I don't think that setting up an enemy is what Chinese government needs to survive after 1979. it might be used to. on the contrary, what they need to survive now is to keep their economy stable and strong to prove/maintain their legitimacy to rule the country.
how many Chinese people have you ever talked to before you say "most of them are brainwashed"? If more than 1 billion people are brainwashed in the era of Internet, either 1. it is a huge success of Chinese government or 2. it's not the truth.
As we all know, VPN is very popular in China. It's just an easy job to access information out of Great Fire Wall.
thinking critically, could you be "brainwashed" by some degree when you assume more than 1 billion people got brainwashed?
vPN is very popular in China? In what range? Thousands of users? Hundreds of thousands? Dozens of millions? Hundreds of millions? The scale matters completely for the discussion.
And brainwashing does not start with the internet. education is a major source of brainwashing and do not discount mass media either which still shapes culture even in hyper connected countries like the US.
Brainwashing works, its not even a remotely disputable claim, we have had two large countries going thru major brainwashing efforts in the 20th century with the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and the results were very convincing in terms of how effective brainwashing can be. Not sure why you would discount brainwashing when China went thru the Cultural Revolution to basically make all dissident voices extinct or irrelevant.
>education is a major source of brainwashing and do not discount mass media either which still shapes culture even in hyper connected countries like the US
How much of your belief that the Chinese are brainwashed people who's opinions should be ignored came from school and media?
if you don't know or doubt how popular VPN is used in China, it indicates that you know little about modern China. everyone I know uses VPN or know how to use VPN if they need. as for exact scale, I'd leave that to you. you could easily figure that out as there are ton of such information online.
If brainwashing really worked greatly like you said, Soviet Union would still exist now. It was their people who overthrew Soviet Union.
exactly because of China going through the disaster like Cultural Revolution, many people just don't believe these propaganda anymore.
my point was not there is no brainwash. it's everywhere including China and US. my point was in the era of Internet and the popular use of VPN in China, i don't think the brainwash really works greatly like you'd think.
"The average Chinese person either doesn't know about Tinanmen"
I am an average Chinese person but I know it since I was a teenager. I suggest that you don't assume that Chinese people is controlled like puppet, that's simply wrong.
I watched the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests on China official TV daily when it was broadcast until the end of May 1989. I was a teenager at that time. we talked about it at school. we talked about at home. we talked about it heavily at college. we just didn't talk much about it publicly. nobody got arrested by simply talking about it, which may not be like what you might be thinking.
when I was young, there was no GFW. I remembered that I visited lots of western medias about it to better understand it by two-sided stories. and I believe that I did better understand it.
I do use VPN as many of others when I am in China. It's a common thing.
"just"? Not being able to say something in public is like not being able to say it at all. What you just talk about with your friends or family is as relevant to the public sphere as your private thoughts are.
"Not being able to say something in public is like not being able to say it at all."
buddy, being so cynical is not really helpful for any constructive discussion. not mention that I was telling a fact not argument.
even in many democratic countries, in terms of political correctness, you don't want to talk about some subjects in public. Does it really mean not being able to say it at all?
> even in many democratic countries, in terms of political correctness, you don't want to talk about some subjects in public.
Yes, and to the degree that happens, things disappear from the public sphere.
I'm German, and the Nazis are not a happy subject one wants to talk about, but being forbidden from talking about that would be so much worse. And while not everybody "wants to hear about it", there is no difference between "in public" or "in private" really, it what matters more who you talk to, or who overhears it. Neo-Nazis don't want to hear about the Holocaust, Antifa has no problem with it, for example.
The way Tiananmen is taboo in public discussion in China is an entirely different thing I would say, simply because it mainly comes from the CCP and repression, rather than the opinions of people. People may say they "don't feel the need" to talk about it, but if someone talked about it in public and wouldn't stop, they would be stopped, and people know that.
> Does it really mean not being able to say it at all?
Yes, for all practical purposes in context of what we're talking about. Maybe this will help explain:
> For Arendt the public sphere comprises two distinct but interrelated dimensions. The first is the space of appearance, a space of political freedom and equality which comes into being whenever citizens act in concert through the medium of speech and persuasion. The second is the common world, a shared and public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings which separates us from nature and which provides a relatively permanent and durable context for our activities. Both dimensions are essential to the practice of citizenship, the former providing the spaces where it can flourish, the latter providing the stable background from which public spaces of action and deliberation can arise. For Arendt the reactivation of citizenship in the modern world depends upon both the recovery of a common, shared world and the creation of numerous spaces of appearance in which individuals can disclose their identities and establish relations of reciprocity and solidarity.
But I agree that this also is a problem in the West, the public sphere isn't exactly healthy, though at least it still exists. A quote by Arendt I posted recently also applies here, both to China and the West: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175000
And from "Origins of Totalitarianism":
> The deprivation of humans of their rights, the killing of the juridical person in them is just a precondition of their being totally controlled, for which even voluntary agreement is a hindrance.
What is voluntary can change, and this is not permitted with some things (or under totalitarianism, a lot of things, until history gets rewritten and then it's not permitted to not change them).
People in the West do that all the time, too: pretend like "that's just how the world is" and they are adapting to it, rather than, as they say that, acting in a way which, together with millions who act similarly, creates and continues the situation they claim to simply adapt to. We don't fear the secret police, we just don't want to be frowned on, we just don't want to lose sleep or our appetite. That's much worse, but two wrongs still don't make a right.
I don't think the CCP is "the villain" and the rest of the world free and saintly, at all, it's just that I can't make an exception just for the CCP and pretend 2+2 is 5 in their case. So while I mean all my "cynical" (I would call it blunt) words, don't take them as just aimed at the CCP (and people who may think they might not be sooo bad etc.)
The moment you want you access the internet as a chinese kid, you can google tianmen and get information about it. Its not of course always the correct information that is on the first results, but its not like its completely wiped.
you are right. but there is bigger question of what information is "correct". no offense, it'd be naive to treat the first result of google result as being correct. we all know there is such a thing called SEO.
>Its not of course always the correct information that is on the first results
That seems like it would pertain to any google search query tho. I don't think I ever just click a single link when I'm trying to find information about a subject.
don't you think that Fedex is suspicious for diversion to the US of some Huawei packages when US government is targeting Huawei for "national security"?
what if a Chinese courier company operating in US diverts some Cisco packages to China when China is "blacklisting" Cisco? what do you think US government would do?
