In the eyes of the West, China is supposedly a very repressive state where the people have no freedom. This is easily debunked by visiting China and seeing how the Chinese live.
The claims in this article are, in the words of its author, easily debunked by visiting China and seeing how the Chinese live.
The article is great propaganda, that's for sure. Whoever it is, they seem to cherry pick certain things, ignore other things and keep a few things below the surface, unspoken. It reads like Sino-exceptionalism. I really love their maximum expansion map.
It is just strawman: look at some extreme reporting on China, therefore all reporting about China in the west is wrong. It would be like judging Chinese media based on editorials in Globaltimes.cn.
I've followed Western media studiously for years. NYT, WSJ, CNN, BBC, etc. I've yet to see a story about China that doesn't spin things negatively for China. It doesn't have to be "extreme reporting."
There are plenty of reporting on China in the western media that just reports..you know...news. You can spot check whatever china-related articles are showing on western media specific pages (assuming you aren't in China and therefore are blocked from those sources, of course):
Just browsing the headlines, most of the stories are boring reports and wouldn't incite outrage even in a wolf warrior. But those aren't the ones that get shared around as anti-chinese articles, so...you know...selection bias.
Most news is boring; e.g. look at the first 15 minutes of the CCTV 7 PM news cast, it is just what Xi Jinping did today! If you just want to consume opinion pieces, then why not just look at FoxNews? WSJ and Economist, especially, are in a different boat since they cater to business readers, and they would lose money if reporting on China was constrained to just opinion pieces.
> journalists with on-site reporting
Despite China's best efforts to deport foreign journalists, there are still more than a few left.
It's worth mentioning that every time I watch Joe Biden or Antony Blinken or Jake Sullivan or Nancy Pelosi or anyone from the US government hold a press conference about China, their words are deceitful and aggressive. That's not my imagination.
When the general public sees all this on television, it is extremely influential (such is the power of television media). And, of course, all of this is repeated on social media. So I don't think it's a strawman at all.
If China had remained a backward, undeveloped country like it was in the 1970s, the world would pay China no heed. China would get zero attention; it would be completely ignored.
Visiting China and seeing how the Chinese live won't make you think it's a beacon of democracy, but it will also show you that the Western caricature of China is horrendously distorted.
Fundamentally, the question you have to ask yourself is: if China really is the hellhole that's described in Western media, why do most people in China have such a positive view of their country? The facile answer is that Chinese people must be brainwashed, but consider the difficulty of brainwashing 1.4 billion people who experience China every single day, vs. the relative ease of brainwashing (or lightly rinsing the brains of) people who have no direct experience of China.
Exactly! The Chinese do not pretend they have Western liberal democracy, but the democratic system they do have works for them.
Moreover, they've seen how well liberal democracy works for USA, UK, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Hungary, and so on, and they aren't fooled. The question is: why are we?
I wouldn't characterize the Chinese political system as democratic at all, and there are many ways in which it does not work for many people. However, life has gotten way better in China by almost every metric over the last few decades, and Western depictions of China are incredibly distorted / driven by fear and chauvinism.
Whether or not we think it's democratic is irrelevant; the important thing is that the Chinese think it's democratic. China's system doesn't have to work for us, as long as it works for them.
The Chinese believe they enjoy just as much freedom as we do. They are informed by their international travel. Every year, over 100 million Chinese travel the world over. They've seen our freedoms in the US, UK, France, Germany, etc.
Most Chinese wouldn't classify their government as "Democratic" even if they think the government works for them. Most Chinese never go abroad either, just a small portion that makes up the middle class. You aren't going to talk to some farmer in the middle of henan province about their overseas trips. Heck, most people in Shanghai (the richest city) haven't been abroad, especially if they don't have hukou there (and many don't).
Given that only 120 million Chinese even have passports, 100 million traveling the world every year seems a bit optimistic.
You didn't read the article. Latana's Democracy Perception Index for 2022 shows that the Chinese believe their country is democratic.
Stats do show at least 120 million Chinese have travelled outside the country every year (except, of course, during the pandemic years). This is not speculation requiring optimism.
But if what you say is true, that means most Chinese with a passport are taking international trips every year. If we discount Hong Kong (which doesn't require a passport, and anyways, is part of China, though it does count as an international trip from the airport's perspective, and you have to go through emigration, you also didn't say if you were counting HK residents also, so I guess we could have a bunch of different numbers there), I don't see how that could be true given the dearth of people with passports who are even capable of taking trips abroad.
Hong Kong is a city state however, so it is probably true that most of their residents travel abroad each year (if we count China as traveling abroad, but even if we don't, > 50% is probably about right).
I assume you know that the majority of Hong Kong citizens live in poverty. They can barely afford a roof over their heads, much less international travel.
But perhaps you've never experienced poverty, so you may not know.
1.6 million out of 7.3 million people is definitely serious, but hardly a majority. I've been to the SAR a few times, and don't think it is especially poor, especially when compared to even China's richest city like Shanghai.
As for my own personal experiences, please don't make assumptions like that. You have no idea what I've been through in my life, and it is rather not relevant to this discussion.
Perhaps I overstated the poverty in HK. But my point was that many people there cannot afford to travel. They live paycheck to paycheck; they have very little in the way of savings. I know people in HK, including family. Most people in HK are not well-off.
When you add these to the people who are living in poverty, that doesn't leave for a lot of travelers.
The ability to afford an apartment (expensive, even rent) and the ability to take a holiday to Thailand are completely different costs. An HK resident could be homeless (unable to afford rent) and still easily have the ability to take a holiday to Phuket. That's how crazy HK is, at least.
