Isn't that the same to every major superpower?

No. There is no moral equivalence with totalitarianism.

Modern China isn't exactly totalitarian though and US is rapidly converging with China in that regard anyway.

How totalitarian is exactly totalitarian? I asked chatgpt and it gave few points

- Control goes beyond politics

- A single, all-encompassing ideology

- No meaningful private sphere

- Mass mobilization and propaganda

- Extensive surveillance and repression

Seems like China is ticking all the boxes.

Honestly thought you were listing traits that the US has now till the last line.

In what universe does the US not have "meaningful private sphere"?

Meta, Google and co control all your private data. GDPR is a european thing not an american or chinese thing.

CIA/FBI have their own massive data centers (see snowden) inkl. their own older bigger palantr style software.

Elon Musk was able to connect a Starlink server to your data and no one cared. He and his Duche aeh sry doge baby boys were able to access and download all Social Security Numbers.

If someone knows were Putin and all the other world leaders are at any given moment, I would bet its USA first than China if even because i don't think China cares that much about it than USA does.

And everyone out of scope of this, lives probably in some rural USA town were no one cares for you at all anyway, but thats the same thing as in China.

Really laugh my ass off, so much whataboutism and American centrism when the debate is whether China is trustworthy on AI. Given your ignorance you should go and do your research, but I will help you a bit here.

- Control goes beyond politics

state corporation monopoly, 党支部 in private sector, crackdowns on NGOs and charities.

- A single, all-encompassing ideology

Party led, mandarin speaking Han Chinese nationalism, blended with Little Pink's unquestionable support for Xi and the party.

- No meaningful private sphere

社区网格员

- Mass mobilization and propaganda

We saw mobilizations on Chinese social media, attacking celebrities who don't openly say anything the party wants them to say. Mobilization in real life is rare though, cos it had shown it can backfire.

- Extensive surveillance and repression

Do I really need to explain this?

Which comment was this supposed to be a reply to?

> No meaningful private sphere

Have you ever been to China? Everyone has their own private lives. It's no different than any other country in that respect.

In China, you rarely interact with the government in daily life. Most people are just living their lives.

You forgot

- No freedom of religion

Dear flagger, did I say something incorrect?

Just as long as you don't openly mention the "three Ts".

China is not totalitarian. Many people believe that China is still like 1950s-60s-era Maoist China, but it's just not.

tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.

Is your contention that Hong Kong is also a totalitarian society? Have you been to Hong Kong in the last 5 years? I feel like people saying these sorts of things are just completely divorced from reality.

> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.

No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.

What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.

> That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.

Tell it to the people in Wuhan, and Shanghai, Urumqi, and other cities that had lockdowns. I was in Shanghai in 2022, I was confined to my apartment for nearly 3 months, you couldn't be more wrong.

Shanghai was locked down as a health measure during a major outbreak in the middle of a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.

Lockdowns were done in many places in the world, including in Taiwan. I get that you're angry about being inconvenienced, but you weren't living in a totalitarian state. You were inconvenienced because there was a massive public health emergency, and the government had the choice of either locking down one city or letting the virus spread to the rest of the country and kill millions of people.

God I wish I could just block you. So called inconveniences in the name of so called massive public health emergency? First of all it was the Omicron variant, we knew its mortality rate is low, second it did spread to the rest of the country by the end of 2022 and killed millions of people, so what was the fucking point? If you have to downplay all suffering by calling them inconveniences, I guess there's no one could convince you anyway, you better hope it doesn't happen to you.

Anyway here are few links and videos for those curious what happened

The Initium's timeline of the whole thing https://campaign.theinitium.com/20220506-mainland-covid-shan...

A viral video on Shanghai lock down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBdOXwdBn5s

Forced transfer to Fangcang quarantine center without testing positive https://youtu.be/NQfmOTB_naA

Spoiled food in groceries https://www.sohu.com/a/539911328_118622

Community effort to collect the names of those who died, whether it is covid or othe medical conditions or suicide(the og Airtable is down) https://github.com/augustuscaesarr/runrunrun/blob/main/%E6%9...

Here's a fun one, a fake app for Covid Health Code, which was required to enter any public space and private business and even your home https://ilovexjp.pages.dev/

And it is fit to finish with Shanghai protesters shouting Xi Jinping Step Down, Dec 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDAX8UO4ZQA

The Omicron variant killed more people worldwide (including in the US) than any other variant.

You were personally subject to quarantine measures in early 2022, and that irks you. On the hand, if you spent the pandemic in Shanghai, you were more free to go about your life than people were in the West for most of 2020-2021.

