Rancid wrote:Deflection, misinformation, and propaganda, are not viewpoints. What we are seeing here is trash done in bad faith.
That's the fundamental strategy from authoritarian shitholes (study any authoritarian shithole from the Americas, to Europe, to Africa, to Asia...). Exploit the relative openness of freer societies to spread their logical fallacies and general bullshit. This happens at various levels.
All view points are not equal, and all view points are not valid. Especially not these "viewpoints". Just as we dismiss superstition, we should be dismissing this crap being spewed in this thread.
Many of us have fallen for the trap that all views/opinions deserve equal attention and weight. This is a mistake. Trash is trash, and should be called out as such.
I understand that you think it like that but we still need to accept CCP/Chinese propaganda to some degree. While I understand your arguments fully and agree with them, the problem of China is that it has not undergone the same processes that Europe and US as a descendant of Europe has undergone. What I mean by that is that the greatest motivators for change is fear, death and pain sadly speaking. Europe and US learned its lessons the hard way, the bloody way. China didn't have the same experience because it was a closed off society so it is reasonable for China as a country and as a society to not understand the same truths that we take for granted. I mean they didn't bleed in the 30 years war nor did they have to fight again Napoleon or WW1 and WW2. They had their own independence war and unification and then the reighn of missmanagement and terror under Mao and they did learn something from that. From our side, sure it is not so much but it explains the situation in my opinion a bit.
The outcome of the unification and independence wars was:
1) Modernisation of the country to a more European model. (Communism is European. Communist model is a European Beurocratic model. It brought modernity to rural populations in China the same way it did in Russia)
2) Strengthening of the military according to European theories and systems.
3) Maos economic mismanagement after the wars directly lead to a transition from hardline communism to capitalism.
4) Maos infinite reign also lead to the Chinese leadership being changed every decade although this process was not institutionolized so Xi is having no problems of breaking this idea as memory of Mao fades.
From our perspective this is little but Europe and US also didn't just magically change their mind on many things that we consider the norm right now. Here are some examples:
1) If it wasn't for the 30 year war then we wouldn't have any rules for warfare.
2) If it wasn't for the Napoleonic wars then we would not have any diplomatic rules or systems to prevent war.
3) If it wasn't for the WW1 then we would not care for minorities so much.
4) If it wasn't for the WW2 then we would not care about genocide so much.
There are far more examples and such. Since the Napoleonic wars we have itterated through basically 3-4 international systems to prevent war because every time the conflicts were more bloodier and bloodier. By the way, the concert of Europe has been the most successful so far although our current iteration is doing pretty good. China simply didn't have all those experiences.
Is it possible to get them without war or massive suffering? Probably but it is easy for us to say that when we have actually experienced it through war and our ancestors paid the prices and learned from it.