You changing your pro-China stance yet?

@Lightman Actually I was never against China, I was against communism. In China that would be CCP, and in the West it hides under many names.

What I was remarking upon in our previous exchanges is lack of historic thinking in what china is and how did it became like that. Also Hong Kong protests were staged by people outside China and Hong Kong, probably similar to various protests we saw around the globe. There are other things I don't agree on when people talk about China, especially when its from same outlets that lie about everything else.

China bad is not accurate. CCP bad is more accurate. Western elites as they are usually refereed to are working with CCP for their own benefits and western consumers have made China economy flourish by having factories in China and buying cheap produces from China. Most people never cared about China until China's economy and political power grew big enough to pose a threat. So China bad narrative is lazy way out of the responsibility of the people outside of China. Most western countries have Marxists in their education system and in public office, and almost no one really objected until it was impossible to ignore. There is some responsibility that comes with that.

And lets not forget that many bad ideas practiced by CCP grew out of western universities, not Chinese ones. Karl Marx was not Chineman, and neither were technocrats in the Colombian university in America. And who is pushing for "climate change", yes CCP adopted it, but they didn't invented it or promoted it.

To put it in another way. I'm against tyranny, and especially the most oppressive one, communism. And that is not native or exclusive to China. Something that usually gets left out of the "China bad" narrative.

@Lightman I'm not so sure. I have spoken to people in China on many occasion and not everyone is unhappy, some are , some are not, as it is I imagine in many places, and dissidents do exists in China, some are quite and some are not. Some have indeed left China to work in other countries, either to escape or to be free to criticize CCP. But some don't mind living in the system as it is now, because they either have no reference, or it fits their personality, or they actually benefit from it more than they would if they lived elsewhere.

Its far from everyone thinking the same or sharing same experience. Even in the CCP itself there are many fractions who don't agree on many things and are either fighting for reform or more power. Off course also China has a long history of stability of the nation over personal liberty and its been around much longer than CCP existed. In some respects this has brought their nation in recent times prosperity. India is democracy, and has as many people, but its not as prosperous and it has been under someone else's occupation for much of its existence. And when it was not occupied it has fought among each other's kingdoms.

I think its important to think historically to understand the culture in the longer time-frame and how it helped to shape the nation and its people. Something many forget. There are those in Hong Kong who feel worse of than in mainland China. They actually go to work in mainland and live there. Hong Kong is no bed of roses , it has high rent, pretty tight social norms and class of super rich vs everyone else. For some that is more pressure than living in the mainland China and working.

I think the history of nations its people are far more nuanced than we would like to frame it in our popular narratives and that is something I see time and time again being lost in stereotypical headline grabbing narratives fit for media consumption.

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One Chinese wrote: "So right now, the Chinese government is putting massive amounts of money into science and technology, and I’m benefiting from it. It’s not so much that they are bribing me, but any government that is willing to put tons of money in science and technology has thought through the future, and so I’ll help them however I can, because I’ve bought into their vision of the future.

Also, my background is that I come from a KMT family, and my father and uncle were on the losing side of the Chinese Civil War. Also I spent a lot of my young in the “Chinese democracy” movement. The way that I’d explain my view of the world, it’s a lot like a Confederate family in 1870. You won, We lost. Now let’s put the past behind us and figure out what we can do to build a future.

It turns out that I don’t have a problem with being anti-CCP if being anti-CCP means being pro-China, but it turns out that I don’t see any viable “pro-China, anti-CCP” ideologies out there.

One thing that I find about the pro-Beijing network is that if you tell them that you think they they are being idiots, they’ll actually listen to you and take what you think seriously. I find that oddly enough this isn’t true with a lot of “democracy fighters” so one reason I’ve ended up being pro-CCP, is that the CCP is a lot more tolerant of different ideas and dissent than you might think."

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Obviously of 1.4 billion people living in china, not everyone's experience of living in China will be the same and their interests won't be the same either. Some are nationalistic, some just try to survive, some are ideological, some are full on board and behind CCP, either because they beealive in communism, much like many westerners do in universities, or maybe they actually benefit from it in some way. Some are going to have much worse experiences or be prosecuted. But we are talking about over one billion people and I hate to paint them all with the same brush. My country has only 4 mil people and that is like an apartment building in China. And not everyone is the same.

Either way, I think both you and I are against tyranny, so we probably agree on that. But I don't think we have the same opinion of China as a whole. And that's fine. We probably also don't have the same opinion on Australia or Croatia or USA. One of the benefits of not living under communism is that we can publicly express it and criticize it and disagree.

Happy new year.