- cross-posted to:
- YUROP@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- YUROP@feddit.org
You must log in or register to comment.
I love the memes about how China is threatening Europe so much. The last time China did anything threatening to Europe it was when they had a war to kick the British out of China, and Europe will never forgive them for it
This is a democracy vs authoritarian logic. Not a matter of territorial disputes.
Hopefully Chinese democracy will prevail against western authoritarianism.
Change nothing lemmy.ml
Can you enlighten us as to how China is authoritarian in a way that Europe isn’t? Because as far as I can tell, even if literally every single thing China is accused of by anyone is true, this is what their major crimes amount to:
- Killing 10,000 protesters in Tiananmen Square
- Imprisoning 1M Uighurs in Xinjiang
- Sterilizing, abusing, and killing some number of Uighurs in Xinjiang, I’ve never seen numbers accompanying this claim
- Suppressing Tibetan religious identity
- Lack of queer rights
- Not respecting Taiwan’s sovereignty
- Suppressing political speech that goes against the government
- General religious persecution of several religious minorities other than those mentioned above; Falun Gong, Christians, other Muslims, etc
- Aggression toward their neighbors like India and the Philippines
- Support of Russia during their invasion of Ukraine
- Support of Myanmar during the Rohingya genocide
Let me know if I missed any.
Meanwhile, (mainly Western) Europe definitely has done the following in the past 50 years:
- Funded and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, killing anywhere from 50,000 people per the Health Ministry to 500,000 per Donald Trump
- Mostly refused to recognize a Palestinian state until quite recently
- Exploited peripheral European states economically
- Continued to hold assets belonging to former colonies in the Global South
- Collaborated with the US to destroy the USSR and strip it for parts, causing one of the largest peace-time drop in life expectancy in history, and unleashing rampant economic and sexual exploitation
- Allow thousands of immigrants to die in the Mediterranean to prevent them from reaching the continent.
- Joined the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan
- Joined NATO actions to destroy the Libyan government, leaving the country in a state of utter chaos and making it one of the only places on earth with open air slave markets
- NATO actions against Yugoslavia and Serbia (granted, to intervene in a genocide, but in a way that was not done to intervene in the Rwandan genocide; this suggests the intervention was primarily motivated by an extractive, imperialist interest)
- Islamophobia; Hijab bans, rampant hate speech, racially stratified economies.
- Backsliding queer rights in some countries, total lack in others.
I think there’s probably more I could go into, but I think that’s at least enough to make my case. If you want to believe China is authoritarian because you believe every point in the upper half is true, then I won’t stop you. But you’re on some craaaazy wypipo logic if you think the points in the bottom don’t mean that the same label ought to be applied to Europe.
Deleted by moderator
Okay, I spent like 10 minutes searching my mind trying to fully understand where you’re coming from and meeting you halfway by listing things I don’t even believe to be true about China. If you can’t engage with people who disagree with you under those circumstances, then what level of engagement did you expect?
How much time have you spent studying the Chinese system?
How many Chinese people have you discussed politics with? How much time have you spent there?
I met people from China who unlike you understand their government is a proletarian democracy (which is different from a liberal democracy in many ways), you can even meet Chinese people here who’ll tell you that their government is democratic, but it’s not THAT hard to learn about a system you don’t understand by at least watching YouTube if you don’t have the patience or habit of sitting down to read.
I haven’t been to China because I’m poor and on the other side of the globe, have you been there yourself? There are nice videos by tourists that show that China is just… a country. Very advanced, great infrastructure, but not what you seem to believe it is.
I have been there, to several places. I have friends there. I know Chinese outside of China. They are not hard to find.
If you live in a big city, there are Chinese places. Go there and try to talk Chinese politics with anyone there, see what’s the general feeling. Sample that with a random European place and see how more easily you can talk politics with a French or an Italian. Thing is, China sends policemen to check the Chinese abroad behave correctly. Even outside China, they are on their toes.
That’s your homework before you try to explain to people online things about a country you never experienced.
There are nice videos by tourists that show that China is just… a country. Very advanced, great infrastructure, but not what you seem to believe it is.
China is far more advanced than most westerners believe, even though they start updating their views a bit. I also heard Dubai and Tel Aviv are very nice city to live in. Which tells you nothing about the ills of their governments.