None of this is "totalitarianism."

Do not fucking reply to me, this is harassment.

You're so soft

lol great way to lose an argument.

What argument? It was just contradiction, he didn't care how much evidences and points I brought. 3 months of trauma and depression and it is just merely irk in his eyes. It was just an unfunny, callous version monty python's sketch.

and the Kent State shootings were in 1970.

Being self-righteous and a yank doesn't make sense, country of war mongers, something that cant be said of China.

Clearly I’ve hit a nerve if you’re stooping to whataboutism. Perhaps you should reflect on why that is.

Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.

Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.

Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.

> Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light.

I'm in Hong Kong right now. Seems like it is still here to me.

Which are the current nontotalitarian superpowers?

EU

That's also the current US administration.

Luckily laws still stand somewhat.

( And Trump ain't smart enough)

Trump's smarter than he lets on. He plays the buffoon in public, but he's smart enough to have gotten elected twice. Which is two times more than I've managed to.

You don't have to be smart to be elected. You have to be a good liar. And it's really easy to be a good liar when you have gotten so deep into bullshitting that you believe your own lies.

Also, being useful to the right people helps. Because they will dump their own money and time into bolstering your campaign.

Based on what is he smart? Every objective datapoint says he's an idiot that fails upwards.

The only thing he was successful in, was literally exaggerating and overselling his capabilities ( eg. He directed the apprentice, it's fake)

Whatbaoutism at it's finest.

Have a peek at the fredom indx and the press freedom index for China. Guess where they stand?

You know about the chinese internet firewall.

You can't trust any data from the CCP.

And please don't equate the aberration that is the Trump administration with "regular" US administrations (and this is coming from a non US person).

People in China live under totalitarian rule, that much is true.

But how free is the average North American, where getting sick can bring you and your family financial ruin? Where the "free press" is controlled by corporations who are also the main source of campaign funding for politicians? Where their urban spaces are designed to require you to have a car and promote complete atomized individuals?

All these things are from the private sector and may be left behind if you like (do younger generations even listen to corporate news?)

The real issues are government surveillance and it increasingly getting involved in my personal matters, but it’s still more free than any other country I could go to. Look at countries in Europe like the UK without true freedom of press arresting people for mean tweets and giving them years in prison.

> All these things are from the private sector

Are they really? All of the cases I listed are consequences of Public Policy, no exceptions.

You’re right, for now, but I think trump will try to turn America into a dictatorship.

..you forgot to mention that any technology in China, foreign or domestic, can and will be used for and to the benefit of the -military- party.. But like someone posted: "not perfect" fits the bill.

Check out the Sean Ryan Show with Palmer Luckey on China and military tech.

Same goes for every country on earth?

Ok? The same can be said about the US

Regular US administrations that commited war crimes in half the world for decades. But apparently it only matters what they do in the US.

Indexes made by Europeans and Americans to congratulate themselves are not reliable.

Exactly. Even if you don't buy into western biases, it's heavily reliant on subjective perception surveys. Hardly proof of anything

We can talk about all this stuff on an American form, but good luck talking about any of China's issues on a Chinese Forum. Lets not talk about how China regularly kills Catholic priests and bishops. Anyone who tries to glaze China is a propagandized fool.

You can say the same about the US

they compare it to fascist USA though

Ask a gay, a black or a Japanese how it feels living in China.

Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent. US is heavily heterogenous and despite that you segregated like a third of society at the time.

Ridiculous take.

>Outside of gay people, the rest is your projection: they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent.

You do know that Chinese people do go to other countries and that we all can see how insanely racist they can be right?

> they are homogenous society

No, China is not homogenous.

> racial problems are nonexistent

Ask a non-Han about how they feel about that statement.

Your take is about as ridiculous. China isn’t at all how you described it.

Sorry, I have lived and worked there 6 years in different cities and I do speak a fluent (though with a very heavy French accent) mandarin. It's totally not my projection but my experience first hand.

During the "diaoyu island" incident in the 2010s the sushi shop 200m near my appartment got sacked, and all japanese-brand car get smashed.

My black (and indian) friends all complained how hard they were treated. And when talking with my Chinese friends they all had very .... interesting... point of view.

Edit: also, I'm not from the US

> they are homogenous society, racial problems are nonexistent

Riiiiiiiiiiiight:

https://ipvm.com/reports/hikvision-uyghur

Guess they solved all the "racial problems" by deploying surveillance cameras to help shove all the undesirables into camps. /s

so alabama and texas are enemies to the US the same way china is?