Compulsory Purchase Orders (Foreign Jurisdictions)

stopthevoting

I see many photos and videos such as this one, https://www.facebook.com/reel/499339252754229, showing motorways or dual carriageways being built around private houses where the owners refused to move. These places seem to be in China. I find it very puzzling that this could occur in such a country where I thought the authorities would have full powers to build public infrastructure. How does it happen that private individuals can hold out against big road projects, when individuals in western democracies such as Ireland would have to sell their property by Compulsory Purchase Order. Also, I seem to remember hearing that some residents in Beijing had to move out of neighbourhoods which were demolished and rebuilt in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games. Everything I thought I knew about the Chinese political system makes these videos very surprising.

Lucien_Sarti

https://news.cgtn.com/news/7749444f35557a6333566d54/index.html

Though the two parties failed to reach an agreement on compensation, the local government guaranteed their safety and continued providing electricity and water to the family.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674d30556a4d31457a6333566d54/index.html

IMO, in a bourgeois shithole er…country - everything is designed from top down to suit the 0.001% (or comprador class in Irelands case) so while there is compensation paid after a CPO - you get no other choice. Basically ‘like it or lump it sunshine’. The Irish individual (propagandised into the delusion that s/he has the most liberty that any human ever had in history) is, in reality, a mere irrelevant speedbump or a flea on the windscreen of infrastructure construction.

In a country like China where power has ever so gently been long ago removed from the tender grasp of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the majority (99%) are placed at a high status in the planning calculus -> thus the existence of these nail houses.

I could answer your question at other levels (including how governing there is built upwards from the smallest hamlet to first tier megacities). But one higher level of analysis I find interesting, and what I think you are alluding to in this query, is at the level - how everything printed, written about and broadcast about communism (& especially China) in ‘the West’ is and has ALWAYS BEEN total lies (just an easier way of summarising the distortion wrapped up in tangential nuggets of truth) – in 'respectable' ??? status quo history, academia, comics, popular books, movies, TV, music.

A question to ponder

Q. Why are we subject to endless lies about socialism/communism on what is allegedly 'our' media?

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122422022#Comment_122422022

The Chinese CP have no qualms about forcibly removing people from their land. They've forcibly relocated tens of millions of people for various construction projects.

I notice how you have attempted to insulate yourself from any contrary facts by pre-emptively declaring that they are lies. That's the argument of a complete charlatan.

Nody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122422022#Comment_122422022

You mean lies such as the three gorges dam flooding where they dump over 2m of water on their own citizens without warning drowning out their own cities? Or perhaps you refer to the CCP pumped out PR images of firemen rescuing people in the storm which turns out to be firemen in a city being filmed while they are pumping out the "rain" through hoses? Or how they fire up satellite rockets in urban areas having the boosters falling down on their own population? Or how about the inspected fire hoses in new buildings that are not connected to anything? Their rockets being filled with water instead of rocket fuel because it was stolen at all levels of the army? The banks refusing to return money to the people who deposited it? People being told they have to buy a house to help stabilize the market by the local government bodies? I could go on about your dream country and "the lies" because honestly the reality is way worse then the "lies" that you perceive in western media.

Lucien_Sarti

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122423404#Comment_122423404

This is all standard, hoary, tedious anti-communist, anti-China spin built on sparse morsels of fact. The space debris thing is a little interesting. That site was chosen in the 60s during the Sino-Soviet split (quite a difficult concept for western anti-communists to exploit due to narrative confusion and contradiction); the CPC wanted to keep this port away from the coast and the Soviet border. The accidents I have checked on were 1996, 2018 & one last month. Obviously not ideal, this issue will hopefully be resolved soon by the use of the Gobi desert & Hainan island lauch ports (& closure of Xichang). The other 3 main space stations are better situated. Which launch center is located within an urban area?

I question that when one stands back and looks at it holistically - isn’t anti-communist rhetoric insultingly stupid in its shameless audaciousness.

