They are much less likely to see the country as an enemy than their parents
    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      10123·
      1 year ago

      What’s funny is I can’t tell if you’re talking about younger Americans refusing to hate China or older Americans chanting “China Bad!”

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          5325·
          1 year ago

          300,000 people are on the organ donor wait-list in China at this very moment.

          You’re a perfect example of the power of propaganda lol

              • FMT99@lemmy.world
                1919·
                1 year ago

                The US has a ton of problems, I’m not saying it’s a great country to live in necessarily (I wouldn’t move there given the choice). But it’s not a dictatorship where laws are optional for the government.

                Maybe freedom doesn’t mean anything to you when you’re not the one being reeducated though.

      • nekandro@lemmy.mlOP
        3310·
        1 year ago

        Both tbh

        American failures are being used to prop up Chinese successes. This is particularly true in urbanism discussions. China is by no means perfect and thinking that they are is harmful to progress.

              • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
                1116·
                1 year ago

                This is really just common knowledge at this point.

                E: looks like the CCP has even infiltrated the mods of this community.

                • Jack.@lemmy.mlM
                  111·
                  1 year ago

                  I get paid 100000000 Xi bucks every time I remove a post. Obviously Lemmy is the most important social media platform in the world that China needs to control at all costs. The communists have even banned brainrot racism on this subreddit.

                • macabrett[they/them]@lemmy.ml
                  145·
                  1 year ago

                  Its actually all sourced from one single guy who has stated it is his mission from God to bring down China.

                  It’s common knowledge because propaganda is incredibly effective.

            • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
              1·
              1 year ago

              That’s why it costs significantly less to import virtually everything from the opposite side of the planet.

              This is not true. It’s so cheap to get the goods here because Canada and USA subsidizes the freight services from taxpayer money.

            • guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              99·
              1 year ago

              For the record, though, any nation-state that got big did all of that. That is literally what industrialization has more or less always looked like. The US used to run sweatshops and disappear/murder activists of any kind, especially the ones who pushed back against the pennies-an-hour sweatshops. It wasn’t until the 20th century that US courts even started reading the First Amendment to mean the government had an obligation to not fuck you up just for your political beliefs (see this title since that’s a larger historical argument than can fit on Lemmy).

              You don’t get social freedom and rights in an industrial society until it hits a very high point of development. This has been true of more or less anywhere.

              While we could argue China should have looked for a better way to develop, the United States also helped create an international system in the middle of the 20th century where the only real option was to aggressively industrialize in an even worse way than the US did, or just be subject to outright neocolonialism (and then develop your industry also in a bad way, also likely without rights, and then not have a rounded enough economy to do anything other than be exploited by richer countries), and then, when China decided to just take a heavy state-led path that employed capitalism and tools of standard industrial nation-building to set themselves up as a powerful capitalist nation-state, like they were “supposed” to, Western countries, the US in particular, bought in hard and financed everything they’re now recoiling against.

              China’s great sin, in this context (and while I’m being slightly sarcastic there, sure, the way they’re industrializing/running shit is bad), was choosing to use their enormous land-mass, resource base, and population to not just be on the very bottom. If America/the West had wanted to see the world industrialize better and more humanely, they should have tried at literally any point to help the world industrialize better and more humanely. At this point, it’s a little absurd for Westerners to complain a situation they created and financed extensively for decades.

                • guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  85·
                  1 year ago

                  I don’t know that I justified it, just pointed out a basic historical truth about industrialization. With a shred of historical context it’s trivial to turn the conversation from “ew China evil” to “is it possible to industrialize without this shit?” which is a question anybody should have been asking from the very beginning.

                  At the end of the day, lambasting China for doing all the things industrializing nations have always done, without offering a concretely better, alternative path for industrialization, and simultaneously demanding they achieve a similar level of development as the West without doing anything the West did to get there, is honestly just pointless. The West imposed a competitive market system based on the preposterous violence of industrial production on the rest of the world, and are now going to be collectively hoisted by our own petards over the next few decades.

                  If we wanted them to industrialize without shit like ethnic homogenization/genocide/systematic exploitation of labor/everything else, we might have tried blazing a path to economic development that wasn’t based on those things.

            • YeetPics@mander.xyz
              212·
              1 year ago

              No no no, clearly you’re suffering under Western propaganda. In China there is zero crime and everyone gets a golden car on their 15th birthday. It’s true and If you disagree you’re a propaganda chicken. (/s)

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    422·
    1 year ago

    This kinda looks like a bad poll. The wording seems to setup a bad choice of extremes. The respondent has to either choose “friendly” or “an enemy”. But the relationship between the US and China is a much more complex thing. The US and China are certainly in competition in a number of areas, economically and geopolitically. The induction of China to the WTO in 2001 impacted the US’s manufacturing sector negatively (see: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm). The US and China are at odds over the fate of Taiwan. But, in spite of all that, the US and China have deep trade links which benefit both countries greatly. And both countries are likely better off than they would be without the other. Global trade is generally positive for the economies involved, though global trade can also fuck individuals inside each economy, including driving wealth concentration and harming the economically disadvantaged and people whose skills don’t align well with the industries their country is focused on.

    Trying to boil US-China relations down to either Friendly or “Enemy” misses a lot of the nuance and may mean people aren’t giving an accurate picture of how they view China.

    • ahal@lemmy.ca
      115·
      1 year ago

      Those options seem fine for a poll imo. If you ask the same question to older demographics and more people pick “enemy”, then isn’t the conclusion in the headline valid?

