Permanently Deleted
To pick one, social credit is a little bit questionable in a lot of its implementations. The Great Firewall is another very, very bad practice.
the reality of the “social credit” system was massively overstated in western media outlets.
You’re right, but there’s still a lot of bad present in the implementation that many regional governments use. My criticisms are all of the present system. Two things I take particular issue with:
- social credit rewards for reporting those practicing Muslim rituals like prayer facing mecca and practicing Ramadan
- better access to loans and jobs for those with higher social credit
My thinking on the firewall has shifted a lot over time. Imagine what a massive problem it could be if every Chinese person was on Facebook, for example - blocking that as an protectionist move and allowing Weibo to grow as the Chinese-owned and -operated alternative was absolutely the right move. And when you consider the censorship that it enables, consider that western corporations do a lot of censorship too - but the difference between western and Chinese censorship is that the Chinese censors are democratically accountable to a larger degree than the western ones, who just happen to own the website in question.
It would be one thing if it was solely protectionist. It’s entirely different; their blocking of websites like archive.org, duckduckgo, and the New York Times shows they’re after far more than protectionism. There’s also no protectionist argument for the banning of all information pertaining to Tianamenn Square and similar events. For all of America’s faults, at least we can read about COINTELPRO and the various coups we’ve orchestrated (although the US government would probably do something you change that if they could).
banning of all information pertaining to Tianamenn Square
There is no ban on information pertaining to the June 4th incident, the ban is on spreading anticommunist propaganda about it. Like any other internet censorship operation however, China relies on an algorithm to nuke suspected propaganda posts, which means that some non-propaganda posts get caught in the net.
Ok I just tried looking up stuff about Tiananmen Square on baidu.com to see what comes up
Found stuff like this and this, which seem to be a timeline of events leading to and directly after the riots. What stuck out to me is that they don’t really offer an in-depth explanation of what happened on June 4th beyond just a couple sentences.
In the early hours of 3 June, some PLA martial law troops were ordered to move in to secure some key targets in the city of Beijing.
At 4.30am on 4 June, the martial law forces began to clear Tiananmen Square. At around 5am, students began to evacuate the square and the martial law forces moved into Tiananmen Square at the same time. By 5.30am, the whole clearing process was over.
3 June The unrest created by a small number of people in Beijing over the past month develops into a counter-revolutionary riot. In the early hours of the morning of the 4th, the martial law troops stationed around the city were ordered to quell the riot by clearing the area and moving into Tiananmen Square.
I tried mixing up the keywords more like “June 4th Incident” “1989 Riots” etc. and found basically the same kind of stuff. Granted, it’s also fucky as shit that no matter what I looked up I couldn’t find any kind of pictures of the events, or at least a more in-depth description, though that might just be because I don’t speak a lick of Chinese and I have no idea what I’m supposed to look up lol. Still pretty damn freaky
I was also very negative on the Great Firewall for a long time but I’ve come around to the belief that it’s necessary, even if its benefits are completely unintentional.
Even libs understand that fake news is a huge threat to democracy and social cohesion, if the media can’t be trusted to report fairly on Bernie Sanders how can they be trusted to report fairly on Xi Jinping? How much worse would propaganda in the MSM get if the US thought there was a chance it was going to cause domestic unrest in China? If we challenge and critically approach the framework of free press as a conduit for unbiased information that selects for accuracy, then the Great Firewall might be the least bad alternative.
Furthermore, Western tech companies have horrible privacy practices and literally collude with US intelligence services, even US allies like the EU are sick of their shit and are feuding with the US over data taxes. Nurturing Chinese tech companies and keeping the data of Chinese citizens out of the hands of US companies was a very, very prescient move (if intentional).
I’m skeptical of the idea “the free market is bad, except when it comes to the press”. I still have a lot of gripes with the Great Firewall as a concept and its implementation but I also don’t know how to resolve those problems without emboldening the US’s efforts at hybrid warfare.
The Chinese fishing fleet is massively subsidized and operates in a lot of African EEZs without regard to international laws, causing the collapse of the local fishing industry and ecosystems.
Failling to protect their culture, I’m sure Gorbatchev would approve the amount of pizza huts they have. Most locally-produced movies are trying to copycat hollywood blockbusters and the music industry ain’t doing better.
China literally claims social credit, calling it “not real” is speaking in direct contradiction of the official information channels of both the Chinese state and all of the experiences and reporting of people who have ever lived and been there.
tl;dr, I don’t even know if you’re trying