For millenia, in certain parts of the surface of the planet (aka Kingdoms) small minority groups of what in modern terminology would be called fascists or mafia, oppressed the masses so much so that there were regular slave revolts, which transformed in feudal times into peasant revolts and in recent modern history transformed again into communist revolts.

As soon as the first workers state was established in 1917, anti-communist oppressors in the West started telling their still oppressed subjects/’bourgeois electorates’/cannon fodder soldiers that the only reason for what happened there is these oppressed serfs in Russia just want *Power* so they can oppress, abuse & massacre people from their own class just for the fun of it (this is the standard technique “Accuse the enemy of that which you are guilty”).

If I had to summarise IMO all past & present anti-communist rhetoric & propaganda, that is what it all boils down to: degrading & demeaning nonsense; I say this having been codded by this cultish propaganda for decades and once you see through it, you then can’t believe anyone else is fooled by it (ofc above technique requires ownership & control of almost all media and endless 1984-esque repetition).

Also, can you explain the nail house thing and please don’t say inefficient Chinese bureaucracy or something unworthy of comment like that.

Lucien_Sarti

Unfortunately the way I write, it may appear it is unfeasible to disagree with me, that is not my intention, sadly I am only able to write polemically! That’s all it is.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058361102/compulsory-purchase-orders-foreign-jurisdictions

I find it very puzzling that this could occur in such a country….

Everything I thought I knew about the Chinese political system makes these videos very surprising

I didn’t really answer this specifically so let me explain how I arrived at my (fairly standard socialist) view.

Firstly- what is the social order in the west? Status quo defenders will talk plenty about a working class and a middle class but they have almost nothing to say about a ruling class. IMO, that is as untenable as saying there was no ruling class in slave & feudal times. As if they abandoned their need to dominate & coercively control their fellow man after they initiated the first parliaments and just went fishing or something. That is why (having read lots of old communism V capitalism threads on here & p.ie) both sides talk past each other for the most part which I hope to try to address at least that here.

Next, the ruling class control what the vast majority of people think about AES (actually existing socialist) countries. Everyone in my family & wider circle that I mention China to - they all have an identical preposterously OTT negative view of China: yet none have ever been to China or have any Chinese acquaintances or know even the simplest fact about how China is actually governed. This can only come from media of all types & deliberate omission in the education system.

The ruling class have a low opinion of you & I & everyone else - a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very low opinion of us all. As a starting point , here are two good books on how mass mind control is achieved in what is purported to be ‘free, open, democratic societies’. Irish media is structured the same way:

Manufacturing Consent – Chomsky, Hermann

Inventing Reality – Michael Parenti (free pdf in an online library).

There are plenty of clips of both on YT, here is a long speech by Parenti you can skip around on. Audience questions at 52 min

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DCFODL58ik

Once this realisation clicked with me, having been an excessive consumer of politics on radio, TV, newspapers & magazines: I turned them all off. That is not in the sense of ‘look at me, I’m cool because I don’t watch MSM’ – no, it’s about this knowledge and self-respect.

That’s my long answer to your shrewd observation. The good news is, if you do very carefully curate where you source information & news from China (e.g. the search engines are all largely gatekept so you have to be creative & determined) - it will blow your mind what’s going on there.

Hotblack Desiato

How does a "socialist" country allow people to die if their relatives can't afford to pay for their healthcare?

Lucien_Sarti

I googled “china people die if their relatives can't afford to pay for their healthcare” to see what you could be alluding to!

Most of the results were 2005-2007 era. All were Western MSM or neo-imperial gov’t agencies. Unsurprisingly, none were from Chinese sources.

Firstly, the truth is Chinese healthcare is universal & affordable (very low cost); China's coverage of essential health services is now ranked among the most developed countries in the world (as of 2023 -WHO). A linked issue, China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty between 1980-2020. That is unprecedented in human history (plus they have a significantly higher definition of extreme poverty than extortion racketeers like the world bank).