      • madcaesar@lemmy.world
        92·
        1 year ago

        I know what you’re saying, but it’s still a shitty poll. I think people in the past were way looser with the word enemy. Everyone was an enemy, the Russians, communism, drugs, immigrants poverty… everything was a fucking enemy that needed a war.

        So, even though just as many people might distrust China the language has changed and we wouldn’t call them “enemy”.

        The Chinese government is authoritarian, evil and awful but I still wouldn’t call China an “enemy”. Because life isn’t black and white, and once you call somone an enemy you’ve shut off your brain and nothing good will come out of it.

      • Shazbot@lemmy.world
        81·
        1 year ago

        A lot of nuance will be missed without some gradation between “I <3 China” and “Down with Pooh!” For example, if we added “Slightly favorable”, “Neutral”, and “Slightly unfavorable” we would begin to see just how favorable younger generations are. Rather than presume there is a deep divide on trade policy, if two bars are almost equal, we may see they are largely neutral. Similarly we could see just how favorable their views of TikTok really are by looking at the spread between neutral to “I <3 China!”

      • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
        5·
        1 year ago

        The issue is that your reducing a multivariable spectra to a single binary. That kind of data compression destroys a massive amount of valuable data, and alot of nuance along with it.

    • library_napper@monyet.cc
      53·
      1 year ago

      I’m neither a friend nor an enemy to most people in the world.

      But when it comes to orgs, I’m an enemy of most od them, and definitely an enemy of every State.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
      22·
      1 year ago

      Also good to remember that digital media can be just as propogandized if you interact with it at a base level. Shopping around for a wide breadth of sources and opinions should be viewed as standard requirement for forming a more accurate sense of world events.

    • people_are_cute@lemmy.sdf.org
      13·
      1 year ago

      Social media dominantly uses algorithms that fine-tune user feeds according to what they think will lead to highest engagement and end up becoming personalized echo chambers. They provide the exact opposite of “a more diverse set of news”.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
        68·
        1 year ago

        Even with the algorithms tuning people’s feeds the diversity of information and views online is very clearly far higher than it is in traditional media where editors decide what content is published, and how it’s framed. You’re also using a platform that doesn’t use any algorithms to mess with the feed to write all this.

  • COASTER1921@lemmy.ml
    371·
    1 year ago

    I visit China frequently for work and feel that the impression most older Americans have of China is incredibly out of touch. The traditional media portrayal of the country is definitely a part of this. Yes, it’s certainly an authoritarian state, but this doesn’t change whether the people are nice or what they want in life.

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        243·
        1 year ago

        I think it’s probably better to simply say that “authoritarian” is a buzzword, though your implied argument that all states work by exerting authority on (at least some portion of) their population is certainly true. Anyone who uses a term like “authoritarian” rather than even a marginally more-descriptive negative term like, idk, “bureaucratic” or “state capitalist” (which gets misused, but I digress) is immediately demonstrating themselves to have untrustworthy judgement on the topic

        • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          maybe bring back totalitarian and use it against countries like the US? have a word that, like Huey P. Newton said regarding coining the term ‘pig’ for police, “highlights the contradiction”, in this case, between the selective usage of a word and it’s inherent meaning, none of which is understandable without contradictions from a prescriptive linguistic context

          • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
            27·
            1 year ago

            the state maintains that this is a moral and legitimate use of force: that it has the authority to do this.

            I don’t necessarily agree with “moral”. In western democracies laws and use of force doesn’t legitimize itself by a call to morality usually. Just using some kind of authority, doesn’t make a government authoritarian by any common definition of the word.

              • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
                16·
                1 year ago

                It absolutely does imo, it legitimises itself through an appeal to an underlying moral framework.

                Yes, but very indirectly. We don’t have a “moral police”, but one that enforces laws which are, as you say, legitimized by the people as a sovereign.

                So you don’t see police stopping people on “moral grounds” in some vague interpretation.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
        147·
        1 year ago

        Authoritarianism was a bullshit term invented by child-fucker libertarians to frame themselves as being the good guys.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
      42·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been once for work. Didn’t have an issue with anyone there. I live in Australia now and a few of my friends are Chinese. In fact, I’ve had 2 Chinese really good friends / best friends

      None of them agree with the government at all

  • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
    351·
    1 year ago

    Isn’t it a general trend that younger people, on average, are less xenophobic / racist / bigoted than the previous generation? I also remember reading somewhere that younger Chinese people are friendlier to Japan, South Korea and the US than their parents.

  • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
    312·
    1 year ago

    My company has an office in China and I’ve been there many many times.

    Chinese people are like all other people - same needs, same hopes and dreams, same fears, same drivers. In the city where our office is located, they are extremely hard working and want to ensure a better future for their family. Just like most American cities.

    Their city is very high tech, moreso than many American cities because they skipped a lot of legacy technology.

    They don’t necessarily subscribe to the same moral/value system as Americans, for example they often see copying each other’s ideas as a compliment whereas Americans see it as stealing. Kind of like - if it’s possible to copy, then it’s fair game - so don’t make it possible if you don’t want it copied. Perhaps that drives a different kind of innovation.

    Obviously there are many more cultural differences. But as a people, we are all essentially working with the same needs.

    All that being said I don’t appreciate the great firewall when I’mthere, the censorship, and the fear they have about discussing banned topics. I don’t appreciate the high-tech security cameras at every corner, or all the tracking of activities. The younger generations tolerate this for now because they are wealthier than their parents and told to cooperate, but that may not hold long term.