Sorry I couldn’t parse that first sentence could you rephrase?

Also, I actually have been on Weibo but it really seemed too like… pop culture obsessed? Not my thing, plus my Mandarin sucked even back then when I was still actively learning it

I have also seen c/manufacturingconsent.

Anyway, I’m guessing you brought up Weibo as a “people can talk bad about the government there so clearly they don’t censor anti China speech” but that’s really not an argument.

China is pretty open about its regulation of the media. I mean you’ve likely read the terms and conditions for some of their media platforms so you already know it’s against their policies to promote ideas contrary to the vision/interests of the CCP or create dissent or however they phrase it. I’m sure small comments slip through here and there because their impact is small and censorship takes effort, but major posts against the government are not staying up very long. (If you can find long standing / popular dissenting post on Weibo to prove me wrong I’ll change my mind on this)

As for bringing up manufacturing consent and “what the west is trying to do” guess what buddy, if lots of people/organizations are doing a fucked up thing, it’s still a fucked up thing.

To be fair, I think trying to ensure your citizens hear good news is actually a pretty good idea, but I’m not a big fan of censoring news in order to make that happen.

Want to make the good news I see outnumber the bad 10:1? Fine, but leave the bad news in there. And I definitely don’t think organizations should censor their failures/problems. Admitting when you’ve made a mistake shows you’re trying to improve; hiding your mistakes makes you seem much less trustworthy in general.

Not everywhere else, China bans speech that shows the party or the country in a negative light lol

A) that’s actually good meme haha

B) the space race ended when the US landed on the moon, if you run a 5k and get to 4.9k ahead of everyone but then don’t cross the finish line, you’ve still lost the race

Anyway the point of my comment wasn’t “the US beat the Soviets because they’re authoritarian” it was “the Soviets had everything they needed to absolutely dominate space travel but their authoritarianism hindered their scientific progress significantly”

On the spaceflight note, it’s rather sad that the Soviets harassed and imprisoned Yuri Kondratyuk since his work was vital in the moon landing and orbital mechanics in general.

If his work in space flight was supported and not repeatedly crushed by authorities, the USSR might’ve landed on the moon first. Instead, he was imprisoned by the NVKD for some of his engineering designs (for “sabotage” of not using nails, which is a dumb thing on its own).

And eventually, he gave all his aerospace notes to a friend to smuggle them out of the country because he feared the govt would accuse him of treason like they had Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (the guy who made Sputnik 1).

The Soviets could have won the space race, if it weren’t for the “authoritarianism” you’re trying to make light of