I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.
I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving great things. I also think there is a high probability that they will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong.
On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our chances of collective failure.
I just hope we never go back to Mao-levels of incompetence
Killing all sparrows, compared to defunding vaccine science in the wreckage of a pandemic..
Village Steel making compared to literally cancelling construction projects for advanced wind turbines
For an example I'm reminded of the recent public backlash to the K visa scheme [1].
1. https://www.ft.com/content/01a0029c-9f7c-4b31-a120-d1652f198...
It’s somewhat like the Tang dynasty at its most prosperous — when envoys from all nations came to pay tribute, and many Japanese and Central Asians studied and worked in Chang’an. But interestingly, I’ve noticed that in recent years, public opinion toward the Tang dynasty has gradually become less positive, which might be related to this.
As for the “bachelor problem,” it roughly falls into two categories. One group consists of older men — they’re actually quite fortunate, since they’re a key target of positive government assistance. In rural areas, for instance, the government often helps them build houses and provides them with monthly living stipends so they can survive without working. China’s living costs are relatively low, so this policy can be sustained.
The other group is younger men. Their solutions are either marrying foreign women or staying single and enjoying life. With modern technology, single life isn’t really difficult anymore. In recent years, the number of cross-border marriages has surged, mainly involving women from Southeast Asian countries. Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos’ red-light districts are also frequent destinations for these men. Currently, influencers who promote foreign marriages are very popular on Chinese websites.
Of course one practical issue you run into is that while Aurelius was perhaps one of the greatest leaders of all time, his son and heir - Commodus, was perhaps one of the worst of all time. But at least if we speak of the eras prior to its decline, Pax Romana in particular, I don't really see how the Roman Empire would be horrifying. And in any case dramatic deterioration of the quality of public leadership, probably presaging a more broad decline, is clearly not limited to systems of minority rule.
When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul it was said he killed one million people and enslaved another million, and was celebrated for it. The actual numbers may not be accurate, but the sentiment probably was.
Moral relativism aside, would you like to live in a society where killing civilians during war and enslaving survivors were both acceptable?
Or how about the the abandoning of unwanted babies:
* https://academic.oup.com/book/6954/chapter-abstract/15122509...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15d74av/how_...
Post-industrialization (kind of assuming they'd have access to modern tech here), slavery makes very little sense - even completely ignoring the ethical issues. Pay a negligible hourly/monthly cost to hire a skilled worker that can be easily replaced or dismissed as desired, or pay a huge up-front cost to take on somebody who is probably low skill, may or may not work out, and then be 100% responsible for all of their needs and other costs going forward? They'd likely outlaw it just like every other country that's gone through industrialization has.
Similarly exposure (which began to be phased out and moving towards adoption once Christianity took hold in Rome) was once again largely a product of technology. Abortion was extremely dangerous in those times for the mother, and exposure was one way it was done relatively more safely. And children were often exposed because of various deformities or their sex which, again, can now be detected at a prenatal stage. Though the sex issue again gets back to a lack of technology. Son's worked and essentially were your pension, whereas daughters joined the house of whoever they married, to say nothing of dowry related issues.
Obviously we have to do a lot of speculation to imagine what a Roman Empire in modern times would look like, but I don't think many of the knee-jerk reactions to it are really justified.
we have yet to solve either problem, regardless of whatever new terms we come up with to describe the plight.
By their standards multipolarity means control ove different circles of influence without interference.
That's what Russia wants for example, they want to secure the regime by controlling nearby countries (ideally turning them into Belarus, or by threat of destruction, like Georgia and Moldova, or by annexation, like Ukraine).
China wants to control territories surrounding them as well.
So don't be fooled by multipolarity, it's just a repacked imperialism and colonialism by right, not by earned influence.
It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.
A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.
> I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.
I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be address and treated as such.
The main reason is probably that US never had the major socialist movements of 20th century Europe. Before those liberals were the left in Europe too.
