Most citizens don’t mind the Chinese government, or at least think it’s better than alternatives. They still need the consent of the governed to rule.
Sure... because economically things are relatively good, and I imagine the constant attempt to brainwash every citizen from birth has something to do with it.
Many Muslim women, when asked, will say that they chose to wear a burqa, or the niqab, but I think most of us here know that they've been conditioned to think that way.
Nearly every change in political system, or power struggle, has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese for the past two centuries. The current post-Deng CPC model, for all its faults, does have peaceful transitions of power.
It remains to be seen whether or not today's wealthier China would also consider economic stability to be just as important.
Didn't Xi Jinping declare himself president for life?
That doesn't sound like "absolutely free". Maybe I'm missing he sarcasm.
> If you ask most (Han) Chinese, the thing they prize the most is stability.
If you ask your questions in a private setting, you'll likely get honest answers.
Regime changes have been almost always bloody. That is true everywhere in the world. Chinese has over 2000 years of history to prove that point.
It has nothing to do with "culture" and everything to do with an oppressive regime's stranglehold on its citizens.
Sure, but how can you argue that people are free to accept anything that is forced upon them? I'm not sure any large number of have true "freedom", but some certainly have more than others.
As other commenters are pointing out, the US is not as bad as China, but there are shitty things in the US too. The average Chinese probably thinks "I'm pretty free to live my life, the economy is ok, what's your problem?", which is not far from what the average American thinks, and both ignore the terrible terrible shit that they don't feel affect them, or they think has always been like that. E.g. corrupt law enforcement and elite, inadequate healthcare, foreign policy that invites wrath, the treatment of minorities...
Who said China and N. Korea are equivalent? Certainly not me. I have no idea what the end of that sentence was meant to mean.
The second paragraph is just more whataboutism and creating another false equivalence while pretending not to. Of course we (our government), like pretty much every country on Earth, have done shitty things and continue to do shitty things. The difference is that we, as private citizens, can speak out against it, protest, and vote their asses out of office. I wonder where the Uyghurs would prefer to live?
The point is, you'd call that Chinese person brainwashed, since they are ignoring their government's oppression and tyranny. Guess what I'm trying to say? It's that at some level you also have been brainwashed. Yes China is a lot worse, but if you ask a Swede what they think about Americans thinking they have a good country, they'd probably laugh and say "Brainwashed fools!".
Yes the Uyghurs would prefer to live in the USA. Guess where a black person would prefer to live, if you tell them about the difference of police interaction in USA vs in Scandinavia? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd8ZTKU8csw
> The difference is that we, as private citizens, can speak out against it, protest, and vote their asses out of office.
How is that working out for you? The Koch brothers are seemingly able to override your choices...
It's not at all surprising our empathy is selective and context dependent, though. What's surprising is that we exhibit it to the extent we do, however inconsistently.
And if you truly believe that there exists no absolute truth then I invite you to walk off a cliff. It would be less of a leap than assuming that just because culture is complex and often inherently subjective that there is no absolute truth.
You should do an AskHN: Does Absolute Truth Exist
Its been a while since I've read a good philosophical debate on HN.
Definition is identity, self-reflective.
Absolute truth must exist. If there was no such thing as absolutely truth then it is absolutely true that there is no absolute truth. In other words, a logical contradiction.
We can play the metalogical game the other way too.
If all statements about X being true are language for "I the speaker believe X to be true but I understand the statement's truth is relative to my perspective", then all statements about truth are non-absolute, including this one without contradiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle
Absolute truth exists relative to axioms. Given x, y. Even the law of identity is not metaphysically necessary; Deleuze argues that difference and repetition are prior to identity.
> Absolute truth must exist. If there was no such thing as absolutely truth then it is absolutely true that there is no absolute truth. In other words, a logical contradiction.
This argument still assumes absolute truth! It is made in the framework in which truths can be absolute as opposed to relative, but what I'm saying is that this dichotomy is invalid. The more accurate statement against absolute truth is not "it is absolutely true that there is no absolute truth" but rather "absolute truth is nonsense because absolute and relative truth are not different except within a defined set of axioms".
It's like having an absolute position in space. A position in space is only ever absolute given a frame of reference, because that's what defines it. Assuming an axiom is what defines an absolute truth. To ask someone what their position is without a defined frame of reference is nonsense.
Haven't you and I been conditioned by the ideology of the liberal conception of freedom, human rights, "democracy" and morality? Do not those concepts also have their critics?
