Comment by CWuestefeld
2 days ago
This is manifestly false.
My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.
She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.
And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.
My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.
These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.
i don't doubt your experience, but just know it might be skewed and not representative of everyone's opinions
the sense i get from my chinese friends are that the CCP is an annoying parent but they understand the challenges both domestic and international and largely agree with the compromises
How do they feel about and respond when asked about the Taiwan question?
Do they either clam up or act like it's a mortal insult to suggest that an independent democratic nation should not live in fear of impending violent conquest?
Because that's the kind of reaction that makes the reports of "happy life, all's good" a little harder to digest.
Not saying that's a unanimous opinion / response, of course. But it certainly seems to be the default.
About 50% of Chinese people I meet very much agree with the government that it's part of China and always has been. The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government. But the people I've talked to about this are people with the means to travel, and many of them have been to Taiwan. So it may not be representative of the typical person on the street. I've been to China several times and I don't want to ask it there, but that's less out of fear of the government but more than I don't want to bother locals with politics and present myself as an enlightened foreigner, since nobody likes that shit. Just like nobody would like a Chinese guy going to Alabama and telling the people they need to embrace socialism if they ever want to escape poverty.
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The majority of US support for Taiwan and it's current situation is owed entirely to supporting a military junta from the mainland that massacred the local Taiwainese who objected to it and suppressed civil society.
Are you saying you would've been neutral on an invasion of Taiwan before 1985 or so, since it wasn't a democracy?
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Nice sample size of 1
Cultural Revolution is all about totally politicalised society, extremely polarised, regular people fight against each other based on ideologies. Isn't that the current west?
> because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp
translate for you - her family was heavily involved in politics, it is just unlucky that her family was not on the winning side, so she hates whatever happened.
posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.
> Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy.
Is it generally normal to hold countries accountable for every person that dies due to their COVID policies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...
No. But there are actual circumstances here that differ between China's actions and the rest of the planet. Specifically...
While the rest of the world was doing stuff like ensuring that as many of its citizens as possible were vaccinated, and letting the population gradually work up to herd immunity so that controls could be gradually loosened, China kept the population at a hard lockdown right to late 2022, and then opened up completely. It was as if they just opened the floodgates.
There were actually people arguing that China was doing this intentionally, with the plan being to thin out the top-heavy aging demographic in the country. I'm not necessarily advocating for this theory, but illustrating that the very fact that there's a colorable argument for it demonstrates how irresponsible Chinese leadership were.
The result was that in my father-in-law's retirement home, literally EVERY caretaker came down with the virus together, which obviously led to most of the residents getting sick. And given the way covid worked, that meant a whole lot of deaths.
Adding insult to injury, his death certificate attributes the cause of death to heart disease. As a matter of policy, all deaths were attributed to any other condition the patient might have had, however trivial, unless covid could be proven. And proving it would involve in declining to properly dispose of the body, paying for the autopsy and so forth. But there's no doubt (having talked to him every day on Skype) that covid is what killed him.
China's policy reduced the death rate by a factor of about 75% relative to the US.
The zero-Covid policy kept Covid out of the country until an effective vaccine was developed and deployed to about 90% of the population. The main problem was that there's a widespread belief in East Asia (including in Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) that vaccination is dangerous for old people, so the vaccination rate was lowest among the most vulnerable group. A lot of old people simply refused to get vaccinated, despite large vaccination drives and public messaging asking them to do so.
Then, as you said, the zero-Covid policy was eliminated overnight, and practically everyone in the country got Covid within 1-2 months. However, because most people were vaccinated, the death rate was far lower than in the West.
All in all, the zero-Covid policy saved several million lives in China. This is based on retrospective studies by outside researchers, not on official statistics.
Depends if the Government welds your apartment gate shut and lets you burn to death.
Did that happen to a lot of people? Do you have a source?
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The fact that the USA and others are also trending authoritarian isn't really relevant. The point I was trying to make is that people have legit fears of the PRC government, enough so that legitimate business like settling a deceased parent's affairs isn't sufficient to convince people to enter the country.
You haven't addressed at all the parts about blacklisting whole families for political reasons, or horrible return-to-normal policies for covid-19 three years ago, or the general pendulum-swing-back-to-evil trend.
I don't doubt you, but what if someone's else's wife felt differently. Would that counteract your wife? Or is your wife special in an objective sense and her intuitions about hypotheticals are more valid than anyone else's?
Your wife feels a certain way and wanted to avoid a certain hypothetical. But since it didn't happen, we have no way of knowing how relevant these feelings are.
How can we address blacklisting and covid response if you are insisting that any comparison isn't relevant and that we should evaluate it with no baseline?
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Sheesh, an actual Whataboutism. The fact that "the US does it too!" won't help Grandparent poster/his wife if they get detained in China. GP says "there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now", most likely they are dual citizens, or were born in China, and from China's point of view, one can't lose the Chinese citizenship, and they're detaining their own citizens.
Actually, China does not support dual citizenship. All naturalized Chinese (now U.S.) citizens I know need a visa to enter China.
I would also like to know if these are dual citizens or not. I think it would be newsworthy if hundreds of US passport holders who do not have chinese passports also were being held in China and not charged with any crime and unable to access consular services.
Sensationalizing claims then qualifying them later is inherently dishonest.
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