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So there is a question that has been gnawing at me for the longest time: is PRC... Good? I mean:
I mean, there are obviously some tough things to get over (the whole free speech thing, how they handled COVID with safetyism that would make many in the West blush, all the other usual stuff), but genuinely, honestly... Following the news from China for a few years, I really can't help but envy the Chinese. Take down the communist iconography and I think that many on the right would see it similarly to Japan.
Other than being a totalitarian police state with no civil rights except those the government pretends to provisionally grant you, and most of its meritocracy and probably its economic numbers being as fake and gay as ours, sure, China is great.
Look, this gets trotted out fairly regularly about a lot of places that are on the surface technocratic modern states with a glitzy veneer where, as long as you are not a dissident, a minority or outsider, or basically anyone disfavored by the state, things are pretty fine. People say similar things about the Gulf states. I remember a few years ago, a lot of "based" trads were saying similar things about Russia: sure, maybe its kind of a little bit corrupt and run by oligarchs and Putin is a dictator who has people who displease him thrown out of ninth floor windows, but he cosplays as a Christian and they don't put up with woke nonsense.
We don't hear that quite so much since the beginning of the Ukraine war, but you still see a little of it here from our Russophiles, who mostly still love Russia because it's not globohomo woke. Leftists put Ukrainian flags in their profiles, therefore invading Ukraine might be... good?
Even the USSR and Nazi Germany were kind of okay for a lot of the population most of the time, and if the thing you hate above all else is anything that Western leftists like, then you can make a case that they were... good because they didn't have pride parades or hordes of imported Africans, I guess.
But I think very few people moaning about how awful things are in the West would actually find they prefer living in China. Unless you are the sort of person who can keep your head down and eat shit your entire life. People angry about having to sit through DEI sessions really underestimate the level of shit-eating that's required in places like China.
It's not quite your point, but it's fairly incontrovertible that today's Russia is the best Russia there's ever been. And it's even quite liberal by historical standards.
What you don't have is fair elections or genuine political competition, combined with somewhere between 40 - 200 political murders over the last 20+ years. But name one Tzar or Bolshevik with a better track record.
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