• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    Do you live in Cuba, Vietnam, the PRC, DPRK, Laos, or Venezuela? If not, you don’t live in a socialist country, but a social democracy, which is capitalism but with safety nets. These social democracies in Europe rely on imperialism to subsidize their safety nets.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      5 hours ago

      I live in a country that went from Imperial control to almost fully Socialist (except for the Police, which are mostly tamed bullies) and is now rapidly progressing towards Capitalism (probably because anyone that refuses to do so, gets on the offside of US).

      And PRC qualifies as neither Socialist nor Capitalist.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        If it’s not on the list, it isn’t socialist. As for the PRC, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state, it’s socialist by definition.

        • ulterno@programming.dev
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          4 hours ago

          and the working classes control the state

          I find it hard to believe that the majority of the working class people consider territorial expansion to be good for anyone in this age.

          • freagle@lemmy.ml
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            4 hours ago

            I find it hard to believe that China is engaged in territorial expansion when it hasn’t dropped a single bomb in 35 years

            Or do mean the border dispute with India? Because that’s an artifact of the British drawing shitty borders and imposing them on subjugated people and those people have not established an effective framework for redressing the problem yet

            • ulterno@programming.dev
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              3 hours ago

              Nepal

              Why did the British not colonise Nepal


              Detaining citizen in Shanghai, if it’s Chinese citizen, why need VISA? If it’s an Indian citizen, why detain?

              Forget British, forget military occupation. What decides who is worthy of controlling a place?
              I believe, one that is there during hard times 2 3. PDF

              And considering how China tried to cut off downstream from Tsang Po, even if I were to assume China controlled all of Indian territory, that act doesn’t make Chinese government particularly desirable. And if we consider that China doesn’t control said territory, then that makes China a bad neighbour at best and an incompetent governor at worst.


              See, I am not very patriotic. I am fine with whatever the name of my country is. But the difference between how the land resources are controlled and distributed over the years, make me seem like China will end up being a worse Central Govt. than India (which isn’t particularly great already), for the given territory.

              • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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                3 hours ago

                Are you actually arguing that the PRC would govern territory materially worse than the Indian Union does today? That China’s central state has demonstrated lower developmental capacity, weaker redistribution, and poorer integration of peripheral regions than India? If that is your stance, then it requires empirical support, because the comparative data point in the opposite direction.

                Over the last four decades, China has eliminated extreme poverty at a national scale recognized even by multilateral institutions. It has built dense transport networks into frontier regions, universalized basic electrification, and industrialized at a speed unprecedented in modern history. Per capita infrastructure stock, manufacturing capacity, high-speed rail coverage, and energy generation all exceed India’s by large margins.

                India remains characterized by deep regional inequality, persistent rural poverty, underemployment, and infrastructure gaps especially in peripheral areas such as the Northeast. State capacity for large-scale mobilization and coordinated development is structurally weaker. Growth has been significant, but uneven, and heavily mediated through private capital rather than centralized planning mechanisms.

                If the question is resource distribution, China’s fiscal transfer system and central planning apparatus have demonstrated stronger equalization effects between coastal and inland regions than India’s center–state fiscal balance has achieved. If the question is infrastructure delivery, China’s record is quantitatively superior. If the question is poverty reduction, the scale difference is like that of an ant versus the sky.

                You can criticize aspects of governance in both systems. But to assert that China would be a “worse central government” in developmental terms is not supported by comparative political economy.

                • ulterno@programming.dev
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                  2 hours ago

                  developmental terms

                  No, I am not at all calling China’s capabilities low in terms of creating a war machine.

                  I am talking in terms of how quality of life has been affected by either of them in places which both countries are calling as their own (see my points in the above comment). While China tries to call Arunachal Pradesh and parts of J&K and its people as under itself, India is what sends the disaster relief resources, whereas China considers blocking natural resources to try and increase discontent of the people living in those areas.


                  China took longer than India to even admit the increasing air-quality problems in high pollution states,[1] which shows me that the govt. doesn’t like admitting facts. And personally, I am fine working with people who fail a lot, as long as they are consistent in communication and don’t try mixing lies into reports. Because trustability is an important part of any relationship, which also applies to governments.[2]

                  And I am not even going to point out the actual quality of buildings that you might have been a part of your metrics, simply because I expect enough people to have pointed those (and other similar conditions out to you).
                  While Indian buildings aren’t particularly great either, I am in a 10+ year old building which was not designed for earthquakes and has still not cracked (much less collapsed into a death trap) despite multiple of those.

