I’ve been seeing a huge amount of anti-Chinese sentiment online, from obvious places like reddit, to even misinformed friends on social media falling victim to viral posts filled with misinformation.
What are we to make of this? Is this the slow march to war, by portraying them as pure evil, à la the fake story of Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies to help get the public on board with our military response? It seems disadvantageous for the US and their allies to fight China, as we are incredibly reliant upon them economically and don’t stand to gain much from the conflict.
Are these the irrational decisions of a dying empire? Or is there something else at play?
Distraction from the country falling apart
Yeah this is my take as well. It’s similar to Russiagate bullshit. Sure there might be something there but like, we have a whole lot of domestic house cleaning to do before we even begin to address other countries’ misdeeds. Even then our only sources are mostly government propaganda from either side and we have no reason to believe one over the other.
All I know is that it fucking sucks as a Chinese diaspora to see rampant sinophobia in nearly all of my media, tolerated, lauded, and even expected.
Had to quit reddit completely because of how disgusting the racism was.
All of their talking points are old and blatantly false, I would know as a chinese person who regularly goes back to China, and stays in contact with my family in China. But it’s exhausting to try and refute their talking points, especially when they don’t even see you as a human being, only a brainwashed CCP shill etc etc.
I’m just tired and disgusted by it all.
It’s incredibly exhausting, and that’s when I only have to see it on the English internet. I have to remove myself from it every time because the dehumanization just gets to be too much. And they won’t listen to you. Anything that some white “China expert” says is law, no matter how racist and easily disproved. We don’t get the same purchase as real human beings. Issues that are approached with nuance and depth in their own countries are just painted with one brush for us.
Such is life though, I was born Indonesian-Chinese under Suharto, so at least it’s better than that.
If you don’t mind telling, which country do you live in now? are you confronted in irl to the same kind of racism than on reddit?
Also, what are the most common/frequent sinophobic comments that you are talking about?
Don’t really want to dox myself, but let’s just say a five eyes country.
The racism irl is less blatant, but that’s mostly because I haven’t left the house in months (lockdown). Regardless, there’s plenty of videos of anyone asian looking getting harassed and attacked online these few months. It honestly makes me worried about leaving the house. People avoid us for looking asian, especially since we wear masks, and give us dodgy looks. My mother got some rocks thrown at her from afar. Lovely people aren’t they.
And the sinophobia? I don’t even know where to start. Remember when covid just started going in China? And there were pics of the doctors and nurses faces with marks and bruises from wearing their masks for so long. It was immediately drowned in comments like - “it’s chinese propaganda”, “it’s all fake”, “lol why the fuck do they have bruises from just masks” etc etc. Plenty of posts about how China owns reddit, and that their ‘brave’ posts about “China Badddd” will be removed so upvote and give rewards now! Other dumb shit I see a lot is “lol suicide nets”, “lol communism no food” (particularly insulting when my parents went through that shit, and a lot of the famine was because of natural disasters but ok). Also “China lied, people died”, wtf man. How can you blame china for the incompetence of your own government?
“chinazi” “Zhina/Shina” are very aggravating as well. I really hated how insults used by the Japanese during the invasion were being leveraged against China, when it was Japan who invaded China and ruthlessly raped and murdered the Chinese. How is any of this ok? Where’s the moral outrage?
There’s this constant vibe of dehumanising when westerners talk about Chinese people. If there are bad news (usually fake and western propaganda) about China, they always talk about how shit the Chinese people have it, and how oppressive their government is, how it is a living hell over there etc etc. But if anyone defends them, they’re a shill or wumao. If they’re Chinese, even worse, they’re brainwashed. So, the Chinese people both need to be “saved” and also don’t know how to think. Ok then.
Other bullshit I see are constant comparisons to robots. Chinese people are not fucking robots, they work hard ok? It’s amazing what you can do when you have steep competition.
There’s a lot of other bs on the internet, it’s honestly very draining for me to recall and write them down. I think a lot of people forget that Chinese people are real, and some of them are even abroad.
I’m not saying the CPC is perfect, but I’m saying that it has done so well for the common people that I’m jealous. You don’t understand how poor and war torn China was less than 100 years ago. The poverty, the famine, the trauma. It’s all very real to my parents, and they tell it to me. Nowadays, we have high speed rail for super cheap, excellent food everywhere for cheap, and access to healthcare that is also very cheap. We literally travel back to China for the healthcare, and tour all over China on the trains. The food is great, but GuangZhou is where it’s at!
Feel free to ask me more, assuming they’re in good faith.
How easy is it for me to come visit as a white dude from a five eyes country? I’ve always wanted to take a train vacation, but it’s so goddamn cumbersome and expensive here. I just wanna spend a week or two zipping around on trains and eating some good food—introducing my kids to a cool new culture would be icing on the cake.
Hey, I’m relatively neutral on all this China stuff, if not a bit wary, but I have a few questions since a lot of news on China are simply biased from the get-go :
- What do you think of China’s buying sprees all accross the globe, and seizure of assets when these countries find themselves unable to pay ? (ex : Sri Lankan port). I know the US does way fucking worse, but China doesn’t appear to be exactly benevolent. I know they financed projects in Ethiopia for their oil and signed contracts with them, but the contracts always seem to disfavour the countries that sign them.