And after his assassination everything went downhill fast with divide and conquer, all alongside global self destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000 for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think about all of the amazing things we could have done with that money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have literally less than nothing to show for it since they not only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less stable.
Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed cooperation, and now we're living in the world they created.
It just so happens that systems of dependency can also be framed positively as 'solving hunger' or whatever. The fact that 60 years later 'solving hunger' has translated to having more than 41 million people completely unable to feed themselves without government assistance is not a coincidence. It a third stanza of that old saying 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. Give a man a fish every day and he'll do whatever you want to keep getting that fish.'
There's countless ways we could have spent that war money (no different during LBJ times with Vietnam) to help create ways for people to be able to genuinely provide for themselves. But I don't think this was ever the goal.
This is complete nonsense. Certain demographics that depend the most on welfare oppose it the most. Mitch McConnell responded to concerns about the political impact of Medicaid cuts saying that voters would "get over it".
LBJ was certainly motivated by power, but he also genuinely cared about social issues as well. He knew that the Civil Rights Acts would overall cost him far more politically than he gained in terms of support from newly enfranchised black voters.
So then he passes the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, then the Food Stamps Act on August 31st 1964, and then there's the election. The black turnout for the election ended up being 58% with something like 94% of their vote going to him, giving him a landslide of an election victory. So what he was saying wasn't just trying to convince people, as it's often been reframed - he was simply being a realist and was 100% correct.
The guy was a massive racist and segregationist for most of his entire political career. But more than anything he was a professional politician who wanted power. And he did what he thought could get that power. This [1] Snopes article includes many of his 'greatest hits' and tries to conclude with an argument claiming that he wasn't mostly fixated on claiming the black vote, but it makes no sense. Apparently in reading the headlines about the Civil Rights Act he was found in a melancholy state and when asked why he said, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come." That was obviously him being worried that his calculations might been wrong, but they weren't - he won 44 states in the election.
[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/
Yeah it is a coincidence. The last 60 years also coincided with massive deindustrialization, job losses and reducing labor power, and multiple drug epidemics. I'm much more inclined to believe it was those factors, and not "welfarism".
This isn't true. I cannot recommend Robert Caro's works on LBJ enough. Johnson had plenty of flaws, but he cared deeply about people, especially the poor. He taught immigrant schoolchildren and saw their plight. He grew up before the Hill Country had electricity and saw the reality of true poverty, and when he had power he used every bit of his skills and connections to get things like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, Medicare, and Medicaid - and so many more.
You can't (and shouldn't) separate LBJ and his administration from atrocities in Vietnam, but if he had been able and willing to extract America from Vietnam, he would be without dispute the greatest president in history and it's not close.
There's been a large effort to reimagine LBJ because having an exploitative racist as the progenitor of many of these things (which you mentioned) is kind of awkward, but reality is always so much more interesting than fiction, precisely because of such things.
---
In the future you'll see something similar with the Amish. There's about 400k Amish in America growing at about 2.5% per year, thanks to healthy fertility rates. And they do, when they see it as necessary, vote (as they did for Trump). As their population continues to swell, and election margins continue to narrow, they're going to be capable of deciding elections in the US in the foreseeable future.
And so you're going to see a Republican suddenly become a hero for everything the Amish care about. Is it because he cares about the Amish? No, but that's certainly how it'll be framed. As an aside, I find the idea of the Amish as kingmakers hilariously appropriate. I guess the meek truly will inherit the Earth!
That’s not true! Some guys got really really rich with it. So, working as indented.
Europe prospered under democratic governments after the second world war. My particular region of Germany was rural, agrarian and piss poor before the war. Now it is an industry hub and one of the richest regions in Germany, all thanks to a democratic government, which prioritised development of rural areas.
The wealth we now enjoy is incomparable to what we had under authoritarian rule before.
Let's also not forget, that the Cold war divided Europe in two halves, one with democratic governments and one under authoritarian rule, an A/B test so to say. The end result was, that they needed a wall in Berlin to keep the people from fleeing to the west.