                  Then comes the destruction of values over the years. China has had a rich culture of thousands of years and any such civilisation develops values and traditions that are conductive to longevity.
                  But the recent values shown by adults (not even children) from China has indicated an erosion of older values that were developed over the centuries in China. This is not something that happens easily without intervention from higher powers (and I am inclined to think it was the govt, unless you know of any other power that might have to gain from activities that cause this side-effect).
                  While there has been quite a lot of food adulteration problems in India, there are some lines that people would not cross. Specially the working class (who actually care about values unlike the business class) would never. But the normal people that seem to come out of China to set examples, don’t seem to be doing any good for its reputation.


                  1. although for both countries, the actual metrics being used to report them hardly align with actual types of pollutants and the mitigations in response have been “too little too late” for both ↩︎

                  2. The main reasons I give flak to US govt and organisations is due to their lack of consistency, which makes them very less trustworthy. ↩︎

                  • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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                    1 hour ago

                    Ah you’re a reactionary spouting tofu dreg and other nonsense. You should try look into things outside your nationalist bubble.

                    Edit:

                    “I am not at all calling China’s capabilities low in terms of creating a war machine.”

                    China’s comparative advantage over the past forty years has been poverty eradication, infrastructure build-out, electrification, and industrial capacity. Reducing that to militarism is either ignorance or bad faith. Where’s your high speed rail? Where are your clean streets? Why is your literacy so low? Why do you have so many shanty towns? Why do your tech expos have to pretend Chinese tech is Indian invented?

                    “India is what sends the disaster relief resources…”

                    India administers those territories. Of course it sends relief? Are you an idiot?

                    “China considers blocking natural resources…”

                    There is no evidence that China has cut off Brahmaputra flow to manufacture discontent. The projects are run-of-river. Seasonal fluctuations are monsoon-driven. You are asserting intent without evidence. That is speculation.

                    “China took longer to admit air-quality problems…”

                    China’s PM2.5 levels have declined substantially since 2013 after aggressive regulatory intervention. India today has multiple cities ranking among the most polluted globally by annual average concentration. If the metric is environmental turnaround after crisis recognition, China’s trend line is steeper. You are ignoring trajectory and focusing on narrative.

                    “Actual quality of buildings…”

                    “Tofu dreg” is a meme, not a dataset. China has built the largest high-speed rail network on earth, thousands of kilometers of expressways, and entire metropolitan regions within two decades. Failures exist, as in India, collapsed bridges, unsafe housing, infrastructure accidents. Anecdotes do not overturn macro-level engineering capacity.

                    “Destruction of values… erosion of older values… normal people coming out of China…”

                    I bet you love those caste values as you beat those dalits to keep them in line.

              • freagle@lemmy.ml
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                3 hours ago

                Yeah a border dispute over a few hundred acres. Please don’t use words like “territorial expansion” when discussing a few hundred acres along a contentious border that has historically been undefined and only in modern times have there been an attempt to make them fixed.

                • ulterno@programming.dev
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                  1 hour ago

                  a few hundred acres

                  It started with a few metres in some cases and has been going on at multiple fronts.
                  Perhaps PRC needs to stop expecting people to forget the past and start noticing how they contradict their own self.
                  The tensions have been created by PRC’s “an inch a day” tactics, which I honestly see as nothing more than petty (and I am saying this, knowing full well than PRC would want to call India “petty”, to help them get more fake points).


                  For Nepal

                  And if it really was just about a “few hundred acres” and PRC really worked with a Socialist philosophy, then they would:
                  a) Not really need to worry about Nepal (a pretty small country with hardly any military power) being any sort of a threat that would require putting effort to take a small amount of land. b) Consider how the small amount of land would hardly make a difference to the people of China, while it would make a big difference to a country with was lesser land than China.

                  And that is where the inconsistency I talk about, comes in place.

                  Nepal is an otherwise docile country and I am pretty confident they would have been happy to have partial open borders with some kind of trade treaties in that area.

                  As such, while you try to play it down by calling it “contentious”, Nepal was trying to hide any such transfer or annexation, fearing what exactly? If it were really fairly claimed, there wouldn’t be a real reason for that, no?

                  • freagle@lemmy.ml
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                    1 hour ago

                    You do realize that the border is with Tibet, right? An autonomous region within China that has never been recognized as a state with firm boundaries in all of human history. The border is contentious because borders are contentious. As much as you might not like border disputes, there is nothing socialist or anti-socialist about having border disputes. Nepal doesn’t want to make a big diplomatic stink over the situation. You want to psychologize them as fearful of China and therefore China isn’t socialist?

                    You’re not making any sense. China is not engaged in imperial capitalist expansion simply because there’s a few hundred acres being built on by the TAR along their own border in ways that violate the border. That’s a resolvable tension and doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.