- What do you think about the South China sea tensions ?
- What do you think about surveillance, social credit, and other “totalitarian” measures implemented or to be implemented ? A lot of it is sentionalized bullshit by western media, but there is some truth to it from what I know.
- Speaking of sentionalized stuff, what do you think about China’s involvement in Tibet and Xinjiang ?
- What’s your take on racism in China, like for white monkey jobs, the way blacks are seen there, or the apparent Xenophobia ?
- Do you think China will, as some tankies say, allow for a greater control of the means of productions by the working class and democratize ?
- Lastly, even if it’s less serious, how do Chinese people view Europe ? And France in my case ? I know it’s a big country, but what is the general vibe people have about these ?
Anyway, hope you can answer these for me comrade.
The US is trying to cold war 2.0 with China. They want to encircle, isolate, and balkanize them (hence the Uigher shit to try and push separatism in a vital trade region, hence HK shit, etc). Some amount of the capitalists have come to understand the liberalization of China has failed, their attempts to steal its wealth has failed and it is gaining the upper hand and has a communist party with many disciplined communists in it in power and they are in panic mode now.
It’s also a nice distraction for them, they can, instead of taking the blame themselves for outsourcing to increase profits blame the Chinese for “not playing by the rules” and “stealing” intellectual property (something the US government has done in the past). It’s building up nationalism to counter the rising inequality and scape-goat the issues onto China. While the people are distracted by the media with tales of intrigue and yellow peril, of a “genocide” in Xinjiang they will pay less attention to all that is going on at home from rising homelessness to the sinking of even mild social democrat reforms (ala Bernie), to BLM. BLM is especially of interest although not the underlying cause of this push, by making China out to be more brutal and downplaying US brutality they can still claim “at least we’re not as bad as China”.
They realize the position they are in and they are desperate. Trump is specifically pushing it because he’s a racist nationalist who has to blame outsiders for being unfair but Democrats (including the much vaunted AOC) are quite on-board with the anti-China stuff and you’ll see, they’ll surprise you by working hand in hand with Republicans just like in the cold war to crush the left and build up a villain narrative against China.
People like to talk about the great firewall of China. The day a fourth of China can speak English and is unleashed on the US internet is the day the US would build our own great firewall to keep them and their opinions out. Same thing with surveillance, they like talking about Chinese surveillance but the US is second to none and getting more bold. I predict an attempt to make encryption economically untenable for all large companies to maintain (by withdrawing safe harbor) will pass within the next 5-10 years. I expect further measures of censorship against “disinformation” to be pushed by the US government and accepted and implemented by private companies. Anyone who posts counter-narratives against the US propaganda may very well be silenced in multiple ways.
something I’ve found worthwhile to point out, too, is that all the US companies steal ungodly amounts of data from us. The Chinese internet still has facebook/twitter analogues, China just built their own platforms instead of selling out their people to US private companies. Yes, this results in Chinese people being sheltered from US opinions, but honestly I can’t entirely see that as a bad thing, considering how horrific the US internet is already.
The US has realized that they severely fucked up by allowing China to gain such a large dominance in manufacturing and the world economy in general. They are now scrambling to oppose China in any way possible. They’re likely never gonna try to go into a direct war with China, but they are almost certainly trying to build a multi-country coalition to oppose China’s growing global influence. Whatever move they make next, they are putting the propaganda machine into high gear so that their citizens and citizens of other countries are willing to go along with whatever comes next.
Maybe, but they have to get other “first world” countries on board with attempting to economically oppose China, which would be an extremely painful endeavour for any country. We’ve already seen the EU decide to continue to get closer to China economically, despite America urging them not to. Even now, Australia is showing some apprehension to the idea of joining America’s “anti-china league.” First and foremost, these countries care about their material interests, so as long as China appears non-threatening enough to them, they have a lot more incentive to stick close to them economically than to cave to US interests.
Do you believe that the growing economic power of China will cause a contradiction to emerge in the national bourgeoisie of the first world? It does seem evident that this is happening
Hi, I’m new here, and have seen a few puzzling posts, so I’m curious about the community’s take on China’s treatment of the Uighur people. I believe I understand the distrust in national discourse that might push us toward another (cold)war, but what makes you think “the Uighur camps are seriously overblown”? It certainly seems pretty serious, and it’s not just the US government that believes so: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/04/887239225/china-suppression-of-uighur-minorities-meets-u-n-definition-of-genocide-report-s
You obviously did not look at any of the numerous posts here debunking the accusations made against China on the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, especially those from the one main source on all of this. Otherwise, you would’ve known that Adrian Zenz, a German Christian fundamentalist, supposed China expert who can’t even speak Mandarin is a bad source at best.
For good measure though, here is a really concise Youtube video going over all of the claims made, if textposts are too much to read.
Its to deflect from the real camps in the US. Its always projection from their own misbehavior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URhrRd4ag38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcNXI5DSFbA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glpE_m8OE2A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMKrFfSuNcc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NI6edfAdZI
