There’ no such thing as a “non-authoritarian” state or other myths like the tooth-fairy, but even if they existed, then it’d be hard to argue that letting the US surveillance state operate freely within your borders is somehow “non-authoritarian”. The US is more likely than any other country to use the intelligence they’ve gained learned to harm you physically.
Literally every government with the capability to control information is doing that, and frankly the rise of bleach-injecting covid denialist flat earth tradwife inflluencers has proven China right to do so.
i love that it has the caveat in the second definition abt a constitution. like, no guys, totslly not us, look at this definition we created to show how we arent authoritarian
So like, objectively not China? Because their ruling party consists of 90 million members and they’re constantly debating shit, and enjoy an incredibly high satisfaction rate among non-party members?
Yes, of course they could. Individual people make the decision to practice birth control every day, and a vast democratic assembly of millions voted in by their peers can make the decision as well.
Yes, but those are entirely voluntary. The point is that a government should have no say in reproduction whatsoever. That is why campaigns to change the cratering birthrate have failed.
That’s cool that you can have that opinion from your position of being one doordash order away from having food to eat, but if you were an elected representative of a society that had to build itself up under seige after a century of colonial pillaging and a world war that devastated your economic and food infrastructure and killed millions of people, you might actually have to engage with the brutal reality of famine and underdevelopment, with the unavoidable questions of survival. If the Palestinian Resistance manages to secure it’s territory to administer, they will have to engage with these questions too. If and when that happens, will you simply write them off as “authoritarian”, and dismiss those who support their struggle as “simping for authoritarians”?
You clearly don’t understand the purpose of the firewall and the online surveillance is no more than any other country but at least our government is accountable to us as opposed to owned by capital.
the online surveillance is no more than any other country
Hahahaha. Spoken like someone who has never been there or lives in pure ignorance. You just try to use an encrypted chat app while there and see what happens. Or criticise the government.
Oh, you can’t. That VPN…that’ll fix it though. Oh that’s right, they’re illegal.
I was born and raised here. The VPN is for the firewall which has many reasons to exist and I support, also they’re not illegal. Criticising the government is super common but mostly over mundane stuff because that’s what people care about (there’s a reason the approval even according to Harvard is 95+%). You people are always so arrogant while being so uninformed it’s amazing.
It simply isn’t. Remember snowden? The NSA? TAO? Pegasus? Our government is simply more open and honest with us (might be a side effect of having real democracy as opposed to a charade put on by bought candidates every 4 years). Also before you say that’s just America, Europe are American vassal states all of these and more (since this is just what has leaked) are deployed against Europeans too and intel is shared in deals like five eyes.
Yeah I remember all of those things. The complete lack of capacity to send an end to end encrypted message will tell you that it’s worse there.
Fill me in on this “real democracy” like I’m not American and pretend I live somewhere with proportional representation where anyone can run for office, because I do.
The method of voting isn’t what makes it real democracy it’s the class content of the state and the fact that voting is a ritual for representatives that will only ever serve capital as opposed to voting being a single part of a daily system of feedback and interaction with deputies embedded in the grassroots situation who need accomplishments (to solve our problems) to go for higher offices. There’s a reason the number of billionaires in China is shrinking while public services and social safety nets are constantly seeing investment while in Europe and America austerity for the masses and tax cuts for the rich is law.
End to end encrypted
Nice vibes based analysis sort of redundant when they have backdoors on every piece of technology deployed there or the fact that most end to end encrypted messages are some mix of lying and insecure like WhatsApp.
I use signal and I’m free to. I’m confident it’s secure. Confident enough that my wife can send me a titty pic without someone looking at it. I would not do that with WeChat.
You call out a straw man about it being back doored when you’ve no idea that’s the case but we’re certain it is in China.
You go ahead and try to create an end to end encrypted messaging platform there and see what happens.
The firewall was created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. 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 or close to impossible to run at scale. I support it and so do many others as the alternative is plain to see. Also everyone has a VPN we’re not living in ignorance it is in fact people like yourself who are massively ignorant about us and our country.
I’ve been to your country. Many times. The ignorance call out holds no weight for me. I’ve lived the online surveillance and lack of access to sites or services I wanted. Hell even SSH connections are speed limited and frequently get a TCP reset to mess with them. Why? Because they can tunnel HTTP traffic.
Not everyone has a VPN (keep arguing for paying for a foreign service for internet access though) and you continuously avoid talking about how end to end encryption is not an option while touting “real democracy” which is laughable and not the point we were discussing which is your assertion that online surveillance in China is no worse than elsewhere. It is measurably worse.
Lack of end to end encrypted messaging is fundamentally bad in my viewpoint. All arguments against allowing it pale in comparison to the chilling effect it has on open discourse, hell even between a wife and husband.
