felt unfree or oppressed by government. Obviously I needed VPN as a foreigner to access everyday stuff, but everything else was mostly minor annoyances, normal differences in culture or law.
I find it odd you mention security cameras. I consider that primarily a privacy issue, but apart from that it's a bit ironic to bring this up post-snowden. The government tracking my online movement worries me much more than cameras in public. And how everyone uploads all their photos and life to big cloud providers that don't give access to their users' data to the NSA ever /s. China definitely does all this too, but in comparison the cameras are really just the icing on the cake. The US is careful to spy on their people unnoticed. China doesn't give a fuck.
so you remember registering your new apartment with the police every time you moved.
you said "security cameras", not me.
I said FACE SCANNING... which is explicitly for tracking your movement in meat-space, they already track your movement in fake-space.
to your point about cloud providers, yes... an existential threat to privacy.
> The US is careful to spy on their people unnoticed. China doesn't give a fuck.
disgusting in both cases
Edit to add: there are a lot of things about China that I really enjoyed. and in some ways, more real freedom... in the absence of enforcement. I went with broken ideals, and I'm sure I left with broken ideals... but they were at least better informed, if still broken, ideals. and the food was better than anything I have had before or since.
There's a fairly decent chance all of our grandchildren will live under a Chinese dictatorship.
N bitwise right shift 2 positions?
I don't really want to run a TOR exit node at my house because I'm afraid I'll get in trouble over illegal (in the US) activity.
When you have physical control over the networks you have unlimited power to determine what flows over those networks. Nothing any of us can do about it.
So much for that whataboutism.
A free market for example is "efficient" but you can't control (and take credit) for anything it produces. It's output is wild.
So what's good for the Chinese people may not necessarily be good for the concept of China and if the concept of China is broken so is the concept of being Chinese. HK/Taiwan already stress this dynamic somewhat.
As to why it's so important for this concept to remain whole I suspect it's historical/cultural. Fragmented city states proper as long as the ecosystem does not contain warmongers. Each city-state requiring its own military is like each individual being hunter-gatherers. Civilization doesn't proceed without the freedom to specialize.
The "humiliation of China" which started via the opium wars is very fresh relatively speaking. Many countries including the US still operate with a domination oriented mindset rather than mutual prospering.
To China's credit. Historically it has never over extended and tried to dominate other countries in the way many western countries have despite often being able to do so.
Anyone got any direct knowledge of the Chinese connotations of "Winnie the Pooh"?
This is the #1 reason why countries should not fall under dictatorship. Humans are flawed, and flawed rulers with a lot of power are extremely dangerous. They tend to retaliate aggressively either against individuals or other countries because there are no "checks and balances" to keep them from abusing their power when they get emotional about something.
This is how you can easily end-up with insane decisions at the highest-level of a government such as "banning the letter N" because the ruler's feeling were hurt. And this is just an example. We'll see many more like this once he's officially declared a dictator (or Permanent President, or "The Senate" - whatever they decide to call him).
Not just dictators but also, as we've seen recently, US presidents too.
[*] https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/asia/china-pooh-censor-trnd/i...
The problem then is you need the tech of a directional satellite dish that knows where to send the data.
Admit or not, the overall impression these days is that China is an uprising power while US is in the decline. At the time they're building the best transportation system and investing heavily into robots and AI, we are here debating gender-less restroom, legalizing marijuana, keeping proving president is tied with Russia,etc.
The tipping point has passed, the gap will keep getting wider, based on history, there is no fix, countries rise and fall cyclically.
The alternative to democracy is not letting people have a say in government, and allowing rulers to rule for long periods until they pass down power to favoured successors or are violently overthrown. Both of those things are absolutely terrible for the health and safety of a society.
Is it really that hard to say we dropped the ball here, badly, and we need to do better, rather than immediately going to whataboutism about China? Yes, they have problems. That in no way contradicts the fact that we need to do better.
The median standard of living across the democratic world is at an all-time high. Things have never been better in the liberal world.
2. Immigration has slowed down, and immigrants have generally seen better outcomes not withstanding the current abuses by ICE
3. Race issues are worse this year than they have been, but exceptions occur. We as a country are at least in the beginning stages of a conversation about it, which has not and may not occur in other countries.
4. The National Debt is increasing, but budget deficits fell drastically under Obama. National debt does not necessarily grow at the same rate as GDP.
You've bought into a lot of propaganda unfortunately. I really recommend you pull a Descartes and re-evaluate from ground zero. Not to say China isn't a rising power, but Democracy is not dead.
just because we have the freedom to make social changes doesn’t mean it’s all the country can do
as long as china’s best and brightest keep coming to live in america and send their kids to american colleges i won’t beleive “the tipping point has passed”
You talk about issues of immigration, but China has a system that maintains internal passports, where citizens need permission of the government to move, and should they do so unofficially they face serious discrimination, and a denial of basic services. [2]
None of this of course, discusses the labor camp system, the imprisionment of political activists, or the murder and organ harvesting of religious minorities.
Just because you may not have heard of an issue doesn't mean that they don't exist, particularly when dealing with a country whose Human Rights records is one of the worst in the world.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
[2] https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21600798-china...
China is about to become the world's most indebted nation on a GDP to debt ratio. If they're not already. If you count a reasonable estimate for shadow debt, they already are.
Total debt vs GDP for China is up over 300% at this point.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/28/chinas-debt-surpasses-300-pe...
To grow their economy by ~$600 billion annually, they need to take on roughly $4 to $5 trillion in debt every year. Their return on debt is extremely bad at this point. No nation in world history has taken on as much debt, faster, than China has since 2007. The S&P projection is that China will expand its huge debt levels by another 77% by just 2021.
Even China's households are now hyper leveraging:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-15/chinese-c...
China: Here... hold my beer.