Hong Kong statistics are usually separate from mainland statistics. This goes for GDP, trade statistics (Hong Kong is a separate member of the WTO, for example), and many other things. I strongly suspect that it goes for tourism statistics as well.
In 2019, there were about 150 million outbound tourists from China (and I think this means mainland China, specifically, but I don't know if multiple trips by the same person count multiple times).[0]
That's up from 100 million in 2013, so the number was rapidly increasing before the pandemic (and it will probably begin rapidly increasing again).
Regardless, the point stands that at the moment, there's no mass rush to escape China. Most people in China think life is getting better year for year, and are fairly optimistic about the future of the country. It's not a democracy, but it's not the dystopia it's caricatured as in Western media.
It's just as silly to buy into the Chinese government's own propaganda about "whole process democracy" as it is to buy into Western fear propaganda about China.
Why is whole-process people's democracy silly? Just because you don't believe in it?
That's what the author meant by Western arrogance. We in the West think we are entitled to define what is and isn't democracy. On what basis? Because we dominate the world politically?
And, by the way, there are also many ways in which our liberal democracy doesn't work for us. Look at our breathtaking Covid death tolls. Look at our staggering inflation and energy shortages. Look at the current mass protests all across Europe over the cost of living. Look at the media censorship over the truth about the Ukraine war. I could go on and on and on.
> Look at our breathtaking Covid death tolls. Look at our staggering inflation and energy shortages. Look at the current mass protests all across Europe over the cost of living. Look at the media censorship over the truth about the Ukraine war.
I've had people in China asked if our country has been destroyed by the pandemic, inflation, energy shortages, BLM protests, etc...and well my answer is "no, you're just being lied to by CCTV." It isn't like the misinformation goes both ways.
True, but my point is that no population has a consensus. Whether you live in China or the West, there are people who know the truth and people who don't know the truth. There are people who are well-informed and people who are ignorant.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 81.8 ms ] threadThe claims in this article are, in the words of its author, easily debunked by visiting China and seeing how the Chinese live.
Have you been to China?
The author isn't saying China is perfect. He's simply pointing out Western anti-China propaganda.
https://www.cnn.com/world/china
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/destination/china
https://www.wsj.com/news/types/china-news?mod=nav_top_subsec...
https://www.economist.com/china
Just browsing the headlines, most of the stories are boring reports and wouldn't incite outrage even in a wolf warrior. But those aren't the ones that get shared around as anti-chinese articles, so...you know...selection bias.
> journalists with on-site reporting
Despite China's best efforts to deport foreign journalists, there are still more than a few left.
When the general public sees all this on television, it is extremely influential (such is the power of television media). And, of course, all of this is repeated on social media. So I don't think it's a strawman at all.
Food for thought.
Fundamentally, the question you have to ask yourself is: if China really is the hellhole that's described in Western media, why do most people in China have such a positive view of their country? The facile answer is that Chinese people must be brainwashed, but consider the difficulty of brainwashing 1.4 billion people who experience China every single day, vs. the relative ease of brainwashing (or lightly rinsing the brains of) people who have no direct experience of China.
Moreover, they've seen how well liberal democracy works for USA, UK, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Hungary, and so on, and they aren't fooled. The question is: why are we?
The Chinese believe they enjoy just as much freedom as we do. They are informed by their international travel. Every year, over 100 million Chinese travel the world over. They've seen our freedoms in the US, UK, France, Germany, etc.
Given that only 120 million Chinese even have passports, 100 million traveling the world every year seems a bit optimistic.
Stats do show at least 120 million Chinese have travelled outside the country every year (except, of course, during the pandemic years). This is not speculation requiring optimism.
But if what you say is true, that means most Chinese with a passport are taking international trips every year. If we discount Hong Kong (which doesn't require a passport, and anyways, is part of China, though it does count as an international trip from the airport's perspective, and you have to go through emigration, you also didn't say if you were counting HK residents also, so I guess we could have a bunch of different numbers there), I don't see how that could be true given the dearth of people with passports who are even capable of taking trips abroad.
But perhaps you've never experienced poverty, so you may not know.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-02/hong-kong...
1.6 million out of 7.3 million people is definitely serious, but hardly a majority. I've been to the SAR a few times, and don't think it is especially poor, especially when compared to even China's richest city like Shanghai.
As for my own personal experiences, please don't make assumptions like that. You have no idea what I've been through in my life, and it is rather not relevant to this discussion.
When you add these to the people who are living in poverty, that doesn't leave for a lot of travelers.
That's up from 100 million in 2013, so the number was rapidly increasing before the pandemic (and it will probably begin rapidly increasing again).
Regardless, the point stands that at the moment, there's no mass rush to escape China. Most people in China think life is getting better year for year, and are fairly optimistic about the future of the country. It's not a democracy, but it's not the dystopia it's caricatured as in Western media.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068495/china-number-of-...
It's not liberal democracy. It's not democracy as defined in the West.
It's the Chinese model of democracy, or what is known as "whole-process people's democracy."
And it works for the Chinese. That's the big takeaway.
That's why the Chinese regard China as the most democratic nation in the world, according to Latana's Democracy Perception Index 2022.
That's what the author meant by Western arrogance. We in the West think we are entitled to define what is and isn't democracy. On what basis? Because we dominate the world politically?
I've had people in China asked if our country has been destroyed by the pandemic, inflation, energy shortages, BLM protests, etc...and well my answer is "no, you're just being lied to by CCTV." It isn't like the misinformation goes both ways.
https://youtu.be/uBchAUGW7Bk
Your comment makes no sense to me.