The conversations are amazing
Despite the unhappy circumstances, it’s kinda nice Chinese and Americans interacting on social media.
The fact this isn’t typically possible because of bans in China is not so nice. Neither is the fact the US is going down the same road instead of proper privacy laws.
But still, kinda nice
The social score thing isn’t really propaganda as much as it is idiots believing whatever they read. It started from what was essentially thinly veiled racism, and became “true” because people kept hearing it.
This is exactly what governments around the world are afraid of. Every government wants us to blindly accept that every citizen of the nation is profoundly evil and must be obedient to its government.
Russia wants its citizens to believe every single lie about itself and other nations. That everyone in Ukraine is a bloodthirsty Nazi, and Russia is liberating Crimea.
America wants its citizens to believe every single lie about itself and other nations. Every brown person is a terrorist waiting for its Manchurian candidate call sign to do a second 9/11, and that the economy is the greatest in the world.
No nation tells the entire truth, from lying from omission via national security, to straight up war time propaganda, to funding and owning news networks. From Radio Free Europe to Sputnik, a government will lie to your face and tell you its an unabridged raw truth.
The only way we could actually learn the “truth” (if there is such a one when anyone could be as brainwashed as their government wants them to be) is by directly talking to the citizens of each nation. The internet is a great equalizer, the only limit is language and translation. That’s why governments censor the internet, or even shut it down when it gets too much for a government to manage.
We all have more in common with the random citizens of China, Russia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, America, Mexico, Canada, Uganda, South Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Brazil… We have more in common with being human and being subjugated and redistricted in doing what makes us happy and free.
And the government and rich of each of those nations and beyond have more in common each other than to the citizens they try to control like dogs. They all disagree on why they do it, but the end result is the same. Status quo, monopoly on violence kept in place with whoever is at the top. The set dressing and costumes change, but the stage play goes on.
You and I have more in common than with the president or prime minister or dictator we are under. The only thing we share with the top 1% and our governments is the lanauge we share and the citizenship. I have friends around the world, and I have more in common with random geeks in Japan and China, than the leadership of my nation.
The governments want you to think that you have nothing to share and love with another human being outside the lines drawn in the sand by people out of touch with the people inside those lines.
The unexpected propaganda win for the PRC too lol. Anyone who might have been doubting the benefits of the dictatorship of the proletariat will now have first hand evidence that life is absolutely not better in capitalism
There’s a bunch of Chinese posts asking if the stuff about school shootings, fires, homelessness are exaggerated propaganda only to be told otherwise. It’s both hilarious and sad.
People of the US and China are both unsure of what to believe about the other, because both are so propagandized lol
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You just made that up. You genuinely have no idea what the Chinese perception of the uyghur imprisonment is. In fact you’ve gone out of your way to call their prison system a “work camp”. I’m not even saying that it’s not a work camp. What I am saying is you wouldn’t call American prisons a work camp despite also being used for mass slave labor.
Already debunked this ~ 6 times in this thread so far.
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He’s the guy who created the website your currently using lmao
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You don’t know what Chinese people do or don’t know. You only know what Western governments and Western corporate media tell you Chinese people do or don’t know.
There’s nothing secret about what happened in Xinjiang. People are well aware of the terrorist attacks and of how the local and federal governments’ responded to them.
Thank goodness for the modlog! You are right on. Just because American propaganda is bad doesn’t mean Chinese isn’t bad too or that we have to defend it. Everyone should be held accountable.
Who told you that the people of China are propagandized, especially to hate other countries and peoples as much as the US does?
Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.
But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.
Ofc there is no such thing as an un-propagandized country. There are lobbyists and think tanks everywhere
The US does NOT have a free press and is not at all interested in freedom and free speech. Notice that there are no socialists or leftists of any kind on any news channel or in political leadership positions.
This is just untrue. There is plenty of legal press in the US of any persuasion, from anarchist to fascist.
The major US news outlets are in bed with capitalists because that’s where the money is, but there are lots of smaller outlets with other views. In China all news outlets kowtow to the government because anything else is illegal.
In China all news outlets kowtow to the government because anything else is illegal.
This is what our media tell us about their media. In every country the media kowtow to the government to some extent, but I’m not sure to exactly what extent they actually do in China, and I’m not going to take our media’s word for what that extent is.
If you do not know the extent of pressure asserted on Chinese media that is willful ignorance.
Of course “our media” (whatever you mean by that) is the only media that can report on it as Chinese media is heavily censored.
If you want to know the extent the information easy to find.
Here’s some of what Reporters Without Borders have to say
“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the world’s largest prison for journalists, and its regime conducts a campaign of repression against journalism and the right to information worldwide.”
“The Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party sends a detailed notice to all media every day that includes editorial guidelines and censored topics.”
“Independent journalists and bloggers who dare to report “sensitive” information are often placed under surveillance, harassed, detained, and, in some cases, tortured.”
Source: https://rsf.org/en/country/china
This is from The Committee to Protect Journalists
“China has long ranked as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. Censorship makes the exact number of journalists jailed there notoriously difficult to determine, but Beijing’s media crackdown has widened in recent years”
Here’s Amnesty International
“Chinese authorities continued to severely curtail rights to freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, including through the abusive application of laws often under the pretext of preserving national security.”
Source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/china/report-china/
Mostly agree with this take. I just wanted to add some nuance. I was talking to a friend about Gaza/Israel-protests in my country and said that the media doesn’t show everything. He then told a story about the protests that was supposedly not covered in the media. However, I had literally just read about that story in my newspaper.
