Only seeing 2 paragraphs here, with no paywall notice. Odd.

One of the key factors mentioned in the article: the erosion of the “the middle ring” from many societies (not just China): “close-ish” but not intimate/familial face-to-face relationships (neighbours, coworkers etc.) that are key to growing a social movement with real world activity.

I saw a similar argument made elsewhere. Namely, that China's boom can be partly explained by the fact that surveillance tech (i.e. China's comparative advantage) is particularly beneficial in low-trust societies. Not just the sinister social-credit system, but just everyday mobile apps with their reputation systems and scoring of every commercial interaction. This kind of radical transparency is logically more beneficial in countries like China than in the kind of highly cohesive (democratic, redistributive) societies where people were already somewhat happy to trust complete strangers.

Uh, you do know who owns Al Jazeera? You're a hypocrite.

I am wondering whether Sixth Tone would be willing to publish similar reports like this

This complaint I already addressed.

To get to the truth, you need multiple perspectives. Exactly as you are doing now by posting this CLB report.

The problem is that you personally only ever want to post, and see, a single point of view. You don't seem to have any interest in learning, or widening your perspective. What you are doing here is the antithesis of journalism.

Sorry, you don't get to decide unilaterally what constitutes propaganda. This community does not belong to you, despite what you seem to think.

I would urge others to consult the publicly available information on Sixth Tone and make their own minds up. The reliability of journalism is not entirely a factor of ownership. If it were, then literally every news article posted online could be labelled "propaganda" for one reason or another.

This is a Wikipedia link

Indeed. A repository of sourced facts that happens to be banned in China.

Of course I understand the difference between the BBC and Sixth Tone. But there's a difference between "pure propaganda" and self-censorship on selected topics (as you just sort-of admitted). A sports newspaper can maintain high journalistic standards even in a dictatorship.

When you read Sixth Tone, you know in advance that you will not see anything (very) negative about China. But what you do see will generally be covered fairly (and it's often quite interesting).

Ironically, Sixth Tone is doing the exact inverse of what you're doing in this community. When we see a post of yours, we all know in advance that the source will be somewhat reputable but that it will not say anything positive about China. The irony!

PBS, BBC, DW and a ton more are state-owned, too. Does that make them propaganda, too?

For those interested: some background on why Sixth Tone is not equivalent to Xinhua or Global Times.

This can depend on your personality type and self-discipline.

If you're a methodical introvert who likes reading, go for a vocab-focused app with spaced repetition, and continue by reading actual newspapers or books (even children's books) as soon as you can.

If you're an impulsive extrovert with a short concentration span, you're going to need a more human experience, if possible 1-to-1 tutoring.

In all cases, don't get hung up on grammar and (especially not) phonetics at the start. Vocab is the key that will unlock the rest.

FWIW I speak multiple languages fairly competently and I'm a qualified English teacher.

Thank you for posting. This article fits the bill perfectly for this community. Interesting content, reliable source.

Mainly, it helps (a bit) to balance out the nonstop drip of boring anti-Beijing hit pieces that a certain other user insists on spamming us with every day. (Please ignore their whining complaint at having to suffer contradiction.)

Please keep posting!

This forum gets 63 users a day so your appeal is likely to go unanswered. And even if an eccentric English-speaking degrowth-oriented Jap did chime in, that would be a very skewed sample size of 1 - not much use for drawing conclusions compared to, say, a poll.

That said, my understanding is roughly the same as yours. They're worried about it but not enough to consider mass immigration, which would undermine their prized social cohesion. They would prefer solutions to come from technology (robots) and labor reforms if at all possible. But - things are not panning out perfectly and low-skilled immigration for the healthcare sector is in fact rising. Mostly from SE Asia where the culture is considered sufficiently compatible. Philippines in particular.

The "boy" who also wrote a previous article that I posted here, "Why China will beat the West"?

I suspect that you didn't read either of them. And neither did anyone else mindlessly clicking the upvote and downvote buttons on the basis of the headlines alone.

Did you read the article?

I share your concerns. This was at the very least a failure of communication. Surely people could have been found to step up if only more of them had known in time. Hosting text-based content means some trouble and expense, yes, but the effort is anecdotal compared to video. This was an apparently thriving and successful server. It's not a good look for it to go belly-up like this, IMO.