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China has grown more new forest cover than any nation on Earth (media.mas.to)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml
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https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-30-years-of-deforestation-and-forest-growth-by-country/

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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I'm not sure why you would assume I'm American. I mean, you happen to be right in this case, but I'm still not sure why you'd assume that.

Anyhow, there's an irony in your assertion that disagreeing with the position of one's government is "brainwashed."

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  • [–] 33 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Americans are very ease to distinguish based both on their political stances (which tend to be rather unique) and how they express them (which IS unique).

    Y'all are like those pickup trucks with LED lights. Once you realize they exist, you can't miss them.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Anti-China/pro-Taiwan sentiment isn't exactly unique to the US. I think you're alluding to an incendiary tone with respect to how you say Americans express their views, but that doesn't seem to quite fit so I'm a little lost there.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I mean, clearly people can tell that you're American, so maybe it's time for some introspection?

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You made an assumption and you've yet to expound on how you justified it beyond some vague assertion about American political discourse. Give me something to introspect on, then, for crying out loud.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Most countries that aren't America aren't inundated with anti-China rhetoric, so if someone starts spouting off about China (and especially Chinese civil rights, or uses the term "CCP") in English they're almost certainly an American.

    Does China lag behind the west in terms of queer rights? Yes. We're critical of that but also recognize the grassroots initiatives within the CPC to change that, and support those efforts. Does China pollute more in raw numbers than America? Yeah, but they're also the global leader in green power production, so they're clearly working to fix the emissions problem, which we support. China also takes a non-imperialist stance internationally, which is far and away better than anything America has ever done internationally.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You don't disagree with your government; you didn't know what your government's position was until right now.

    You still don't really know what your government's position is, otherwise you'd understand that here, as in many cases, there's an official stance for diplomatic relations and then a bunch of propaganda (for both domestic and foreign consumption) that undermines that official stance.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Bold of you to assume what I do and don't know about geopolitics. I'm well aware of the fine line that the US government walks, but I don't speak for the US government and my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime, and 2) that Taiwan is a de facto sovereign state which broadly speaking doesn't particularly want to be assimilated into the PRC. Where is the propagandistic angle here?

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    my views aren't informed by "propaganda" but by the simple observations that 1) the PRC is a totalitarian regime,

    lol

    Just because you agree with it doesn't mean it isn't propaganda

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Do you disagree with either of those observations? They seem fairly indisputable to me.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    In totalitarian USA the racist police run over protestors with impunity and torture you at a blacksite for made up poverty crimes, president Xi please my people yearn for freedom

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    A disfunctional system isn't the same as a totalitarian one. Both are bad, yes, but they're not one and the same.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's funny how when the US does something wrong, it's never a reflection on its essential character, and yet the fucking Four Pests Campaign or whatever is a fundamental reflection of the ideology of Chinese Communism.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    you're only allowed to call the PRC "totalitarian" or undemocratic if you condemn the "democracies" of the english speaking world. the US president isn't even the person who gets the most votes🤡

    Taiwan does not "generally" have a stance against reunification, some independence parties are a bit more popular than they used to be, but them becoming a legally independent state requires vast constitutional and international changes no government has even begun to implement

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    I'm sorry, but there's no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith. The decidedly un-totalitarian nature of the US government is exactly why it's basically not functioning right now. There's plenty of valid criticism there, but to draw any sort of comparison to the Chinese form of government is insane.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Of course you believe in American exceptionalism

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    On the contrary, I think that totalitarian states are moreso the exception than the rule in this day and age. Hell, I wouldn't even group Russia in the same class. There are varying degrees of autocracy and the US president certainly wields more power than heads of state/government in many European countries, but it's just a bad faith argument to try to draw a comparison to it when speaking about a regime such as the CCP.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    I mean yeah one has a bourgeois state (US) and the other an proletarian one (PRC) so technically you're right in that it's not really comparable.

    Do you know what hegemony means? And do you think it's a coincidence that you hold the same belief as the US state department?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    regime such as the CCP

    People would probably take you at least a little more seriously if you knew the actual acronym of the Communist Party of China. "Le ebil SeeSeePee" just outs you as a redditor, no matter what other gestures you might make toward the appearance of wordliness.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I'm sorry, but there's no way you can possibly equate the US government to the CCP without arguing in bad faith.

    "You have to agree with me or you're the one arguing in bad faith!"

    • A person with no sense of irony.
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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    "Totalitarian" is a buzzword with a hazy definition at best. Go ahead and substantiate it.

    But my point is that using such a buzzword with no further explanation is a somewhat comical display of how propagandized you are for how thought-terminating your use of the word is.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You aren't brainwashed, you are just enculturated to a very reactionary ideology. I actually agree that it's better to analyze them as separate countries for the purpose of something like this graph, but this thinktank (which, to be clear, is very Atlanticist, i.e. aligned with your geopolitical views) is almost surely gunning for having their little infographics be diplomatically palettable in hopes that they get used by important bodies.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I understand what you're saying here and I agree that that's what's going here, but making something "diplomatically palatable" is for all intents and purposes equivalent to appeasement and (in my view) automatically makes any other claims made subject to suspicion.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I mean, Atlanticists are imperialists and should be condemned, but your view is rather unhelpful since it means the vast majority of statements connected to the UN since ~1980 fall under the same view. It's not like the PRC denies that the RoC government exists and effectively controls the island of Formosa, in our context it is just a rhetorical affectation to the effect of the RoC government not being legitimate, which is a pretty fair stance to take given the RoC's own positively absurd territorial claims.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The ROC's territorial claims are a side effect of the PRC's stance on Taiwan. I don't remember the exact details but essentially the PRC has previously declared that it would interpret any change in the ROC's territorial claims as a declaration of war. It's a matter of pragmatism.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Uhh the RoC's territorial claims are a direct effect of their century-old hyper-nationalist stances that led to them losing a civil war against the peasantry of China.

    Unless you think Mao somehow personally provoked them into declaring ownership over Mongolia?

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The ROC has undergone a pretty big shift in its form of governance and general culture in the last ~50 years. Yes, their current claims are a remnant of their past as the government of mainland China, but given that changing their official stance runs the risk of provoking the PRC they're effectively immutable for the time being.

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