Point is, there is some freedom of press (at least in my country) and the press is fairly pluralistic. However, to really find out what’s going on you need to read i.) several sources, and ii.) continue to focus on events after journalists took the effort to dig down. That’s a big ask for many people. And the stories that come out first tend to be most biased.
the stories that come out first tend to be most biased
I honestly think the concept of news is actually harmful, because it’s about reporting what happened, not about making the audience understand the subject. It puts a premium on getting the report out as quickly as possible, and favours the most shocking events and interpretations that draw people’s attention.
Ultimately most news are “empty calories” of information that mostly give an illusion of knowledge. “Explosion in Herptown, dozens wounded” does not meaningfully increase your understanding of the world, it mostly just makes you scared. It will take weeks until the cause and consequences of the explosion can be fully understood, and a lot of research to put that into perspective.
Friends of mine who have moved away from China. One of them had police at their door in China for social media posts that were friendly to Uyghurs (not even anything to do with the genocide, just general friendliness as a “we’re all Chinese” kind of message). Being taken to police stations for even slightly questioning the state narrative is terrifying.
Source: I heard it in a dream
Source: a friend of mine personally telling me what happened the last time he was in mainland China.
Woah I never recognized your username in the wild before. Thanks for giving us Lemmy. Huge fan.
No probs!
Scroll down, addressed this three times in this thread already.
You mean how both China, and the US propagandize their citizens? Yeah, I’m fully aware of that already. All states will do it, as a system of control over the working class, in order to continue to exploit them.
I mean, if controlling the people wasn’t the goal, whats the purpose of the oppression of a state?
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huge false equivalence
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I’m reminded of that ex Soviet joke about how they always knew the government was lying about their own countries but were shocked to learn it was telling the truth about america
Lmao
It’s uncomfortable seeing Xi with an actual jawline…
Xi Chadping
TOPXI
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I just want to point out that the attempt to compare medical costs in a direct comparison in US dollars isn’t exactly easy as it does ignore purchasing power and base wages.
The point would probably be better made with hours of labor at a base pay to pay off treatment which I do think American healthcare would probably still lose quite handedly.
As a civ player, I know a cultural victory when I see one.
Eh, there’s truth and lies on both sides. Coming from someone that lived in china for 4 years and was able to engage with Chinese primary news sources. But basic healthcare in china is faster and cheaper, but then again I went to get a wart removed and they prescribed me acorn paste that accelerated the growth of the wart. So win some lose some.
If banning tik tok ends up galvanizing demand for healthcare reform I’m going to laugh my ass off
Good comrades like Lady Izdihar are taking off in a big way, might help radicalize a lot of people towards Marxism even.
Rednote’s algorithm seems very receptive to communist content, at least compared to what I’m used to. Hope it stays that way.
Me too!
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People are people no matter where they live, which also means you can’t trust any government anywhere. Propaganda is powerful.
The idea of a social credit score has always been hilarious to me, like yo bros we have credit scores over here and they legitimately fuck us over since you need good credit to do alot of things like renting a place to live.
Circle jerking about China is as ridiculous as circle jerking about the US. We’ve been here before with US vs USSR, but this time everyone has a megaphone and an IQ that can be measured with a ruler.
You keep on coping there little buddy. What’s happening is that regular people from both countries are now talking directly to each other, and finding out what life is actually like.
Uhhh, not exactly regular people. From what I’ve seen from the Rednote, at least my feed is wealthy upper-middle or upper class, while the Americans are from low to middle class.
not what I see in my feed, might depend on the interests you picked and whom you followed, etc
That’s because via GDP those two are at the same level even though they are different levels in their own country.
what was preventing them from doing it before?
Lack of will on the part of Americans to engage on Chinese platforms like Xiaohongshu. The looming TikTok ban is what pushed people over the edge.
tiktok is chinese tho so where were all the chinese users?
TikTok is a Chinese built platform, but it’s built strictly for users outside of China. The Chinese version of TikTok is Douyin. You could’ve googled this yourself in the time it took you to write this comment.
Why? Tiktok is availabe in multiple countries with completely different language, culture and laws so why not China? Why have a different version of the app specifically for china?
Because censorship lmao
I’m curious, what does this line of questioning have to do with my original comment?
Sorry for being pedantic, but those foldable work rulers are exactly 2 m long (at least in MetricLandia), which is, incidentally, the span of IQ values (0-200).
So yeah, it literally can be mapped one-to-one to a (common type of) ruler.
200cm, the american one is up to 80 inches 😁
This is a common ruler where you live?
In my country we have rulers with 12 in/ ~30cm as the most common. We also have “yardstick” which is more often a meter stick now. But no foldable rulers.
Yeah.
The 30 cm is ubiquitous for officework or drawing, while this is for tiling floors, doing plumbing, measuring walls, roofs, etc. etc… There are also those retractable coils (usually 2 or 5m), but they tend to break easily and collapse under their own weight, so they’re not as useful for some things.
I can find one like this in basically any hardware store with few exceptions (Austria). They’re almost exclusively 2m in length (I literally haven’t seen a longer or shorter one ever in my life)
Also, a meter stick sounds workable, but borderline impractical.
Yup. There are like 3 types of rulers: normal (a stick), foldable (this) and those retractable metallic strips.
Sticks are usually either 15 or 30 cm, while the foldables are literally always 2m.
The coils are the most ubiquitous, but I orefer the foldavles for most things since they tend to fall undet their own weight when measuring longer distances. These sre either 2 or 5 m I think.
We have the coils too, except we call it a measuring tape.
We also have have a flexible soft version used for measuring human proportions for clothing, but it’s called a “tape measure” for some reason.
I wish we had the foldable kind, that sounds useful.
Some of this stuff is dated. Chinese healthcare used to be less available and more expensive until the government put efforts in changing that fact. China’s a nation that seems to believe that they can use their government to make things better.
