China regulator bans TV parodies amid content crackdown
yahoo.com
yahoo.com
Counterfactual: Venezuela.
"Days after the [Maduro] recall movement was cancelled, 1.2 million Venezuelans protested throughout the country against the move"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_protests
"Huge marches as Venezuela marks 50 days of protest"
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/05/venezuelan-opposition...
June 2017 "Beginning on April 1, anti-government demonstrators have staged daily protests across Venezuela that continue to devolve into violent clashes with riot police, leaving thousands arrested, hundreds injured, and 66 dead."
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/months-of-anti-gov...
The centralized economy enabled Maduro's government to co-opt food distribution and election security apparatuses to make the protests fruitless. TL; DR An organized dictator can survive economic collapse longer than one might expect.
"Voters who used their Fatherland Cards were given food at a quarter of the polling stations surveyed in December by Torino. At some other sites, voters were instead told where they could pick up the food.
After voting, Katerina Noriega, a street vendor in Santa Rita, was directed by Socialist activists to a warehouse to receive a couple of pounds of rice and beans, worth about 10 days of work.
'They bought our votes,” said Ms. Noriega, who acknowledged supporting the government candidate to get the free food. “I did it because of our difficult situation.'
...
The so-called Fatherland Card, using technology from Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp., allows the government to keep track of who has voted. That permits officials to put pressure on food recipients if they are reluctant to cast a ballot, according to election experts, government critics and ruling party activists.
By law, the vote is supposed to be secret. But at voting centers in the capital, Caracas, and the westernmost state of Zulia during the December municipal elections, it was easy to see how the ruling party worked the levers of government to ensure that likely supporters made it to the polls. In a giant red tent, Socialist activists scanned voters’ Fatherland Cards. Using a computerized database, they could determine who hasn’t voted and what benefits those people receive. Government supporters called “patrollers” were then dispatched on motorbikes to the homes of food recipients to remind them of the benefits and convince them to turn out, according to a local ruling-party official."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-maduro-clinging-to-p...
The average Venezuelan reported losing 24 pounds [1] of body weight just in 2017 from lack of food. The system won't survive much longer. They're at a stage of collapse where cannibalism will probably start to show up. People are flooding to Colombia and Brazil. The army will very likely remove him sooner rather than later. There's no cult loyalty system built up around Maduro as with someone like Kim Jong-Un for example.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelan...
A dictator can stay pretty long with enough force.
Oil output peaked the few years prior to Chavez taking over and then began a persistent decline. Oil exports boomed from 1987 to 2000, going from 1.5m to 3m barrels per day. Under Chavez that collapsed by nearly 50%. Maduro of course has just continued the trend line.
Venezuela has essentially collapsed. Their people are starving to death and have been rioting in the streets for years.
2016: "food riots show Venezuela crisis has gone beyond politics"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/20/venezuela-brea...
May 2017 "Venezuela protests: 200,000 march against President Maduro as riots and looting spread across country"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/venezuela-protes...
January 2018 "Venezuelans Are Rioting Over Food Shortages"
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Chinese-loc...
(At least, that was my understanding around 10 years ago; I don't know if anything has changed.)
All in all, reunification and the fall of Communism has been very good for East Germans:
http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-second-economic-miracle/a-1797...
Nobody's being brainwashed there - instead, unsurprisingly, people prefer to read news that paints their country in a good light, and it's antagonists in a poor one. It's the exact same thing in the US.
As long as you don't cause problems for the thieves and oligarchs in charge, nobody really cares what books you read, what news you watch.
The US maintains no such "list" mentioned in this article.
Also, not to spin your words.... but couldn't help it here: "as long as you don't cause problems for oligarchs in charge" kind of seems like the definition of authoritarianism. "Citizens will okay as long as they don't cause problems for those with power/ in control."
Authoritarianism is always a question of degree. The degree of it in Russia is high for political activity, but much lower then it is in China for information access. You can read whatever news you want, including foreign news critical of Russia, you can use Facebook, etc.
The population is about as brainwashed as it is here.
Pot, kettle, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
Do you mean blatantly obvious at the time and from outside? Could you please elaborate? I thought the USSR put up a good front, and fooled much of the West with regard to economic development (not freedom).
Hollywood put out several productions that proclaimed the USSR was a paradise. [1][2]
US and European industrialists had gone over to the USSR pre-WW2 and helped them build out their industrial base. The Soviets had entirely failed at industrializing on their own. From those experiences, and people writing about them, it was fairly well known what general condition the USSR was actually in economically. Firm, reliable metrics however were largely unavailable throughout the Soviet era.
