In America, the rich controls the government - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside). In China, the government controls the rich - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside).
…and with a bonus few:
In Russia, the top of the government controls the rich who control the rest of the government - to screw anyone they can get away with screwing while waving the “just remember we have nukes” flag. In Europe, the leaders keep flip-flopping about who they should be screwing so they just take turns footgunning while announcing “I meant to do that”, and then slapping each other on the wrists for appearances. In the UK, the rich and the government take turns visiting the pawnshop with anything that isn’t screwed down, then acting shocked when swathes of the government end up effectively owned by other governments.
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
I respectfully but firmly disagree regarding three words used here: racist, tropes, parroting. I would have been willing to clarify and defend why (and why I can partially do so from lived-experience), while also empathising about how one part of what I wrote might be possible to misinterpret without that clarification. The comment has since been removed though, so it wouldn’t be productive now. I still feel it important to say that a now-invisible comment of mine being called out as something is in my opinion not that thing (so readers don’t just assume it was without hesitation), while respecting your right to claim as such, especially before seeing any followup clarifications.
The only cognitive dissonance here is your own buddy. The reality is that no human society is perfect and people who keep comparing societies that exist in the real world to some Platonic ideal of society are not serious. China has problems like any other country, however it’s crystal clear that life for the vast majority of people in China has been steadily improving since the revolution, and that the government of China works in the interest of the working majority. People such as yourself will continue regurgitating empty rhetoric, while others will continue to improve their conditions.
I think two productive things I can say in reply to your comment are:
Your post was about governments and rich people, yet your replies are here referring to the people and the societies. In the spirit of your post, and your reply-comment singling out China, I was replying about the Chinese government (both the things they do, and the things they normalise and accept from bad actors in society), just like I was talking about for the US, Russian, UK, and European governments in my previous comment. A lot of that comes from my empathy for Chinese people, culture, and society - quite the opposite of what it seems you interpreted.
I think a key to remaining in touch with our core, shared humanity is remembering that some methodological means can never be justified by any material ends, and to keep revisiting what our own personal moral code says about where that line is. Importantly, I don’t reserve that opinion for any subset of political/religious/whatever systems or subset of countries, and have particular distrust for fundamentalist (unquestioning) implementations of any and all of them. Hence, to quote the last (and clearly not by any interpretation “rule breaking”) sentence from my comment:
Kindness and humaneness is not measured in GDP and hot-button topic popularity polls
My post was about two different social systems. The government is a product of the way society is structured. Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor is at odds with reality as the citations I provided above clearly show. Talking about core values, shared humanity, moral codes, and so on, is all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless unless you can show how that translates into something tangible.
Real kindness and humaneness is measured by how society is able to lift people out of poverty, provide them with education, housing, jobs, food, and healthcare. That’s what the government in China achieved for 1.4 billion people. Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.
Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor…
Although that uses many of the same words I used in that sentence it is a fundamentally different sentence from what I said.
Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.
Thirdly,
Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.
On this point I agree with you entirely. Fundamentalist Capitalism (especially the end-stage variants we are seeing in some places, and the inevitable Disaster Capitalism facilitated by certain politicians) is an absolute cancer. Just as much as Fundamentalist Utilitarianism is a cancer. It seems you keep trying to use that as a gotcha, for some ideological banner I am not even waving.
I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends. You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.
You dismissed my moral standpoint with:
…all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless while…
Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake. Not just one governmental implementation, all of them. That is why I think the presently constructive action is to accept that our respective “lines in the sand of acceptability” on these issues are different, and just agree to disagree on those points.
Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.
Again, there is zero evidence that cruelty is state policy in China. Meanwhile, if you think that society can completely eliminate individual acts of cruelty and other human vices then you’re once again engaging in fantastical thinking.
I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends.
Your comments are frustrating to me because they’re born out of ignorance. You have not spent the time to actually understand how Chinese system works, and your criticism is rooted in idealistic thinking that ignores the realities of the world we live in.
You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.
Nobody is arguing that the system in China is perfect. What’s being argued is that it is a system that actually works in the interest of the majority, and it’s a preferable real world alternative to what the west is doing. It’s a tangible improvement.
Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake.
Again, if you bothered to learn a bit of history you’d see that the general principles of the Chinese model has proven to be very stable historically. China has enjoyed centuries long stretches of peaceful existence, while the west has been drenched in blood and violence. I urge you to actually spend the time to learn about China instead of regurgitating demagogy.