One of the results above was a Guardian article from 2007 (13 years before the end of extreme poverty) where such allegations about healthcare costs were made for some named individuals. Such individual cases can’t be investigated or falsified at this remove.

But, Western MSM distorts & lies about healthcare in the same wholly fraudulent, cunningly cynical (albeit primary-school-playground) manner as they misrepresented & lied about the poverty elimination program as follows:

Western media uses different definitions of poverty to confuse readers and dismiss China's achievement.

There is: Absolute poverty, Relative poverty, Circumstantial poverty, Systemic poverty. Absolute poverty is the minimum a human being needs to sustain a dignified life. Relative poverty, is a threshold relative in each country, depending on the level of wealth of said country. China's 2020 elimination of poverty was the elimination of: Systemic absolute poverty, this is a type of poverty caused by the local environment, that is systemic to the local community.

HOWEVER, anti-China propaganda cannot accept China doing something good, so they use different definitions of poverty to dismiss China's historic achievement. Their main tactics is to find videos of some poor family in China and uses that single instance of Circumstantial Poverty to discredit China's elimination of Systemic Absolute Poverty. Circumstantial poverty is a form of poverty caused by individual issues affecting that person.

Circumstantial poverty exists in every country regardless of the wealth level of said country. Anti-China propaganda will lie to discredit China on everything. So if you don't want to be treated like a fool, then think twice when you see anti-China content.

So, who to believe about China’s healthcare

1. Western ruling class oligarchs who publicly, confidently & shamelessly admit every syllable out of their vile mouthpiece media about China is bad-faith, lies & slander (and has been for 75 years) or
2. 000s of Chinese socialists living in China talking about their own country

It’s a tough choice (not).

scrabtom

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122516687#Comment_122516687

Hmmm yeh I've thought about it and I'm going to go with the Western media on this one.

Lucien_Sarti

Fire away.

It is of course a legitimate political viewpoint to be in favour of rule of the predator class, the death cult of capitalism & its necessary, non-stop, violent imperial resource extraction.

A minority?/some?/many? of the supporters of this system, like yourself maybe, understand the well-used imperial playbook being directed at China, understand clearly that this narrative (shoved down everyone’s throat) is war propaganda aimed at the home audiences and strongly approve of the critical necessity for the endless blizzard of across-the-board lies about China.

Can’t see the attraction myself.

Brussels Sprout

Man you say all this as if China hasn't entirely switched to a rapacious capitalistic system themselves in all but name. They basically have all of the worst aspects of capitalism (income inequality, housing bubbles, plutocrats, destruction of the environment, celebrity culture, the veneration of greed etc) without any of the basic freedoms (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, a free and open internet etc).

You talk about "the necessary, non-stop, violent imperial resource extraction" of capitalism as if the Chinese haven't happily inserted them right into that system themselves. There's no shortage of Chinese mines all over Africa, ripping opff the locals as they extract the raw materials for their own factories, while the soya beans required to feed Chinese pigs have led to devastating deforestation in the Amazon.

Spare us the sermon. I'm no fan of western capitalism but the Chinese are certainly no better and probably a lot worse.

Lucien_Sarti

The current ‘housing bubble’ in China that Western MSM presents as a sign of economic failure or evidence that China has an identical capitalist boom/bust system as the West has to be the funniest thing ever - in a species-level, existentialist, abject depressing sense.

It demonstrates in one cringeworthy narrative case study everything I have been saying here and how simple-minded & gullible the ruling class thinks the majority of people in the OECD/West are (in our defence - propaganda only works when one doesn’t know what’s being said IS propaganda).

Part of the obscured detail:-

https://twitter.com/GodfreeTrh/status/1752980086205341782

The Communist Party of China was aware that Evergrande was commodifying property in a wild western gamble against the CPC. So they discussed what to do about it in 2021, or so, and decided this particular property speculator would not be helped and thus they would go to the wall.

