this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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You were very clearly making a false equivalence there, trying to say that China is just differently bad from the US. All the oppression exists in the minds of western liberals who guzzle propaganda uncritically. Meanwhile, censorship exists everywhere, it's absolutely hilarious that westerners think that they got the level of censorship right while everyone else got it wrong. It's a perfect example of people suffering from anchoring bias thinking the rules of a society they grew up in is the natural default.
Posting racist images online is not a meaningful expression of freedom, as anybody with a functioning brain would understand. Here's what actual tangible freedom looks.
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
Winnie the Pooh is not banned in China, despite Western propaganda to the contrary.
No government is perfect, but Chinese people like their government a lot more than Americans like theirs for good reason: their material conditions have been steadily improving over the last several decades while ours have been steadily deteriorating under grinding neoliberalism.