That is a very causatively specific thing you are claiming I said, which I didn’t. Again.
Your comments are frustrating to me because they’re born out of ignorance. You have not spent the time to actually understand how Chinese system works
…if you bothered to learn a bit of history you’d see that…
I urge you to actually spend the time to learn about China instead of regurgitating demagogy.
That’s making quite a few assumptions and accusations about someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. Have you genuinely considered that many of those assumptions and accusations might be wrong? And no, I won’t (and shouldn’t) fall into the same “courtier’s reply” trap by itemising first-hand experiences, interactions, etc here because A) that would be inappropriate and should be irrelevant to a healthy discussion-focused dialogue - free of such “appeal to authority” logical fallacies, B) as stated before it is clear you keep arguing past what I’m actually saying - to how you reinterpret what I am saying, and C) after working through your false assumptions, false accusations, ad hominems, and misreading it seems you didn’t actually say anything else for me to reply to.
I made statements about various global systems of government, in general, and when you redirected and contextualised every statement to being consistently only about China, at first I did you the debater’s courtesy of addressing that, but unfortunately that courtesy has a limit, especially when you don’t reciprocate. As much as people displaying Said’s concept of Orientalism irreparably bias and taint global-context discussions, Occidentalism is also harmful for the same reason. Both of them often veer discussions into two-sided, one-dimensional (and often zero-sum) arguments to be “won”, rather than multivariable, multidimensional, fallibilistic and constructive debates. I have only been here for the latter but you are either only able or only willing to participate in the prior, so I say again it makes sense to just agree to disagree and move on. Anything else is just browbeating.
Lastly, I would have thought those ad hominems alone should be delete-worthy due to rule 1, no?
It’s deeply embarrassing that you’re old enough to have been verbal in the 90’s and still use the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ when you just mean something you disagree with. You write with the trying-to-sound-smart affectation of a teenager.
Completely vibes-centric analysis. If the Chinese government were screwing the population, how come every western polling org agrees that the government has at the very, very least 86% approval rates, far above any EU nation, let alone the US?
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as “analysis” sits that low.
I’m not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Did you notice I used the word “extend”? …and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human “bot” with the naive agenda of waving one team’s flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the “winning side” of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as “leadership” pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no “winning side” for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I’d just say they (who am I kidding, “he”) needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.
I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people’s lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->“fake nice” spectrum, and getting on the “actual kindness” and “mutual respect” bandwagon. But lately I’ll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.
I think I would extend it thus:
…and with a bonus few:
Bonus evidence of Chinese government screwing everyone in the country.
Here’s the report explaining how a typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
Removed by mod
These are some extremely racist tropes you’re parroting.
I respectfully but firmly disagree regarding three words used here: racist, tropes, parroting. I would have been willing to clarify and defend why (and why I can partially do so from lived-experience), while also empathising about how one part of what I wrote might be possible to misinterpret without that clarification. The comment has since been removed though, so it wouldn’t be productive now. I still feel it important to say that a now-invisible comment of mine being called out as something is in my opinion not that thing (so readers don’t just assume it was without hesitation), while respecting your right to claim as such, especially before seeing any followup clarifications.
Have you considered taking a communications course so you don’t sound like a pretentious, obfuscating jackass?
Eschew gratuitous obfuscation. (See what I mean?)
There seems to have been a modding mistake, based on how your comment is displayed in the modlog
Your name is cleared
The only cognitive dissonance here is your own buddy. The reality is that no human society is perfect and people who keep comparing societies that exist in the real world to some Platonic ideal of society are not serious. China has problems like any other country, however it’s crystal clear that life for the vast majority of people in China has been steadily improving since the revolution, and that the government of China works in the interest of the working majority. People such as yourself will continue regurgitating empty rhetoric, while others will continue to improve their conditions.
I think two productive things I can say in reply to your comment are:
Your post was about governments and rich people, yet your replies are here referring to the people and the societies. In the spirit of your post, and your reply-comment singling out China, I was replying about the Chinese government (both the things they do, and the things they normalise and accept from bad actors in society), just like I was talking about for the US, Russian, UK, and European governments in my previous comment. A lot of that comes from my empathy for Chinese people, culture, and society - quite the opposite of what it seems you interpreted.
