• 5 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • I arrived in China 2001.

    I experienced the harshest and largest lockdown in all of history: Wuhan, January 23rd, 2020. A real lockdown, not the cosplay bullshit you experienced outside of China. (Yes, this is me saying you’ve never fucking set foot in the country.)

    The rest you’re just flat-out lying about. Sorry, Sparky. Did pet killings happen? Yes. They were not the mass shit that the press you’re so obviously reciting acts like they were. Did some doors get welded? Yes. But nowhere near you and, again, nowhere near in the masses the press you’re basing your lies on made it seem like. The local salaries are garbage iff you’re a fuckwit sitting in the west applying western prices to Chinese salaries. (Which, naturally, you are, good little fuckwit liar that you are.) And you’ve changed your tune from 14 hours to 12 hours really fucking quickly there, Sparky, not to mention using the proper slang only after I gave it to you.

    So yeah, you’re just a west-dwelling fuckwit lying about being here. Go toddle off in your China Watcher corners and play with the rest of the intellectual children you belong with. There’s a good boy.
















  • OK, let me unpack a few things here.

    1. It is emphatically not racist to criticize a government’s actions.
    2. It is emphatically racist, however, to assume every (perceived) citizen of a government’s nation is uncritically accepting of their government.

    And here’s where it gets messy.

    The China Watchers™ crowd always says they “hate the government, not the citizens”. (The fact that this echoes extremist Christian bigotry with “hate the sin, not the sinner” whenever they go on rampages against every social group they disapprove of is a feature, not a bug. They know their audience well.)

    Yet…

    Ask anybody with a (perceived) Chinese name how often they have been called upon by China Watchers™ to personally account for the Chinese government’s actions. You will likely get a shock by how often these people who “hate the government, not the citizens” take perceived citizens to task for their government’s actions (while at the same time, in a stunning display of utter hypocrisy, refuse to take responsibility for their own governments’ actions despite (technically) having a say in who that government is (which Chinese citizens don’t have).

    Chinese citizens. People of other nationalities resident in China. People with (perceived) Chinese names or looks. These all get hounded by the “hate the government, not the citizens” crowd with a zeal that puts the “not the citizens” part of things in the firm category of “blatant lie”.

    And that is just flat-out racism.

    So while yes, technically, people criticizing the Chinese government aren’t being racist (and holy fucking SHIT are there good reasons to criticize them!), the reality is that most of the people doing so are hiding behind that technicality and are being racist as all fuck, so often, in fact, that it’s my default assumption unless I see evidence to the contrary.

    You don’t like that default? Well, here’s a bit of sage advice I got from an activist friend of mine in the late '80s: “Rein in your crazies or you’ll be mistaken for them.”



  • … how could the Chinese government enforce this vast national amnesia of a major, recent event in their country’s history, one in which the government sent troops to slaughter perhaps 2,600 peaceful protesters?

    In the very first paragraph Vox gets it wrong.

    Not a surprise.

    Here’s a little hint: look up Columbia University’s Columbia Journalism Review and see if you can tell why I’m laughing at Vox right now.