Comment by toss1
14 days ago
Whatever slim you want to think your recourse is in the US, it is FAR better and broader than in the country that has uncounted mobile execution vans with zero available records of who is executed.
At least the US is trying to be a democracy, and has largely functioning checks and balances.
CCP is flat-out 'you cannot even talk or access information on things that make us look bad, such as Tibet or Tiananmen Protests' and 'make the wrong criticism at the wrong time and it is over for you'.
There is a MASSIVE difference. Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.
> Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.
Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.
America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.
China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.
China is still a developing nation. China is winning at the junior economic Olympics. The same way all the major 1st world economies dominated it when they were developing.
Come back and waive your victory banner when China has a $60k GDP per capita and has the current growth trends it does. It needs to increase its GDP 500% before that happens though...
GDP per-capita only works if you're comparing places with similar costs to live and costs to produce.
It's nearly meaningless to use it as a measure of individual quality-of-life without correlating it to the price it costs to produce/consume goods.
This is why the military spending arguments are so weird comparing the US and China. Even omitting the weird bookkeeping that keeps their defense budget supposedly low, it costs much less to produce military goods/services than here.
China is the workshop of the world what are you even talking about? Their infrastructure is more developed (and more advanced) than most places in the US.
You seemed to be confused by the fact that China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine. That's the point: they're trying to avoid the terminal rent-seeking behavior endemic to Western economies.
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I was not talking about false equivalence about their economic status; I was talking about falsely equating or 'whatabout-ing' their human rights status.
And if you think that polls of life satisfaction are meaningful among a population who are forbidden to criticize their govt except in limited ways (e.g., local officials), I'd like to talk about some fantastic oceanfront land in Kansas...
Economy? Of course people are happier to have a change from abject poverty, but it is entirely based on unfair export trade practices and highly leveraged investments both official and shadow-banking. At this point both are extremely fragile as the democracies start to catch on and the over-leverage starts to work against it. Even the massively over-inflated official growth numbers have tanked. On the economy, I'd choose to be in the USA over China, no hesitation.
"Transforming entire continents"? You mean making extortionate loans to impoverished countries to build their own ports and extract resources? Again, that has limited runway as people figure out that it isn't such a good deal.
And I notice that you entirely avoided the human rights citizen security issue. Yes, the US has corporate over-harvesting of data, and govt agencies can buy and/or demand access to the data. We also have court processes. Meanwhile, China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world, and mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more, but there are no public records. Again, no contest, USA is massively qualitatively and quantitatively better.
Serious question, if you don't think so, why haven't you moved to China? I'm sure they'd welcome such an advocate.
> China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world
Second to ours.
> mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more
Absolute nonsense.
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