I think a key to remaining in touch with our core, shared humanity is remembering that some methodological means can never be justified by any material ends, and to keep revisiting what our own personal moral code says about where that line is. Importantly, I don’t reserve that opinion for any subset of political/religious/whatever systems or subset of countries, and have particular distrust for fundamentalist (unquestioning) implementations of any and all of them. Hence, to quote the last (and clearly not by any interpretation “rule breaking”) sentence from my comment:
My post was about two different social systems. The government is a product of the way society is structured. Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor is at odds with reality as the citations I provided above clearly show. Talking about core values, shared humanity, moral codes, and so on, is all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless unless you can show how that translates into something tangible.
Real kindness and humaneness is measured by how society is able to lift people out of poverty, provide them with education, housing, jobs, food, and healthcare. That’s what the government in China achieved for 1.4 billion people. Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.
Although that uses many of the same words I used in that sentence it is a fundamentally different sentence from what I said.
Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.
Thirdly,
On this point I agree with you entirely. Fundamentalist Capitalism (especially the end-stage variants we are seeing in some places, and the inevitable Disaster Capitalism facilitated by certain politicians) is an absolute cancer. Just as much as Fundamentalist Utilitarianism is a cancer. It seems you keep trying to use that as a gotcha, for some ideological banner I am not even waving.
I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends. You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.
You dismissed my moral standpoint with:
Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake. Not just one governmental implementation, all of them. That is why I think the presently constructive action is to accept that our respective “lines in the sand of acceptability” on these issues are different, and just agree to disagree on those points.
Again, there is zero evidence that cruelty is state policy in China. Meanwhile, if you think that society can completely eliminate individual acts of cruelty and other human vices then you’re once again engaging in fantastical thinking.
Your comments are frustrating to me because they’re born out of ignorance. You have not spent the time to actually understand how Chinese system works, and your criticism is rooted in idealistic thinking that ignores the realities of the world we live in.
Nobody is arguing that the system in China is perfect. What’s being argued is that it is a system that actually works in the interest of the majority, and it’s a preferable real world alternative to what the west is doing. It’s a tangible improvement.
Again, if you bothered to learn a bit of history you’d see that the general principles of the Chinese model has proven to be very stable historically. China has enjoyed centuries long stretches of peaceful existence, while the west has been drenched in blood and violence. I urge you to actually spend the time to learn about China instead of regurgitating demagogy.
That is a very causatively specific thing you are claiming I said, which I didn’t. Again.
That’s making quite a few assumptions and accusations about someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. Have you genuinely considered that many of those assumptions and accusations might be wrong? And no, I won’t (and shouldn’t) fall into the same “courtier’s reply” trap by itemising first-hand experiences, interactions, etc here because A) that would be inappropriate and should be irrelevant to a healthy discussion-focused dialogue - free of such “appeal to authority” logical fallacies, B) as stated before it is clear you keep arguing past what I’m actually saying - to how you reinterpret what I am saying, and C) after working through your false assumptions, false accusations, ad hominems, and misreading it seems you didn’t actually say anything else for me to reply to.
I made statements about various global systems of government, in general, and when you redirected and contextualised every statement to being consistently only about China, at first I did you the debater’s courtesy of addressing that, but unfortunately that courtesy has a limit, especially when you don’t reciprocate. As much as people displaying Said’s concept of Orientalism irreparably bias and taint global-context discussions, Occidentalism is also harmful for the same reason. Both of them often veer discussions into two-sided, one-dimensional (and often zero-sum) arguments to be “won”, rather than multivariable, multidimensional, fallibilistic and constructive debates. I have only been here for the latter but you are either only able or only willing to participate in the prior, so I say again it makes sense to just agree to disagree and move on. Anything else is just browbeating.
Lastly, I would have thought those ad hominems alone should be delete-worthy due to rule 1, no?
It’s deeply embarrassing that you’re old enough to have been verbal in the 90’s and still use the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ when you just mean something you disagree with. You write with the trying-to-sound-smart affectation of a teenager.
Completely vibes-centric analysis. If the Chinese government were screwing the population, how come every western polling org agrees that the government has at the very, very least 86% approval rates, far above any EU nation, let alone the US?
I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.
Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as “analysis” sits that low.
I’m not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
Did you notice I used the word “extend”? …and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human “bot” with the naive agenda of waving one team’s flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the “winning side” of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as “leadership” pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no “winning side” for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I’d just say they (who am I kidding, “he”) needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.
I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people’s lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->“fake nice” spectrum, and getting on the “actual kindness” and “mutual respect” bandwagon. But lately I’ll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.