[goblin89]

I had seen China and talked to Chinese. The range of policy opinions my counterparts could express, and topics they could engage in, seemed to be extremely limited due to what I could only assume was the state of being misinformed (including by omission) by—and fearing retribution from—their own government. The very same factors would, obviously, be limiting their political agency.

Do you have a real choice in how to personally treat CCP and Taiwan? As in, do you feel like you can talk about, say, respecting the preference of Taiwan citizens about them being/not being part of China, or about that mysterious May 35th incident, with, say, a taxi driver?

Could it be that the population overwhelmingly supports invading Taiwan because this is literally the only appropriate course of action instilled in them by a government in full control of both traditional and social media?

[FooBarWidget]

I think you are overly attributing opinions to censorship, and not giving enough credit to people's ability to form their own opinions despite censorship.

The hypothesis that Chinese opinions are overwhelmingly the product of censorship and media control has already been debunked by Harvard research. There is a paper which shows that censorship does not steer opinions in a certain direction. Instead, censorship's goal is to silence and dampen movements. Both pro-government and anti-government comments are equally censored -- the actual criteria is whether those comments have the potential to become viral.

The inability of censorship to steer opinions, is corroborated by a recent essay "How Chinese liberals lost the young generation" https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/erCJHZVLEtnZ4wWbkgij3g This essay states that for a long time, the popular opinion was that CCP is bad, and and that western-style democracy is superior. It also states that censorship did nothing to change people's opinion on this topic because reality is stronger than censorship/propaganda. It then states that all of this has changed in the past 5-10 years: the CCP has become popular nowadays, again not because of censorship or propaganda, but because in reality they've actually improved and done a good job.

[goblin89]

My first question wasn’t rhetorical, knowing where you stand could help any further discussion, should it occur, be meaningful.

What you instead wrote in response makes sense to me only under the assumption that people have a choice—to have CCP or not to have CCP—and that they choose to have CCP; if you’re saying that assumption is correct then we have sufficiently differing views of reality (perhaps you know something I don’t, etc.) that we’d be talking past each other.

Newspaper pieces on how %opposition% is %something negative%—written as if it was somehow relevant and even vitally important, creating an illusion of pluralism in absence of any real possibility for the reader to effect any change—were a thing in USSR from what I hear; based on your summary of the essay I smell the same old fish wrapped in a fresh newspaper.

[FooBarWidget]

All right, sorry if I misinterpreted you.

For the question on whether you can discuss such things with a taxi driver: yes. The authorities don't care about that sort of thing until it escalates (or think think it will escalate) into a bigger movement.

What you say next, about people only being able to choose between having CCP and not having CCP, was not the point I was making, but it is something I think. I don't understand however why you then say that we'd be talking past each other. Only having the choice between having CCP and not having CCP is simple reality. History did not give us another choice. The Qing was weak and corrupt. The KMT was corrupt. No other governing movement in the past 100 year succeeded. The west doesn't have a good track record of installing functioning, prosperous democracies in foreign lands (see e.g. middle east). The CCP is literally all we have, and the past 30 years of CCP is also literally the most successful period in the past 3000 years.

What is written in the essay corroborates roughly with what I hear in social circles. Whenever I talk to Chinese people on the western Internet, most of them either have roughly similar views. I also follow a bunch of foreigners who live in China, and they too corroborate roughly this view.

Last year, the government built sewers for my wife's grandmother, and installed a toilet for her (she lives in the country side and only had a literal mud hole in the grond as a toilet with no sewer). They gave her health insurance. She is overjoyed. She isn't happy because of propaganda, she's happy because she is actually satisifed with what the government provides.

[goblin89]

A situation where a small group of people wielding immense power over the rest is not peacefully replaceable strikes me as extremely fragile. To say it is not is to trust that group to be ever-prescient, ever-correct, never to become corrupted by power and money. Unless the belief is that the group consists of gods, that cannot be true given human nature.

And yes, the ruling body may have become popular, but in absence of real alternatives that popularity hardly means anything—at some point people have to like the government, to protect their own sanity if anything; to feel otherwise is to feel mistaken, betrayed, subjugated, disoriented, gaslit, not knowing what’s true and what’s false after years of misinformation, etc.; our egos tend to be way too fragile for that avalanche. The phenomenon is not unlike Stockholm syndrome of sorts. (By the way, this is not at all specific to China—I observed this elsewhere as well.)

Thus, I ignore the popularity and stick to facts. Transparency, processes, working systems. In Iain Cheng’s terminology, that’d be a world that can sustain itself after its creator has exited.

[0] By the way, from my reading of history, USSR had definitely messed with China politics, directly helped CCP with resources and facilitated its ascent to power.

[FooBarWidget]

That framework of thought is based on western history and experience, and does not fit Chinese history and experience. You say popularity doesn't matter, only facts matter. The hard facts state that historically, in China, the biggest problems occurred when central government was weak and when the country was divided. The hard facts also state that the past 30 years are the best in 3000 years.

Liberal ideology state that transparency is absolutely essential for good governance. Yet COVID-19 has proven that this is wrong: the relatively untransparent Chinese government did better at fighting COVID-19 than the supposedly transparent western governments. One can point at the fuckup that were the initial first few weeks, true. Yet even this initial fuckup pale in comparison to the many months of outright denial by western countries that COVID-19 could be a problem. All the transparency in India has also failed to contain the spread of the Delta variant.

The facts have shown that liberal ideology is dogmatic and lack empirical evidence.

I am not against liberal ideology, nor against things like transparency. But I think the hard facts have shown that there is place in the world for an alternative governance model. China does not force their model on other countries; why should we force China to adopt ours? Why can't they be allowed to figure out their own path as long as they don't force us to adopt their ways? To each their own.

[goblin89]

> The hard facts state that historically, in China, the biggest problems occurred when central government was weak and when the country was divided. The hard facts also state that the past 30 years are the best in 3000 years.

I heard the same from people living in other countries, sometimes ironically and sometimes (sadly) not. Things are going well; the same president is still around; those two circumstances must be connected—how can those dissidents even dare to think that maybe their well-being improved despite their government rather than thanks to it?

> Yet COVID-19 has proven that this is wrong: the relatively untransparent Chinese government did better at fighting COVID-19 than the supposedly transparent western governments.

Isn’t it paradoxical to state that the lack of transparency is what helped Chinese government contain COVID? Accepting that it lies (including through omission) undermines any official statistics coming from it, since it can be assumed to not report inconvenient facts and data like it did in the past.

(Perhaps you can see why I believe that transparency is a fundamental requirement necessary to take anything else the government does or says seriously.)

In addition, saying that “the lack of transparency is what helped China contain COVID” seems to imply that people in China can only be manipulated into doing the right thing by not being given the true facts. I hold a higher opinion of them.

> China does not force their model on other countries; why should we force China to adopt ours?

And thus we’ve circled back back to the possibility of China’s invasion of Taiwan, a country that appears to not want China’s model to be forced onto itself.

Addendum: I don’t think any country should be forced into changing its model of government, unless it somehow becomes an existential threat to objectively transparent, democratic governments elsewhere; but I do hope such a country evolves in that direction as its citizens become tired of being lied to.