The fooling of the West, regarding the Soviet's mighty materialism output, mostly fell apart by the 1960s (the facade lasted for ~30 years or so, and mostly only for people that were sympathetic to that ideology).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Star_(1943_film)
It's only blatantly obvious in hindsight. My vague memory of the history of it: There were many in the West who supported the Soviets as the future of humanity (not nearly a majority, but a not just a couple of wackos either - especially at the beginning). In the 1970s / early 1980s there was a major debate in the U.S. over whether to compete with the Soviets or just accept their power. U.S. intelligence thought the Soviet economy was doing well right up until the end.
Few people expected the Communist political system to collapse the way it did, but the lowercase-communist economic system was pretty obviously on its last legs by then. And indeed, look at what's happened: Russia abandoned lowercase-communism along with uppercase-Communism but certain features of the Communist political system managed to reassert themselves, in the form of the former KGB man Putin seizing and consolidating power. By this point, Russia's sphere of influence had retracted from eastern Germany all the way back to struggling to maintain control over Ukraine, but a little bit of brute force managed to keep Ukraine in line, too.
China, unlike Russia, managed to reform away from lowercase-communism while still maintaining the uppercase-Communist political structure. They are also just now attempting Great Power-style diplomacy over their neighbors, whereas Russia was overextended into that role ever since the end of WWII.
Sounds like we're edging into an old Cold War ideological fight, attributing things to characterizations rather than addressing the ideas.
How does the parent post explain the CIA and Henry Kissinger's 'Detente'?
EDIT: minor edit, more edit
Detente was a short-lived policy of the Nixon years. By the early 1980’s, US foreign policy pivoted more strongly to a consistent anti-Soviet stance, consistent with the neoliberal revolution in economics that predicted the failure of central economic planning and invalidated countless Nixon-era policies both on the domestic and foreign levels. It may have been a surprise to the West just how much of a house of cards the Soviet bloc was, but it was probably also a surprise to Gorbechev that the Soviet system couldn’t survive his attempts at reform.
The far more optimistic notions about the USSR had their heyday during WWII, when their rapid industrialization and valiant defense against Hitler won them considerable respect, and the “enemy of my enemy” situation shielded them from the now-obvious criticisms of Stalinism.
"At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed."
With Xi assuming total power, there has to be a legitimate concern regarding what might be about to happen.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
Or britain - you know the place that 1984 was about. Or germany, spain, canada, russia, saudi arabia, etc.
> I do wonder if an ever increasing crackdown and everything ultimately becomes so unwieldy that the whole country falls apart.
People like gordon chang have been wondering for decades now. Wouldn't hold my breath on it though. China has a few decades more of development and urbanization ahead of it. They'll continue to grow for a few more years.
Yes. Britain is far ahead of everyone at this moment. I'm sure china and the rest are desperate to catch up.
> The EU and US
As an american, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't lump us in with the EU. EU is a lot closer to china than you think in terms of political system, censorship and mentality. After all, the EU heavily censors parodies and "hate" speech and is at the forefront of internet censorship.
I'm afraid america stands alone in many respects but we have our own challenges. We are most definitely not perfect.
I don't think you even believe that horseshit.
Not only that, Britain is the most surveilled society on earth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/6108496.stm
That's from 2006. Britain has at least a decade head start. But china is working very hard to catch up on their surveillance.
But I guess it's evil when they do it, but it's "civilized" when britain does it?
What makes you say that? Last I checked, the UK was still a democracy, still had freedom of speech laws, and still doesn't ban VPNs, Tor, or other anonymity tools.
> As an american, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't lump us in with the EU. EU is a lot closer to china than you think in terms of political system, censorship and mentality.
And yet the US is ranked 43rd in the Press Freedom Index, behind all EU members except Romania, Italy and Poland.
> After all, the EU heavily censors parodies and "hate" speech and is at the forefront of internet censorship.
China is clearly at the forefront of Internet censorship. I don't see how that's even debatable.
For the record, this is the video that was enough to arrest and convict a man:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYslEzHbpus&bpctr=1521821668
What rubbish. The assertion that nations like Canada are comparable in terms of freedom to nations like Russia and Saudi Arabia is utterly bizarre.
You could not use the letter N in China for some time without being blocked.
I perceive a difference.
The headline brought to mind that scene from V for Vendetta right before Stephen Fry gets disappeared.
https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza
He's a South African living in China for 10 years and married to a Chinese woman.
Very interesting to see his videos from the last few months about how things are changing in a more dramatic way than in his entire time there.
If the average Chinese person has no prior interest in wanting to read that book or even knowing of its existence, why would the Chinese government care about banning it?
"Oh I've been there and it's nothing like that."
Followed by something like:
"And it's not at all like things I worry about back in the west like" + Insert sort of odd complaint with odd verbiage.
And then, yes, there are the outright defenders/deniers. As it turns out, the Chinese are well-acquainted with astroturfing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
But I also this is a moot argument because I doubt the lack of consent would stop China from using intellectual property.