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by bduerst 2450 days ago
As much as this seems like a foreign concept to westerners, most Chinese citizens (outside of the European provinces) simply do not care about it the way westerners do.

To GP's point, their lives have and continue to improve, with the fastest growing middle class this decade. And before you project western ideals on China and start doomsaying about their impending economic collapse, understand that people have been saying that for a decade too.
2 comments
yeahforsureman 2450 days ago
Yeah, that's human nature. A lot of people were fairly satisfied even behind the Iron Curtain for a time before the economic dysfunction became too apparent.

Yet even then as now, we have every right to project and even attempt to impose these "western" ideals of individual human rights on systems that try to deny them from any one individual.

The only "western" thing about them is that the particular framework of discourse we currently use to describe these values was born here. Yet those values are, or should be, universal. I refuse to take any bullshit claiming otherwise from any collectivist ideology, with or without Chinese characteristics. They have no legitimacy in overriding the rights of an individual based on any braindead ideology or concept of an essence of a society or culture, historical dialectics or whatever.

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bduerst 2450 days ago
Right, but it will be several generations before that even becomes a possibility. Right now you have the famine generation who remembers how terrible things used to be, and will be content as long as things are and continue to improve.
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yeahforsureman 2450 days ago
Perhaps. Then again, people don't often get, for example, how brutish even Western Europe was pre-1945. But realistically, yeah, not during the current generation of people in power.

The next generation looks worrying, too, and authoritarian systems certainly can persist and are able to adapt over time. Yet they are always brittle in many ways. It sure looks like Chinese leaders know this, too.

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deogeo 2450 days ago
I was not aware the desire for freedom (of speech, and otherwise) was such a uniquely Western ideal.

And it's easy not to care about it - until its absence is used against you. At that point, it changes from an ideal, to a very pragmatic matter (ask the Uyghurs or Tibetans). But by then it's too late.

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bduerst 2450 days ago
The history of freedom of speech is rooted in western philosophy, right down to it's origins in Greek and English cultures.
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