Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway189262

Do you not realize it was Xi and his propaganda that caused a massive change in opinion of the west? The state news agencies constantly blames everything on foreigners and the west.

It has nothing to do with financial crises or BLM or whatever. Financial crisis also happened in 2001 and 80's, they happen all the time. BLM protests are insignificant, US has protests constantly because they are not restricted by government.

Handling of COVID is bad, and most of us don't like Trump. But Xi's anti west propaganda is very real and influences all Chinese news and social media. Xi has massively ramped up rhetoric against the west and especially US. That is why majority of Chinese don't respect the US anymore.

You can see Xi saber rattling with US, building basesin South China Sea. Troop fights with India. Bullshit with Tibet Dali llama. Uighur re-education camps. Crackdown on Hong Kong. There's many more. This is why relations with US are going bad. Xi is pissing everyone off to drum up patriotism in China and make Chinese direct anger at foreigners instead of problems with Chinese government

Do you realize that the content you listed is all propaganda by the US government?

> Do you not realize it was Xi and his propaganda that caused a massive change in opinion of the west? The state news agencies constantly blames everything on foreigners and the west.

I don't know where you got that from. CCP stopped long ago painting the US / western countries as enemies and sources of today's problems of China.

The fact is, Chinese and China in general are much less ideology sensitive now. Given current hostilities from the US, CCP propaganda and China's new medias still haven't called for hate of the US at ideology level. There were hash words against the US, but all targeting very specific actions, for example shutting down of Huston consulate, and specific person, for example Pompeo. There is no ideology level attack.

It is a very large topic to discuss why and when Chinese people stopped admiring the US. I would only say it all started in 2008 financial crisis. It was then China's elites, here I mean both the ones educated in the western countries and the ones with no foreign education background, started to question the soundness of the financial market regulation system of the US and corruption of the US politicians, and then everything else. And when China could produce its own hero startups and entrepreneurs, like Jack Ma of Alibaba, Pony Ma of Tencent, Yiming Zhang of ByteDance, Lei Jun of Xiaomi etc., Chinese people feel more confident that its own system might just work. And Trump administration and the handling of covid19 are the latest blow. CCP doesn't really need to do anything.

All the other matters you mentioned like South China Sea, disputes with India, Xinjiang etc. aren't new problems. They have been there for ages. They are not the factors driving the changes.

One of the things that "scholars" Martin Jacques (China-friendly academic commentator) and Steve Bannon (crazy Trump guy) agree on is that 2008 was the pivotal event.

A wave of nationalism has swept the western world. From Trump in the US, to Brexit, to numerable populist nationalist parties turning mainstream in Europe (AFD, Front National, Sverigedemokraterna etc.) all stemming out of the frustration of lack of prospects for the common man.

Rather than going to the root cause populist nationalism blames the other; the Chinese, the immigrants, the scientist, the media. And let conflict drive the agenda.

Incredible that it is a widely held view in the west that it is changed Chinese politics (the rise of Xi) that has bought forward the change.

Unfortunately I don't think things will get better any time soon.

They might even accelerate further.

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