and how about even being unable to speak about how much of a womanizer (and thus a hypocrite) mao was because you fear for your life.
how would any of that make china vulnerable economically to the west? i mean they're already doing a good job of that themselves.
imagine if you couldn't make a joke about bill clinton, or had to worry about trump killing you if he was elected president. i would rather china get "influenced" by the west than continue going that route.
edit: how does limiting the information of your citizens allowing them to make rational decisions? it doesn't.
If you made the same post but about some Chinese politician and in China, you could get in trouble for that.
> If China wasn't so protecive, they would have become economically dependent on the west (as opposed to being the powerhouse they are today).
You're claiming that China's economic growth and independence is because they censor their citizens?
Well, no, they censor all ideas that run contrary to the party line, period, regardless of origin. I suppose you could try to claim that no Chinese person could ever independently conceive of an idea that contravenes the will of the Party, so if such ideas occur then they must have been crowbarred into their innocent minds by foreign propagandists, but that would be stupid.
> Obviously ideas that infect people within China would be in practice censoring "Chinese" people.
Huh?
Not that I don't find the West problematic but the many problems of the West don't actually make China's problems any better and I'm not sure there are many who seem to think they do.
Individuals take responsibility for themselves. Countries can too
Sure. Controlling the influence of Western ideas seems to be exactly they way they're doing it. Reasonable IMO.
It has the same effect as internet censorship. People who speak up are prevented from communicating with the rest of society.
The reality is that no one has the moral high ground; we are all competing for resources and relevance and every country is willing to resort to dirty tricks to get ahead.
China has the Great Firewall, the US has the NSA...
Although the US is not as democratic as it should be your comparison is not even laughable.
I find it hard that people can be so misled, or maybe you are just trolling. China has a brutal dictatorship that executes people for trying to get more power and were responsible for the Tiananmen massacre and still will not even admit it happened.
If you think you could live in China and even write anything about the party the way you write about the US government from your comment you are delusional. The US has a very free press and free speech for everyone.
Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression
Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.
Source: http://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-a...
We talk about the NSA about five times as much as about the Great Firewall. And when we do, it's off-topic to butt in with "but China has TGF!" Just as much, this is not the place to dismiss anything based on the NSA.
This is as literal an example of changing the subject as you can get. A hypocrite isn't wrong. He's just a hypocrite. Everybody is. Can we please move on and actually discuss the subject at hand instead of deflecting?
OP is completely right.
(Btw I thought your gp comment was good, this is just about the "hypocrisy means you can't criticise" part. +1 man!)
Amen! In my experience, on articles critical of China, 90% of the comments are deflections about the West. Here's one thread that's easy to count [1]. 9/10 comments talk about how the West does it too
How would China become dependent on the West if Chinese people had access to non-CommunityParty ideas?
Soon enough, Chinese people would no longer be content with Chinese-made goods and services from small Chinese suppliers (e.g. through decentralized marketplaces like Alibaba) - Instead they would start buying US goods through centralized marketplaces like Amazon and Apple store - Basically the money would leave China and they would all be worse off on average.
By keeping western media out, they keep Chinese money in. Don't ignore the fact that media is paid for almost entirely by advertising and that advertising is paid for entirely by companies who need to sell products.
Both totally available in China already via their local forms (store.apple.cn and amazon.cn). My wife orders from Amazon a lot.
Economics aside though, there are enormously dangerous consequences to controlling the exchange of information.
Seeing China's nouveau riche and the general demand for western luxury goods, and hell even Buicks, you don't know what you're talking about.
What "US good" - all that stuff is made in China to begin with! Well, OK, not literally everything, but as interconnected as the global economy is, what you are proposing strikes me as pretty much nonsensical. China won't benefit from "protecting" itself from trading with the West.
To whom? Isolation won't do any good in the long run.
As westerners, as much as we like to pretend that we know the whole truth, in reality, what we know is only a biased approximation of it. The west likes to impose their version of the truth on the whole world but China is determined to stick to their version - I don't see anything wrong with that; especially if it works in their favour.
Regardless of how you look at it; the west is aggressive when it comes to spreading its ideals and values. If China wasn't so protecive, they would have become economically dependent on the west (as opposed to being the powerhouse they are today).