The crazy conspiracy theory believed by 190 million Chinese - Alliance for Science
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Numerous public opinion surveys have shown that Chinese people have a sharply negative attitude towards genetically modified foods, despite the worldwide scientific consensus that they are as safe as any other. But the latest piece of research, published in the Nature partner journal Science of Food by two scientists working at University of California-Davis, is […]

You can read about the reason I'm asking this in the spoiler. TLDR I'm just wondering if there's some debunking I can do since western media is oh-so-not-trustworthy

spoiler

I'm in some IRL debate (Well, online but in a closed chat) with some libs. They are talking about the right-wingers saying Taylor swift is being paid off to spread democratic votes, whatever, hollyweird are all dems, no conspiracy needed.

I mentioned that we need to actually, you know, actively keep conspiracy theories from spreading, and my liberal friend is gishgaloping a bit, but I'll bite since they are sincere, even if wrong.

They came back with "Well china has conspiracy theories", which I didn't mention china, I didn't mention anything about censorship, it's just gishgalloping like I said, but anyway..

Any truth to this one? I mean being anti-gmo is not rare, so I'm not surprised if it was true. I don't have a good handle on high quality china news (And cannot read their sites myself, even with translators it's a slow experience).

Edit: Oops, I had to go AFK after posting this and didn't get to clarify as the comments were all being. I meant do Chinese people broadly believe in the conspiracy theories around GMOs such as causing cancer or making your DNA change or something like that. Of course GMOs are complicated science and are a tool used by capitalists to patentize (did I make up that word? Lol) the food industry, which is a natural science and typically difficult to patent.

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    5 months ago

    Weird that the headline is in raw numbers.

    The precise question, translated literally from the Chinese, was the following: “There is an opinion that the transgenic technology from the US may be bioterrorism to China. If you are a patriot, you should oppose GM food. What do you think about this?”

    While 13.8 percent of respondents selected “Agree, patriot should oppose GM food,” 54.4 percent selected “Disagree, debate on GM food should base on science” and 31.8 percent selected “I have no idea about that.”

    Compare these numbers to a Pew survey of Americans:

    About half of U.S. adults (51%) think GMOs are worse for people’s health than foods with no genetically modified ingredients, while 41% say GM foods have a neutral effect on health. Just 7% say they are better for health than other foods

    The framing in the Chinese survey sounds pretty biased too, rather than just "What is your opinion on GM foods?" it presents a reason why one would be opposed to GM food (but not a reason one might support it), and frames opposing GM as a supposedly more patriotic answer. Despite this framing, Chinese people disagreed with the idea 54% to 14%.

    Extrapolating from a survey and then putting it in absolute numbers is suspect, because there's a lot of people in China and surveys usually have a floor. If a survey only gets 1% of Chinese people saying something, the headline could read "14 million Chinese people believe [thing]."

    I don't really have information on Chinese perspectives on GMOs, the scientific consensus is that it can be done safely but I think there's some validity to being suspicious of capitalists fucking stuff up with it.

    • RedClouds@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      5 months ago

      Thank you for your thoughts around this!

      It does seem like as responses have trickled in, it's basically decided that the questions used were pretty biased, 2000 people cannot be extrapolated to 1.4 billion, and the biggest problem with GMOs is mostly around the capitalists creating patented seeds instead of there being just regular seeds that you could get for extremely cheap or free (from last years round of crops, for example).

      Also, as someone who's seen the lies, damn lies, and statistics thing with my own eyes, I'm fairly certain what they meant by statistically significant in there was really that there was enough responses for them to have a significant result, not that it is statistically relevant to the population.