Blackrock and other western Banksters were left holding the bag for their speculation on Evergrande and other foreign backed speculation projects. The communist party was never going to let small homebuyers suffer – Rebecca Chan

Also oops

Does your ‘respectable’, ‘trustworthy’ Western oligarch media tell you this. They do in their hole. The IT, FT, economist and all the other broadsheets (exact same rags propaganda-wise as the Sun or Daily Mail but use words of > 5 letters) write 3,000 word ‘sermons’ wailing and gnashing their teeth about imminent fears of the Chinese property collapse and how should international investors be protected & saved. <sad, crying emoji>

It is all such a grim farce but unfortunately again, the joke is on the consumers of this oligarch obfuscation.

Must look into your pigs/soya/Amazon bait.

moon2

This thread has a certain amount of morbid fascination for me.

propaganda only works when one doesn’t know what’s being said IS propaganda

That's an interesting position for you to hold. The reason I think it's interesting is this quote:

The Communist Party of China was aware that Evergrande was commodifying property in a wild western gamble against the CPC. So they discussed what to do about it in 2021, or so, and decided this particular property speculator would not be helped and thus they would go to the wall

So the CPC decided to crash the housing market, and leave many people without the homes they paid for, just so they could teach one speculator a lesson?

It doesn't even sound like propaganda, just needlessly punishing their own citizens for some bizarre reason?

If we're supposed to believe this was a planned outcome for years, then this is a pretty awful management by the government.

Perhaps we're intended to believe that it's a good outcome that these people have no homes, and developers are being bankrolled by hundreds of billions by the state to complete houses and the CPC is so smart for creating this crisis years ago... But if that really is the case it sounds like classic case of "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears". This ain't a win for anyone involved, and definitely not a win for China or the Chinese people?

Similarly,

Most of the results were 2005-2007 era. All were Western MSM or neo-imperial gov’t agencies. Unsurprisingly, none were from Chinese sources.

You're right. It's not surprising, in the same way it's never surprising that authoritarian states rarely have negative news about the government in their governmentally controlled media :)

That said - for anyone with English as a first, second or even third language, the unusual word choice and sentence structure really emphasizes the strangeness of the content

Lucien_Sarti

while the soya beans required to feed Chinese pigs have led to devastating deforestation in the Amazon.

So I looked into soy grown in Brazil/Amazon, it’s not something I know much about. Greenpeace say that the Amazon forest part of the soy issue was resolved in 2006 but that soy grown in other S. American countries still impinges on other forests.

Instead of yet more “China-bad” “independent thinking” I would say this is a global issue. I now think animal meat & fish is stone age food (as well as being needlessly cruel to animals). Any protein got from meat comes from the protein in plants that the animals eat. I’ve cut my meat intake in half & fish by 90% in recent years and aim to eliminate them completely. It would be better if everyone on the planet did too.

So the CPC decided to crash the housing market, and leave many people without the homes they paid for, just so they could teach one speculator a lesson?

Perhaps we're intended to believe that it's a good outcome that these people have no homes, and developers are being bankrolled by hundreds of billions by the state to complete houses…

Ok, I shouldn’t have started with the phrase:- The current ‘housing bubble’ in China.

To clarify:- there is no property bubble in China, there was no recent property crash. Not a single mortgage holder in China was evicted. There was no gov’t bailout to any property developer.

This was a financial attack on China by ONE company - Evergrande. The attack blew up in their face because capitalism is sensibly regulated in China (compared to the West). These marauders will likely lose most or all of their raid investment funds, it is not finalised yet. The whole thing is hilarious.

However google “property bubble China” and read the endless obfuscation in articles from “respected” media (then compare that to the clarity of the tweet from Godfree Roberts above). In the event anyone wants to go on a jarring, uncomfortable journey of decolonising their mind from anti-communist brainwashing, you could start by asking yourself – if the ruling class can tell this many reality-inverting lies about something happening right now, what about all the stuff they said about communism for the last 110 years.

moon2

There's only so much one can discuss when the response is effectively "everyone is lying, except for Chinese state run media which say that China is doing great".