> Look around the world and see how many countries managed to achieve similar success using the same liberal principles
Beside the whole of Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Uruguay and Taiwan come to mind. Taiwan has a per capita GDP 2.5x that of mainland China.
Also, Europe dominated the world for a couple of hundred years before the Great War. Some parts of Europe may have been poor during that time, but compared to the rest of the world I do think it was a whole lot better.
Japan was incredibly rich in the beginning of the 20th century - and it was definitely not a democracy. Australia, Canada and NZ are all part of the ex-British Empire and I would say that's what made them prosperous, not their political system.
South Korea rode on the back of US support, like Japan after the war, but I do agree they did that while being mostly democratic.
Uruguay has just very recently become a nice place due to basically a single guy! That president, Jose Mujica, was such a legend! And a big critic of capitalism , by the way.
Taiwan was what we used to call the "Asian Tigers" that became rich in an incredibly fast manner... I don't know that you can attribute that to a political system at all: Singapore was and is a dictatorship and is perhaps the best example of Asian Tiger - it became richer than Australia in like 20 years!
All in all: you do not convince me. You do not seem to understand what made those countries rich in my opinion and you haven't really reflected on it if you really think that democracy was the common theme.
EDIT: Taiwan is a tiny island, China is a huge country. The GDP percapita of Shanghai and Beijing is about the same as Taiwan... Hong Kong and Macau, also part of China, have much larger GDP/pc still.
that is what it means to have property rights.
It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.
If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).
If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.
The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have united the population, it was immediately politicized such that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.
We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country against each other over literally every issue.
The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.
Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).
So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.
Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).
PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.
Lack of free press makes it easy to look successful.
It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?
Soviets never did any of this. They "stubbornly" kept to a command economy. While china does have their 5-year plans and command economy, they have loosened that up for private individual's enterprises, and allowed special economic zones for which free market capitalism thrives.
With a bit of state help in infrastructure etc, this enabled china to leverage their enormous human capital to simply out-muscle their way into industrial dominance. Now with such a dominant position, they can call shots in a way that irks the US. Compounding the problem is that the authoritarian style of gov't in china enables long term strategic planning and execution - something that seems sorely lacking from the US for the past 3 decades.
You’re literally just explaining why the Soviet Union was less successful.
Nothing stopped the Soviet Union from liberalizing their economy and running it better like China. They just didn’t do it. Which loops us back to my original comment.
I didn’t bring my point up as some kind of communism versus capitalism thing, I’m just plainly stating that as far as single-party mostly-authoritarian governments go, China is far more accomplished than the USSR was.
America had to go to all the way to the moon to win a "first" against the Soviet Union in space.
yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.
of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point
I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the travel videos I saw, but it was even better.
And as for free press, look at where freedom of press took United States. You have companies like Fox news that "aren't actually news, just entertainment", who blatantly lie about election fraud. You have podcasters like Joe Rogan who are at the same time "just bullshitting", while also pushing ideological narratives. And most republicans still believe election was stolen in 2024.
And overall, the party that was all about free speech, free trade, and small federal government power is pretty much doing the exact opposite in every single aspect, and people voted for them.
Im glad China has reigns on all of that. It allows them to pass laws like this https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/chinas-new-influencer-law-wan...
And yes, from a pure statistical standpoint, having centralized power isn't optimal since you don't want someone crazy having lots of centralized power, but at the same time, you also don't want what US has, where on the average 7/10 people simply just don't give a fuck about US being destroyed financially and socially.
It claims free speech is being taken away, then gets upset people use it (Fox News).
Then it celebrates a law that actually curtails free speech.
In the US, organized religion and Fox News are the two most destructive forces in our society.
Yes. There are already laws that curtail free speech - i.e yelling fire in a crowded theater as the popular example. Its not hard to extend this to the act of lying about information on air.
The optimal solution is that the government should have the power to enforce a ban on certain individuals on social media, which should be done through a court procedure where facts are presented and if the person is deemed to be spreading misinformation, the ban applies.
And the famous right wing argument of "don't give government power because it will use it to oppress you" doesn't work anymore.
