After seeing a megathread praising Mao Zedong, an actual mass killer, and a post about a guy saying “99% of westerners are 100000000000% sure they know what happened in ‘Tiny Man Square’ […] the reasons for this are complex and involve propaganda […],” I am genuinely curious what leads people to this belief system. Even if propaganda is involved when it comes to Tiananmen Square, it doesn’t change the atrocities that were/are committed everywhere else in China.
I am all for letting people believe what they want but I am lost on why one would deliberately praise any authoritarian system this hard.
Can someone please help me understand why this is such a large and prominent community? How have these ideals garnered such a following outside of China?
First and foremost, I think people should consume media that is not from the West. You really can’t claim to be an internationalist if your media bubble (I’m including social media as well) is entirely situated within the West. To be an internationalist means recognizing that Western thought isn’t the end all of human civilization. What constitutes the West is actually pretty small. It’s only through imperialism that the West has a very oversized presence. But the West is only one of many viewpoints. At a bare minimum, you have to read what non-Westerners say.
But it’s not just a case of picking any random non-Western country since many of their news media has been captured by the West through NGOs. Personally, I find news from Anglophone non-Western countries (India, Nigeria, and so on) to be bad overall as far as echoing what has already been said on Reuters and the BBC. The easiest way is to get out of the bubble is to pick news media from countries that are hostile to the West. That’s one of the reasons why you see Russian/Chinese/Iranian/Venezuelan news media cited in ML circles. It’s an easy way to pierce through the Western bubble even if you must be cognizant of the geopolitics at play. It’s not the only way by any means. In many ways, social media by non-Westerners can be superior even when accounting for botting and censorship. There’s a reason why the US wanted to get rid of Tiktok and I strongly suspect they will move to do the same with XHS, which actually has authentic Chinese people (of a certain demographic) on social media.
When you step outside the Western bubble, it’s very obvious that the vast majority of criticism of China comes from a broader Cold War 2.0 strategy by the US to attack China. Whatever is not wholly made up is put an exorbitant emphasis on. There are numerous problems with Chinese society, of course. Many of them are actually pretty apparent if you consume Chinese social media made by Chinese people in China. However, you’re not going to find this in any article by the BBC unless it’s to push some ridiculous narrative about how Taiwan is going to be invaded or Tokyo is going to be nuked by China. You have to step outside the Western bubble.