Lucien_Sarti

You’re not wrong about the limits of discussion in this ‘Capitalist Truth’ dystopia. And China is doing fine.

Its not that everyone is lying – its only the capitalist class that are lying. They are in relative terms negligible in numbers (and btw, of say 8 characteristics, being extreme liars is by a long, long, long distance the least obnoxious trait of the typical capitalist ruling class individual).

There are thousands of Chinese & foreigners working & living in China live streaming their daily routines. None of them mention economic hardship, bubbles or homelessness for the simple reason that these are western oligarch fictions.

moon2

Oh really?

I suppose it is hard to track unemployment, and underemployment, if the government decides to stop tracking it when it becomes too bad.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66506132

Interestingly, it was then restated using a new metric, and that new metric followed the same trajectory - worsening over time

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/15/china-july-data-retail-sales-industrial-production.html

I understand you can't seem to find any negative news at all about China, the people, or any of the current woes and worries about it's economy. It is just one more strong signal that this is nothing but propaganda - actual propaganda. It's just baseless accusations, and factless arguments, and ridiculous class based hyperbole. Shrug.

Lucien_Sarti

So you don’t want to regurgitate the same China-bad talking points that EVERYONE else reflexively does (which is not unconnected to the fact that it & the DPRK are two of the main targets of US empire war-propaganda for 70+ years).

Instead, you only want to talk about problems, woes and worries of China as if it was any other country like say Luxembourg or Malta, in an ideologically blind but definitely NOT in a China-bad, CPC-bad sense.

Great.

Of course China has a very long list of problems to address just like every other country. Youth unemployment is one – true; I’d pick two more - they still burn far too much coal and the security issue i.e. never ending military (& economic) aggression and threats from the primitive, rogue US empire.

Re: youth unemployment- China is going through a transitioning period, from manufacturing to a prioritisation of the services economy and there are a lot of complex moving parts across many industries happening there atm to easily summarise.

Chinese youth unemployment is a combination of higher tertiary education intake rate (creating a smaller base for larger fluctuation) . A transitioning economy, assembly line jobs in China can't even find enough workers. -another view

Based on their track record of solving several orders of magnitude more difficult issues than youth unemployment, I’m very confident China will have solved or minimised it years or decades before the likes of Spain, Sweden, Greece, Italy do (who currently all have higher YU rates; Jun 2023).

45.8% youth unemployment in capitalist India – wow, what a simply wonderful system it is for serving peoples needs – all across the world.

Headline: …but industrial data disappoint

Sub headline: Industrial production rose by 5.1%, below the poll’s forecast of 5.2%.

A drop of 0.1% from………….an arbitrary ***forecast*** that some hapless wage-slave pulled out of their ass! But it did rise by 5.1% and THIS is the headline.

This is a good example of why Western financial reporting is bad for one’s sense of sanity. China operates on 20-50 year timescales, the West on moronic 3 month scales.

you can't seem to find any negative news at all about…the <Chinese> people

What does this mean?

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122536689#Comment_122536689

Many years ago I travelled through Vietnam (another country ruled by a communist party). One day I noticed that there was a national paper that was printed in English so I bought it and read it from cover to cover. It was most unlike any national paper that I had ever read before. All of the stories were either positive or blandly neutral. Things like how production of such and such a product was at record levels, how the planning for some event was on track or how such and such party official was celebrating 10 years in their role.

The job of the media shouldn't be to cheerlead or to act as a PR agency for the government.