Head onto Weibo there and call for “Western style democracy” (even if you don’t agree with it) or criticise the handling of Tianenmen in 1989 and see how quickly you get shut down. It’s not just surveillance, it’s control.
I’m all for digital sovereignty but let’s not pretend there isn’t a massive, massive control element to the lack of freedom there. If you try to argue that I’m afraid our discussion is at an end as I can’t take that viewpoint seriously.
Ive been to your country. Many times. The ignorance call out holds no weight for me. I’ve lived the online surveillance and lack of access to sites or services I wanted. Hell even SSH connections are speed limited and frequently get a TCP reset to mess with them. Why? Because they can tunnel HTTP traffic.
The firewall again isn’t a surveillance tool it’s a blacklist that protects us from the very clear worse option which is a US controlled digital infrastructure. Also you vacationing here really doesn’t do much to assuage ignorance. Plenty of EuroAmerikans vacation across developing countries and are still massively ignorant on how they actually functions. I’d go a step further and say most EuroAmerikans don’t even know how their own country really functions as “lived experience” is only a small part of the puzzle.
It’s not just surveillance, it’s control.
you continuously avoid talking about how end to end encryption is not an option
I’m assuming the choice of the word continuously is an artefact from an LLM considering end to end encryption was only brought up once. Also I very clearly didn’t avoid talking about it I simply pointed out that the most common ones such as WhatsApp are mostly a mix of insecure software and lies, also are largely irrelevant considering the NSA backdoors on every piece of deployed tech in the western hemisphere
LLM? No, continuously was a deliberate choice. I don’t see what’s wrong with it.
I’m using the example of end to end encryption to show how online surveillance there is measurably worse.
Your assertion was that online surveillance there is the same as elsewhere. That’s ridiculous. That’s the starting point and it’s what I’m sticking to. Lack of E2E is just such an obvious example of how it’s worse.
You’re making assumptions about back doors in all Western tech. China has them.
I can use any E2E encrypted platform I choose. You can’t use any. That’s worse.
To us. There’s a reason that even from Harvard’s research the government has a 95+% approval.
Direct elections reach the township and county levels where voters choose deputies to local people’s congresses. These grassroots deputies constitute the overwhelming majority of all deputies nationwide. Advancement to higher levels requires proven service at lower rungs, ensuring every national deputy has worked up from local material conditions and remains accountable to the masses below.
Grassroots legislative liaison stations and community consultation channels ensure mass input shapes policy at every stage, making democracy a daily practice not a periodic (meaningless) ritual. Whole-process people’s democracy embeds consultation and pilot programs into governance: policies are tested locally, refined through mass feedback, then scaled nationally. This grounds decisions in what we want and need.
All 55 ethnic minorities hold guaranteed representation in the NPC. Farmers and labourers comprise roughly 15% of deputies while professionals and technical personnel make up the remainder.
Even besides all that if you just look at what the Chinese government does as opposed to those owned by capital. Mass poverty alleviation, anticorruption at all levels, massive investment in socially profitable but monetarily unprofitable public services, deflating the housing bubble. These are not the actions of a government only looking out for a select few.
And also the CPC has over 100million members since 2024 that 1 in 14 people are party members not to mind those who aren’t but are active in consulting due to their position such as most engineers and scientists.
Just because the anglosphere is a socioeconomic nightmare realm of genocide, immiseration and omnipresent propaganda where everyone is at each other’s throats doesn’t mean everywhere else is too.
What you’re saying is you want to be suspicious of data that paints other places in a better light than us, because it makes you feel bad. You then rationalize this desire as “wisdom” while continuing to apply it selectively against societies your government has told you to hate.
Oh, I assure you, I have no red tinted glasses for my home. We are run by a decaying orange pedophile and his fascist sycophants.
That means I’m less inclined to trade one set of unaccountable “elites” for another just because they don’t like each other.
China is a state capitalist society that has the very same problem the US does. Overproduction of a group of “elites (parasites)” that need more and more power and wealth so they can get more power and more wealth.
Chinas actions towards the HK protestors and towards Taiwan indicates they are imperialist, which is a non starter for me already.
“non authoritarian governments are known to implement mass firewalls and online surveillance”
Every country should be blocking the US surveillance giants, its extremely naive for countries to be letting facebook, twitter, reddit, and google operate unhindered.
There’ no such thing as a “non-authoritarian” state or other myths like the tooth-fairy, but even if they existed, then it’d be hard to argue that letting the US surveillance state operate freely within your borders is somehow “non-authoritarian”. The US is more likely than any other country to use the intelligence they’ve gained learned to harm you physically.
Literally every government with the capability to control information is doing that, and frankly the rise of bleach-injecting covid denialist flat earth tradwife inflluencers has proven China right to do so.
From Merriam-Webster
" of authoritarian
1 relating to, or favoring blind submission to [authority].
