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Do not confuse Technocracy with Socialism. While Chinese Technocracy is Socialist, Technocracy alone can be a massive problem.
Waiting for Liberals to actually have a thought out response to the excellent resources the MLs of this community provide.
the real question: where is the liberal equivalent of @Cowbee@lemmy.ml
Something something square Something something tanks
And don’t forget that China has billionaires!
Yeah and they don’t control the government like in the US but vice-versa.
Lotta comments from accounts a few days old, or with less than 50 comments in several years. Interesting.
But I was told by Piefed and MoG that Tankies infiltrate every community!! Why would they project?!
Democracy is only as good as the voters. The average Chinese is better educated and a better citizen overall than the average USAmerican. Thus the difference in results. My experience with Chinese and USAians confirm this, even if anecdotal. I could have just missed the bad Chinese and was overexposed to bad USAians.
Also bourgeois/liberal democracy is the quintessence of adopting democratic aesthetics, forms, and language without any actual democratic function. No one can vote according to their interests, and no one’s votes actually influence policy.
The reason most modern imperialist states have evolved their own form of liberal democracy is because of how effective it is at mediating domestic capitalist contradictions so they can be externalized.
If the US were somehow a true functional democracy it would have evolved beyond capitalism decades ago.
“To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
― Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
Democracy is only as good as the voters.
I wouldn’t know. I’ve never lived in one.
Western liberal democracies are structurally flawed, and despite the immense systemic advantage capital already enjoys, capital still needs to manipulate education, religion, and media to persuade people to vote against their own material interests. The result is a political landscape that, in many cases, produces outcomes more dysfunctional than those seen in some modern monarchies or even historic feudal systems—yet with the added disadvantage that many citizens remain unaware of their own diminished political and economic conditions, convinced they live in the freest societies on earth and that everything elsewhere must be worse. Concluding such a system is not truly democratic, or merely a democracy of the bourgeoisie is a valid conclusion, because whether systematic or through manipulation of education, religion and media, they are the only ones who benefit from it, and the majority have no means of getting what they want.
I know you already know this. This comment was meant for any lurker who doesn’t know. The people who think they are one election away from fixing the system if they would only voter harder.
They can both be bad.
They aren’t, though. China is a rising socialist state, and the US is a dying, brutal empire run be pedophiles and fascists.
I’m tired of being surrounded by propaganda. Do better.
Tell that to your pedophile rulers
we do
lmao the fuck you do
Once I stop reading “two things can be true at once” whenever your nazi pedophile rulers tell you something bad about the next country they want to destroy maybe I’ll believe you
You don’t do jack shit
Both states are awful.
Wow, that was hard.
They’re both bad…
how many bombs has China dropped in the last 20 years?
Yeah USA is terrible. Being better than USA is not a high threshold. China is still a terrible country:
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/china
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/china/report-china/
Again, how many bombs is that?
Ohh, so I get to pick which awful country is better? Cool choices.
Edit: aaaaaaand the tankies show up.
Why do you think China is awful?
My Chinese friends living in New Zealand as dual citizens are afraid to criticize the Chinese government even in private online conversations. That says a lot, I think.
That says a lot, I think.
It certainly does but mostly about them lmao. If you ever end up living in China you’ll come to realise criticizing and debating about the government is like the second most popular conversation topic. We love it, it’s almost a national pass time.
But do you do it in public, online or offline? What about protests? What about strikes?
Where are the independent news organizations and invitations to during media to prove to the world everything we think is wrong with the Converse government is a lie?
Why the great firewall of China?
Yes, people discuss government policy in public and offline all the time. It’s a very normal topic of conversation. In practice, serious political discussion tends to happen face-to-face because that’s simply a better format for nuanced debate, but there is also plenty of discussion online. What generally gets censored online are calls for overthrowing the state, organizing mass unrest, or similar things. Many countries draw similar lines around incitement or destabilization.
Protests and strikes do occur, but they are usually local and issue-specific rather than ideological movements aimed at regime change. Labor disputes, land disputes, corruption complaints, etc. happen all the time and are often resolved through administrative or legal channels. The political culture tends to focus more on petitioning, negotiation, and internal pressure than on permanent protest movements.
On “independent” media: Independent from whom? In Western countries most major media outlets are owned by a very small number of large corporations or billionaires. Those owners influence what gets covered, what narratives dominate, and what perspectives are marginalized. Calling that system “independent” while ignoring ownership power is a very selective definition of independence.
The firewall was originally created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. That was a legitimate policy choice. Many countries regulate foreign platforms and data flows. China built its own ecosystem instead of depending on foreign companies. We have seen what happens when foreign platforms operate without local oversight: Facebook facilitating genocide in Myanmar, coordinated anti-vax disinformation campaigns in Southeast Asia, algorithm-driven radicalization. The firewall makes those kinds of external influence operations harder to run at scale.
I like many others here support the firewall even though it can be inconvenient (so long as vpns remain accessible and legal). I have seen the alternatives. The trade off makes sense to us.