Post #2643908
2026-05-01 02:47 UTC
Replies (5)
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@chu@climatejustice.social 2026-05-01 02:56
@mayintoronto@beige.party @cxiao@infosec.exchange @liztai@hachyderm.io The other thing I was led to believe was that mao bad, Chiang Kai Shek good. He was on team US. My family is from HK so we definitely had our biases. Two years ago when I visited Taiwan for the first time, I realized that not even people in TW believe he was the good guy in the story. He brutally murdered a lot of people in TW and installed himself basically as an emperor who killed so much he was super paranoid of getting assassinated at the end of his life. I am trying to relearn the stories I was told as a kid but from a different pov now. The only one I haven't taken up is the Japanese version of Nanking since I think they just pretend it never happened.
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@cxiao@infosec.exchange 2026-05-01 03:08
@mayintoronto@beige.party @chu@climatejustice.social So there are a few issues I commonly see when talking about Chinese social issues: The lack of visibility into those issues in the first place. The suppression of independent journalism means that there are many systemic issues that you will just never hear about, and the activism that does exist is often in Chinese (and many people in the west, despite speaking for and about China, still just can't read Chinese). The online censorship environment is very heavy and extends into mundane topics as well, that you wouldn't even think are topics for censorship. As an example, take a look at some of the censored/deleted topics in China Digital Times' monthly archive: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2026/04/cdts-404-deleted-content-archive-summary-for-march-2026/. The lack of basic knowledge about PRC society. For example, I see a lot of people assume that healthcare in the PRC is free: It's not, and being able to afford even basic medical care is a huge issue for seniors and those in rural areas. Similarly, I see a lot of people assume that China has strong labour protections, while completely being ignorant about the systematic and large scale labour inequality perpetuated by the hukou system. Finally, the discussion of Chinese issues only in terms of the issues that exist in our own western societies. This is using China as a mirror, rather than as a real place. Climate change and electrification is an issue for us Canadians, so people look wistfully at Chinese solar panels. The devastating wars that America is waging are a horrible issue that we feel powerless about, so people look wistfully at China who is speaking against the US. But this is still fundamentally centred around ourselves. This is not only bad in that it ignores the Uyghur slave labour that's being used to build those solar panels, and the Chinese airplanes that are being used to bomb the resistance in Myanmar. It also never engages with PRC society, and the real people there living at the bottom, on their own terms from the perspective of the problems they face. It stops any attempt at understanding Chinese society and its actual tensions and contradictions. A thought experiment: What would it look like if we started from the Chinese perspective on a problem, and then used America as the mirror and comparison instead? For example, the PRC's mining operations and environmental damage in Zambia - how does mineral exploitation that western countries have done in Zambia compare? Or for example, the white paper revolution in 2022 - what can Americans learn from the protests that happened then?
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@cxiao@infosec.exchange 2026-05-01 03:22
@mayintoronto@beige.party @chu@climatejustice.social One thing is that Chinese rural poverty can be really unimaginably devastating and extreme, and similar (or much worse than) to the extreme poverty we know in Canada. This recent translation of an interview with a Chinese rural rights activist has the headline "misconceptions that chinese urban dwellers have about rural china". However, I think this interview can apply just as much to "misconceptions that westerners have about rural china": https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2026/04/translation-why-do-urban-chinese-have-so-many-misconceptions-about-the-countryside-part-one/ It's a good example as well, of having a bottom up Chinese perspective on the social issues that they actually have, rather than framing Chinese rural poverty through our own lens.
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@liztai@hachyderm.io 2026-05-01 03:23
@mayintoronto@beige.party yes two things can be true. A country is not purely good or bad. Most countries are self serving. But any country that uses AI to bomb children does not get a morality pass. Zero. @chu@climatejustice.social @cxiao@infosec.exchange
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@liztai@hachyderm.io 2026-05-01 03:41
Narratives are so powerful. And we know who controls it right now due to the power they hold over the nedia. The thing is the binary thinking dominating much of discourse these days. "Two (or three things) can be true at the same time. Life is not a game where there's a good and bad team to root for. Even Nazis can be kind (look up the story if the Nazi that saved thousands of Chinese during the Nanking massacre. The point of my tweet is to highlight that Ai is done differently in the East, not that China is an angel. People have lost the ability to even comprehend this way of thinking. @mayintoronto@beige.party @chu@climatejustice.social @cxiao@infosec.exchange