What about the Uyghurs? Disgusting Economist just a vehicle for CCP propaganda.
“ At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.” “
Also, they note they don’t poll migrant workers, those citizens with the worst lives.
> We tend to forget that for many in China, and in their lived experience of the past four decades, each day was better than the next,” Saich added. “Our surveys show that many in China therefore seem to be much more satisfied with government performance over time, despite rising inequality, corruption, and a range of other pressures that are the result of the reform era.”
She said that people in China simply do not think of it in those terms. Being "happy with the government" struck her as a particularly Western way of framing the question. I pressed her further and asked if she thought that they governed in a way that improved people's lives or made them worse. She said that she thought they improved people's lives, and that a country like China needs a strong government to hold it together, and that the CCP is succeeding in that respect.
I don't know if this is a representative view, but take it for what it is: an account of what a single Chinese lady told a random person on HN.
China is putting people into forced labour (or concentration) camps en-mass. Its arrested or exiled thousands of HK democracy protestors. Its going backwards on democracy and rule of law. Not to mention causing the largest pandemic of the 21st century (so far). Its support for North Korea is another whole mess. Oh, and it almost started a war with the neighbouring nuclear power.
If people are satisfied with that, they're pretty socially bankrupt imho.
What's more likely is that with absolute control of the media, the vast majority have no idea what's really going on. They're just reassured about how awful every other country is.
In fairness, the camps and the plague weren't a thing till after the 2016 end of the survey. Xi Jinping only really ramped up his authoritarian storm in the last few years.
I wonder how the average citizen there would react after an hour of straight forwards factual updates on the domestic situation.
All this aside, I am glad they have eliminated extreme poverty. That is progress, socially as well as economically.
The notion that Chinese people aren't perceptive and that they would adopt Western ideals if only we could reach out to them is pretty much orientalism 101 mixed with the End of History. There is a wealth of diversity in terms of opinions at all echelons of Chinese society, including inside the Party structure. This diversity will tend to touch on ideas orthogonal to the Western equivalent. Similar or identical in parts, but very different in others.
Picture someone whose only understanding of America would be specific events like Guantanamo Bay or a smattering of memes relating to Trump. You'd want to tell this person about the complex interplay of history and culture that shaped America into what it is today, and that they are missing out on 99% of it since they are so zoomed out. What I have described here is in fact the equivalent of what the typical person commenting on China thinks and knows about the country. I myself absolutely do not claim to be an expert, just that I got a taste of how much I don't know about the topic.
All of this matters greatly since it has an effect on how the West will conduct its strategy going forward.
Of course, the level at which it’s appropriate to omit to mention an ongoing atrocity is difficult to determine. Clearly it’s somewhere above a sentence, and clearly it’s beneath the question of broad strategy. But I would suggest that understanding China’s broad strategy for poverty alleviation (in the Han heartland) is a discrete topic that can quite reasonably be discussed without inviting this sort of response. In fact, if you don’t understand topics like this, it’s likely that your response to China is going to be handicapped.
Uyghur forced labour is certainly widespread and bad. I am not sure that it’s fundamental to the Chinese economy though. If we say that there are 20 million Uyghurs (which is a very large overestimate), out of 1.3 billion that’s not very much. Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour. And sterilisation means that they’re unlikely to be relied upon economically in the long term—elimination and economic exploitation are very difficult to reconcile, as indeed the Nazis found.
If you’re discussing some market in a small village far from Xinjiang—of course forced Uyghur labour in some way impinges on it, but, well, it would be odd to discuss the camps as the most important determinant of what’s going on in those camps at all times. You can’t develop an understanding of the whole without understanding the component parts, and that involves occasionally e.g. reading articles that don’t mention the Uyghurs.
The obvious analogy is the Holocaust. Nobody complains about books about the Nazis that contain e.g. chapters mostly concerning matters other than the Holocaust. That’s for good reason: you have to pay attention to the other components too, even though the aim of extermination is an important overall reason to understand the Nazis.
In the frame of my original comment, i.e., ‘at what level should one focus on specific individual parts even at the expense of overall important atrocities?’, I agree that discussing the economy writ large whilst ignoring the Uyghurs would neither lead to a good factual understanding of the economy nor be appropriate morally. But the question of poverty alleviation in the Han heartlands to me is a discrete one that (a) is important to broadly understanding the economy and (b) is a sufficiently narrow topic to be discussed without necessarily focusing on the Uyghurs.
> Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour.
is rubbish interpreted in the natural sense. Of course I meant without the use of forced Uyghur labour as we see at the moment. It is arguable that growth 1970s-now mostly was not underpinned by forced labour, but the strategies of the 50s-60s certainly involved a lot of what we should call forced labour.