To feel I've been lied to about China

[Sulettamercury]

I'm well aware the country is far from perfect but no where is and I've just come back for the summer after spending 2 years there working as a teacher I'm going back in a few weeks.

What I can't get over is the fact all my friends seem to be indoctrinated into thinking China is this 1984 style hell hole where you can't criticise the government or do anything without being in constant fear.

I have to say living there really opened my eyes and I was shocked when in my first months of teaching one of the Chinese workers (now a good friend) started openly moaning about government policy and I'll admit I was nervous at the time but soon realised nothing would happen and that despite what I was told no one came after her and she didn't disappear and that every one was moaning about government policy if it didn't suit them with no consequences.

The infrastructure is also wonderful and far from the cheap rubbish you're told it is and housing isn't all on the verge of collapse or at least no worse than some of the rubbish I've seen here in the UK

Again it's definitely not perfect but AIBU to say I I feel like we're lied to in the west about how bad China really is and that some of the things we accuse them of we either do ourselves or we blow out of proportion?

OP, having a positive experience in China doesn’t negate all of the many terrible things they’ve done, and continue to do. PP have listed many of their atrocities eloquently.

What puzzles me is that you seem to think the two things are mutually exclusive - but they’re not.

It’s no different than Dubai. I wouldn’t set foot there because of its horrific human rights record and the abject way they treat women. And yet, I have a friend who regularly visits who describes a fabulous location. Both of these things can be fair and true, and it’s the same for China.

I don’t think in the U.K. we’re particularly fed anything that’s too off the mark about China. I suspect it’s different in the US, especially while the orange toddler is in charge.

Ultimately though we will all view other countries through our own cultural lens. That doesn’t mean it’s propaganda but it is the difference between hearing a place described and going to see it firsthand.

The fact that China cosies up to North Korea and Russia should give you a clue OP. The problem we have is that since Brexit we’ve pissed off Europe, and now have to take our chances with either a hysterical US President who ignores the law and uses state agencies to settle personal vendettas, or China which is a very long way from the U.K. ideologically.

I live in DongBei, you should hear the taxi drivers complaining about the govt up here! 🤣

This is a sweetly informative video. Her village is about the size of my small, English market town in a rural area.

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The outstanding factor to me is their fantastic public transport provision! We have a little train station that connects to our nearest large towns, where you have to change, and a whole five buses a day to the same towns. Our trains no longer stop at the actual villages, some of which have only three buses a week.

Mia's video shows a LOT of hand-farming. That's incredibly inefficient, back-breaking work for limited reward. China still requires certain quotas of specified crops from agricultural regions; by the looks of it, her village produces wheat. You definitely do not see our farmers spreading their grains on the main street to dry, turning it twice a day by hand 😯

We don't have Uber or JustEat but we do get parcel deliveries, thank the gods of logistics. I'd be stuffed if I had to attend a depot 2km away to fetch everything. We also get supermarket deliveries, even in the small villages. The farmers' market's okay as it goes, but it would be very restrictive to have to buy all our food from whatever the local farmers have over-produced each week.

The Chinese government's been doing some interesting work in crop diversification - their single crop per region policies deplete the soil & water resources - and in agricultural automation using renewable energy. I noticed, though, that these experiments are very piecemeal and often seemed a bit half-hearted. The farmers in the experimental regions have no choice on whether to take part. I don't know what happens to them if an experiment fails.

Some of my friends had brilliant stories about oddness in remote Chinese villages, but these date back to the 1990s and life is changing very fast there. No subways or internet back then, for one thing!

I have had a long hard look at Chinese business initiatives in action in SE Asian countries such as Myanmar,Laos and Cambodia.The 99 year lease at King's casino in Laos for example where they manufacture synthetic narcotics and related products to flood the intetnational drugs market and kill many young people in the West often online.The human trafficking of females from Myanmar for marriage.The extraction for a pittance (or plastic chairs)of natural resources such as teak and gemstones from northern Myanmar?The Chinese mafia setting themselves up in Asian cities(Phnon Penh,Yangon,Chiang Mai..) with Chinese government documentation to take control of local businesses?The alleged intervention of PLA forces in Myanmar to stop the military junta from being defeated last year.The more i ve looked and seen with my own eyes,the more critical i feel about the C.C.P's form of governance.The form and actions of their governments are key to understanding Chinese thinking.They are neo-Imperial(some academics and military leaders here have expressed admiration for the British Empire) even at this stage and amoral in approach to dealings outwith their own country.We have a handful of UK billionaires to content with in terms of economic equality....they have more billionaires (and quite possible a hidden trillionaire or two)who are firstly nominally Communist (anti-west and can afford to be)and who are able to back their own RMB up with the massive yearly floods of USD remitted from globalized trade.Thats why when Donald Trump talks about devaluing the Chinese currency against the US dollar he's told it's a non starter.What they do with those dollars in Beijing has provided the success you see in modern China (but it is also working against the west in many ways such as above).If for example if they wanted to influence global events they could rapidly flood the US dollar onto world markets to try alter the value.I believe they have yet to try that,but they are certainly financing a lot of dangerous organisations that are causing huge problems worldwide...amongst the nicer more official stuff at home and in international diplomacy.The division i think is split between the C.C.P and P.L.A,they work in different ways with the P.L.A and related military doing the covert more nasty work.
To have a undefeated clique of Communist families who have trillions of US dollars to spend on whatever they fancy(Take over the O.S.S economy in ASEAN?,fund Mexican drug cartels?,Lease the main port in Darwin for 99 years?Buy 50 years worth of oil and gas from Gazprom a few weeks before Moscow embarks on a invasion of the Ukraine?Buy up loads of European businesses since the 1980s and shipping them whole to mainland China and then taking on competitors with subsided pricing?)..... is i think probably one of the biggest dangers to the west today.

