There's a bunch of articles in western press about crack downs on queer communities in China, as well as feminist communities. What's the reality? Is it actually happening? Why?
There's a bunch of articles in western press about crack downs on queer communities in China, as well as feminist communities. What's the reality? Is it actually happening? Why?
I think it's understandable when you consider the reactionaries at all levels who want to overthrow the PRC. like for sure it does suck, but I understand their defensive mentality on it
Oh 100%, I entirely get it. It sucks but that's the price of having a communist ruling party in a world that wants it dead. Couple that with China being pretty socially conservative, I'm sure the Party doesn't want to "push" LGBT rights too far and lose support of the conservative majority, which again totally sucks but I get it.
they have been using official party channels to push LGBT rights, and younger party members are hugely in favour of LGBT rights and support
I think this is another example of how, if you curb just the worst excesses of imperialism and capitalism, things will become dramatically better within a few generations. Hatred about modernization and lack of oppunrtunity have been cut back, so that anger is not directed towards LGBTQIA+ people, so they get rights pretty quickly. Of course, I may be missing a million other factors.
I think you're 100% right. It's much harder to shift public opinion on this kind of thing under horrible living conditions.
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Democracy is when two parties
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They do vote for some things but otherwise they practice the mass line (although I don't that term was actually used in between Mao and Xi, Xi has revived the use of the term). Think about a party official going to a village and saying "what kinds of problems do you have here? What could I do to help?" And then actually following up on that, something like this is shown in the PBS documentary which I think is called China's War on Poverty.
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Oh don't worry, it only aired in a limited fashion before PBS pulled it for being too pro China (but I believe it's available on YouTube anyway)
democracy = rule of the people, voting is just one way (not necessarily an effective one) by which that rule is exercised
china has a kind of consultative democracy where people are literally asked about what they want and think, and the government runs things based on that - if the local administrator fails to provide, another one is put in his place, and so on
this is far more effectively democratic than voting every X years, as in the latter voters are actually more like consumers ("here's a list of what we're offering, pick one that is closer to what you want") than actual participating citizens ("tell me what you want so we can see a way to provide it")
that said, yea, they actually do vote as well, but just for the legislature
honestly, it's a great mix, not without its flaws obviously, but has worked wonders
edit: also the vast majority (over 70%) of the chinese definitely think 1) democracy is good and 2) they live in a democracy, which are much better stats than what you see in america for instance
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yea i think the chinese experiment is generally fascinating to look at tbh
i mean, even if one is of the opinion that they're revisionists and all, they're the hardest and most complex experiment we've had so far, and we should be taking a closer look at it, even if we end up concluding there were more mistakes than successes
but we're usually just going either like "eww capitalism" or "wow very infrastructure" when it goes far deeper than this
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