China News Thread
- Thread starter KYli
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1) The Tiananmen protest was not a pro-democracy movement. While analyzing the esric data, I found something very interesting and unexpected. Public dissatisfaction with inflation, unemployment, social morale, and government inefficiency skyrocketed during the peak of the urban protests in spring 1989, but the majority of urban residents in October 1988 (54 percent) thought that market reform was going “too fast,” and such “anti-reform” attitudes closely echoed the rise of inflation during the same time. In the meantime, public demand for liberal democratic ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press never surpassed 33 percent, even in May 1989.
This was a really objective article. The author is right to point out that the main issue with American infatuation with "regime collapse" is tied with black and white ideas of democracy. This was the same argument used against the USSR's broader idea of human rights rather than a politically focused definition.
The author also makes a great point about government responsiveness. Trump's inept handling of the covid situation in the US was allowed to continue to the end of his term. Meanwhile, many top level officials in Wuhan were dismissed immediately. Considering that PRC has the death penalty even for economic crimes/corruption, it could be argued that PRC citizens actually demand more accountability in some cases.
Democracy is being used to bludgeon countries not yet under it's spell just like how Christianity was used by the same colonialist pigs to conquer or in their words "civilized" the barbarians (Africa) and "heathens" like China.
It's the same old playbook repackaged with better marketing language and propaganda money can buy.
I have said the exact same thing in the HK thread. Democracy is a new religion.
We pretend that it has special powers like "Democracy will save the people", like "Jesus Christ will save your soul". However, it's just a system. If we believe that it has divine powers, then we will not be able to fix the flaws. For example, democracy is often seen as more resistant to corruption, but one look at India and you can see it is way worse than China in that respect.
It's an ideology disease in a nutshell. Self-proclaimed liberals consider themselves bastions of tolerance, but if you don't agree with their ideas 100%, you are a bigot.
I recently found a Singaporean analyst channel that had a pretty good breakdown of the incident. It's worth a watch if you are fluent in Mandarin.
Economic issues are always at the root cause of any political discontent.
Chinese translation of English went from zero to hero