If you start with the assumption that Chinese government is trying to do good for its citizens, those are straight forward decisions.
CCTV protects people from street crime; credit score seems to provide tremendous value in establishing trust between strangers, let's build a better version; people > algorithms, let's regulate the latter.
No, I'm seeing it through taking a series of factually established premises, and comparing them. Critical thinking (however anecdotally a position one launches from) isn't a byproduct of "Western Media".
"If you start with the assumption that Chinese government is trying to do good for its citizens, those are straight forward decisions." Are they?
"CCTV protects people from street crime" ...or just makes investing in ski masks popular? Your statement is so absent any context (who has access to the CCTV, what legal recourse is there for auditing the footage from a privacy or legal evidentiary perspective), are there controls to prevent abuse, etc.
I said nothing of a credit score. I said a social score, which is a very different, and much more contentious issue: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-e...
Most people consider themselves critical thinkers, but subconsciously apply a bias on the sources they read.
For instance they would go to depth on and apply every single possible suspicion on news that are against their perception, or failing that, just simply labeling it as 'false news'. At the same time, news or information that conforms to their bias are accepted as truth usually without any questions asked.
It's alarming because most of the time it is worth a lot more to think critically of the news that conforms to what you believe - because you are already critical of those that are against it by default. That is what true critical thinking is.
That said, the threshold for lazy loading bias can be significantly different for people, and trying to become a Vulcan-Mentat combo might not be the most ideal goal. Actually applying some real rigor and not just resorting to convenient heuristics (e.g. "Western media", "MSM" , "leftist" or "rightist" or several other "ists" reflexively) usually is a good start.
" most of the time it is worth a lot more to think critically of the news that conforms to what you believe"
Agreed.
A benevolent authoritarian government could be very efficient and good, but we still reject authoritarianism because it is bad.
Please explain how the continued lockdown in Shanghai is “the Chinese government” doing good for its citizens vs. not wanting to lose face on an absurd zero covid policy?
Why would anyone do that given treatment of Uyghurs?
From the Chinese perspective, what their government is doing to the Uyghurs is justified because terrorist separatist muslims. And anyway, from the Chinese perspective, nothing really bad is happening to the Uyghurs anyway, they're just being reformed into good citizens.
Completely without any sort of consequences in the world.
US chose to bomb Afghanistan into the ground, China chose to establish very strict social controls. Both are terribly inhumane to innocent people in those regions, but what are real alternatives?
Wikipedia lists a steady stream of domestic terrorism incidents involving Uighurs [0]. It seems like the Chinese government only has one tool in their toolbox--control--so apparently their solution is to eliminate the entire ethnicity, although my prediction is that ultimately that will increase the amount of attacks, because now the entire population has a (concrete) grievance as opposed to a few radicalized ones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China#Chronology_...