2 relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people
i love that it has the caveat in the second definition abt a constitution. like, no guys, totslly not us, look at this definition we created to show how we arent authoritarian
So like, objectively not China? Because their ruling party consists of 90 million members and they’re constantly debating shit, and enjoy an incredibly high satisfaction rate among non-party members?
104 milliion last I checked.
It’s been over 100 million since 2024
Would a non-aurhoritarian government be able to institute a one-child policy like China?
Given the vagueness of your definition, yes absolutely.
I don’t see how “blind submission to authority” could be any more clear cut than it is.
Explain to me what that actually means, what “blind submission” actually entails. You’re just going off of vibes
Not being able to disagree with how your government conducts business without legal punishment.
Non authoritarian states don’t have dissidents in exile or political prisoners.
Yes, of course they could. Individual people make the decision to practice birth control every day, and a vast democratic assembly of millions voted in by their peers can make the decision as well.
Yes, but those are entirely voluntary. The point is that a government should have no say in reproduction whatsoever. That is why campaigns to change the cratering birthrate have failed.
That’s cool that you can have that opinion from your position of being one doordash order away from having food to eat, but if you were an elected representative of a society that had to build itself up under seige after a century of colonial pillaging and a world war that devastated your economic and food infrastructure and killed millions of people, you might actually have to engage with the brutal reality of famine and underdevelopment, with the unavoidable questions of survival. If the Palestinian Resistance manages to secure it’s territory to administer, they will have to engage with these questions too. If and when that happens, will you simply write them off as “authoritarian”, and dismiss those who support their struggle as “simping for authoritarians”?
Lol such a tired argument. If you get to fucking assume shit about others (aka build a strawman) then the rest of us get to do it to you.
You’re not even worth giving the time to read that whole thing. The moment you clapped off about fucking doordash you made yourself irrelevant.
You clearly don’t understand the purpose of the firewall and the online surveillance is no more than any other country but at least our government is accountable to us as opposed to owned by capital.
Hahahaha. Spoken like someone who has never been there or lives in pure ignorance. You just try to use an encrypted chat app while there and see what happens. Or criticise the government.
Oh, you can’t. That VPN…that’ll fix it though. Oh that’s right, they’re illegal.
Just like everywhere else. Hahaha.
I was born and raised here. The VPN is for the firewall which has many reasons to exist and I support, also they’re not illegal. Criticising the government is super common but mostly over mundane stuff because that’s what people care about (there’s a reason the approval even according to Harvard is 95+%). You people are always so arrogant while being so uninformed it’s amazing.
Making a statement that online surveillance there is no different from elsewhere will get you that kind of response tbh. It is measurably worse.
Source: it is known
It simply isn’t. Remember snowden? The NSA? TAO? Pegasus? Our government is simply more open and honest with us (might be a side effect of having real democracy as opposed to a charade put on by bought candidates every 4 years). Also before you say that’s just America, Europe are American vassal states all of these and more (since this is just what has leaked) are deployed against Europeans too and intel is shared in deals like five eyes.
Yeah I remember all of those things. The complete lack of capacity to send an end to end encrypted message will tell you that it’s worse there.
Fill me in on this “real democracy” like I’m not American and pretend I live somewhere with proportional representation where anyone can run for office, because I do.
The method of voting isn’t what makes it real democracy it’s the class content of the state and the fact that voting is a ritual for representatives that will only ever serve capital as opposed to voting being a single part of a daily system of feedback and interaction with deputies embedded in the grassroots situation who need accomplishments (to solve our problems) to go for higher offices. There’s a reason the number of billionaires in China is shrinking while public services and social safety nets are constantly seeing investment while in Europe and America austerity for the masses and tax cuts for the rich is law.
Nice vibes based analysis sort of redundant when they have backdoors on every piece of technology deployed there or the fact that most end to end encrypted messages are some mix of lying and insecure like WhatsApp.
I use signal and I’m free to. I’m confident it’s secure. Confident enough that my wife can send me a titty pic without someone looking at it. I would not do that with WeChat.
You call out a straw man about it being back doored when you’ve no idea that’s the case but we’re certain it is in China.
You go ahead and try to create an end to end encrypted messaging platform there and see what happens.
Hell… use pgp in your WeChat. See what happens.
You are literally talking to a Chinese person from China, smug liberal dipshittery knows no bounds
Then they fit the second part, living in ignorance. Online surveillance there is measurably worse.
The firewall was created to foster and protect China’s fledgling digital infrastructure and data sovereignty. 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 or close to impossible to run at scale. I support it and so do many others as the alternative is plain to see. Also everyone has a VPN we’re not living in ignorance it is in fact people like yourself who are massively ignorant about us and our country.
I’ve been to your country. Many times. The ignorance call out holds no weight for me. I’ve lived the online surveillance and lack of access to sites or services I wanted. Hell even SSH connections are speed limited and frequently get a TCP reset to mess with them. Why? Because they can tunnel HTTP traffic.
