[anthonyleecook]

A reddit post from a student in China.

“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.

A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.

sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/80xttj/silence_this_...

And another one post from a student in China

"I’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :("

[agumonkey]

Few years ago I talked on people on omegle. Chinese girl pops up. We talk, like many many Chinese, she asks quickly what I think about China.

I grew up fond of Asia: Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, asian food, spiritual ideas, that simplicity in art, architecture, clothing; Japanese culture too.. anyway I was very very positive about her culture.

She responded right away: cool but well you know.. it's not all rose here; with a few mild comments about economy and politics. Then a long silence, followed by panick-ish excuses around the fact that she shouldn't have said this and she disconnected.

Note that this was about the big firewall thing. Surely it didn't help for paranoia. Still it was the first time I ever talked to someone scared about her country as a whole.

----

Recently with the growth of international chinese tech brands, some news about raising wages, using robots instead of armies of exploited people .. I thought China would get a stable and peaceful rise. I did not envision this.

[794CD01]

If someone posted that on reddit, especially /r/China, there's practically no chance he/she is actually Chinese. /r/China is full of English-speaking immigrants who hate China.

[potatote]

Yep. I was born in SE Asia and came to the US for high ed (and have since been living here). Most of the people who I met on the internet and in the US, who are interested in the political situation of my home country, posses a view from a bubble that is very different than the perspective from people there. Overall, people just want to have food, shelter and a good living. They could care less about who is ruling them. It's like some people from Europe think Americans are idiots because of our current leader's doings. Not a lot of people in the US, who reads NYT, Economists and such, do not understand that their glimpse into other countries is very much biased and limited.

[Slansitartop]

> posses a view from a bubble that is very different than the perspective from people there. Overall, people just want to have food, shelter and a good living. They could care less about who is ruling them.

Seems like just different bubbles, actually. I'm somewhat skeptical of taking at face value the opinions of a population subject to authoritarian information controls. Even in such a case, you're likely to get very different opinions of a government like China's in Xinjiang or Tibet than you will in Beijing. Both groups are only able to form their opinions of the whole from the very limited pieces available to them.

I think the most interesting perspectives come from people with a foot in both worlds. I have friends who don't want China to become a democracy, at least not right away, because they're afraid of what it would do. The CCP has kept the necessary civil society weak, and encouraged popular nationalist sentiments that could be very dangerous if put into action.

[SZJX]

Do you mean not a lot of people understand or "do not understand"? Your wording is a bit confusing. Apparently more self-awareness is good but indeed I'm afraid if they keep being imbued in the mainstream media who keep feeding them ideological nonsense and agendas from their own elite politicians they'll know very little about the reality. Talking about China, Tibet, Xinjiang all the time without even actually having been there at least once and talked to actual people living there. That's laughable.

[SZJX]

What sensationalist and exaggerated rhetoric. People who claim imminent collapse and chaos in China have been doing so for decades. They can keep on trying. Nobody is listening to them.

The Chinese leadership knows too well what a complete trainwreck Mao and the Cultural Revolution have brought on the country. Their priority is always on developing the country further. They are way smarter and more pragmatic than some western media/elites want to imagine them to be (e.g. imagine them to be some Kim-esque figure who only cares about personal enjoyment and leaves the population dying. That's absolutely not the mentality of the current Chinese leadership.)

What if that guy was told that in Germany, UK etc. there are practically no limits on how long a head of state can serve, as long as they are re-elected? Substitute the name for China. Would they change their rhetoric 180 degrees around? All just ideological nonsense with no substance. Yes, Xi's reforms could fail. The power struggle could become so intense that it spirals out of control and harms the populace somehow. But it could also be the case that Xi truly realizes his vision and became the leader to make China the most powerful country for a long time to come, a la Lee Kuan Yew, Ataturk etc. It's all hugely uncertain at the moment. Talking as if China is doomed from now on exactly shows how ignorant and far from reality this person is.

Personally I hate the fact that China is becoming like another US on so many aspects of the society. But really, that is a totally separate matter.