And your idea of court ordered ban on speech? What is a good example? That Covid absolutely 100% didn’t originate from a lab in China? How about the fact that Covid vaccines stop transmission of the virus?
Both of those were actually banned on major social media sites, then turned out to be true.
So what you’re suggesting is banning speech that isn’t untrue. Just inconvenient to those in power.
Sounds horrible.
The act of it is not, but you can be charged with other things like inciting panic, and so on, especially if someone gets hurt.
Same laws would apply to broadcasting.
>And your idea of court ordered ban on speech? What is a good example?
* Saying that vaccines are causing mass issues, and government is hiding it.
* Lying about what officials said in relation to vaccine. Nobody said that vaccine stop transmission or that vaccines even mean you don't get covid. The whole goal of mandates was to overall reduce the risk of the complications, which were the primary cause of death.
* Claiming that MRNA is untested, or the whole vaccine is untested or can alter the genes
E.t.c and so on
Discussion should not be banned. You can talk about available evidence. You can talk about things that are unclear. But when you straight up lie to promote a political narrative and make stuff up, that should be prosecutable. All of this is easily discoverable in courts.
Other countries were able to successfully develop with less authoritarianism than China (Japan did it twice: Meiji Restoration and post-WW2), and were able to move to more democratic systems.
See the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell for various case studies on what works and what doesn't:
* https://profilebooks.com/work/how-asia-works/
* https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-asia-works-success-and-fail...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works
From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.
For tech workers in particular, the structure of the economy would prevent high equity-based compensation. I also distinctly recall China's heavy-handed enforcement of COVID lockdowns, and the sudden about-face when discontent reached a boiling point. Then there's the censorship too - disagreeing on low-stakes local issues is one thing, but if you disagree with national policy, you cannot exactly discuss it in the open the way that we do here.
I have known a few Chinese people, and they downplay this stuff. Some of them are even political refugees from the purges following Mao's death, and they downplay the level of authoritarianism in the country. As bad as the US has gotten recently, we're still not at that level.
It really does seem like both nations are slowly converging on similar systems of government, but hopefully this authoritarian swing in the US can be limited.
In China, the only real restriction is that you cannot severely criticize the Party and its leaders. I mean, minor criticism is acceptable—for example, pointing out areas that aren’t working well—but you cannot completely reject them. For instance, you cannot post offensive memes about leaders. This is different from the U.S., but I think the comparison is interesting. By sacrificing this particular freedom, we actually gain many other freedoms.
The most typical case this year was a food poisoning incident at a kindergarten. The staff, ignoring safety regulations, added toxic chemical elements to the food. This incident went viral on the Chinese internet, and the public criticism was focused on the government and relevant medical authorities, but people did not(dared not)—blame the Party itself. In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.
Many people don’t realize China’s major advantages, and I only understood them by observing foreigners who run businesses in China( i mean this video if anyone is intreseted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ozoOKhUO4&t=329s) . China has a system of accountability. If anyone travels in China, I highly recommend observing rivers, streets, and even trees—they all have markers indicating who is responsible. This means that if something goes wrong in that area, someone is accountable. Of course, corruption can undermine this, but the system is still operational. China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.
As for why I chose the UAE: honestly, Europe has disappointed me too much these days. Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia. They’re basically at the same level of insecurity. Even in the UAE, which is considered a relatively safe country, I was still worried about my credit card being lost or fraudulently charged. In China, I never have to worry about such things. Of course, Japan, South Korea, or Singapore might also be safe, but those countries are just too boring for me.
Do I care about politics? Of course I do. The more sensitive topics can always be navigated with wordplay—everyone is familiar with these strategies. For more serious matters, a VPN works perfectly.
(My English writing isn’t very good, so I often write in Chinese and use ChatGPT to help me translate.)
Also, Linux is invovled?
(Yes it is coming under threat of caging in the US too now.)
Do you think this is a polite suggestion from the government?
I trust it more than other internet posts, as it's a first-hand description. It also mostly matches what @yanhangyhy wrote here.