Out of curiosity Lucian, is there anything that you would criticise the Chinese Communist Party for? (and not in a back-handed insult of the West such as: "They placed too much trust in the Western devils and were betrayed")

Lucien_Sarti

Brussels, the CPC are better at self-criticism than anything I could come up with (contrast below with the baby drool fed to the West about the CPC on oligarch media)-

Excerpts from Xi Jinping's report to the 20th CPC National Congress, 2022

These problems inside the party included a "slide toward weak, hollow, and watered-down Party leadership in practice" leaders "wavering in political conviction" and "pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism, and extravagance"

The report goes on to note that "privilege-seeking mindsets and practices posed a serious problem, and some deeply shocking cases of corruption had been uncovered."

Then the report goes into more structural issues facing the Chinese economy including "acute structural and institutional problems. Development was imbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable, and the traditional development model could no longer keep us moving forward."

But this report really sums up the problems this model brought with it: uneven development, inequality, environmental issues, etc. Xi Jinping's leadership of the party has been characterized by the "leftward" turn towards greater emphasis on party command of the economy.

It's interesting to note how Xi Jinping links these problems to "misguided patterns of thinking such as money worship, hedonism, egocentricity, and historical nihilism" as well as a lack of "confidence in the socialist political system".

In essence, the development model that had brought China out of poverty and afforded unprecedented improvements in standards of living also brought with it the inevitable problems of integrating a subordinate capitalist mode of production.

Now, when have PR obsessed FF or FG ever spoken about themselves like that?

Btw, the paper you read is called agitprop. It is a form of encouragement. It is not unlike when a little child comes home from school and shows her mammy she got a star on her copybook for best in class for that weeks homework and the mammy coos praise & makes a big fuss about it. Encouragement when done right feels good & builds a sense of community or meitheal.

In your time in Vietnam did you see any evidence of skittery people cowering in fear afraid to say anything negative about the gov’t or the socialist order. If there is no freedom of speech in AES countries, as Capitalist tycoons claim, you would have mountains of undeniable evidence of same even if you were there for only a week.

Brussels Sprout

I asked you for your own personal criticisms. I didn't ask for the party's officially sanctioned self criticism.

What do you think the party has done badly?

Every system is flawed so you shouldn't have any problems coming up with a few examples off the top of your head.

Lucien_Sarti

I’m only learning, I haven’t enough knowledge to make useful criticisms yet. They maybe could have avoided the border war with Vietnam in the 80’s? The cultural revolution in the 60s got out of hand in the first 18 months and was a black mark.

Edit: I don't know what you mean by "why the party has done badly" - this is what normal course correction looks like in a sane, rational society.

So about your observations of no freedom of speech in Vietnam. If you didn’t see any evidence, it doesn’t mean you’re incorrect - just that you personally didn't see any.

Hey2 – does it grind your gears that 28% of humans live under Communism now in the 2020s and your slave-masters can’t get rid of it without destroying themselves and all of humanity?

In the 30s & 40s - 22 million+ Chinese were slaughtered to crush communism by local & Japanese ruling classes and it still won against them both (you'll never guess why!).

“Silly ideological rubbish” – Sure dude.

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122544879#Comment_122544879

Not to forget "The Great Leap Forward" either

Lucien_Sarti

Just two bits of context before saying anything about the Cultural Revolution.

Capitalist media-owning liars (and the lackey historians they amplify) rarely contextualise or even mention the history of a country before communism arrived on the scene. They do that for a very good reason – if they did, their narrative collapses like a chocolate teapot. Bearing in mind the 22 million killed in the Japanese occupation (be in no doubt that one of its top priorities was to eliminate communism from Asia).

1 The West make out like the Cultural Revolution was the worst thing to happen to Chinese people

It was NOT!

The WHITE SUPREMACISTS squatting on China & inflicting the Opium Holocaust on the Chinese for over a century was the worst thing BAR NONE in China’s 5000 years of history.

-Rebecca Chan

2 Chinese life expectancy 1850-2020, this graph has the time/year axis removed. Can you guess when the communists came to power?

GHU-yoLakAAVyDk.jpg

Also, some macro deaths figures for Mao. The first figure 25/100,000 in 1950 is straddling 26 years of brutal war. The death rate 1965-1970 (relevant to the CR) shows the third major drop in a row. The comparison to similar countries India & Philippines tells another story.

