And china's problem before they became an authoritarian shithole had nothing to do with caring about trying to preserve liberty. And laying down high speed rail isn't a measure that I care about when the cost is everything else china does. If you love china's way of doing things go move there with the bugmen.
China has never ever been a democracy. China wasn't a democracy during the Republic of China's reign under Sun Yat-sen. It was an ethnonationalist state where Hans were at the top and any non-Han was racially profiled.
Their mantra was 驅逐韃虜,恢復中華,創立合眾政府. It literally means exiling the so called "colonial Manchurian rulers of the Qing dynasty" to "reinstate the Chinese state", who were simply minority Chinese that were ethnic to the region, ruling over a supermajority of Hans. It's a sort of blood and soil ideal before fascism became an ideology.
I just realised it's 14 characters as well. One can call this the Han fascist's 14 words.
The CPC is by metrics, the most democratic government China had so far, which is not a compliment and a testament to how authoritarian they have always been.
I am 100% serious. What are the downsides of living in China, from your perspective?
I've lived there for nearly a decade. Surveillance is one of them. Government red tape used to be unbearable but now it's a lot better since the CPC busted lots of unneeded red tape.
Bribery was a problem, now it's the opposite extreme where public servants are too scared to even eat at a restaurant with someone from the private sector, in fear of corruption accusations. This makes everything unbearably formal.
Online freedom is another. While this site isn't blocked in China, most sites people use are. There are certain periods where the GFW is a lot tighter, such as during People's Assemblies in Beijing.
China is still extremely racist and it's home to a lot of downright retarded Han fascists. During the anti-Japanese riots, I witnessed some of them storm a Korean food store. KOREAN. China's retarded thugs are just like America's, delusional and ignorant.
Koreans are an ethnic minority in China. They essentially stormed a store owned by a Chinese minority couple because they thought the text was Japanese.
Regional governments often over-react to Beijing policies and do batshit insane things such as trying to take crosses from churches. They are also known to waste money on frivolous projects. Once the hammer comes down, someone gets shot but the damage has been done already.
Consumer protection is still shit in China.
China's a nation of smokers (and drinkers). I've made it clear to the people I work with there that if they want to smoke during gatherings, I'm walking out. At some point, they just let me book venues and I choose ones that ban smoking on premises. Don't you dare shove a cigarette into my face because I'll tell you to fuck yourself. I hate that kind of culture. Giving someone a ciggie is seen as respectful, to me it just seems like "get lung cancer and die". Their cigarettes are a state monopoly that's profiting from cancer. While we put gross organs on ours to dissuade smokers, they're putting addictive flavouring (like mint) in theirs. The cigarette kingdom in China is also more powerful than the CPC. They get to write laws and guess what, they wanted to outlaw e-cigarettes. Nobody here mentioned this, which means most of you don't know much about Chinese society or how their state functions.
China's healthcare coverage is also lacklustre. In Tier 0 and Tier 1 cities, there's coverage. In any other, they'll just let the patient rot unless the family paid. This happened to one of my colleagues' relative. They got a friend to foot the bill first, then the hospital would accept.
So the downside of living in china is most of the country is still a shithole, now they just have an authoritarian regime running parts of it.
What's the definition of a shithole? The poorest village in China on top of a literal mountain range has 5G and electricity, and it's cleaner than your average town.
This might shock you if your knowledge of China is solely based on Falungong (human trafficking cult) channels like China Uncensored.
The downside of living in [X] country is because not everywhere looks like [Y] showcase city? C'mon man. Is the downside of living in America is that not every area is like New York City? That seems like a plus to me, actually.
They still have organized crime problems, they still have a huge corruption problem. They have no sense of morality at least not in the western sense, you can't trust them not to rip you off if you work with them. I don't like that a large part of their economy is made up of essentially slaves in sweatshops.
None of this is true.
Not having free speech, being spied on, authoritarian control, having a giant firewall to control what people see, directly letting the federal government take away rights because of speech they don't like. These are things people here should want to stop, instead of cheering them on.
I agree with this.
If you look at all of our problems in America, nothing stems from anything that would be fixed by moving to a system like China's. The opposite really.
That's also not true. America has a lot to learn from China when it comes to doing infrastructure.
And unpopular opinion: handling crime
If China makes you uncomfortable, then replace it with Japan. Japan is also a surveillance state with no freedom of speech, but similarly they excel in infrastructure development. If Japan hits too close, use Taiwan instead. Taiwan scores very high on journalism freedom indices, is a real democracy, has freedom of speech (FFS they have pedo rights rallies), but they're also a surveillance state. Yet their infrastructure is great too.
I never said there wasn't. There 100% is a crisis. The point was that there is in fact a housing crisis in China. When he claimed that there was not.
What housing crisis? 90% of Chinese own the home they live in.
Don't get me wrong, they totally floundered on housing development but it's not a crisis. It's one bad developer that utilised Ponzi-scheme like tactics of growth, and they fucked up. Examples are found throughout the world.
Xi basically said "homes are for people to live in", and told these twats to go fuck themselves. No more dumbfuck impractical skyscrapers, no more development blocks to swindle people.
It's a consequence of their shit consumer protection laws. The current CPC getting rid of the few human rights lawyers they used to have doesn't help either.
So many problems in China stems from backwards consumer protection laws.