[nirui]

That's what I always say. Contrary to popular belief, the current ruling party of China poses a much bigger threat to China than any external factor such as the US, Taiwan or India would ever achieve.

There is an meme online titled "When China made a decision", followed by a picture of the Prime Minister of Singapore laughing (see link 0 for sample), hinting the fact that due to many mistakes made under Xi's administration, companies/economic entities (including Chinese founded ones) are moving away from China to Singapore, often citing social control and economic reasons.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/real_China_irl/comments/162oc8g/%E6...

However, I don't really think that's all Xi's fault. There are so many things you just simply don't know if you're a child of nepotism. The party highleaders created their own social class, and as result, they and their offspring became disconnected from the reality more and more generation by generation. Most of them has so little experience of real people and so many experience of nepotism, it is already a miracle if they can still maintain a healthy mental condition, let alone the capabilities needed to do things right.

The same kind of disconnection can also explain why the highleaders believed that the Wolf Warrior Tactic was a smart move: they simply don't understand how politics work, so the most primitive solution became the most obvious to them.

[ethbr1]

I thought of this as why authoritarian regimes are so so bad at propaganda -- they have no experience in interacting with a normal, sometimes adversarial media landscape.

At home, they say the sky is red, everyone says "Yes" or gets a visit from the secret police.

So they do the same thing elsewhere, and there's criticism, memes, humor, apologism, etc... all the features of a more open information space with diverse opinions.

But they have little basis for how to interact with that, because they didn't need any of the nuanced soft power skills at home.

And so you get Russia endlessly repeating 'Everything is proceeding as planned in the special military operation' and China saying the Philippines "deliberately stirred up trouble" by navigating and claiming Philippine UNCLOS-EEZ waters in the Spratlys.

[0dayz]

Propaganda works really well in distraught countries with no hopes or dreams and that has historical qualms with certain nations.

Such as in Africa where Chinese and Russian propaganda along side homegrown Propaganda is actually pretty convincing for the citizens there.

[throw0101a]

> At home, they say the sky is red, everyone says "Yes" or gets a visit from the secret police.

That is the old(er) (outdated?) view of propaganda. The/A new view is to generally not necessarily care about about any particular message:

> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...

(Of course you can do both.)