I’ve interacted with 5 - 7 Chinese users over Lemmy recently ish. Haven’t been, but one of my close friends went to Hong Kong pretty recently and enjoyed their time.
LOL. Worked with Chinese, discussed politics with Chinese (outside of China, for obvious reason to anyone who met any Chinese citizen). Try to get first hand accounts before praising one of the strictest censorship in the world. And learn a bit about the specifics of Hong-Kong, or better, meet activists there if this is your sample of China
🫡
Except the EU can’t compete industrially or millitarily with any of those 3. The EU needs to correctly identify who to partner with for its own survival, and it’s clear that the PRC is the best option, Russia being a second choice. The US Empire is dying, and the EU imperialists are either going to fall down with it or be forced into cooperation with those it has convinced itself are existential enemies.
Of all choices, Russia is the most dangerous right behind the US.
I wouldn’t say “right behind,” Europe was very happy to buy Russian energy for decades until the US sabotaged Nord Stream. The US Empire is by far the most dangerous.
Sabotage as in actually sabotaging the physical pipeline or just salting the contracts by lowering the demands for the goods?
Bit of A, bit of B.
The EU has a much larger GDP and a significantly higher defense budget than Russia (about 457 billion USD vs. 146 billion USD in 2024). While its industry is more fragmented, it can be rapidly scaled up when needed as demonstrated in Ukraine. and the comparison to russia also lacks because the EU doesn’t consider the current situation as active war. However, compared to the US and China, the EU still lags behind their global projections. Although Russia has increased its arms production in recent years, it is suffering from sanctions and material losses in the Ukraine conflict, which limits its military capabilities. Overall, the EU is economically and industrially stronger than Russia, but still trails the US and China in a global comparison. Since there is a noticable shift of power in the world the EU started to focus more on China and India as trading partners and leave the US who traditionally were European allies.
The EU has a much larger GDP and a significantly higher defense budget than Russia (about 457 billion USD vs. 146 billion USD in 2024)
The EU is far more financialized, in terms of gross industrial output the EU is behind the Russian Federation. This is a holdover from their soviet legacy. In terms of real production, Russia succeeds, despite lower GDP, because money stretches much farther in Russia. 1 million USD worth of Russian goods gets you a lot more than 1 million USD in European goods, to make things simple.
Europe could make up the gap, but it is so dominated by finance capital and energy dependency that this makes it incredibly difficult without adopting socialism.
Overall, the EU is economically and industrially stronger than Russia
This is false. The EU is financially stronger than Russia, largely thanks to modern neoimperialism in Africa, but industrially is far behind.
Since there is a noticable shift of power in the world the EU started to focus more on China and India as trading partners and leave the US who traditionally were European allies.
Correct, the EU is being demoted from imperial vassal to periphery, and since it would take devastating losses in open conflict with a major power without US backing it has to seek other allies.
The Netherlands colonized half the world despite being smaller than Mongolia - Venice was able to stand up to countries like the ottoman empire despite being only a single city.
Financialization isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing either.
Surprise 😂
?
Okay Russia is understandable cuz they’re in a war, USA understandable cuz they’re saber rattling, but genuinely what is China doing besides minding their own business?
The worst crime of all. Being powerful while the wrong race.
Buying ports and selling cars, generally speaking an economy war.
Nationalize your ports to prevent private foreign companies from buying them.then dont sell the ports and buy the cars?
No no no, you don’t understand, we wanted to make money from the ports and produce the cars but they had to be the complex, oil-sucking ones because those are hard to produce and we and our partners made good profits from the oligopoly and making cheap and environment friendly cars is just cheating. It’s against the rules-based world order! Also, Uyghurs!
economy war is when the west voluntarily hands you all its production and then gets mad that someone somehow handed the production over. i guess.
edit: the people actually waging economic war on you are your own god damned ruling class.
China is the evil economy.
Boost their own, flood foreign.What are you talking about. What country doesn’t want to boost their economy???
Between an exchange of goods and services and flooding it by subventiontioning to suppress the competition is teensy tiny difference, no?
This is called a “skill issue” on the hand of western imperialists that can’t compete. Stop framing doing better as being evil.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder.
