The other reply to this post provides a pretty legitimate source.

But, well, it’s not exactly hard to Google.

Hundreds, thousands, millions. It’s all the same because people died and the people that died weren’t white.

Didn’t a bunch of Muslim countries actually ask China about Uyghurs (and even visit Xinjiang) and they left unanimously content with the response?

Asbestos has some pretty insane properties, though. Just a shame it causes cancer when disturbed and inhaled.

As a building material? What’s even better than asbestos in terms of the trifecta of sound/heat isolation, bulk, melting point, and structural soundness? Aerogel?

It’s less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It’s not like people didn’t know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.

It’s not even illegal to cirumvent the Firewall… It’s literally a glorified recommendation feed. It’s technically illegal to use a VPN to circumvent the Firewall, but in practice this law is only ever used against the VPN vendor (and even then, it almost never is). Accessing and producing illegal content (e.g. CP) is, obviously, still illegal. Using a HK SIM in China is, obviously, still legal.

My claim is that the Chinese propaganda dissemination system is less developed and less competent than the American one, in large part BECAUSE of China’s blatant censorship rather than in spite of it. Whereas the American system operates in this illusion of freedom of speech, China makes no such indication. People know that media in China will, by and large, follow government policy. As a result, manufacturing consent is very challenging because people are inherently more skeptical of “news” they read. As a result, there’s a strong understanding around the fluidity of “fact” in modern Chinese culture.

Non-Chinese perspectives are easily accessible across the firewall as well as through travel to Hong Kong/Taiwan (which is both very cheap and very accessible for those in tier 1/2 cities).

Unlike Putin with Ukraine, Bush with Iraq, Bush with Afghanistan, or Clinton with Yugoslavia, Xi Jinping has struggled to get any sort of significant traction for an invasion of Taiwan. Public support for it is estimated at around 25% after adjusting for polling bias, with support for an invasion without first pursuing economic normalization or other solutions dropping to as low as 1%. This is despite Xi Jinping posturing on the issue for years. It’s a startlingly failure of what many claim to be one of the most restrictive Internet systems in the world. In contrast, the Iraq War was started when public perception was polling at 60% happy for an invasion in the next week or so (54% if the UN didn’t allow it).

I believe that this failure is in large part because Chinese propaganda is too blatant. Whereas the US has teams like the 4th PsyOps Airborne and “NGOs” like Atlantic Council, Chinese propaganda comes from the government or from people who are knowingly parroting government policy. While that’s pretty good at getting broad public perception to align, it fails at driving any decisive action because it provides neither the illusion of choice nor the radicalization necessary for decisive policy to pass.

China doesn’t pretend that their media is unbiased, though. There’s no aura of unbiased media in China. Meanwhile, Facebook’s head of global threat intelligence, is literally a US intelligence plant (and most of the authors on his Meta adversarial threat reports are ex- or current US intelligence). Meta is just the most memorable example, which is why I’m picking on them. Given the algorithmic nature of news delivery nowadays, how much influence would you guess US intelligence has on what news people see?

Xiao Qiang at UC Berkeley did a study before the VPN crackdown and estimated that there are about 10 million DAUs (daily active users) of firewall-flipping VPNs in the country. DAU/MAU is usually between 20%-50%, so that gives 20-50 million people with VPN access monthly (2-5% of internet users). Last October, China clamped down on some VPNs, but then the user counts for those VPNs that were still working skyrocketed.

Anyway, these numbers are actually really quite high:

Bing has 100 million DAUs worldwide. Reddit has about 55 million DAUs worldwide. LinkedIn has about 22 million DAUs in the US. Twitter has about 54 million MAUs in the US. Threads has about 8 million DAUs worldwide (though probably less now, lol). 1-5% penetration of total users in terms of usage is indicative of very high awareness. Other options include using a HK SIM (widely available) and a VPS (harder to setup). I have no idea what kind of market penetration these methods have.

The post I was replying to said:

That’s meaningless if they aren’t democratic

I get what you mean, but the other guy brought up democracy as if it was the be-all end-all solution. Countries that disprove OP’s point about democracy being the solution are fair game.

Chinese people know they’re being censored, though. That’s the key difference. They know that the perspectives being presented are, by and large, coherent with national policy and most urban people either know how to flip the firewall or know someone who can - it’s really not that hard. Sure, there is this nationalist block that doesn’t want to do so, but when have right-wing people actually looked at content that doesn’t agree with them, anyway?

Ask any random American what they think, and they’ll go on and on about freedom of speech and blah blah blah… As if the large media organizations in the US don’t all cite reports from “independent think tanks” that are conspicuously all funded by the same billionaires and manned by “ex”-US intelligence. See: the Atlantic Council. The US has been the world leader in manufacturing consent in a way that China and Russia can’t really match. It’s been impressive to see tbh.

We also don’t have infinite people.

As shown by Henry Ford a century ago, more hours does not correlate to more production. https://time.com/charter/6167989/ford-overhauls-its-work-practices/

Moreover, as shown by Britain, doctors will gladly still be doctors even if the pay is absolute dogshit.

How many famines do you think occured in China and Russia prior to communism? How many people do you think died because of famines in the decades prior to communism?

Famine in late 19th century/early 20th century China and Russia were a fact of life. They’d come ever few years, kill a few million, and then leave. That had been the case throughout history because subsistence farming isn’t exactly a very robust system. How many famines do you think occured in the decades before the communist party took power?

How many famines would you guess occured in the decades after the communist party took power in Russia or China? What do you think the odds were that those famines would have occured with or without communist party intervention?

Which is, of course, why productivity increased when they instituted the 8 hour work day and is, of course, why Americans only average something like 3 hours of work in an 8 hour day. Because more time working means more work done. Obviously.

It’s also, of course, why people are still starving when agricultural output easily exceeds consumption. Because of food scarcity, obviously.

This must also explain why in Britain, notorious for underpaying doctors, becoming a doctor is still one of the most desirable occupations. Because people won’t pursue societally necessary jobs if they don’t pay well. Obviously.

You can find a bad example for any form of government. By any reasonable metric of success, the US government is performing poorly compared to non-democratic countries… Even in terms of freedom of speech, given the prevalence of government and intelligence-funded “independent think tanks” that influence policy in Washington.

At least most people in Russia and China can distinguish between the truth and the party line.

Ah yes, because American democracy is going so well.

Who’s interests are the Republicans representing? Who’s interests have the Democrats protected after being in power for 3 years?

Democracy is meaningless if it doesn’t actually act to benefit the people. After all, the goal of government is to improve the lives of the people over which it governs. All of these experiments into different methods of governance should be evaluated based on how much the quality of lives of the population have improved and how happy the population is with their government.

The assumption here being that we live in scarcity? That worker productivity is directly tied to the amount of time worked? That people won’t take difficult jobs like being a doctor without the financial incentive?

Fuck the PRC because… They have state-owned enterprise instead of actual communism? Interesting take.

That’s not really how it works

Ah yes, because everything you do is to meet societal needs and not to make more money for the 1%. That’s why 34% of wealth in Canada goes to the top 1%.

That’s the cost of designing education for the worst students.