Not everyone has a VPN (keep arguing for paying for a foreign service for internet access though) and you continuously avoid talking about how end to end encryption is not an option while touting “real democracy” which is laughable and not the point we were discussing which is your assertion that online surveillance in China is no worse than elsewhere. It is measurably worse.
Lack of end to end encrypted messaging is fundamentally bad in my viewpoint. All arguments against allowing it pale in comparison to the chilling effect it has on open discourse, hell even between a wife and husband.
Head onto Weibo there and call for “Western style democracy” (even if you don’t agree with it) or criticise the handling of Tianenmen in 1989 and see how quickly you get shut down. It’s not just surveillance, it’s control.
I’m all for digital sovereignty but let’s not pretend there isn’t a massive, massive control element to the lack of freedom there. If you try to argue that I’m afraid our discussion is at an end as I can’t take that viewpoint seriously.
The firewall again isn’t a surveillance tool it’s a blacklist that protects us from the very clear worse option which is a US controlled digital infrastructure. Also you vacationing here really doesn’t do much to assuage ignorance. Plenty of EuroAmerikans vacation across developing countries and are still massively ignorant on how they actually functions. I’d go a step further and say most EuroAmerikans don’t even know how their own country really functions as “lived experience” is only a small part of the puzzle.
I’m assuming the choice of the word continuously is an artefact from an LLM considering end to end encryption was only brought up once. Also I very clearly didn’t avoid talking about it I simply pointed out that the most common ones such as WhatsApp are mostly a mix of insecure software and lies, also are largely irrelevant considering the NSA backdoors on every piece of deployed tech in the western hemisphere
So you work for the Chinese government.
The question is, why the fuck are the mods removing the replies to you?
“Ohhhhh” points “must be an llm!!! (Now we can all dismiss them! Convenient!”
Fuck off with that shit. You’re the one talking like a paid government shill on lemmy of all places.
LLM? No, continuously was a deliberate choice. I don’t see what’s wrong with it.
I’m using the example of end to end encryption to show how online surveillance there is measurably worse.
Your assertion was that online surveillance there is the same as elsewhere. That’s ridiculous. That’s the starting point and it’s what I’m sticking to. Lack of E2E is just such an obvious example of how it’s worse.
You’re making assumptions about back doors in all Western tech. China has them.
I can use any E2E encrypted platform I choose. You can’t use any. That’s worse.
Are they accountable to you or to party members?
To us. There’s a reason that even from Harvard’s research the government has a 95+% approval.
Direct elections reach the township and county levels where voters choose deputies to local people’s congresses. These grassroots deputies constitute the overwhelming majority of all deputies nationwide. Advancement to higher levels requires proven service at lower rungs, ensuring every national deputy has worked up from local material conditions and remains accountable to the masses below.
Grassroots legislative liaison stations and community consultation channels ensure mass input shapes policy at every stage, making democracy a daily practice not a periodic (meaningless) ritual. Whole-process people’s democracy embeds consultation and pilot programs into governance: policies are tested locally, refined through mass feedback, then scaled nationally. This grounds decisions in what we want and need.
All 55 ethnic minorities hold guaranteed representation in the NPC. Farmers and labourers comprise roughly 15% of deputies while professionals and technical personnel make up the remainder.
Even besides all that if you just look at what the Chinese government does as opposed to those owned by capital. Mass poverty alleviation, anticorruption at all levels, massive investment in socially profitable but monetarily unprofitable public services, deflating the housing bubble. These are not the actions of a government only looking out for a select few.
And also the CPC has over 100million members since 2024 that 1 in 14 people are party members not to mind those who aren’t but are active in consulting due to their position such as most engineers and scientists.
You should be skeptical of any poll or survey that presents that level of agreement on anything with that breadth of societal implications.
How do you square the whole Hong Kong protests in regards to the extradition laws? Or the aggression towards Taiwan?
Just because the anglosphere is a socioeconomic nightmare realm of genocide, immiseration and omnipresent propaganda where everyone is at each other’s throats doesn’t mean everywhere else is too.
What you’re saying is you want to be suspicious of data that paints other places in a better light than us, because it makes you feel bad. You then rationalize this desire as “wisdom” while continuing to apply it selectively against societies your government has told you to hate.
Oh, I assure you, I have no red tinted glasses for my home. We are run by a decaying orange pedophile and his fascist sycophants.
That means I’m less inclined to trade one set of unaccountable “elites” for another just because they don’t like each other.
China is a state capitalist society that has the very same problem the US does. Overproduction of a group of “elites (parasites)” that need more and more power and wealth so they can get more power and more wealth.
Chinas actions towards the HK protestors and towards Taiwan indicates they are imperialist, which is a non starter for me already.