Full disclosure, I live in Africa and don’t have a dog in this fight. I like proper discourse and it’s alright if I and another person disagree on something, what is important is that we communicate and understand where the other is coming from. The ultimate goal is the satiation of needless and avoidable suffering for all minds.
I’ve only been on Lemmy for a few days but across any sub I’ve noticed any criticism of China or the CCP is met with immediate downvotes and anything remotely positive of the US or really any western country whatsoever meets a similar fate.
Anything pro-African is mostly neutral but in essence ignored, no upvotes, no downvotes, no comments.
Has anyone else noticed this? Am I completely off base here? And is there anything else here that seemingly gets downvoted automatically. It would be sad to see the fediverse and Lemmy be nothing more than just another echo chamber on the web.
Finally, I am posting this assuming it will also be downvoted to hell based on the title alone and that itself will be some monochrome of truth of the situation here.
Is China actually communist though? Like is their government or economics actually communist? Also I don’t think communism and China are one and the same. Finally all things should be open to fair criticism and discussion. There’s no need to turn politics into religion2.0
First thing this is all purely personal opinion viewing stuff from outside and as a general interest in world history.
I am an American but I have lived outside the USA for a couple years and no it wasn’t on a military base.
So with that said my personal interpretation is that China is still largely the same China as in ancient times and has decided to take several large chunks of both Communism and Capitalism and add those to the far far larger just continuing to do/be the same as they have for thousands of years.
To put it a different way, it is a case of fix what they feel was/is broken and keep doing all the things that work and from their point of view China has kept itself as one of the largest Nations in history for one of the longest times of any country.
So on the bad side you have things like them being willing to be extremely repressive is terms of censorship. Or the oppression of minorities they don’t fall in line enough to the central control of the government. Or minimizing stories that damage their reputation like mining issues.
On the good side they seem to be able to at least partially consider long term large scale society value. At least from the point of view of engineering. The USA by comparison seems to exclusively only consider short term value. Often in terms of weeks or a financial quarter and occasionally the few year duration of a presidential or Senate term.
China also seems to care about improving the average life of it’s citizens. This is a big deal and probably the most “Communist” thing. However that also goes along with them seemingly not just allowing but being perfectly happy to have some people have truly horrific lives as long as the baseline average is improving.