Struggle session engage. Post your pathetic arguments so that I and the other China Good Posters can dismantle them and you can learn.
Key points:
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China is a democracy. It is arguably the most functional and responsive democracy in a major country today. Its citizens consider it more democratic than the citizens of almost any other country do their own.
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China is on a clear path to socialism and economic justice. No nation in history has ever reduced poverty in anything like the way China is doing it.
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The vast majority of people in the PRC support the CPC. This is not due to being brainwashed. Americans are brainwashed and still hate their government.
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Almost everything you hear about China in the West sits on a spectrum between malicious misrepresentation to outright fabrication with no basis in reality.
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China's ascension to the premiere global power is an extremely good thing for world peace and the global socialist movement. While China does not actively support other socialisms (sadly it's not as good as the USSR in this regard) it does not do imperialism. China will allow socialisms around the world to flourish simply by not actively crushing them like the US and Europe.
Those slums still develop in China, and then the Chinese government destroys them and sends the people back to where they came from. There's obviously going to be a good reason why people move to these places in the first place.
Additionally, this lack of movement isn't just between rural and urban. It's between lower tier cities and bigger ones. Imagine as an American if you lived in like Detroit or Cleveland being told you aren't allowed to move to NYC or California even though all the economic opportunity left the first city and all new opportunities are in these other places. The levels of wealth disparities in this later case aren't all that different all things considered.
It's a bit different than "not being allowed to move to big cities" as there often is a point based system that favors people with higher education (college entrance exam in China is mostly equal opportunity).
Also People talk about economic opportunity associated with big cities but city spaces are limited. Moving a person to a big city comes at a potential opportunity cost of not being able accommodate a more productive person.
Yes so the children of the elite in Shanghai get to keep their hukou forever while the rest of the country remains middle income trapped. I've spoken to countless chinese people about this, and it's definitely used as a metric of ones existing class status from birth.
Schools in lower tier cities also aren't as good, it's going to be harder to get into the top universities this way, hell, there are extra spots at the top universities like Peking for students from Beijing.
The idea of more vs less productive person is bullshit, let people live where they want too as they see fit and do everything you can to make it all work. It's totally fucked up that China has decided that the population of their top tier cities is no longer allowed to grow.
I don't know where you get that "middle income trapped" from. Western, less developed provinces enjoy bigger percentage development than coastal provinces and cities like Shanghai. Also, just because someone was born in Shanghai does not automatically make them "elite". They may have millions in terms of household wealth, but a majority of that is tied down in real estate. Ironically, he can sell his real estate and move to a less developed province to enjoy better quality in life due to the lower cost. Many chose to do so.
Provinces like Hubei, Shandong and Jiangsu routinely outperform in college entrance exams.
Not by much. It's mostly proportional.
Isn't that, you know, capitalism? It only encourages more unneeded competition in the big cities.
That's why China is also focused on developing the inland provinces, thus solving the inequalities at its root, instead of further exacerbating the rural/urban divide.