And i was a teacher there too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peng_Shuai#:~:text=In%20November%202021%2C%20in%20what,became%20widely%20censored%20in%20China.

I think you’re being incredibly naive OP. The Chinese Government may not bother about the Chinese equivalent of Mrs Jones at number 15 who works as a secretary and has no public profile complaining about them. But if you publicise their policies or human rights abuses on a national or still worse international scale I think you would find out very quickly how dangerous that was.

I went to a talk last year by a Chinese author who cannot return to China to see her elderly parent because it has been made very clear to her that it wouldn’t be safe to do so.

I am sure a country such as China is more developed than we give it credit in the west but the human rights reputation is awful. Perhaps if you just go about your daily life and aren't a political activist then all is well but scratch the surface and it will be a different story.
Nevertheless travel really does broaden the mind and from what I have seen in podcasts on YouTube living standards can be quite high with affordable housing and reasonable infrastructure. I have never been over though though so cannot comment firsthand.

You’re right the forced labour and oppression are simply a figment of our imagination. They say travel broadens the mind - in your case it seems to have done the opposite. Obviously you can prove me wrong when we see the results of the next Chinese election.

Forced labour camps? Suppression of religion? In the UK? On any of the indices of human rights the UK will be in the top 10 and China in the bottom 10.

I was thinking about Peng Shuai too.

It was all just really shocking - a public example of what happens to anyone who displeases Chinese authorities.

Just another example to add to their list of human rights atrocities.

I haven't visited China but my perception is that it's a mix of represssion, but also very advanced and busy in many ways. So it's complicated. But the West is a mixed bag too, especially the US. Much more freedom politically but often economically very divided with pockets of deep poverty.

TBF I don’t think it’s any worse than Dubai and many of the same people criticising China prob other on holiday

it’s the same hypocrisy too, prob spend their lives going on about Palestine and electric cars then buy nearly everything from china

Sorry, couldn't read past the fact that you've been teaching there and "no where it is".

When I worked there for a short time I saw extreme poverty - an extended family living in a garage with no electricity. The only water was running in a gulley down the middle of the street. Also, I was in a university, and the head of department was also the Communist Party rep so everyone was very careful about what they said. Also, one of the student’s dog disappeared and she stated quite firmly that it would have been cooked and eaten. However, I would also add that they were desperate to learn about England, although their view of it was based on Charles Dickens.

I work with people from Hong Kong who have left their country because the Chinese government are monitoring peoples social media and throwing them in jail if they dare post anything they don’t like.

Not many old and unwell men being given long prison sentences just for owning a newspaper that displeased the government though.

Honestly some people!

Well, the UAE gives its own citizens free money, housing, education and all sorts. It treats its foreign residents a lot worse than that. Chinese people are not kept in luxury by their government and their country doesn't import needy workers.

Both regimes are repressive and ruthlessly exploitative, neither is a democracy. Apart from that, the two have little in common. UAE has a state religion, protected by law. China has none. It's illegal to express atheism in the UAE, in China it's risky to express religion. Women's rights are poles apart.

Everybody buys nearly everything from China, around the globe! Even if you somehow avoid 'made in China', the things you use are made using Chinese components or technology.

When I did a week in china I really liked it, was in central Bangkok and it was very clean, the streets felt spacious to walk down, everyone seemed to be having fun. - very different to what I expected. I only saw a small snippet though so probably not representative of the whole country and all times but still I do think that a lot of people have a nice life there. There’s probably also a lot that don’t (I know commuting can take forever but that’s also no different to a lot of places

You were in Bangkok, China? 👀

It’s disingenuous to talk about slavery today because Britain used to have slavery?

China had slavery until the 20thC so hopefully you take that into account when considering their situation today as well, right?

Oh wait, you don’t. You analyse China on its situation today (and that’s assuming your description is accurate) as though the country had just popped into existence - but the U.K. gets the whole “Oh but historically they had slaves” schtick. 🤯

China is amazing. I’d move there if I could learn the language but I’ve tried and it’s too hard for me

They may not have attacked Taiwan yet but aren’t they doing some sort of soft blockade? When they ramp that up and the rest of the world can’t get chips we’ll know about it. They already occupy Tibet.

like getting arrested in Britain for social media posts?

I take it you’re not a Christian OP

Who thinks that??

Whoops meant Beijing, it’s been a long weeks