Liberals are always going to have this fundamental problem when it comes to attempting to understand China, as you have laid out by paraphrasing Jacques.
There's no outside of that liberal hegemonic worldview unless you escape liberalism or you're a Sinologist/historian, and even then there's no guarantee that this hegemonic worldview won't persist.
I've seen liberals use the accusation that China is ethnonationalist by throwing the term "Han supremacist" around. To anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with China, this is laughable because "Han" is less of an ethnicity than it is an umbrella term for a melting pot of ethnic groups.
Now I'm not making the claim that Han Chinese people, or some of them, don't see themselves as somehow superior or better than other ethnic groups but to make an accusation like that and to import the notion of white supremacism over into China and to project that onto Han people is just... idk it's just political fiction dressed up and being passed off as some sort of deep wisdom in the world where facile political analysis goes from Harry Potter analogies to analogies based on real-world western politics and no further.
I think that you're not going to find any rich discussion on China in the west outside of a few little niches here and there.
Serious question. Were you guys never like them? Unaware of politics and takes outside of the mainstream propaganda.
I came out of the womb w a complex sociohistoricoeconopolitical understanding of the IMMORTAL SCIENCE
This is one of those things that I really feel people have to acknowledge that on individual level, political consciousness and radicalization is very chaotic. I was kind of in a weird place because I was kind of an incoherent Soc-Dem growing up. I guess the best way of saying it is that I hadn't really read theory but was really open to left thought.
The reasons I would give are, that I am in a weird place that my grandparents are/were drastically more left than my parents (New Deal Liberals/Farmer-Labor types). And even though my father is quite reactionary he traveled to Europe a lot for work, and he was willing to acknowledge that their healthcare and education systems were better because (at least at the time) they were less privatized/neoliberalised. So, I was kind of a weird crank even in middle school/high school that wouldn't accept the bullshit talking points about how universal healthcare couldn't work in the US or would be worse than what we have, even before the ACA. The other thing is that I was extremely young, but the first movie I saw in theaters was Star Trek: First Contact. I don't remember what age I was or much of the movie (it was well before I started Kindergarten), but the only scene I remembered from the movie that stuck with me, was Picard talking about how in the future they don't have money and everyone works to better themselves. So that always left me in this weird state of, due to all the liberals that surrounded me, not really questioning official narratives (outside of being told certain things aren't possible in the abstract) but liking the ideals expressed in Communism as I understood them. It was kind of the situation of "Well I guess Stalin did kill 90 gorrillian people and the USSR was bad, but this ending private property and everyone sharing in the common prosperity of all sounds cool", or "I haven't looked into it, so I guess I will trust the official narrative on the Vietnam War".
So my radicalization, as dopey as it sounds, just required coming across Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and reading FAIR. But it is one of those things, where I think my path to the left would be longer or not happen if a handful of formative experiences hadn't occurred or I had had different family members.
That's why I didn't want this to be a dunk. I was them, I want to help them into the light: (
I was a full on idiotic lib at one point, but the thing that irks me the most is the the libs that will confidently say things that are easily fact checked, or just say things based on vibes, or just make shit up.
I feel like the difference between many of us, or at least myself is when I do not know something I will try my best to figure it out even if that means challenging my existing disposition. This is what lead me here.
So in one respect yes I was like them I was an ignorant lib, but never ever ever would I just say some wild bullshit then plug my ears and start yelling.
Back in the day when I was severely depressed, which was like 3-4 months a year, I spent an enormous amount of time just reading wikipedia and the news and trying to claw together explanations for shit that was happening from as many disparate sources as I could find. Does make it rather frustrating when people are totally indifferent too and uninterested in easily checkable facts.
Ofc we are all raised on the same propaganda but I can't think of a single time I ever put this much energy into being like this. I cared more about whatever vidya was coming out and when I met my first real communist IRL it didn't really illicit any emotion in me other than "sounds cool"
While agree with where you are coming from, I'm not sure how we'll crack that shell currently. If the admins>mods>users are all in lockstep on having terrible worldviews, it's not gonna be easy to make much difference. This is the instance that pre-defederated remember.
Probably, but it was a long, long, long time ago. I think 2011 with Libya or 2012 with the al-Awlaki assassination was when it finally clicked that everything I'd been raised to believe was a lie.
They seem like the most proudly
brained population of posters I've seen in the lemmyverse. There's other instances that are bad in their own ways, but LW is just pure refined version of that shit. Lots of 'too much politics/don't make it political' alongside the worst cartoon understanding of history and the world.It's probably only going to get worse and more mask-off in due time though.
Ofc china isn't fascist. It's more like a very capitalist system, disguised as a communist one. But the difference between the rich and the poor is far bigger than it is in most other developed countries. And the reason their economic power is going through the roof is that they are abusing their sheer amount if people for cheap work and their amount of natural resources.
but the difference between the rich and the poor is far bigger than it is in most other developed countries.
got a source on that? Wiki says USA has 4h highest inequality and China is #111. So it would appear you're full of shit like most users with an @ in their name here.
"Higher Gini coefficients signify greater wealth inequality, with 0 being complete equality, whereas a value near 1 can arise if everybody has zero wealth except a very small minority. "
USA GINI: 0.852
China: 0.702
This is obfuscated by the fact that hedge funds in the west are bleeding the fuck out of the population's wealth
"China bad" and "anything I don't like is fascism" is the chefs kiss of Lemmy.world
Hey, be cool nerd.
Sometimes even leftists have no idea they hold incorrect beliefs.
Educate by leadership in good-faith :)
One thing I've noticed personally is an extreme response to general statements. Even when the statement is vague, has no real action to it, etc. There is this assumption that everything someone says is either steeped in hidden agenda or otherwise nefarious when it doesn't immediately align with someone's ideology. Even if ideology isn't a part of the discussion or anywhere near the context.
An extreme (hypothetical) example would be mentioning a pizza I ate, and having someone jump on it as if you were telling everyone they had to eat that pizza or that the toppings you chose are actually a sign of how you support fascism.
That said, I appreciate opportunities to learn and have my own beliefs challenged. Even if there is hostility. I can understand that having someone come here and say something dumb, or having another troll come through, can be tiring.
500,000 municipal labor cohorts engaging in national council elections that allow for decentralized economic diffusion and expansion would beg to differ
Just the fact you're not even aware of the existence of the world's most extensive capital controls regime in history, perfectly illustrates the utter ignorance westerners display when talking about this subject
Open a fuckin book
Please be nice to our ignorant friends from other instances. Not everybody knows better
But the difference between the rich and the poor is far bigger than it is in most other developed countries.
Yeah so this is something you just pulled right out of your ass
The US doesn't have any problem abusing people for cheap labor nor does it lack resources, and yet it's falling apart
