There’s something kinda ironic I realized.

You see, the funny thing about being as focused on the lies about China as you are is that you end up not noticing the actual problems China has.

And it shows here when you think about it: how else would you conclude that rejecting those lies is equivalent to saying China is perfect, than if you’re not aware of any other problems China could have beyond what propagandists told you? Assuming you are arguing in good faith that is, which you making straw-mans don’t exactly corroborate ngl.

Of course! That’s totally what the meme say as we can all see and definitely not a straw-man you made up in your head. Clearly the peoples saying that think that China is perfect and can do no wrong as you can see from… erm… from… From somewhere, I don’t have example but I’m sure you can definitely totally undoubtedly find an example somewhere.

It’s so funny how the only way you can think of to defend your ridiculous 1984 tech-dystopia narrative about China from criticism is to make a straw-man so you can pretend that our criticism of your narrative is the more ridiculous and over-the-top of the two.

It’s always nice seeing peoples willing to hear out a different perspective on those controversial issues instead of instantly clutching their pearls and not listening. We don’t see it often but it’s always a pleasure when it happen. All power to you friend .

Redsails is also not a good source, it’s openly from an ML perspective, so it’s not neutral, which you absolutely have to be when discussing history. It’s also under no pretence to be academic or accurate either, Redsails is ideologically driven rather than factually driven - so it won’t ever be critical of the ML perspective. You can use redsails to talk theory, absolutely, but not as a historical or factual source, it’s dishonest.

There is no such thing as a neutral historian. Every human has things they know and things they don’t even on topics they are experts in, every human has opinions on the things they know (or think they know) that will unavoidably taint what they say, even unconsciously, and therefore, everything written or said by a human is necessarily biased. And that’s saying nothing of financial interests, politics and other things that bias things even further.

This is not avoidable, the most you can do is be aware of biases and work with/around them.

If an historian or a journalist tell you that their work is “neutral” or “unbiased”, they are either lying to you or don’t know how biases work, and in either case you should be very skeptical of them because they are clearly not doing their job correctly.

It’s a list of links that you can click on, you should try it.

Chinese citizens have to tow the line. The company I worked for had operations there, when our guys meet with counterparts then and ask probing questions everyone clams up, and one off to the side says we can’t talk about bad things.

If you go against it you have reprogramming training classes.

So your “evidence” for that is a personal anecdote + trust me bro? Assuming you’re not just making shit (it’s not verifiable, as anecdotes tends to be) can you give examples of the kind of “probing questions” your guys asked? Also, did you personally witness the meeting or were you just told about it by your guys afterward?

Looks to me like your little story is full of holes at best.

We even have Chinese police stations here in Canada and they go knocking on doors because a Chinese citizen has said something negative about the homeland. And coerce them into going back to the mainland. This is not me reading it on the web, this is coworkers at the house when it happens to their room mates.

Ah, yes. China totally has a nation spanning network of secret police stations (with all the 10s of 1000s or more personnel and tons of equipment that would imply) in Canada that Canada either somehow didn’t notice or won’t do anything about for some reason. A guy you know told you, so it must be true! Trust me bro!

If your gonna make shit up or repeat shit made up by someone else, you should at least try to make it not completely nonsensical.

Stop trying to make China a utopia it is not. I agree with Socialism, but not a dictatorship.

No one said anything about China being “a utopia” and you know it.

You know how ridiculous your narrative about China being a 1984 tech-dystopia that will track you down to the end of the world sounds and how badly it holds up to scrutiny, so instead of defending your narrative (since you can’t really) you try to flip the table around and pretend that we are the one with a ridiculous narrative by pretending that we consider China “a utopia” when none of what we have said points to that at all.

I see it, and anyone who isn’t already indoctrinated by you narrative can easily see it too.

It woukd seem you are being paid to promote China propaganda, or you are severely deluded to what goes on there.

“If you believe something other that what I believe, you must either have been paid to say you do or be stupid/insane.” A cheap excuse to dismiss criticism without having to think about it or come up with an actual counter-argument.

A survey of citizens that know they cannot speak ll without retribution to them or their family, will always look positive. Please use some critical thinking here.

That, my friend, is what we call an “irrefutable argument”, and it’s a fallacy. “Chinese peoples aren’t happy with their government, and if they say they are it’s because the government forces them to.” It’s a bullshit excuse to immediately reject any evidence that doesn’t agree with your narrative.

You’re not refuting our point, you’re just coming up with excuses to dismiss it without having to think about an actual reason it might be wrong (because you can’t, and until you do I’ll continue to affirm that you can’t).

Tibet, South China Sea

These are ‘in and around China’ whether you like it or not.

As a European, I can promise you the the EU isn’t good.

It’s a neoliberal cult that purposefully keep its poor eastern members down for the benefit of its wealthy western members; continues to meddle in and exploit Africa by any means at their disposal, including coups, invasions, funding and arming of death-squads and assassinations, even decades after so called “decolonization”; cultivate an attitude of horrific and bloodthirsty racism among their population, especially against migrants despite being the cause of most mass migrations in the first place, in order to keep migrants miserable and their labor cheap; fund and arms a genocide as we speak; has purposefully let overt and covert neo-Nazi factions gain power in every of its member states; stabbed their own economy for the benefit of the US, multiple times; and so on and so forth.

On the scale of “badness” the EU is right behind the US, they’re just more subtle and quiet about their evil than the US is.

Your car could in theory be used to run over 100s of pedestrian and commit manslaughter! THAT MAKES YOU A TERRORIST!!!

Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, genuinely helping poor countries develop is a pretty good way to gain soft power.

No one here, and I do mean no one, is saying that China isn’t gaining anything from doing that. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad for the other party or hides some nefarious secret purpose either. Diplomacy isn’t a zero sum gain where if China gain from a deal therefore the other party has to lose to compensate, that’s not how international relations work.

And yet you accept anti-communist slander as true without question.

Have you ever, even just once, asked yourself where those accusations come from? Who made them? Who propagated them? Why they did?

No sources for that claim of course, as usual.

To my knowledge the only military base China has in Africa is the one in Djibouti, and literally every country who can afford to have a base there has a base there.

If that isn’t the definition of imperialism, I don’t know what is.

Indeed, you don’t have a clue what it is. Try looking up “unequal exchange”, or better yet reading a book on the subject. Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism and Fanon’s How Europe underdeveloped Africa are good reads on the subject.