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Cake day: February 3rd, 2026

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  • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.mltome_irl@lemmy.worldme_irl
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    5 days ago

    There is literally no communist country where people are acceptably free and don’t or didn’t want to get out to flee to one of the not communist countries

    Lmao. Clearly not looking very hard. The CPC even by western sources has an approval rate somewhere between 85 and 98%.














  • We’ve arranged ourselves to be in compliance with the content of one, doddering racist’s fever dream of America.

    This war is possibly the most American thing he has ever done. He’s simply following the long tradition of American imperialism in the Middle East: from the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Mossadeq in 1953 to protect oil interests, to arming the Mujahideen against the Soviets, funding the very networks that would fracture into the Taliban and al-Qaeda; from Bush Sr.'s 1991 Gulf War that entrenched permanent bases in the region, to Bush Jr.'s 2003 invasion of Iraq built on fabricated WMD claims; to Obama’s 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that toppled Gaddafi under a “responsibility to protect” mandate, then abandoned the country to militia warlords and slave markets. Each chapter follows the same script: regime change, chaos, retreat, and the next generation of blowback.






  • I was born in the 90s. I lived through that period too. My family was rural, and because of minority status we experienced the system differently so while I understand what that era felt like on the ground, I can only sympathize with what you went through.

    I don’t support the one-child policy. A lot of people on the mainland don’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand where it came from. It was created under extreme poverty, food insecurity, and rapid industrialization. The intention was to slow population pressure, but the execution was harsh and often cruel. What you experienced was real, terrible, and not something I would ever support or want repeated. I’m not denying or justifying those practices.

    But what you’re doing now is turning personal trauma into a judgment on an entire country and decades of development and progress.

    When I was a kid, my parents’ home village and surrounding villages still had no proper roads, no clinics, no stable electricity. That was normal. Look at what followed: hundreds of millions lifted out of extreme poverty, infrastructure reaching remote areas, near-universal schooling, massive housing programs, healthcare expanded nationwide. Corrupt officials actually getting investigated and punished, including high-level ones. The one-child policy ended over a decade ago but the positive policies remain, and so do their effects.

    You can hate that policy. I think it was deeply flawed too. But saying “nothing changed” or that the whole project is meaningless is just ignoring reality.

    You ask why the state had power over reproduction that’s a great question, why do states have that control, but you talk like this only happens in China. Western governments regulate reproduction too: abortion bans, forced sterilizations in prisons and detention centers, child removal through foster systems, welfare penalties for having kids. States everywhere control bodies in different ways. So don’t pretend this is some uniquely mainland evil.

    And no I obviously don’t hate you I know nothing about you. I don’t think your existence is a crime. You’re turning my defense of China’s overall development into a personal attack on you.

    Your experience deserves sympathy. I genuinely mean that. But a country isn’t built around any one person’s trauma. You judge a government by whether it feeds people, educates them, houses them, provides healthcare, and raises living standards, not only by individual suffering, even when that suffering is real and tragic.

    You can resent the policy. That’s fair. But don’t erase the entire historical process because of it.

    And since we’re talking about flawed policies, I also think the hukou system is deeply broken. It affected me personally too. Not to the extent the one-child policy affected you, obviously, but enough that I know what it feels like to be limited by bureaucracy and birthplace. I don’t pretend these systems were harmless or well-designed. But you also can’t let real mistakes erase the whole picture. Depending on how cynical I’m feeling, my assessment of the government ranges from 60/40 to 90/10 in its favor but even at my most critical, it’s still obvious they’ve done far more good than harm overall.

    You’re focusing on one painful chapter and pretending the rest didn’t happen. That’s not honest, especially to the hundreds of millions who no longer live in desperation.