What the article says is, of course, horrible. But even if you believe it, it is parents who put their kids in conversion camps. The only part where the govt. comes in is with the assertion that some people heading these “schools” are members of the CCP (which has over 90 million members so c’mon). There are two other articles in this series but they are paywalled so can’t talk about them.
Here is a good article covering LGBTQ+ news in China (positives and negatives).
Here is some direct rebuttal by someone more educated.
All this kind of coverage in Western news does is make certain conservative voices within the Global South associate lgbt rights as “western” and hurt marginalized people within.
It helps that they’re already on the anti-racism and workers rights train. My parents still haven’t come around because they have liberal brainworms, though my grandma has used her power as matriarch to bully them into being nicer. Shes pretty well known in our village back in Czechia, everyone knows her, so she kinda made it her business to begin to convince people. Theres also just the fact that it isn’t America. The default for LGBT people is obscurity, only in America and Western Europe is there a big political debate about it, though that is spreading to Eastern Europe too as time goes on.
It definitely puts new light on the claim stupidpol types love to make about how “all of the working class people outside of the west hate gay people, so the LGBT movement is bourgeois and imperialist.”
It’s nonsense. Most people don’t even know being gay or trans is a thing outside the west. It’s a curse and a blessing.
Shit, the idea wasnt even particularly well known in the west until the 80s and 90s. Like I didn’t even know being gay or trans was an option until I was like 14.