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Might be helpful to articulate your major concerns with our glorious motherland. Autocratic? Yeah sure. Backward and broke? Depending on who you compare us to. Culturally barren? Pretty much but I think it could get better. Constantly sitting in the cuck chair? Couldn't agree more. Communist? Unless you're specific types of deranged people (by that I mean both the 粉红 and the 反贼), it's feels unserious.
You could write a book about it, but let me condense my concerns into three points.
A) Gross materialism and an obsession with wealth. If you think Americans are disgusting in greed and consumerism, they have nothing on the Chinese. You would think that a communist state would have a more egalitarian ethos, but mainlanders judge very sharply on money and class. When you obliterate traditional mores and religion, what you are left with is a class of hustlers who have no shame or dignity.
B) Placing face over truth. Nearly all Eastern cultures have this to some extent, but China will never foster an intellectual or artistic scene that is worth a damn if the powers that be only allow critique for the purpose of internal power struggle. When you embrace lying to preserve the reputation of your superiors, you move away from the Enlightenment and sink into oriental despotism.
C) Destroying the environment. I'm not a green, but poisoning the water table, scouring the oceans clean of life, and pumping unfiltered toxins into the air is not a sign of a rational or scientific government. This casual disregard for their own stewardship extends to the people as well (baby formula being the most significant, but SARS and COVID are there, too.)
All of these things are bad, and will destroy China if allowed to continue unabated, but the party has shown no signs of even recognizing that these are problems.
Agree with A anc C. Doubtful with B because it's a choice between truly believing a horse is a deer (them) or pretending to believe a horse is a deer (us). You're also seeing the outcome of their philosophy and how much damage it does to their own society. Assuming that truthfulness and untruthfulness being 50/50, our societies have roughly equal chance of being right.
The biggest fault of our collective mind I guess is to always default to the rulers to solve our societal illnesses. The party absolutely does care about your point A (and point C for the sake of practicality). There is little that they can do about it. They wish they are the all powerful leviathan but they're simply not. Never stopped them from trying though.
Edit: for what it's worth I think you're mainland Chinese. The fact that you called the party "the party" is pretty telling. No need to tell me if my detective work is solid or not.
I wouldn't be so opposed to the Communist party if they demonstrated technocratic chops to govern. But even if you look at the official figures, the birth rate and the demographic pyramid scream mismanagement. I don't know how people can sell Chinese technocrats as wise and farsighted luminaries when it's obvious they have the same short-term incentives that all politicians share. At least the West has the excuse that democracies elect feckless and shortsighted leaders. What's China's excuse for half a billion pensioners in 2100?
And so far, the solution it seems is to pretend it doesn't exist: to become South Korea with nukes with a quarter of the GDP per capita.
Isn't China actually trying harder with the birthrate crisis than most of its neighbors? I mean in a stupid way that won't work at best and might be counterproductive at worst, sure, but they're discouraging condom use and offering giant subsidies. This stuff probably won't raise the birthrate(for what its worth, free childcare doesn't either) but they are at least trying something.
The problem is that those subsidies run up against the the bubble that is the Chinese housing market. To be married as a man in China requires that you have a property to even compete. More money is useful for those already planning families but does nothing to make men be capable of marriage.
Yes, I'm not claiming it'll work- I think trying to discourage condoms won't do anything and mos of their handouts will make it worse if anything- but China is more than willing to address the problem, and there are only two secular societies with high fertility anyways- secular Israel and the US military. Both of them are outcompeted by highly religious peer societies in the same countries. Expecting China to actually fix its fertility problem is just unrealistic.
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It’s farcical to claim that they’re pretending the demographic and pension crisis doesn’t exist. This is literally the central policy push right now. Increasing fertility through nationwide subsidies (there’s a 100B yuan subsidy rolled out by the ministry of finance), plus additional subsidies rolled out by provincial governments (from the dating hellscape Jiangxi of all places). And delaying the retirement age. You can argue these measures won’t work, but pretending the issue is being ignored is simply false.
Also, something I forgot to mention in response to your previous post: one of Xi’s personal pet projects is the whole “green water, turquoise skies” environmental campaign. To the point that this stupid slogan has made its way into fucking Arknights. You can say the policies will fail (maybe), or that they’re lying (I don’t think so, given how many peasants in Hebei are literally freezing in winter due to restrictions on coal). But saying they didn’t even try is just wrong.
You might need to get some news feed from the old country a bit. Overseas Chinese (whether you’re actually Canadian or not, I’m not confident either way) tend to get stuck in some pretty warped social media ecosystems, partly as an overcorrection for censorship back home. I get that people need to vent sometimes but still. Otherwise you end up with Russians challenging your Chineseness, which might be hilarious if you’re indeed one of us, but not entirely baseless either.
And Chinese gdp per capita is already more tha 1/4 of SK. Come on.
My critique is that not only are these campaigns to correct problems wrongheaded and ineffective, they're of the long-term sort that expose the systemic problems of the party. Namely, that the party commands too much from the top-down. Party planners wanted to correct the birth rate to avert Malthusian catastrophe and did so in a inhuman and vicious matter. Now, all of those girls they aborted are a haunting hole in the demography. The slightest concern for the environment or health regulation could have forestalled disaster and plague. But it didn't happen.
Not to say that this doesn't happen in the West. But the corrective mechanisms in an authoritarian society are simply too slow to react to largely foreseeable problems. No doubt the next set of existential crises are lurking about, unchecked, because to point them out would be embarrassing to the local politicians - and to the party, by proxy.
This does not sound like a communist, technocratic government where pragmatism dominates. This is the rot of the Soviet Union - a bureaucracy and party apparatus who can only react and not proactively solve problems. I wish for the best for my countrymen. I hope they prosper to provide a second pole if America should falter. But I enjoy western liberal norms, and I'm not willing to oblige myself to the strong authority of a state. So I'm stuck in an uncomfortable place.
Ah well. My opinion doesn't really matter.
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