People in China live under totalitarian rule, that much is true.
But how free is the average North American, where getting sick can bring you and your family financial ruin? Where the "free press" is controlled by corporations who are also the main source of campaign funding for politicians? Where their urban spaces are designed to require you to have a car and promote complete atomized individuals?
All these things are from the private sector and may be left behind if you like (do younger generations even listen to corporate news?)
The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.
We can talk about all this stuff on an American form, but good luck talking about any of China's issues on a Chinese Forum. Lets not talk about how China regularly kills Catholic priests and bishops. Anyone who tries to glaze China is a propagandized fool.
..you forgot to mention that any technology in China, foreign or domestic, can and will be used for and to the benefit of the -military- party.. But like someone posted: "not perfect" fits the bill.
Check out the Sean Ryan Show with Palmer Luckey on China and military tech.
Meta, Google and co control all your private data. GDPR is a european thing not an american or chinese thing.
CIA/FBI have their own massive data centers (see snowden) inkl. their own older bigger palantr style software.
Elon Musk was able to connect a Starlink server to your data and no one cared. He and his Duche aeh sry doge baby boys were able to access and download all Social Security Numbers.
If someone knows were Putin and all the other world leaders are at any given moment, I would bet its USA first than China if even because i don't think China cares that much about it than USA does.
And everyone out of scope of this, lives probably in some rural USA town were no one cares for you at all anyway, but thats the same thing as in China.
Really laugh my ass off, so much whataboutism and American centrism when the debate is whether China is trustworthy on AI. Given your ignorance you should go and do your research, but I will help you a bit here.
- Control goes beyond politics
state corporation monopoly, 党支部 in private sector, crackdowns on NGOs and charities.
- A single, all-encompassing ideology
Party led, mandarin speaking Han Chinese nationalism, blended with Little Pink's unquestionable support for Xi and the party.
- No meaningful private sphere
社区网格员
- Mass mobilization and propaganda
We saw mobilizations on Chinese social media, attacking celebrities who don't openly say anything the party wants them to say. Mobilization in real life is rare though, cos it had shown it can backfire.
tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.
Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.
Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.
Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.
Is your contention that Hong Kong is also a totalitarian society? Have you been to Hong Kong in the last 5 years? I feel like people saying these sorts of things are just completely divorced from reality.
> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.
No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.
> That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.
Tell it to the people in Wuhan, and Shanghai, Urumqi, and other cities that had lockdowns. I was in Shanghai in 2022, I was confined to my apartment for nearly 3 months, you couldn't be more wrong.
Shanghai was locked down as a health measure during a major outbreak in the middle of a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.
Lockdowns were done in many places in the world, including in Taiwan. I get that you're angry about being inconvenienced, but you weren't living in a totalitarian state. You were inconvenienced because there was a massive public health emergency, and the government had the choice of either locking down one city or letting the virus spread to the rest of the country and kill millions of people.
God I wish I could just block you. So called inconveniences in the name of so called massive public health emergency? First of all it was the Omicron variant, we knew its mortality rate is low, second it did spread to the rest of the country by the end of 2022 and killed millions of people, so what was the fucking point? If you have to downplay all suffering by calling them inconveniences, I guess there's no one could convince you anyway, you better hope it doesn't happen to you.
Anyway here are few links and videos for those curious what happened
Here's a fun one, a fake app for Covid Health Code, which was required to enter any public space and private business and even your home https://ilovexjp.pages.dev/
The Omicron variant killed more people worldwide (including in the US) than any other variant.
You were personally subject to quarantine measures in early 2022, and that irks you. On the hand, if you spent the pandemic in Shanghai, you were more free to go about your life than people were in the West for most of 2020-2021.
What argument? It was just contradiction, he didn't care how much evidences and points I brought. 3 months of trauma and depression and it is just merely irk in his eyes. It was just an unfunny, callous version monty python's sketch.
Trump's smarter than he lets on. He plays the buffoon in public, but he's smart enough to have gotten elected twice. Which is two times more than I've managed to.
You don't have to be smart to be elected. You have to be a good liar. And it's really easy to be a good liar when you have gotten so deep into bullshitting that you believe your own lies.
Also, being useful to the right people helps. Because they will dump their own money and time into bolstering your campaign.
Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent. US is heavily heterogenous and despite that you segregated like a third of society at the time.
Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.
During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.
My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.
Weird in the Venezuelans case, as there is no restrictions for double nationality and having only Venezuelan citizenship doesn't have many advantages. I would guess that it is because most Venezuelans living there already have an European passport due to parents/grandparent, so no need/can't get a third
Cannot only if the other European country does not allow dual nationality.
If they are permanently settled in the UK surely it would be better to have British citizenship rather than that of a country they do not live in?
The nationalities listed are all very small groups in the UK. maybe they are not really permanently settled? Someone who moves somewhere for work might end up living there a decade (and in the UK that would mean getting indefinite leave to remain) and then returning.
The information on my passport is of comparatively little value compared to the information on my devices. Most states could get my passport information with little more than a friendly request to my government, same for most, access to my phone however.
Why give up more information than is strictly necessary, so you can tap your passport on your phone? Not convincing imo.
Because for many people with poor eyesight, poor English or computer literacy tapping a passport is far easier than typing the data in with no risk of transcription errors.
You clearly don't know anything about the history of the country. It was never about classism or racism, venezuelans are racially diverse with lots of mix between the original indigenous inhabitants, colonial europeans, african slaves and then the second wave of european immigrants after the WWII.
> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
> There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems
OK.
> but that was still functional
Clearly not, because Chavez was elected despite having attempted a coup d'etat previously.
Clearly not, because the coup d'etat against Chavez failed because the population was overwhelming supporting him.
> populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle
Which was necessary because previously it was an oligarchy ran by an opposing circle, which lost favor with the people.
> It was never about classism or racism
It's classism, partly fueled by racism, which causes the ruling elite in Latin America to have such disdain for the rest of the population, that they believe they can take control of the country and govern it as if they were some kind of aristocracy, and completely ignore those beneath them, because they aren't of the right class, are not white enough, and don't have enough wealth, to be taken into consideration.
~60% of the 8M people that fled Venezuela are incline to support a military intervention, that number goes down to 40% estimated for those still inside, so about more than half the country want external action to get out of the dictatorship. That percentage is for external action, the percentage that voted against the dictator in the stolen election last year was calculated at 76%; so no, is definitely not just the MAGA fan base that want to see something happen.
A bad situation is not improved by an even worse one. It does speaks volumes to the desperation of Venezuelans that many would rather their own country get invaded if that rids them of Maduro.
That did not quite go according to plan either. Definitely not a dictatorship but not exactly clean and the end result is not so far off from where they started. Venezuela could easily end up worse than it is today.
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