• Wage_slave@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Is everything world news on lemmy about China? Like I’ve seen everything from crap articles saying China has a declining population like its a bad thing, or how the west looks like shit compared.

    Like, it’s nothing racist or offensive. Not to me at least. Just lots and lots of it being the primary topic in ways that I’m ain’t too familiar with.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      Remember that a huge part of the lemmy (and derivatives) userbase just came from Reddit, and Redditors are obsessed with China.

      • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        I wonder where they got that obsession from? Could it be their entire view of Geopolitics was shaped by the moderation and administrators of Reddit? Strange how Reddit seems to want people to say the same things that the US state department like to say.

    • AnonTwo@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      …?

      Like 9 articles on my front page are US. 1 is Ukraine. 1 is China, and the rest are neutral.

      Are you maybe just taking particular notice to the China articles?

      edit: since I realize this was specific to m/worldnews…

      2 China post
      2 Ecudor post
      3 US post (1 pertaining to Italy as well)
      1 iranian post
      1 French post
      1 Japan post

      I stopped there as this is actually getting redundant at this point, there’s very little trend among the posts as of this time.

    • tintory@lemm.eeOP
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      2 years ago

      China is very active player and driving up events, especially as they may be working with nazi wannabes in the German government

      • alternative_factor@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        Tankies: China is a world power!! It drives so many world events!!
        Tankies: Nooo how dare China get in the press (good, bad, and neutral).

        They feel like any China coverage is inherently imperialist, even when its “China breaks fusion record”, that is meddling in China’s internal affairs to them.

        • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          For real. The tankie problem here is crazy. I can say something like China is trying to deny freedom of navigation of international waters on the South China Sea and somehow it becomes “BuT aMeRiCa”. I don’t get it.

          • reddwarf@feddit.nl
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            2 years ago

            I’ve been seeing this a lot from instances like hexbear and lemmygrad and my take is either cult members, paid trolls, brainwashed persons prone to pavlovian responses, or all of the above.

            I just wish that as a user I could block instances.

            • Menachem@midwest.social
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              2 years ago

              It’s definitely all of the above.

              Hexbear is particularly vexing to me. According to the fediverse observer they’re less than a month old and yet have already become one of the most active instances.

              • ihatebirds@lemm.ee
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                2 years ago

                hexbear has existed and been building their userbase for 3 years, but during that time their codebase diverged greatly from mainline lemmy to include in-house tweaks and features which made it not possible to federate, and it’s only within the past month that they got everything compatible

            • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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              2 years ago

              This isn’t unique to the far-left, though. It’s a problem throughout the entire political spectrum.

              It’s rather dangerous to be creating echo chambers in a democracy, though. Democracy lives off of discourse between opposing views.

              • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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                2 years ago

                Democracy lives off of discourse between opposing views.

                The inference here is that both views are of equivalent merit which is very much not true. This idea is called The Paradox of Tolerance. If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant.

                • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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                  2 years ago

                  Except… That’s not what democracy relies on. Democracy relies on discourse of views, even if they are unpopular. Tolerating only the prevailing opinion isn’t a democracy, it’s an autocracy.

              • reddwarf@feddit.nl
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                2 years ago

                I would not call them far left tbh. There’s something else about them that irks me. It honestly feels more North Korean to me and that ain’t left by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to be more authoritarian minded.

                • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  Agreed. Tankies are right-wing authoritarians in that communism is supposed to be stateless. They bitch about US imperialism but are always very quiet about China’s actions in Africa. It’s frustrating because like I get it. America has some pretty deep problems but to think that somehow it is worse than China is mindlessly reactionary.

          • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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            2 years ago

            LOL, I just don’t even know what to say here. You do realize that when the Europeans subjugated China it was, in part, through naval superiority? Specifically, China did not have a blue ocean navy. China didn’t emerge from that subjugation until 1949, and then didn’t actually manage to do much more than stabilize it’s society in the subsequent years. FFS, Hong Kong was only returned to China from British domination and occupation in the late 1990s.

            China’s navy was developed under these conditions, after WW2, after the US nuked 2 civilian cities in the Pacific, after the US became the world super power, after the end of the USSR. China is the one who has been denied freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. When China pushes against the psychotic imperialist West and it’s proxies, that is not China denying freedom of navigation anymore than slaves revolting against their owners is the slaves denying their owners peace and prosperity.

            The entire concept of freedom of navigation is a relational one. Raising points about China while ignoring the relationship with the world super power who, under Obama, decided to move 60% of its military assets to the Pacific Theater, is just anemic thinking.

            • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              Hey look. A tankie that has no idea what the fuck they are talking about. I am shocked. Territorial waters are defined as 12 nautical miles typically from the shore. These are defined by the United Nations that China is a part of and agreed to. There is a reason why China is literally building fake islands to increase it’s territorial water claim there.

              • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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                2 years ago

                Territorial waters are defined as 12 nautical miles typically from the shore

                BY WHOM IS IT DEFINED? You don’t need to answer the question here. We all know the answer. It’s the “rules-based international order”, you know, the one invented by white genociders that dominated and subjugated 80% of the world population. But do go on about how the definition of territorial waters is perfectly compatible with the US encircling China with nuclear capabilities, occupying much of the region, colonizing and subjugating various indigenous peoples on various islands so they can test weapons and prepare for war. It’s CHINA that’s being a problem.

                There is a reason why China is literally building fake islands to increase it’s territorial water claim there.

                Awww, what’s the matter? Are you upset when the fake rules that whitey made to dominate the globe are sometimes used by non-whites to game the system in small ways that show everyone just how vacuous and bankrupt the West really is?

                How about you focus on things like why China is even the UN at all, how the US refused to let the PRC into the UN and instead decided that the KMT should be at the UN despite the KMT prosecuting the White Terror and mass murdering people by the thousands for so much as suggesting that maybe they should end the civil war officially and integrate with China now that the PLA had demonstrated they had the overwhelming majority of popular support.

                • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  I like that in all of your rambling, despite directly quoting me, you carefully evaded explaining why China would want to build fake islands and expand it’s territorial waters.

                  • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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                    2 years ago

                    What a loser response. It’s obvious to everyone why they want to expand their territorial waters - to push out the US and other North Atlantic fascists and create a defensible perimeter against US nuclear encirclement. It’s not like this is a secret. The secret is that treating it like a secret is a propaganda tactic to make something that is quite literally out in the open into something nefarious as a way of distracting from the fact that the reason they are doing it is because the USA is a mass murdering fascist regime

      • tuga [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 years ago

        They’ll work with whoever the fuck krauts pick to lead them, simple as.

        From where China is standing, they have no reason to see the AfD as any worse than, say, the “we want to nuke europe into the stone age” Greens

      • zephyreks@lemmy.ca
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        2 years ago

        Nazi wannabes with 13% of the vote…

        I mean, it’s not like China is only working with AfB. They recently invited School to Beijing.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 years ago

          AfD holds multiple municipal seats and Hitler never won an election (he got about 36.7% in 1932). The Nazis took over because liberals (specifically Hindenburg and co) appointed Hitler and then Hitler was able to take over when Hindenburg died in part thanks to paramilitary support. Just worth noting for gauging AfD’s distance from potential takeover.

          I highly doubt that the PRC wants them in charge or wants to help them get there, though.

    • ElHexo [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      Since 2016 we’ve slid into “China bad” reporting, so there’s a lot on that.

      The reporting is usually pretty weak and facile, and rarely touches some of the real issues over there.

    • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      it’s the active sort. it prioritizes topics people feel heated about by weighting posts with more comments higher. it also doesn’t decay the weight quickly enough with time so those posts stay on the top as long as people are arguing in the comments.

    • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      They’re a target of the US Empire and folks that can’t do media criticism gladly take the bait.

      The first rule of propaganda is emphasis, which is what you’re astutely picking up on. Why are stories about X and not A, B, C? When they’re about X, what context is emphasized, what is fact and what is allusion, who is interviewed and given the opportunity to comment and who is not? “World news” stories are very frequently just stenography of various think tanks, often ones that are more or less in agreement with one another.

      The entirety of China’s actions reported in this story are that China (exactly who isn’t stated, not even a group) invited an AfD delegation to meet with them. No source is cited, but maybe it’s Weidel. From this they create an entire narrative by retelling past articles about AfD’s foreign policy statements and ask one person to comment: “political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder from the University of Kassel”. They don’t mention that he’s also an SPD politician and associated with a government-funded research institute with a dodgy past. Maybe his takes are good, but why they asked him and not others isn’t stated, of course.

      This is just folks getting easily hoodwinked by a propaganda push. Same as folks were suddenly very concerned about WMDs in Iraq or the political powers in Afghanistan and so on. They weren’t, not organically - a network of think tanks, government stooges, etc all rally to provide jobs for these kinds of nerds to write these kinds of articles and have these kinds of takes. Several think tanks in Washington have converted from focusing on Syria or Iraq to focusing on Russia or China, as they know who butters their bread.

      Anyways that’s a long ramble in response to a simple question.

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      .ml stands for Marxist-Leninist so for some reason there is generally a lot of praise for China which is closer to fascism than either of those idealogies.