Evil is the invisible hand of the market fisting the ass of your country, who send their production to a foreign country, and then start crying because they get better after decades of doing what guys should have being doing all along.
Explain how it’s evil to allow the US companies to move their production out of the US? The US corporations could have kept industry here, but they decided to fuck themselves over so that a few shareholders’ margins went up by a few percentage points. That wasn’t China being malicious, that’s the US lacking any sense of foresight while being blinded by greed.
Being better at producing goods is evil?
Oh no the Chinese are sending us good quality, cheap goods and letting us pay them with our dogshit overinflated currency. If only we were forced to buy plasticky shit at extortionate prices made by the USA (USA!! USA!!).
What do you mean “evil economy?” Is producing goods a bad thing?
Death to production, unlimited chaos on everyone.
Literally sounds like 40k logic, lol.
Flooding foreign economies with cheap subventioned goods so the domestic can’t compete and go out of business and thus increasing dependency in you.
Yes, I’d say this is bad.Bad for who
It is a pretty bad deal for Western workers that our economies have deindustrialized. But that’s not China’s fault, that’s our ruling classes’ fault.
Deindustrialization itself isn’t really bad. It’s a neutral thing.
Yeah, kind of, but under a capitalist system where workers can’t reap the benefits of automation and much labor is still performed in the imperial periphery it is negative.
I would argue that it is in fact bad because it’s a threat to national security and sovereignty. The Europeans are now finding out that they’re unable to produce things domestically that their people need, and have become entirely reliant on US energy exports and military protection.
This is just cope, though. China has better industrial capacity, and can produce high quality goods for lower prices because of this. It isn’t because of evil, it’s because China as a socialist economy is surpassing capitalist economies.
The goods produced in China are cheap because Western economies made a bet that they’d come out ahead by moving their capital out of their own economies and into China. China won the bet instead of them and now has more productive capacity than the West. Why is it China’s fault that the West had poor foresight and deindustrialized itself in exchange for short term profits? Should Chinese workers have remained poor forever instead of benefiting from Western investments?
China isn’t forcing anybody to buy their goods at gunpoint last I checked. The fact that western markets are unable to produce comparable goods at the same prices is entirely the problem with the way western economies are structured. The whole premise for loosely regulated markets was that they were supposed to be more efficient than state planning, turns out that was a big fat lie. So now the dumb fucks in the west are crying that their failed economic model can’t compete with China. Tough!
They are literally genociding part of their population to enforce a unique race
They aren’t? Not only is the idea of mass Uyghur slave labor atrocity propaganda akin to claiming that there’s “white genocide” in South Africa, Christian genocide in Nigeria, or that Hamas sexually assaulted babies in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the PRC is an incredibly industrialized country and as such doesn’t have a need for slavery. Slavery in general is a horribly inefficient system fir anything other than agrarian production, which is why the Statesian North liberated the slaves in the south, for more wage-laboring industrial workers.
In the case of Xinjiang, the area is crucial in the Belt and Road Initiative, so the west backed sepratist groups in order to destabilize the region. China responded with vocational programs and de-radicalization efforts, which the west then twisted into claims of “genocide.” Nevermind that the west responds to seperatism with mass violence, and thus re-education programs focused on rehabilitation are far more humane, the tool was used both for outright violence by the west into a useful narrative to feed its own citizens.
The best and most comprehensive resource I have seen so far is Qiao Collective’s Xinjiang: A Resource and Report Compilation. Qiao Collective is explicitly pro-PRC, but this is an extremely comprehensive write-up of the entire background of the events, the timeline of reports, and real and fake claims.
I also recommend reading the UN report and China’s response to it. These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz, professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does.
Tourists do go to Xinjiang all the time as well. You can watch videos like this one on YouTube, though it obviously isn’t going to be a comprehensive view of a complex situation like this.
Can you provide a source for that claim?
can you make a new one with marvel characters? it allows for more nuance :3
No you don’t understand white people are like dumblebot and the asian hordes are moldymort.
Euros love to imagine something they are not
yeah always funny. The main achivement they got was grpd and ubs c on iphone. You dont build an empire base on thoses.
What no materialist or historical analysis does to a mf.
Liberal brainworms slop.
What a deep and specific argument you have here