I suspect these are much more of a reason to offboard her from social media than all the LGBT stuff, which she had already done for years.
Source: The Daily Mao on Twitter, who said he physically spoke with her half a year ago. Naomi said she's fine, she's just not allowed to have a public social media presence. She's very lucky not to have been thrown in jail for national security/terrorism reasons, especially given how paranoid the security officials are. Perhaps the Shenzhen authorities put in a good word for her.
I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe. It’s also a very diverse region so it’s hard to generalize. But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers.
But regardless, I’d take having a 0.001% chance of my wallet (which contains zero valuables) being stolen versus being silenced by the government for criticizing the regime or being unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation. Let alone all the history rewriting and censorship.
But Europe is also quite heterogeneous. E.g. in Scandinavia getting scammed or pickpocketed is really rare, but in say Barcelona or Rome the chance is a lot higher. Violent crime like robbery is in general very rare everywhere.
it's not propaganda, i am talking some thing like 'yelp', real people share real experience after travel to EU. sure there are many good ones, but lots of bad ones.
> unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation
you can. but not in the public media. people share LGBT content on the Internet all the time. Right now the most popular influencer on chinese tiktok is a crossdresser
not intent to change your view, just some clarification.
I also now realize that my original comment may seem harsher than I intended. I fully understand your point of view since I was also born in a comparatively poor place, and I realize how uplifting it is to see everything around you improve at a rapid pace. But despite this, cases like that of Naomi Wu are egregious. Nobody can say for sure how much each “inconvenient” aspect of her online presence (accusing companies, being openly gay, having an Uyghur partner) has contributed to her shutdown, but the fact is that this person can’t publish her videos on tech anymore. This is very hard to justify for me.
Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your opinion. It is very valuable to get your perspective here.
Personally, I don’t quite agree with this kind of action, unless there’s a clear law that she violated. But China isn’t very transparent about such matters, so sometimes what the government does is right, sometimes it isn’t. Each case needs to be studied specifically. However, this lack of transparency is indeed a weakness.
Really, where?
I have been robbed in Belgium and in France, have had a knife on my throat on a Sunday morning, and have had burglars twice (once in Antwerp, once in Leuven). About five of my bikes were stolen, and I've been conned by construction workers several times.
Anyhow, sorry to hear about your experience. That’s how statistics work I guess. For any particularly unlucky person there’s a correspondingly lucky person that averages them out.
Conning is definitely more of a thing, but I wouldn’t place it in the same league as pickpocketing of tourists. Which of course is a thing, I don’t want to deny it. Just that using it as a reason to avoid Europe is absolutely blowing it out of proportion.
That is the baseline that Chinese are comparing to nowadays. That's why even many what we call safe places feel unsafe to them.
Also consider that just 15 years ago, China was definitely way unsafer than many European countries. China upgraded from a low public trust to high public trust society in front of people's living memories. This is what you have to consider when considering why Chinese people are happy with their government. All this voting stuff is just theoretical benefit. In Netherlands, our politics have been a mess for more than a decade. Voting certainly didn't solve the problems.
What you said is absolutely right. We’ve gotten used to this kind of society, so our expectations for safety when traveling are much higher than those of people from other countries. Credit cards are, of course, convenient, but in China we’re used to going out with just a phone—no wallet, no cards. No risk of fraud, no risk of robbery, convenient, fast, and safe.
Well...
So you have only ever visited a country that is very definitely NOT a democracy, and you have never lived in a democratic country.
> In the end, a large number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced. The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party itself.
How is that "gaming many other freedoms". If the party was not to lame fine, but what happens when they are to blame?
> China doesn’t have problems like California’s high-speed rail, the UK’s HS2, or the charging stations under Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held accountable.
You said you cannot criticise the party and its leaders. So if something like HS2's cost overruns happen would you even know about it? Does everything get done at the planned cost?
> Our social media is full of reviews about being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the same applies to Southeast Asia
That is not the reality of living in Europe. I lived most of my life in the UK and those sorts of crimes are rare.
i belive no country is democratic. its would be a fool to believe the two-party-voting-system=democratic.
