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Weird and revealing double standard you got there, comparing "Chinese" as a collective to "many" Americans.
I can think of "many" Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans. Can you? Or do those folks not count.
> It's definitely true that arguing with stupid people is a useless waste of energy.
Indeed.
Chinese are collectively more or less in the same situation, they are ethnically mostly the same people and live under the same rules, Americans are not.
Few very reach Americans enjoy all the freedom power can buy, everyone else either comply or suffer the consequences
You really did not know?
> Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans
Nope.
I don't believe in the kind of freedom Americans believe to possess
It's simply a different kind of tyranny
Unless you mean the freedom to be shot in the streets.
For example: there are 700 people in jail every 100k citizens in USA, they are only 115 in China.
In 2008 USA had the 25% of the global World jail population
And you know why?
Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
USA has the lowest life expectancy of the whole west and it's only one year longer than China, despite being the country with the highest spending per capita in healthcare in the entire globe.
Is this the freedom you're talking about?
So no, USA is not a benchmark for anything good, including the exercise of free speech, which is only a lame excuse to not take action against extremists propaganda
> Indeed
So sometimes you experience moments of lucidity when you see yourself for what you really are?
That must hurt!
Perhaps the ones you hear about are “ethnically mostly the same people”, but that's not actually true.
I will rephrase this way
"92% of Chinese people are part of the Han ethnic group but that doesn't mean that they are mostly the same people... oh no wait! IT DOES!"
You do know that saying bad things about $CountryX doesn't prove good things about $CountryY, and vice versa, right?
Are you jocking right?
1/15 is about 7%, did I say or did I not that ~92% of the people in China are from Han ethnic group?
92+7 = 99 so yeah, there are mostly the same people in China
I never said that the other ethnic minorities are uniformly distributed or that they do not exist.
For example anybody would say that in Italy the population is mainly formed by Italians.
And that would be true even though Italians in Italy have dropped to around 90% of the total.
Less than the Han in China.
And besides that, who cares if some troublemakers are killed off? The Han "collective" is not bothered by such minor things as individual rights and due process
LOL. You "know" just enough to remain comfortable in your ideology, and your self-imposed media echo chamber is more than happy to feed that "knowledge" to you.
If you think you are credible outside your tribe... don't quit your day job. You're just as delusional as the people whose speech you wish to control, and hence provide an abject illustration of why we don't want state control of our speech.
And don't feel bad that China is still behind the US in so many ways, there will be a Great Leap Forward very soon!
And no matter how bad it is, it is still better than State-owned media, which bypasses the whole marketing mechanisms and just relies on the ruling power to keep the very same type of public control through fear and intimidation.
Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp. Afterwards tell me which people gets to more or less manipulated by their media.
At the end of the day, media that doesn't turn society into idiots that undermine national interests has its virtues and maybe preferrable. That was once the case with tame free media before much of it turned into divisive reality TV. Similarly you can have dangerous state media that whip up nationalist frenzy, cause sectarian violence etc, or you could have boring ass state media and manage civic engagement for political serenity. All media are manipulated, all narratives shaped, blatantly manipulating media for serenity to a knowing population self-fulfilling properties. People stop giving a shit about politics, and politicians end up government instead of campaigning. Prerequisite is having a good system for selecting competent leadership in the first place.
This is not unambiguously endorsing state media as good, but decline of free media in many places is simply that bad. Some countries still have passable public broadcasting, but for how long, and whether commercial pivot for ads + anxiety is terminal transition.
For Uyghurs: under the most delusional estimates, Chinese Uyghurs still have less lifetime chance of being in a indoctrination camp than US blacks in US prison industrial complex. For much shorter sentences. After they'll be coerced to work in vocational program for more pay, even adjusted for exchange rate. Not US prison labour moving covid bodies tier coerced labour, but actual useful jobs designed to transition into society instead of recidivate back into for profit prisons. China actually wants to integrate minorities instead of exclude, even at extreme costs. So I suppose the answer is, it's better to be a Chinese Uyghur in a few generations after they've been sinicized and integrated than a Black American in 20 years who will still be getting executed on the street and fighting equal treatment.
Take the Hong Kong situation. If "highinfo/curious" chinese people in mainland China look at it and just repeat the Party line of "they are just troublemakers" instead of supporting them as loudly and as effectively as they can, then all this awareness of being fed propaganda is as good as nothing.
I mean, you are actually parroting the bullshit about concentration camps being about "integrating minorities". Minorities that are being tortured and brainwashed into submission are not "integrated", just destroyed while keeping a shell of the people to show around.
Maybe mainlanders don't deem HK worthy of protection. Mainlanders cared about pollution, they protested, government responded. They lost their shit at poor safety due to rapid development (aviation, high speed rail, food, medicine), the government responded. They were disgruntled over pork prices. The government responded. Chinese society skews old, conservative and anti LGBT. Government unfortunately responded. Unprecedented MeToo trials happening right now. Government responding. Sufficiently significant issues that elicit widespread attention gets addressed, Chinese people advocate for themselves all the time.
> fed propaganda
Fact is pork prices is literally a bigger problem to mainlanders than plight of privileged HKers with historic acrimonious relationship. This is a well understood dynamic, suggesting HKers would have ever got mainstream mainland support because of propaganda and not bad blood is exactly the kind of anglosphere illiteracy on China I'm talking about. ProHK / pro liberal reform voices exist but not much. Why? HK protestors from mainland perspective: young, nativist, disillusioned but privileged individuals who spread shit about mainlanders on social media for years... Yeah, I just described alt-right. Is it any surprise they got minimal support. Lots of mainland diaspora in the west with access to both side of the story, did meaningful numbers come out to support HK? No, they had access to both sides of the story, they just knew better.
>integration
Of course the goal is integration, CCP is not spending tremendous resources to be cruel for shits and giggles. If Han knew how much was going into XJ they'd protest, due to costs not human rights. Like people everywhere, the public would rather the minorities rot than take disproportionate resources. But unlike democracies, CCP can actually ignore public sentiment. Some in this generation will be a shell, their descendants will be integrated. It's ugly, but things move fast in Chinese 5 year plans. None of this long arc of justice nonsense. It's not right, but history will judge relative wrongness compared to locking up 1/4 of black Americans or trapping indigenous peoples in backwater reserves forever.