cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/61813958
Last week’s US midterm election furnished us with yet another example of the redemptive power of democracy. It’s a reminder that democracy’s greatest strength is not that it prevents political mistakes but that it gives citizens a way to challenge them and, sometimes, to change course.
Those who insist on applying false equivalence to the United States and China should consider that nothing like that is possible under the regime of President Xi Jinping.
Last month the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian model focused on punishing a French football star for daring to utter the truth about Mao Zedong’s dictatorship more than half a century after his death. Kylian Mbappe’s comment wasn’t a political statement, just a simple response to online references to his dictator-like dominance of games. Yet it received a full-throated CCP-orchestrated backlash.
[…]
Xi Jinping’s expansion of party control and suppression of dissent since becoming Communist Party general secretary in November 2012 have made him China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao, which further explains the enraged response to Mbappe’s comment.
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This has been complemented by the CCP’s expanded control over public life. Under Xi, the party has rolled back previous civic and economic liberalisation, further restricting civil society, academia, independent activism, religious and ethnic groups, speech and media. It has used an increasingly extensive internet censorship and surveillance system and the party-controlled legal system to punish its critics.
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Xi’s tenure has also seen the mass repression in Xinjiang, where the UN human-rights office found large-scale arbitrary detention of Uyghurs, restrictions on religious and other rights, credible allegations of torture or ill-treatment and indications of coercive birth-control and labour practices.
Xi’s China has dismantled Hong Kong’s political opposition by imposing national-security laws that enabled prosecution of pro-democracy figures, disqualifying legislators and changing election rules to restrict who could serve.
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But it’s not only China’s domestic sphere where this increasingly authoritarian model threatens us. For what the party has perfected at home, it exports abroad. Xi’s China supports regimes resisting democratic ideals, helping spread surveillance technology, capacity and state-centred ideas about digital governance across the globe. And China’s securitisation of everything in pursuit of the party’s interests has infected our own systems, undermining open trade and globalisation and reintroducing geostrategic competition to our post-Cold War bliss. The unspoken truth of Xi’s national rejuvenation project is that it must come at other countries’ expense, whether that be territorially, economically or otherwise.
Most visibly egregious and revelatory is Xi’s no-limits partnership with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s kleptocratic strongman (or former strongman). China’s deep assistance to Russia’s imperialist and genocidal ambitions in Ukraine, and its prolonging of Europe’s largest conflict since 1945, is part of an anti-Western axis that seeks to weaken and reshape the global order more systematically than Trump’s America. Xi’s China is currently the only country with the intent and capability to supplant the post-1945 order, and it is laying the foundations for one that gives preference to its authoritarian interests.
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For all the angst about Trump’s America – and there has been plenty to be angsty about – democracy has shown that a government’s worst impulses can be curbed, checked and held accountable. There’s nothing within China that can check Xi’s trajectory. In that sense, if one must compare the two great powers, US democracy, for all its imperfection, offers a far healthier model to which the world should aspire.
Sorry, did I miss when every living US President was just imprisoned for their war crimes?
Doesn’t mean they always are, also USA is not a functioning democracy.
Despite that, they at least criticize Pete Hegseth of war crimes now, and there’s a good chance he will be impeached in January.
In Russia you die if you criticize Putin for war crimes, but the bar is way way lower than that, you die if you even call the war against Ukraine a war. That’s a punishable offense that will send you to prison, and people tend to die in prison in Russia.
China has similar restrictions, and you can go to prison merely for comparing Xi to Winnie the Pooh. Despite the similarities are striking and funny.
Don’t keep up with the news? You’re expecting the Democrats to not go ooops and miss another vote?
Might want to check on the stats of mortality in US prisons. Or incarceration rates in general.
Whereas in the US it’s the far more fair thing of being not white.
Und was passiert wenn man in Demokratien wie den USA einfach so schwarz ist in der Nähe eines Polizisten?
Oder was passiert in Demokratien wie deutsche wenn man irgendwelche Politiker als 1 Pimmel bezeichnet?
China = Böse
Wir = Gut
😌
Those are not problems with democracy, WTF have you been smoking?
It is a problem that “democratc countries” have.
If you have some imaginary “democratic Utopia” in your Head that no actual democratic country can be meassured again at than you are no better than the tankies that Claim the Sockets or something we’re no true socialism.
The US is repeatedly cited as the beacpn of democracy but their massive Problem with racism cannot be quenched by it and the “democratic structures” that ought to hold the police accountable fail. Miserably. Since forever.
Or do you say that the accountability of the executive branch of the government is not a democratic thing??
If so than China and Russia are just the same! Their executive branch is also not beholden to any rules or laws. Just Like US Police officers or ICE officers when they murder black people or Andy Grothe (A State Minister in Germany at the time) when he was insulted as 1 Wiener online and fucking swatted the perpetrator and had also no repercussion.
If your democracy doesnt include that the executive branch of government has to play by the rules, but only include that we can choose the mascot of the government, then you are not a democrat.
Exactly. And it’s why people in the US wanting to cry about authoritarianism or war crimes in Russia is particularly annoying.
You’re literally bombing multiple countries, illegally, right now.
Your prisons are full. Of minorities, who are arrested and murdered without justice in numbers far outside of any possible chance.
Clean up your own fucking house before you start looking elsewhere.
Yes!
I dont even like China or Russia, but the US is just as bad effectively and this Propaganda article is so amateurish that it alone should make the Double Standards obvious.
The US billionaires did quite the Job when they convinced their consumers that changing the color of the government is actual democracy…
However this is the fate many Western “democracies” seem to suffer, since there is no real political and economic change. Only how many groups of consumers there are and which are how important in Relation to each other, ranging from courting to Elimination of a consumer group.