this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Did people think Chinese people were ever evil? Videos of china on my feed are always positive
I dunno what feed you mean because most westerners think China is an authoritarian dictatorship. There are a lot of people that won't touch anything owned by Tencent simply because it's Chinese. Youtube is flooded by social credit score and Winnie the Pooh Xi jokes. Outside of the internet the mainstream News is constantly harping on the "China Threat" and how it's a threat to democracy. Those are just a handful of examples off the top of my head but even small stuff like all through my working life I've had co-workers used communism and Chinese as shorthand for bad. "Made in China" for example is shorthand for "badly made" when Westerners say it.
The flood of Chinese treats banned from the US being seen might unironically be the radicalisation trigger for the US.
We've had Treaterites but are you ready for Treatist-Leninists?
Cultural Marxist = ❌️
Treatist Leninist = ✅️
If there was Treatist-Trotskyism they could tape a lollipop to the their newspapers like British kids comics did in the 90s.
The dialectic really is ever in motion
I wrote a long, detailed dismantling of a the sundae cherry comment "the US sometimes behaves badly but isn't genocidal like China" atop a lot of barely-disguised sinophobic posting on a [redacted professional industry I work in sometimes] news site the other day. In part because that particular comment was so blatently an inversion of reality and partly because I'd had enough of how pervasive and unchallenged it was.
I didn’t join tik tok for two reasons:
1 addictiveness
2 China has a more robust surveillance system than the US does and are further along in facial recognition tech. I don’t want them getting a scan of my face. It’s bad enough the US likely has one because of my drivers license, but our tech hasn’t caught up to chinas yet. Or at least the implementation of it. I fully expect the worst of Chinas social credit stuff to be implemented in America as well as America importing Israel’s surveillance tech that they’ve mastered in their genocide of Palestinians. Im off the major social networks now but im deeply uneasy about where the world is heading. I don’t want anyone to have my data anymore whether it’s a Chinese based or US based or any other country based company. The data will one day be used against me.
A lot of the perception of ‘social credit’ is very muddied and unspecific. If I’m being completely honest, I see it as a relative nonissue for China to have a scan of my face (which really is available to anyone and anything so long as there exists even a single picture of you online)
Like, exactly what is China going to do with it? For those who live in America, the American Gov’t will be the ones attempting to surveil and control you. China doesn’t exactly pose a threat to me as a person lol.
“I’ve done nothing wrong I’ve got nothing to hide”
I don’t want any country having a scan of my face. I’m livid they likely have my drivers license but at least that’s just one static image and not endless photos and videos. I just don’t want that level of data out there about me with the rise of AI and the eventual introduction of social credit in the US. And who knows what the future brings
there's difference in actually scanning your face and scanning faces of people appeared in a video available to public (let's be real here, they are all already scanned by all the AI companies in the US too). There's some controversial discord age verification bot through 3rd party service thing and roblox age verification that actually requires you to scan your face, that's ones that I will never submit my photo to. As long as these chinese apps do not require you to do the same, I don't see any problem with that.
I deleted my social media profiles that have my face before AI and ring cameras on every house came to be. But yes, the American companies are doing the same shit. China (and Israel!) is further along in their technology but the US will catch up. I just don’t like it, there’s something about it I find extremely off putting in a generational trauma hairs on the back of my neck standing up kind of way.
I always think about how the Holocaust wouldn’t of been possible without industrialization, it was the industrialization of death. If they didn’t have the prototype to computers they would of never been able to accomplish the horrors to the level they did. AI / facial recognition / normalization of surveillance all combined seem like the next level of industrialization and all it takes is a bad actor acquiring that data and using it against marginalized people such as myself.
You're very fortunate. Sinophobia is 'baked into the cake'
as it were where I live. Chinese people are depicted as childlike, unscrupulous and brainwashed all at once as though they are 'programmed' by the CCP (CPC) to be spies for the country or rabid nationalists while still being shielded from the rest of the world behind the Great Firewall. Any basic normal day-to-day stuff, if done by a Chinese person, is instantly suspicious. Posting cute panda videos? It's an insidious SoFt PoWeR pUsh. Buying infant formula? It's China flexing its economic might to deprive western babies of nutrition. Highly coordinated dance? It's brutal training to quash individualism (unless ofc its shenyun in which case it's 4000 years of esoteric tradition and majesty...). Chinese people cannot exist or act in the west without being seen through the lense of the yellow peril.
I asked on my group chat if people were thinking of switching over to xiaohongshu and received a response "why, so a Chinese steals my social security number?"
I think we still have a long way to go with this whole racism thing.
You're probably a decent person and the algorithm put you in a bubble.
considering "it's chinese" is liberal for "it's bad", yeah I would say so
They think of them as scheming hordes incapable of independent thought or creativity.
I think most Americans barely think of them at all
Idk have you seen the Lemmy.world news feed. There's at least one article on the Chinese threat per day.
lemmy.world is not exactly representative of your average US American - it's a bunch of post-reddit dweebs obsessed with an extremely narrow understanding of politics as posting
lemmy.world is hitlerites, while the average Amerikkkan is a treatlerite.
Lemmy.world is full of extremely bad liberal takes and they get their panties in a twist if you call out the democrats bullshit re their so called “progressive” policies that are half baked and never implemented because they’re a spineless and ineffectual party who only cares about protecting the desires of their corporate donors.
Are you in the US?