- Why does China, a socialist country, have mega corporations like Tencent and Bytedance? Are they collectively owned by syndicates or unions? If this is a transitionary phase to socialism, can we trust China to actually enforce Socialism after this stage ends?
- Child Labor in factories: Myth or Fact? I have a Chinese friend who said he personally never worked as a child in China, but obviously if this was true not every single kid would have worked in a factory.
- Surveillance and Social Credit: are these myths, or are they true? Why would China go so far to implement these systems, surely it’d be far too costly and burdensome for whatever they’d gain from that.
- Uighur Muslim genocide: Is this true?
Thank you to anyone who answers, and if you do please cite sources so I can look further into China. I really appreciate it.
edit: I was going to ask about Tiananmen Square, but as it turns out that literally just didn’t happen. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
https://leohezhao.medium.com/notes-for-30th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-incident-f098ef6efbc2
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/
- Because of their market pivot, which was to avoid having the whole project get destabilized and destroyed. Their stated intention is to become a socialist country. I don’t think it’s worth thinking about it in terms of trust unless you’re a Chinese citizen. Worst case they don’t pivot and the world is just completely fucked.
- There’s child labor of course, but that’s just a feature of capitalism.
- None of my fiance’s family has ever interacted with any kind of social credit system, it’s apparently mainly for business entities.
- Certainly nothing like what’s been reported breathlessly in Western media.
Yeah the “Social credit system” doesn’t exist. There’s some kind of business credit system that may be the source of the social credit system bs, but no system of tracking individual behavior and using it to punish and control people exists.
Yeah sources like FP do align with that: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/
I disagree with FP plenty, but the headline at least fits.
This ain’t it.
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The surviellance thing is overblown. Facial recognition doesn’t work well. It’s mostly used to supplement other kinds of investigation. As far as anyone knows China isn’t under significantly more surveillance than the US. Notably, the UK is the most intrusively and constantly surveilled population in the world, despite China’s reputation. Keep in mind that your position is being tracked in real time with at least 1m accuracy by your cellphone provider, every app that has location permissions, anyone who buys your location data from your cellphone provider and everyone scraping it, and presumably any US government agency that asks politely. And that applies to most people in most places. And then the NSA forks all internet traffic going through the US trunks and reads whatever they can of it. China is probably at a comparative level of surveillance, along with most of the rest of the world where the local government can afford it.
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The Uighurs didn’t anything. Some Islamic terrorists from the Uighur ethnic group engaged in attacks in Xinjiang. Seriously the fuck is this racist shit?
I see. I was thinking of camera’s snatching someone’s face from a crowd. I was not aware they were using it for access control purposes on a wide scale. One more nightmare to worry about.
Since we’re asking China questions I’ll throw one in too: the rationale for Dengism and the harnessing of capitalist production is for the development of productive forces. China is currently the most productive economy on earth. At what point is the pursuit of productive forces considered a success and a step away from the capitalist production model pursued? I imagine this is a point of live debate between Chinese scholars/economists/politicians, can anyone give me some good translated readings on the topic?
Re 4.) - Here’s the UN’s report on Xinjiang. It’s the closest thing to an unbiased report you’re going to get.
Pretty much everything else that’s not from the Chinese government is various degrees of creative bullshit. The Chinese government’s obviously got a bias and an agenda. If you want any kind of idea what’s “really” going on (was going on, apparently they wrapped up their counter-terrorism operation a year or two back) this is probably the best resource available.
Tried to keep the answers consise, I’m sure others will expand on your questions as well.
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China is a socialist nation because it’s run by the CPC (which itself answers directly to the people of China), but it still uses the capitalist mode of production (i.e. the means of production are held by capitalists in order to generate profit). This is largely due to Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms of the 80’s. As a result, there are billionaires and corporations, but also unions, co-ops, and of course outright government-owned operations (think Sinopec or the Bank of China). Red Sails has a great article called China Has Billionaires for further reading.
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I’m sure child labor exists in China - they’ve gone from an isolated rural economy to a global superpower in 40 years, that’s not enough time to be perfect liberators on every issue. But as with most aspects of Chinese life, the government is actually working on improving people’s material conditions, so things like child labor will continue to be less and less common. Of course, if you live in the US, child labor is extremely prevalent especially in poor communities and illegal immigrants. And of course it’s getting worse with red states racing to rip up child labor protections in the name of saving businesses when “no one wants to work”. See Rueters about the Alabama Hyundai factory or Wapo about the kid killed in a Mississippi poultry plant.
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As with all western reporting on China, the surveillance aspect is hugely overblown. A lot of the claims end up being silly shit like how westerners will swear up and down that Winnie the Pooh is banned in China when you can buy his merch at Shanghai Disney. And social credit falls in the same boat as its pretty similar to credit score systems in the west - the main difference being that China won’t force you into homelessness and poverty because your credit is bad lol. I don’t have a good article to break it down, I think this subject would be best understand by people actually living in China.
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Big no on this one, and that’s if you mean “genocide” as in “actually liquidating an ethnic group” or the recent pivot to “cultural genocide” via teaching Uighurs Mandarin. Qiao Collective has a great educational piece on this to deep dive, but the short of it is that the claims of genocide of any variety come from explicitly anti-communist westerners who fail to provide any actual evidence.
