this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Think about it this way, if you were a Chinese citizen would you rather work in a harsh factory setting or work as a subsistence farmer and risk starvation because it didn’t rain enough one year? Because that was literally the choice. There were no other options.
The reason why the Chinese government maintains a high level of support from Chinese citizens is not because they’re great propagandists. Rather it’s because hundreds of millions of people went from extreme poverty as peasants to living stable middle class lives within a few decades.
Why do you see that as such a bad thing? Would you prefer all these people remain in poverty as they have in other countries such as India or the Philippines? I don’t get it.
I don't see capitalism raising people out of poverty as bad. It's one of the greatest achievements of capitalism.
The way they implemented it is the problem, and clearly not everyone is happy about it as we see in Tiannemen square and, more recently, the way Chinese citizens developed a coded vocabulary to express their discontent.