GHUUq8DbYAAIk_Q.jpeg

Imo, the cultural revolution is a tragic, bewildering and fascinating event. I think it should be interesting for people who have no interest in politics let alone communism. It has a lot of lessons about human nature, fervour, mob mentality and the fine line between freedom and lawlessness.

The death toll is hard to put a number on, but it is in the range of a fraction of the low end of the different numbers thrown around. The millions, tens of millions or bajillions figures are as usual ridiculous, worthless slander, just like everything else Capitalists have to say about China.

The smallest number of deaths were the unfortunate people who were cruelly/unfairly targeted by the youthful mobs, a much bigger category were different red guard factions fighting and killing each other. The largest death toll was in combat (basically a low-level civil war) in 1968/69 when Mao directed the PLA to bring to an end to the different red guard fiefdoms and the overall anarchic chaos. A very interesting topic, still highly debated.

Hotblack Desiato

Unsurprisingly, none were from Chinese sources.

Totally unsurprising, yes. Just not for the reason you seem to think.

It's breathtakingly naive to post something like your quote above in relation to a country where no freedom of speech or free media exist.

Hong Kong's few remaining freedoms won't last long, soon it'll be the same as the PRC itself.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/asia-pacific/2024/08/29/hong-kong-court-convicts-two-editors-of-sedition/

Lucien_Sarti

The 2019 HK riots were a US backed and funded colour revolution attempt and that paper was directly involved; so it was participating in an active CIA insurrection. So this is not JUST isolated free speech, this is operational support of an ongoing foreign backed coup attempt. Jimmy Lai was an organiser of this operation too which is why he was jailed.

Unlike the US empire, China is not run by criminals so it doesn’t respond by trying to organise coups in countries that attack it. This equating of active insurrection with free speech is really weird (but very prevalent in imperial-normalising UK MSM).

Are you suggesting people can try to overthrow governments in the west and they don't get killed/jailed because of our free speech values?

Hong Kong's few remaining freedoms won't last long, soon it'll be the same as the PRC itself.

HK was an apartheid colonial shithole where Chinese were treated as 3rd class citizens. Linking the notion of freedom with HK’s 156 year colonial history has to be some kind of joke.

Brussels Sprout

Appreciate the commitment to the bit but as moon2 said earlier "There's only so much one can discuss when the response is effectively "everyone is lying, except for Chinese state run media which say that China is doing great".

blackwhite

This feels like reading repeated press releases from Mick Wallace and Clare Daly.

Lucien_Sarti

Appreciate the commitment 

Your welcome. I’ve put up links & explained how the media & mind control works in the West so there’s no need to repeat it again.

As for discussion, maybe you're right. Socialist China is way too big to laugh at like the DPRK or dismiss like Cuba – it developed without any foreign plunder, it is integrated into the world economy like the US used to be post 1945. In this situation, the existing Western narrative about China reinforces how ->

neo-imperialist foreign affairs/geopolitics, of all things, really shows what an anti-human horror-show the entire capitalist dictatorship system we live under is (& why).

I wouldn’t like to be defending it - even on a shooting the breeze board like this.

Try to defend the English & French ruling class’s ambitious 1839-1949 effort to exterminate the Chinese off the planet with heroin (but keep 50 million coolies alive for slave labour). This is identical to the German ruling class plan for Barbarossa – exterminate the Russian & slav people keeping 20-30 million for slave labour. Or the European invaders who exterminated 90 million existing people from North America to take their land & resources.

How can anyone who isn’t a psychopath defend that? And why would anyone want to?

I’d argue – nobody can;

I’d go further and say nobody really tries to.

csirl

Came here out of curiosity to see how CPO works in other countries.........and got a thread filled with essays about China.

Can we keep on topic?

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122559620#Comment_122559620

You have it bad.