In my experience Chinese people know extremely little about world history as well as their own uncensored history.
We must be talking to different people. No shortage of history buffs and politics nerds in the neighborhoods I visited.
Often they believe that because of their size harsh controls are needed to prevent chaos and they now easily point at the US as an example of what they don’t want to become.
Well, the US has QAnon and other elaborate conspiracy theories. They’ve got all sorts of horrifying racist media that stokes tension and fear between communities and ethnicities. They’ve got a political system that rewards persecution of opposition and spawns enormous amounts of corruption and waste.
I can’t blame other countries’ leaders wanting to avoid that.
But if you’re a racist then hearing “the government says you’re not allowed to post ‘Black people are eating the dogs and the cats’ to social media” will feed a combined sense of paranoia and self-righteousness.
And then you end up with people who double down, get louder, get more insidious, and start calling down a police response as a result.
Then you’ve got a group of ugly reactionaries buried in a “Freedom of Speech” movement, which poisons the idea on both sides of the issue.
Their narrative on the US goes back even when America and the world would have classified the US as rock solid. The current events is just them seeing that they were correct the whole time.
I’m more referring to the rank and file Chinese who don’t speak or read any English.
There are far more Chinese English speakers than American Mandarin speakers. Not that it matters, as we’ve had translation software for decades and quite a few people doing the yeoman’s work of manual translation for even longer.
But it might say something about the insightfulness of Chinese political analysis that they picked out the flaws in our system way back when the vast majority of Americans were fully blind to it. Perhaps the Reagan and Clinton Eras should have been a warning sign we heeded a bit earlier. Perhaps there’s something to this historical materialism that you’re not giving enough credit.
You can make an argument that they are correct, but most of America is panicked about the rise of fascism, whereas China sees fascism as a solution to chaos.
We must be talking to different people. No shortage of history buffs and politics nerds in the neighborhoods I visited.
Well, the US has QAnon and other elaborate conspiracy theories. They’ve got all sorts of horrifying racist media that stokes tension and fear between communities and ethnicities. They’ve got a political system that rewards persecution of opposition and spawns enormous amounts of corruption and waste.
I can’t blame other countries’ leaders wanting to avoid that.
But if you’re a racist then hearing “the government says you’re not allowed to post ‘Black people are eating the dogs and the cats’ to social media” will feed a combined sense of paranoia and self-righteousness.
And then you end up with people who double down, get louder, get more insidious, and start calling down a police response as a result.
Then you’ve got a group of ugly reactionaries buried in a “Freedom of Speech” movement, which poisons the idea on both sides of the issue.
Their narrative on the US goes back even when America and the world would have classified the US as rock solid. The current events is just them seeing that they were correct the whole time.
I’m more referring to the rank and file Chinese who don’t speak or read any English.
There are far more Chinese English speakers than American Mandarin speakers. Not that it matters, as we’ve had translation software for decades and quite a few people doing the yeoman’s work of manual translation for even longer.
But it might say something about the insightfulness of Chinese political analysis that they picked out the flaws in our system way back when the vast majority of Americans were fully blind to it. Perhaps the Reagan and Clinton Eras should have been a warning sign we heeded a bit earlier. Perhaps there’s something to this historical materialism that you’re not giving enough credit.
You can make an argument that they are correct, but most of America is panicked about the rise of fascism, whereas China sees fascism as a solution to chaos.
???