Thank you for that. I really appreciate this post and it resonates with me. I wouldn’t have stayed there for so long if I didn’t love it too. But I can’t deal with the rhetoric on .ml that acts like it’s a utopia with no justified dissent.
There is absolutely a functioning democracy, but it isn’t immune to nepotism or greed, just like everywhere else. It’s also capable of manufacturing suffering.
The two people who remain in my thoughts the most from my time there were the 80 year old couple who worked as parking attendants in my building so they could stay in a single room partition in the garage with a kerosene heater. This was in 2011, in the center of Kunming. Not one of the rural villages in the mountains. They could have been provided for but they weren’t. It’s not a utopia, but it is a great country full of wonderful people.
That couple in Kunming. No amount of progress erases that. They deserved better.
But, so much has changed since then. Even just since 2021. Housing market cooling down, 996 ruled illegal by the Supreme People’s Court, new protections for delivery riders rolling out in Zhejiang, Guangdong. And the corruption crackdowns, “Tigers and flies” clearly wasn’t just propaganda.
On .ml people seem tired of the constant negative spin on China, so they swing hard the other way. Sometimes too hard (though I’ve yet to see it too many times). And, even folks here can still slip into old “China bad” habits (seen a lot of this recently). Like saying China does nothing for the Global South when you’ve got the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, Gwadar Port, vaccine donations, debt relief and much more showing how patently false that is.
I’ll just say it plain. I think China’s model, the way we do democracy, foreign policy, the whole political economy, is the best working option we’ve got right now. Not because it’s perfect, but because it actually moves the needle for hundreds of millions. It’s not even playing the same game as the Euro-Amerikan hegemony that’s been exporting crisis forever. Why throw out the good, or spend all day demonizing it, when so much worse is happening way closer to home for most people on here. Stick in their eye vs a speck in mine, yknow?
Edit: a graph just to show how much things have changed
Thank you for that. I really appreciate this post and it resonates with me. I wouldn’t have stayed there for so long if I didn’t love it too. But I can’t deal with the rhetoric on .ml that acts like it’s a utopia with no justified dissent.
There is absolutely a functioning democracy, but it isn’t immune to nepotism or greed, just like everywhere else. It’s also capable of manufacturing suffering.
The two people who remain in my thoughts the most from my time there were the 80 year old couple who worked as parking attendants in my building so they could stay in a single room partition in the garage with a kerosene heater. This was in 2011, in the center of Kunming. Not one of the rural villages in the mountains. They could have been provided for but they weren’t. It’s not a utopia, but it is a great country full of wonderful people.
That couple in Kunming. No amount of progress erases that. They deserved better.
But, so much has changed since then. Even just since 2021. Housing market cooling down, 996 ruled illegal by the Supreme People’s Court, new protections for delivery riders rolling out in Zhejiang, Guangdong. And the corruption crackdowns, “Tigers and flies” clearly wasn’t just propaganda.
On .ml people seem tired of the constant negative spin on China, so they swing hard the other way. Sometimes too hard (though I’ve yet to see it too many times). And, even folks here can still slip into old “China bad” habits (seen a lot of this recently). Like saying China does nothing for the Global South when you’ve got the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, Gwadar Port, vaccine donations, debt relief and much more showing how patently false that is.
I’ll just say it plain. I think China’s model, the way we do democracy, foreign policy, the whole political economy, is the best working option we’ve got right now. Not because it’s perfect, but because it actually moves the needle for hundreds of millions. It’s not even playing the same game as the Euro-Amerikan hegemony that’s been exporting crisis forever. Why throw out the good, or spend all day demonizing it, when so much worse is happening way closer to home for most people on here. Stick in their eye vs a speck in mine, yknow?
Edit: a graph just to show how much things have changed
Fair. Thanks mate I know it took thought to write that. I’ll digest if for a while.