Okay, so background: I’m your average pro-gun fuck-the-police, fuck-trump zoomer honed by years of unsupervised internet access and I’ve just discovered this community and started lurking for a while. But I still hold extremely negative views on China, which I still think are justified.
“Which views?” I’ll throw them out real quick: child labor! internet censorship! media censorship! anti-LGBTQ! uygher genocide? positive and pro war relations with russia! (because fuck putin)
So I get really confused anytime I see people expressing pro-China sentiments. Have I been spoonfed by the media or are some of these points actually justified?
I’ll bite:
CHILD LABOR: Yeah, it’s bad, but China is working to reduce and abolish it. Like most Western nations it is illegal for children under 16 to work in normal jobs. However, they have exceptions for “special circumstances”. This mostly leads to children in rural areas of China being employed on farms and such, not much unlike here in the US. It is important to remember China’s meteoric rise from a nation racked by poverty and war in the 40s to the powerhouse it is today. That’s not even 100 years. Took most everyone else a lot longer to get with the program.
CENSORSHIP: We all experience censorship all over the world. Here in the US certain views are censored from our media (our corporate media is part of the state). YouTube censors swear words. I can got on. China, like most Asian nations, cracks down hard on libel and slander. So defaming someone or spreading bullshit is censored and punished, unlike America. China is not alone in this. For instance, in Japan, you cannot even tell the truth about someone publicly if it would defame them. Like telling people your partner cheated on you. It has to be “in the public interest”. The “censorship” in China reflects this value that is shared across many Asian cultures in that region and is nothing particularly special or heinous. Most people in that region are fine with these laws because they have different views on freedom than most Westerners.
ANTI-LGBTQ: This is not particularly special to China, sadly. The US has it’s own issues here. The Arab world is a disgrace in regards to this. African nations struggle with this issue. South American nations struggle with this. Many Asian cultures struggle here as well. It is an awful truth that much of the world has a poor view on LGBTQ+ peoples and their rights and the struggle to protect the dignity of our LGBTQ+ comrades everywhere is ongoing. China is not exceptional in one way or the other here.
UYGHER GENOCIDE: Putting people in re-education camps is not good. As someone who has actually worked in corrections in the USA I can attest that in every correctional facility there are abuses that the average person would recoil from. It’s why I did it for a short time and quit. It’s why I’m an abolitionist. I am highly skeptical of the claims made about “organ harvesting” and nightly r*** because even in the most dire conditions these are particularly heinous. Remember that the guards in China are people, too, just as capable of good and evil as we are. It is also worth noting that the most vocal critics are all members of a weird cult in China and are generally only ever amplified by US propaganda outlets, for which the US media (our corporate state media) re-prints. So there is plenty of reason to be skeptical. It is also worth noting that for decades the US spent tens of millions trying to radicalize the Uyghurs into terrorists in China. So seeing our government officials here suddenly cry over their treatment while they previously wanted to turn them into suicide bombers really makes my blood boil. It is so disingenuous.
RUSSIA: Russia is a capitalist hell-hole now and the fall of the Soviet Union was one of the many tragedies of the last century. China does not have the “red scare” that the West has in regards to Russia. If you step back and look at things objectively, Russia is really no worse than many other nations, like the USA. Sure, they invaded a white nation. If only they were murdering brown people then our media wouldn’t care. But I digress, Russia is bad. Ukraine also sucks. Ukrainian people don’t deserve war. Well, nobody deserves it. China needs partners around the world that aren’t antagonistic to them and Russia is one such partner. In fact, Chinese businesses are already filling the gaps in the Russian economy since they don’t give a fuck about Western sanctions. China is looking at this from that perspective. Should they also let the average Russian suffer? Would that satisfy you?
I was not expecting such a well thought out response. As much as I would like nations to immediately become good and progressive, you brought up the point that there are many nations around the world that struggle with a lot of these things and I forgot to think about that. Thanks for your entire comment - I’ll probably be re-reading it a lot.
I want to touch on the child labor point, though: as is evident in day-to-day life in America, laws can exist without not really being enforced to the point they become virtue signaling. My point is is there any evidence that the Chinese government on their end has worked to enforce their laws?
Before I answer this I want to point out an interesting contradiction your concern raises. You propose that the Chinese government is lax in enforcement. Well, is the Chinese government an authoritarian monster who punishes citizens over the tiniest infraction or are they lax in enforcement of some of the most obvious violations of the law? When discussing China with people I notice things like this. “China bad” wins over common sense. Propaganda works, folks.
Yes, China has actually been working to reduce child labor. The thing with China is they are actually concerned about their image to the rest of the world. Child labor is a blot on them. They still have about twice as many children in the workforce as the USA or UK, but the days where they worked them like they still do in Bangladesh are over and the situation improves year by year. This is not to mean we shouldn’t be critical. We should be critical of China, the USA, the UK, and everywhere were children are abused and exploited.
I would also note that as the American public is currently discovering, there are far more children working in slaughter houses, factories etc than they thought. And this doesn’t even include things like the troubled teen industry which runs work camps for teens who often haven’t committed a crime or juvenile prison labour.
You also have the fact that several US States are currently passing or pushing bills to re-legalise children working in these dangerous places. So you have all of China pushing in anti-child labour direction and a significant proportion of the US pushing in a pro-child labour direction.
Holy fuck you’re right lmao I didn’t even realize I was contradicting myself
One last thing I’d like to say in regards to “freedom” that has little to do with China:
Freedom is an interesting concept. There is an idea in the West that freedom is universal. That it’s definition is so obvious and essential to us as human beings that we must all surely think that it means the same thing to everyone. In America we even wrote down that our rights are divinely imbued to us. However, it doesn’t take much reflection on the idea to realize that this simply isn’t true. Take our free speech example early. The Japanese have plenty of people who defend the laws. For them there is an oppression in the idea that anyone can just go spreading lies and rumors about you. Or that your private mistakes, like unfaithfulness, could hurt you professionally. Any woman in the USA can explain to you what it feels like to be alone in a big city. They cannot walk down the street at 3am alone without knowing there is real danger all around them. Is that freedom? To be gripped by fear because you walked home alone after a night out? If you ask a woman in Havana if she shares this fears it is alien to her. Unheard of. The idea that she might be assaulted walking around the city at night by herself is so rare that it simply does not even cross her mind. So is freedom based around what you can do as an individual, or is it liberation from being prevented from doing normal human activities, like simply existing somewhere late at night while you are a woman? Maybe there are other views of freedom. That’s the catch, what freedom means to most Westerners is not what it means to other peoples around the world. We aren’t wrong and they aren’t either. The imperialist mind hasn’t caught up to this yet.
None of us are immune to the propaganda we internalize our whole lives. Not me nor you.
It’s possible that it could be not that different from here, though. The US is an incredibly authoritarian state if you’re black, for instance. And the state will take every change it gets to enforce its laws against you. If you commit financial crimes or wage theft, though, if you are prosecuted at all, it’s with kid gloves.
It’s entirely possible for a state to be inconsistent with its enforcement of the laws.
Entirely true, but that exposes the core of what I was getting at: China’s contradictions and problems are really not that unlike us. They are painted as otherworldly authoritarian monsters; a system entirely separate and alien to ours. Yet, if you accept what you just said, you must reluctantly admit that they are not so different after all. If you can admit that they are like us in many ways then it starts to really become obvious to you when they are painted as so different. The veil of Western propaganda lifts slowly.
This is not to say the US is the same as China or whatever. Just that they are not as different as the imperialists say.