this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Yes. No democracy, no support from me. "But the US isn't democratic!" Which is why I don't support it either. Not sure if the other guy is the same.
No country disproves that democracy is needed. "Benevolent dictators" (all dictators think they're benevolent) die. If you think a dictatorship is doing well just give it a few years.
"Yes they censor everything, but it's easy to circumvent!" is not an excuse. How accurate is this really though? Do you have any sources to prove this is the case? Genuinely interested.
Chinese news cite chinese think tanks, both entities funded by the chinese government. How is it any different? Doesn't China have more billionaires than the US too?
China doesn't pretend that their media is unbiased, though. There's no aura of unbiased media in China. Meanwhile, Facebook's head of global threat intelligence, is literally a US intelligence plant (and most of the authors on his Meta adversarial threat reports are ex- or current US intelligence). Meta is just the most memorable example, which is why I'm picking on them. Given the algorithmic nature of news delivery nowadays, how much influence would you guess US intelligence has on what news people see?
Xiao Qiang at UC Berkeley did a study before the VPN crackdown and estimated that there are about 10 million DAUs (daily active users) of firewall-flipping VPNs in the country. DAU/MAU is usually between 20%-50%, so that gives 20-50 million people with VPN access monthly (2-5% of internet users). Last October, China clamped down on some VPNs, but then the user counts for those VPNs that were still working skyrocketed.
Anyway, these numbers are actually really quite high:
Bing has 100 million DAUs worldwide. Reddit has about 55 million DAUs worldwide. LinkedIn has about 22 million DAUs in the US. Twitter has about 54 million MAUs in the US. Threads has about 8 million DAUs worldwide (though probably less now, lol). 1-5% penetration of total users in terms of usage is indicative of very high awareness. Other options include using a HK SIM (widely available) and a VPS (harder to setup). I have no idea what kind of market penetration these methods have.
What they "pretend" to be doesn't matter, what matters is the thoughts they want to put on the people who read it, why they want to, and how many of them do read it. Any and all state media or state collaborative media tries to paint the state it comes from in a good light. This is not somehow more benevolent or less manipulative when it's done by China, even if "it's easy to circumvent" or "people know it's biased".
I wonder if WeChat and TikTok are any different, too.
So basically, it's easy to do, but illegal, but it's rarely persecuted? That's a really weird policy.
It's not even illegal to cirumvent the Firewall... It's literally a glorified recommendation feed. It's technically illegal to use a VPN to circumvent the Firewall, but in practice this law is only ever used against the VPN vendor (and even then, it almost never is). Accessing and producing illegal content (e.g. CP) is, obviously, still illegal. Using a HK SIM in China is, obviously, still legal.
My claim is that the Chinese propaganda dissemination system is less developed and less competent than the American one, in large part BECAUSE of China's blatant censorship rather than in spite of it. Whereas the American system operates in this illusion of freedom of speech, China makes no such indication. People know that media in China will, by and large, follow government policy. As a result, manufacturing consent is very challenging because people are inherently more skeptical of "news" they read. As a result, there's a strong understanding around the fluidity of "fact" in modern Chinese culture.
Non-Chinese perspectives are easily accessible across the firewall as well as through travel to Hong Kong/Taiwan (which is both very cheap and very accessible for those in tier 1/2 cities).
Unlike Putin with Ukraine, Bush with Iraq, Bush with Afghanistan, or Clinton with Yugoslavia, Xi Jinping has struggled to get any sort of significant traction for an invasion of Taiwan. Public support for it is estimated at around 25% after adjusting for polling bias, with support for an invasion without first pursuing economic normalization or other solutions dropping to as low as 1%. This is despite Xi Jinping posturing on the issue for years. It's a startlingly failure of what many claim to be one of the most restrictive Internet systems in the world. In contrast, the Iraq War was started when public perception was polling at 60% happy for an invasion in the next week or so (54% if the UN didn't allow it).
I believe that this failure is in large part because Chinese propaganda is too blatant. Whereas the US has teams like the 4th PsyOps Airborne and "NGOs" like Atlantic Council, Chinese propaganda comes from the government or from people who are knowingly parroting government policy. While that's pretty good at getting broad public perception to align, it fails at driving any decisive action because it provides neither the illusion of choice nor the radicalization necessary for decisive policy to pass.