Comment by Saline9515 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Saline9515 | Hacker News Reader

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I have spoken with people who grew up in China. I have also spent time there. The education system is geared around brainwashing the children as early as possible, into thinking that the PCC is China and criticizing the PCC is criticizing their country.

China is not a free country; there isn't free information or free speech. I'm sure that many North Koreans also think that their country is perfectly fine and Comrade Kim is the best leader they could have. The pig in his sow likely thinks that he lives his best life. Does it mean that it's true?

Most people I discussed it with, including PhD students, had very little knowledge of their country's history in the 20th century, of what really happened during Mao's rule and after.

Besides, China is a country socially deeply divided, and the PCC doesn't incentivize social empathy in its population - quite the inverse. So I'm not really surprised that rich kids in USA universities (so, the top of the cream of the regime) don't complain about the system and have never experienced hardship personally.

Have you discussed it with people who were locked up in their buildings during Covid? Or farmers who were evicted to make place for promoters who bought their land on the cheap? Or maybe the Tibetan monks that immolated themselves to protest against the destruction of their culture? Lu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace prize, who spent the rest of his life in prison, for saying the wrong (non violent) things?

Your abbreviation PCC suggests to me you're francophone. So you're probably not aware that everything you say about China has an equivalent in the US (deeply divided, lacking empathy etc)

The political content of the respective education systems is different though. What one observes is, Chinese seem unwilling to criticize the government, but Americans seem to be unable to filter out misinformation. In the US, church or other "civic institutions" are conduits for divergent narratives; imagine the French Catholic church but much more fragmented or independent.

It also depends on the time period. As China modernizes it has become less repressive to the average citizen-- though probably still as repressive to dissidents. Rural versus urban divide exists too, just like in the US. (Modern Vendee?) What were the religious background of the people you talked to? PCC is terrified of cults which spread alternative politics under the guise of spirituality. For historical reasons. You will notice that mainstream Islam is fine.

In any event, when wars happen due to decisions taken by government, civilians take the bulk of the damage. It is not a noble thing to speak on the side of violent foreign policy, especially when its couched in the language of "liberation" or "security"

Stop with this sophism where there are only two models - either the US or China. It's false and Taiwan is here to prove it.

Chinese people are much more unable to filter out misinformation because the government tightly controls information flows and manipulates it toward its interest - at least in the US people can hear different voices and make their own mind about it. It's quite ironic to post such idea on HN, which is an American forum that would be censored if it was in China.

Competing religions are indeed a great concern of the largest cult in China, whose church is the CCP. The CCP hates "mainstream Islam" (what is it?) and Uighurs have been jailed for things like reading the Quran. But repression is not at all solely religion-oriented.

And what you are saying regarding the regime becoming more liberal with time is also wrong - the dystopian surveillance of society and the absurd crackdown during Covid is a good example that the CCP is always ready to go back to its mad totalitarian roots when time is right.

Just like it ordered to kill all sparrows in the past, the CCP ordered to seal buildings and their inhabitants during covid. Nothing really changed.

FWIW I think both CPC and US "system" are _both_ fundamentally doomed versions of liberalism. (Are we forgetting that Marx was a liberal?) As is Taiwan's DPP. They are losing the youth vote to the more consistent but pragmatic 3rd party, which will likely lead to the loss of the Presidency to the pro-unification KMT.

CPC are not so much banning the Qur'an as making it subservient to Confucianism (which is a liberalish ideology that human nature is basically wholesome and does not need to be benchmarked against a higher standard)

More "nuanced" criticism here (facts here may be triggering)

https://bitterwinter.org/china-promotes-a-confucianized-appr...

How about instead of getting angry with the heuristics of _fellow liberals_, thus shilling for the deaths of essentially apolitical billions, we get angry with our liberal selves for not being able to see how to fix the fundamental issues with liberalism-- itself not immune to cultlike thought patterns

Start by studying the work of Karp, ex-student of Habermas, you may learn something about yourself :)

There is nothing liberal about the CCP's ideology. Karl Marx wasn't a liberal (in the philosophical sense) at all, argued that dictatorship was necessary and against the free market, among other things.

Confucianism nowadays doesn't really play a part in the CCP politics, it may be pushed at the individual level as a way to promote social "harmony", but certainly not as a general policy. For instance, the party recently judged that increasing the ultralow pensions (30$/m) of agricultural workers was not necessary.

In general, modern china is mercantilist economically, but not really liberal: the State heavily intervenes, property rights aren't guaranteed and the legal system isn't predictable at all (no jurisprudence). Socially, it's even less the case, with omniscient surveillance and repression of the information flow and expression.

Chinese workers still need internal temporary residence permits to work in cities like Beijing, and have no access to public services if they don't. The framing of "CCP policies as liberalism" is plainly wrong, and you ought to do some wikipedia reading about liberalism first.

By the way, Taiwan doesn't have a one-party rule, so its political system is not tied to the DPP. KMT also won elections and it didn't become a dictatorship either.

There's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Marxism

Which I feel is the "most complete take"

>Karl Marx... only criticizing the freedom in the great inequality of wealth and power.[3]

Confucianism is mostly CPC marketing; its gerontocratic heart really beats for Legalism, though some still hope for the "tail wagging the dog, peacefully", just like we'd want "civic individualism" (now represented by Mamdani?) to wag the genroto-corporatist dog in the US.

Regarding the pensions, it's not like national-level legislators are getting censured for supporting their raise.

I'm glad Taiwan's not tied to the DPP, because I'd rather support this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_People%27s_Party#Policy

Looks like it's projected to replace DPP after the boomers die off (peacefully)!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_T...

Sorry, it's just immoral to me to sow discord against CPC in an US-based geronto-corporatist forum. If you want we can continue this on a PRC youth-forum (where I'd think it would be immoral to cast aspersions on US :)

Regarding Taiwanese fix for liberalism, Audrey Tang (with Glen Weyl) is not wasting time:

https://newpublic.substack.com/p/how-taiwan-is-leading-the-w...

>As Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson famously argued, free democratic societies exist in a “narrow corridor” between social collapse and authoritarianism. From both sides, information technologies seem to be narrowing the corridor, squeezing the possibility of a free society.

She'll probably run under the TPP flag?

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html

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