Struggle session engage. Post your pathetic arguments so that I and the other China Good Posters can dismantle them and you can learn.
Key points:
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China is a democracy. It is arguably the most functional and responsive democracy in a major country today. Its citizens consider it more democratic than the citizens of almost any other country do their own.
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China is on a clear path to socialism and economic justice. No nation in history has ever reduced poverty in anything like the way China is doing it.
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The vast majority of people in the PRC support the CPC. This is not due to being brainwashed. Americans are brainwashed and still hate their government.
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Almost everything you hear about China in the West sits on a spectrum between malicious misrepresentation to outright fabrication with no basis in reality.
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China’s ascension to the premiere global power is an extremely good thing for world peace and the global socialist movement. While China does not actively support other socialisms (sadly it’s not as good as the USSR in this regard) it does not do imperialism. China will allow socialisms around the world to flourish simply by not actively crushing them like the US and Europe.
ITT: People who (quite rightly) hate Bernie Sanders for being a moderate defend a country with a healthcare and welfare system far behind anything Bernie advocated.
And no, it’s not just because China is a poorer country, plenty of poor countries in Latin America give their citizens much more than China does. Might have something to do with the fact that China’s 1% controls 30% of the country’s wealth, and those billionaires are very well connected to CCP leadership. Just spitballing.
China has universal healthcare and most medical resources are publicly owned. Access to medical resources varies greatly and coverage isn’t perfect in rural areas but you can see a doctor and get a prescription for less than $10 almost everywhere in the country. If you get Covid the state will pay for 100% of your hospital stay and use every available resource to keep you alive, even if it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The US is decades away from that level of coverage.
Every urban Chinese resident was guaranteed housing up to around 2000 and every rural Chinese resident is still guaranteed a plot of arable land. China’s not a social democracy and the way it addresses poverty is fundamentally different from social democracies.
You could drive a dumptruck through these loopholes:
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Therein lies the failure of China’s safety net: that it does less for rural residents, and almost nothing for the migrant class that are not “resident” of the place where they are actually living. This proviso applies to almost every public service in China, and it functions to exclude a huge percentage of the (actual, existing) urban population, favoring a middle class whose families have long-established residency in the coastal cities.
Surely you must know this, otherwise you wouldn’t have written it in this way, so why the equivocation?
Yes, I recognize that there’s inequality within China and a strong urban-rural divide, that’s a valid criticism but I’m not hearing much of a solution. The current healthcare system is far, far superior to healthcare under the planned economy that dominated the country up until the 90s, so it’s not a reflection of unequal distribution of resources by the market. Both urban and rural healthcare has drastically improved within the last 20 years, market reforms are what made universal healthcare possible.
An urbanized, coastal metropolis like Shanghai is going to have better services than a remote mountainous village in Yunnan. That’s true of every country and economy in the world, it was true of China during the planned economy era and it’s true today. It’s much more helpful to compare current rural healthcare access to rural healthcare access 20 or 50 years ago rather than urban healthcare access today.