> How is that "gaming many other freedoms". If the party was not to lame fine, but what happens when they are to blame?
its the freedom of accountability, people do wrong things, they get punished or sentence to death. most country dont have.
> So if something like HS2's cost overruns happen would you even know about it? Does everything get done at the planned cost?
yes. no, but things like HS2 would never happen in China. its just too Absurd. In China, at most the leaders might embezzle some money, but they still get the project done.
> That is not the reality of living in Europe. I lived most of my life in the UK and those sorts of crimes are rare.
Compared to China, it is still a very unsafe place. if i have travel to most of the relative-safe countries, i might go to EU. After all ,i read so many books about it, it's still a must-to-go place
- My marriage is invalid in China
- There are multiple clinics that can prescribe me gender-affirming care with little gatekeeping in my city (for now at least). My understanding is that there is significantly more gatekeeping in gender-affirming care in China
- The government actively censors discourse related to my sexual orientation and gender identity
While it appears the US is looking to become more like China in this regard, for now life under the Chinese government would be comparatively untenable for me.
So much in such few words. It sucks immensely.
On Chinese internet there is even a joke. Because women retire earlier than men in China, people discuss whether they can exploit a loophole by changing their legal gender to female in the year before the female retirement age to retire earlier.
> I think this is necessary
Are you trans?
Considering that Article 8 of the ECHR is framed as a negative right (as in freedom from coercion and interference):
> Right to respect for private and family life
> 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
> 2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Then it seems odd that the ECtHR decided, at some point, to start interpreting it as a positive right (as in obliging specific actions to be taken), in this case the argument that anyone should be free to instruct the state to change their sex marker on state-issued identity documentation, with minimal restrictions attached.
Also they seem to have disregarded that permitting this may have significant repercussions on the rights and freedoms of others, depending on what exactly this sex marker permits an individual to do in any particular jurisdiction, i.e. accessing services and facilities restricted to those of that sex.
Because I really doubt that you personally know many trans people in this category.
> Sometimes I even think the evaluation requirements aren’t strict enough.
Leave it to trans people to judge that.
https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/11000/letter_to...
That doesn't really affect my daily life though, especially for someone born there. If it's the tradeoff for the other aspects (high public safety, developed infrastructure...) then I would consider accepting it.
Trust is brittle. I looked even more into the facade of america, and honestly, i am confused by both parties to a certain extent which are both controlled by billionaires etc.
The president I respect the most is teddy roosevelt, I have heard good things about kennedy too but I want to read so much more about the absolute chad known as teddy roosevelt.
I think that there is hope for america but that's only if people actually try to understand what's happening, which is what I am hoping, its a shame bernie sanders couldn't have been a president but I am hoping that a new wave of american politics could arise to tackle corruption/politcal lobbying/bribery.
But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for extremely short term gains.
In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare, halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to make less than our parents while billionaires make more.
Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.
We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.
I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address.
And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes.
Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace".
We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.
It seems most of us in the West are mostly incapable of self-criticism and have been fed so much propaganda that we forgot how to see through all the bull**.
1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty established said boundaries through quite a lot of imperialism about a century before the US got busy manifesting its destiny.*
If the argument is that Tibet was not a country, then the same applies to Taiwan. Taiwan is not internationally recognized as a country, except for a few nations.
It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)
The US is able to mention its past mistakes.
China still can't talk about students it murdered over 30 years ago.
Yet, recent American presidents have no problem admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq wars weren't the best of ideas.
The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes is for future generations to be able to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident from their progress and events that they have not forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the very least.
Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current president is going after Canada just because of an ad, don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to "mention" things either.
What good is mentioning past mistakes if there's strictly zero consequences
This isn’t some gotcha. This article is about china, so chinas issues are relevant.
I'm glad they don't have self-induced famines anymore I guess, but it's not exactly japan in the 80s.
Oops, my hypocrisy meter just broke.