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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.
Can you describe what you're talking about? This is a genuine question; I don't have any direct knowledge of what living in China is like. If I were to guess I would assume a certain amount of obsequiousness towards the Xi and/or the CCP is required but I imagine this feeling a lot more tolerable than being forced to pray at the alter of DEI (I sort of picture it as being similar to having to recite the pledge of allegiance or something).
Of course if you're a Uighur living in Xinjiang I'm sure the situation is quite different.
Well, I need to disclaim that I have not personally lived in China. But:
Obsequiousness towards the state is the big one, but it's also a very socially conformist society. Uighurs and Tibetans are oppressed, yes, but it's also not a great place to be a Christian (my understanding is that you can pray and go to church, but evangelizing is highly frowned on and anything that smacks of "activism" will get you slapped down in a hurry). The things you cannot talk about except in a state-approved way are numerous-- Tienmen square, Taiwan, anything critical of the government. There is a reason they have the "Great Internet Wall of China" that, while very porous and easy to bypass via VPN, is still a crime which can get you in trouble if caught. If you find yourself in legal trouble, forget about any of the due processes you are accustomed to in the West.
It's honestly baffling to me that anyone would say "China seems fine, better than being forced to pray at the altar of DEI." I mean, even if you are in the wokest of woke companies, no one is forced to "pray at the altar of DEI." You may be risking your career if you share your spiciest takes about HBD or male/female differences, but you cannot literally be arrested. Meanwhile in the street or here on the Internet you can call the president a retard, a corrupt tool of oligarchs, a Zionist agent, a pedophile, or anything else, and nobody can arrest you for that either, and you're highly unlikely to be fired even if you said it publicly on X. Try doing that in China. (I believe they also persecute you for "hate speech" in China as well: they may not care much about "DEI" as such, but start posting about how much you hate Jews or blacks or women and eventually you will attract negative attention with an actual government impact on your life.)
Our 2nd Amendment enthusiasts have many valid complaints about the breaches of their Constitutional rights, but you don't have even a shadow of those rights in China. Right now the USA is in turmoil over protesters versus ICE agents. I think some of the folks in this forum would not be unhappy if the National Guard starting machine-gunning protesters in the streets, but most people, even those who are strongly pro-ICE, agree that annoying purple-haired lesbians should be allowed to protest in a non-vehicular-homicidal way. In China, machine guns and tanks would be a real possibility. And not just for your annoying purple-haired lesbians.
Do they have to "worship at the altar of DEI"? Well, their version of DEI is called the social credit score. Would you like the government tracking everything you do and say and whether it is "anti-social" enough to start limiting your access to services, travel, credit, and being put under increased monitoring by the state? That seems better, really?
Again, for the average Chinese person, most of this is probably invisible, and for the affluent, life in the big cities is fine. Chinese have their own forums and social media and their versions of 4chan and the like. But all the stories we share here, about people being persecuted in various ways for wrongthink? Multiply that by an order of magnitude in China. Try being a "normie" Chinese with a few problems, some grievances about the system, or in a bit of legal and/or financial trouble. Try being a real wrongthinker.
I'll take (often dramatically, hyperbolically, catastrophically overstated) DEI bullshit over that.
The religiosity has been loosened a fair bit in the last decade or two, but you're also definitely not allowed to be obnoxiously proselytizing and there's been a certain slow surge back towards it. 'Traditional Chinese Religion' has probably been preserved better over in parts of Southeast Asia amongst the Chinese diaspora due to a lack of cultural revolution plus different cultural pressures. Malaysia, for instance, has a roughly 30% Chinese population in a Muslim majority country who have held strongly to a lot of their Chinese cultural markers partly out of a desire to actively stand out from the Malay ethnics.
Social credit score doesn't function like how you think it does, plus atleast stops all of the relentless own goaling of Western society where social defectors can essentially run around doing whatever they like for an unlimited amount of time. I'm personally willing to take the tradeoff of occasional oppression of protestors in exchange for cracking down on homeless and drug users in some sort of functional way.
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