• FunkyStuff@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      Can you enlighten us as to how China is authoritarian in a way that Europe isn’t? Because as far as I can tell, even if literally every single thing China is accused of by anyone is true, this is what their major crimes amount to:

      • Killing 10,000 protesters in Tiananmen Square
      • Imprisoning 1M Uighurs in Xinjiang
      • Sterilizing, abusing, and killing some number of Uighurs in Xinjiang, I’ve never seen numbers accompanying this claim
      • Suppressing Tibetan religious identity
      • Lack of queer rights
      • Not respecting Taiwan’s sovereignty
      • Suppressing political speech that goes against the government
      • General religious persecution of several religious minorities other than those mentioned above; Falun Gong, Christians, other Muslims, etc
      • Aggression toward their neighbors like India and the Philippines
      • Support of Russia during their invasion of Ukraine
      • Support of Myanmar during the Rohingya genocide

      Let me know if I missed any.

      Meanwhile, (mainly Western) Europe definitely has done the following in the past 50 years:

      • Funded and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, killing anywhere from 50,000 people per the Health Ministry to 500,000 per Donald Trump
      • Mostly refused to recognize a Palestinian state until quite recently
      • Exploited peripheral European states economically
      • Continued to hold assets belonging to former colonies in the Global South
      • Collaborated with the US to destroy the USSR and strip it for parts, causing one of the largest peace-time drop in life expectancy in history, and unleashing rampant economic and sexual exploitation
      • Allow thousands of immigrants to die in the Mediterranean to prevent them from reaching the continent.
      • Joined the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan
      • Joined NATO actions to destroy the Libyan government, leaving the country in a state of utter chaos and making it one of the only places on earth with open air slave markets
      • NATO actions against Yugoslavia and Serbia (granted, to intervene in a genocide, but in a way that was not done to intervene in the Rwandan genocide; this suggests the intervention was primarily motivated by an extractive, imperialist interest)
      • Islamophobia; Hijab bans, rampant hate speech, racially stratified economies.
      • Backsliding queer rights in some countries, total lack in others.

      I think there’s probably more I could go into, but I think that’s at least enough to make my case. If you want to believe China is authoritarian because you believe every point in the upper half is true, then I won’t stop you. But you’re on some craaaazy wypipo logic if you think the points in the bottom don’t mean that the same label ought to be applied to Europe.