Yeah I was gonna say, I don't think they have universal health care. Or anything like Medicare for the elderly, either, right? Families take care of their elders and te on the costs associated as I recall.
To make an obvious point, there's a good chance that a large portion of ostensibly "American left" boosters of President Xi are on the payroll of the Ministry of State Security...
Liberals everywhere are done with this leftist doomerism. Our country is flawed but great. Right now we are fighting to protect against the worst, and eventually make things better.
Im glad the country is great for you. There's a lot of people for whom it is absolutely not great, and I hope one day you can bring yourself to give a shit about them and their perspective.
I think it's a mixture of swallowing pro-China propaganda from communist social media coupled with a misguided belief that a nation that holds itself out as Marxist would be doing well on egalitarian goals.
It's been really fascinating to see the number of people who basically take the standard left-wing-American set of stances on feminism, LGBT rights, and antiracism, combine that with European economic systems, and then call the resulting image "Life under the Chinese Communist Party"
It's not even clear if those people count as tankies! Sure, other people just say outright that state censorship is good and so on. But there's been this weird spillover from that crowd whereby tankie-ism became so fashionable that people adopt the pro-China label while keeping their prior views
(Come to think of it, it's similar to the phenomenon observed by many whereby a lot of self-described leftists are more like libertarians who haven't analyzed their own beliefs much)
On more than one occasion, I've seen someone using the word "neoliberalism" sorta like how fundamentalist Christians use the word "Marxism" to describe anything they dislike, but then watch as their arguments make them sound like 75% anarcho-capitalist.
Sadly, the "read one book" crowd rarely gets passed one. I'm tempted to agree that they just want social democracy with mixed market capitalism, but with a "radical" aesthetic, and while that might be true for some, I'm afraid that's probably too coherent for others.
I think this is mostly coming from swallowing a mishmash of talking points from networks that are influenced by a few different leftwing subcultures. Knowing their exact positions is like knowing where an electron is. Got to interact. Until then it's in superposition.
Probably not a few are paid disinformation accounts. Russia has had its organic tankies but surprising to see useful idiots come out of the woodwork for China.
Anywho, the CCP's attitude towards welfare isn't terribly different than the GOP's, only they've achieved the GOP's ongoing goal of making it so only they can hold legitimate power.
It’s because they’ve been told for decades that China was and always has been (in our lifetimes) an enemy that needs to be treated as such. Naturally people will fight back against it but I’d hope that if they are curious as to why ppl say this about China they’d look into all that they’ve done.
Like, I'm pretty sure most leftists were OK with masking, social distance and vaccines, maybe some not, but now their making excuses for the regime of "we're locking everyone in their apartments for months on end".
The idea that a median lower-income person is better off in China than in the United States is ridiculous.
Maybe as to other liberal democracies you can have a reasonable argument parsing different metrics (it's far from clear cut). But China? There is no metric at all on which to make that case.
Comments
I know because I’ve been to factories like this.
Her daughter was just killed.
The husband quite likely did it, he will never face charges, and he is now keeping the kids from ever seeing their grandmother.
F tankies.
Time to act accordingly.
🤷♂️
Maybe as to other liberal democracies you can have a reasonable argument parsing different metrics (it's far from clear cut). But China? There is no metric at all on which to make that case.
https://www.amnesty.org/ar/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ASA1794382018ENGLISH.pdf
In the US it's 92%.