Yes, I am engaging in whataboutism - but sometimes that's a good thing to see just how far the slippery slope can slide. If the Chinese populace, with its faulty ideology, and the Muslim women wearing burquas, with their faulty ideology, can be said to have such a "false consciousness", why is your (or my) ideology so much less faulty or immune to criticism? What about the very ideology you espouse that declares that overriding the will of people is justified if people are "conditioned"?
It is very hard, rare in fact, to escape false consciousness. It just so happens that our false consciousness is a little different to those in other places.
No form of government has lasted the test of time, but authoritarian governments have statistically populated the longest lasting ones. In modernity, there has been a brief renaissance, but I don't believe that corruption of a modern democracy will take longer than it did for Rome ANYWHERE, including the USA.
It's hard to be critical of becoming successful as robber barons of the USA, when there's so little culture and so much of the capital to waste. Don't mistake those qualities for innate value.
To say that the philosophical underpinnings of liberal freedom and democracy are immune from criticism (feminist, Marxist, or otherwise) is tantamount to dogmatism. China's concepts may be worse than the Western concepts, but the Western ones certainly aren't beyond reproach.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/#2.1
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-liberal/#Cri
Well a lot of people criticize our freedom to bear arms. People criticize free speech a lot. Despite what you've been told, freedom isn't held in high regard anywhere really. We just give it a lot of lip service.
> human rights
What is it? UN declaration of human rights originally had absolute "free speech". Then they started limiting it to protect religions, identity, etc. One human right is for free assembly and community. Another is for free movement. What happens when these "human rights" collide? Healthcare is a "human right". Should other nations invade the US to give us our "human rights"? Right to life is a human right? Should people who believe fetuses are persons invade to stop abortions? Things aren't as black and white as you think they are. Whose human right is more valuable?
> and democracy [representative government]
There are plenty of arguments against democracy. Go read about the founding fathers and their opinions of democracy. That hated the idea so much that they created a government to guard against democracy and only gave voting rights to a tiny fraction of the nation. The first presidential election ( for Washington ) had low single digit voting percentage.
Naively talking about "freedom, human rights, and democracy" sounds great at a superficial level, but when you get down to details, it isn't as straightforward and rosy as you think. The only people who talk about freedom, human rights, and democracy so cavalierly are those who never actually thought about it.
Frankly, the only thing "freedom, human rights, and democracy" has been used for in the past few decades is to use it to justify invading other countries. I'm sure all the millions of murdered vietnamese, iraqis, south americans, etc sure appreciate the "freedom, human rights, and democracy" we've dropped on them. It's pretty much a repackaged neocolonial "white man's burden".
Secondly, freedom and rights all have prices. One's freedom is another one's lack thereof. Say you are free to speak your mind, what if I don't like to hear it? Like the N word, or anything that is not appropriate to pronounce even in "freedom of speech" countries. Is there complete freedom? Are there unlimited rights? Of course not. The issue is just where we should draw the line.
As to democracy, well, how do you tell it apart from populism? How to stop the elites from hijacking it to their own good? You know, if the propaganda machine is working full force, democracy or not is not that different. And you lose the efficiency.
IMHO, a mature person, and the collective of mature persons, aka a mature society, should know that there is nothing inherently, and absolutely good or bad. Everything requires compromises and tradeoffs. If you point to something and ridicule anyone else's unkind opinion torwards it, it is you being naive.
Just like the USA is #1 and the USA stands for freedom. Everyone is subject to brainwashing by the society they're raised in. Anyone telling you they're a completely independent person is probably fooling themselves. That there's not that much discontent is a nice feature for those who are contented.
We all are conditioned by the culture we live in. We generally think our culture is better than theirs regardless what our culture or their culture is. People can accept a lot of limitations to their freedom as long as life is decent and people don't feel that they need more. Think of all of the libertarian arguments about how a large government limits the freedom of people, but most people in the west are okay with most of those limitations.
Western countries might not be running active government propaganda, but things like Hollywood absolutely push a certain type of culture into society.
There are actully objective truths in life. Whether or not people can accept oppression due to cultural influences is irrelelevant; it's not a good thing. Freedom to speak and, therefore, to think, is preferable over the alternative. Not all arguments are created equal, and comparing the influence of Hollywood (while certainly real!) to that of an authoritarian government is a joke.
"Know"? The practice is spreading among Jewish women in Israel, who appreciate that it's a strong visual signal of their piety.
Should we conclude that they've been conditioned to think that way too?