1. 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?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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/

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago
    1. Combination of maintaining a financial incentive for the global bourgeoisie to protect China and oppose things that would harm it because it is in their financial interests to do so, vs a centrally planned economy with publicly owned SOEs. 60% of the Chinese economy is state owned, the rest is there to ensure that the world doesn’t do to them what happened to the Soviet Union.
    2. Myth in the way the media and gossip portrays it. Are there probably a handful of instances slipping through cracks? Probably. They’re punished severely.
    3. It’s a credit system. Surveillance could feasibly exist in the form of centralisation of all things in the anything app they use, with everything going through one app that’s an easy point of “we know you did X and when”. GCHQ and NSA are doing this too though and I suspect far worse.
    4. Completely false. This takes hours to debunk though, lots of that information is here - But I’m also willing to just straight up answer direct questions about specific accusations, events, etc, if reading a book’s worth of information in one sitting isn’t your jam and conversational back and forth works better. I know there’s A LOT of it. TL;DR: Lots of terrorism resulted in a re-education program. Terrorism stopped. US no longer had reason to be in Afghanistan as a result of it.
      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Those accusations all ultimately source from the ASPI, which takes a large chunk of its funding from American defense contractors.

        A lot of it is also verifiably false from more recent publically available information. Notice how most of the mosque demolition allegations stopped around 2020? Its because there’s now enough openly available evidence go the contrary that it’s now embarrassing.

        Plus, just because some mosques are demolished does not mean evidence of persecution. Xinjiang is following the general trend of urbanization. When hundreds of thousands of people move from villages or smaller cities into large cities, new mosques are built and old mosques are converted or torn down.

        • motherofmonsters [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Thanks. That is what I figured. It’s insane how much American propaganda comes up on this topic, all sourced to think tanks with names like The Society for the Preservation of Freedom