I don’t think Xi Jinping loves when Trump puts 1quadrillion% tariffs on China.

So the Democratic Party is structurally incapable of pushing through the reforms and new programs that are necessary to stop fascism? Why should people keep being married to that party instead of supporting any other effort, and pay no rhetorical support nor lip service to a party that also facilitates fascism?

Did Biden win the senate?

It seems that now that Trump is president, what congress says doesn’t matter at all and the President can do whatever.

Did he appoint the judges for the supreme court?

He could’ve expanded it, like FDR threatened to do and forced the court to let him do some of the New Deal reforms they were previously opposed to. Biden never lifted a finger with regards to that. This also could’ve maintained Roe v Wade.

I agree that he mishandled the conflict in Israel,

1. it’s a genocide
2. “mishandled” is a really egregious weasel word for “gave unconditional support to the government even as approval ratings slid down the drain”

You’re right that the grass always looks greener on the other side. I’m sure a large number of the Gen Z people who post Chinamaxxing memes only do it in jest and/or wouldn’t do it if they knew a bit more of what they would have to give up to live in China (especially if they’re queer, but otherwise moreso in the realm of access to cheap foreign goods that people in imperialist countries get than “free speech” which anyone on TikTok of all platforms has already learned is never guaranteed in a capitalist country). Yet Western countries seem to be backsliding on those aspects, while the older generation in China that’s stricter and more conservative is aging out of politics. I think you don’t have to be pollyannaish to think that in ~20 years, China will have surpassed the largest issues you might have with it, but it gets harder and harder to think Western countries will do the same.

we all know only the “right people” have access to western internet

Quite literally anyone in China is capable of grabbing a VPN and have unsupervised access to the same internet as you and me. The so-called “great firewall” only exists as a means of making it more difficult for Chinese internet users to patronize Western (mostly American) internet services. If there was no firewall, companies like Meta and Google would have access to the Chinese market and it would be hard for local Chinese companies like WeChat or BiliBili to grow.

Are you sure? Something tells me that their conclusion that there’s nothing worthwhile in a country of 1.4 billion people that covers nearly a quarter of the largest continent on earth, with 5,000 years of history, and incredibly varied ecosystems, architecture, cultures, and landscapes might be biased. But I don’t want to be uncharitable.

It seems like the user who posted that article makes similar posts attacking China exclusively, day-in and day-out. 4000+ posts in the last year.

This particular post is a summary from a report from a large European think tank that’s obviously quite pro-NATO and worthy of skepticism from any anti-imperialist audience. The report itself seems to cast an extremely broad net as to what should count as nefarious Chinese meddling:

However, China’s efforts today are about shaping public opinion at scale. In a wider casting of the net, Chinese FIMI now relies on a busy ecosystem of other actors. For example, Beijing uses research partnerships, business associations, cultural exchanges, diaspora networks and social media influencers—who may or may not recognise their role in communicating CCP narratives. These locally based people and organisations (such as, for example, a Polish influencer talking to Polish audiences) provide familiar cultural and linguistic references and possess legitimacy that Chinese authorities lack. They help embed Beijing’s narratives into debates that, at first glance, may seem unrelated to China, such as the future of European industrial policy, global governance or the economy.

The underlying logic runs as follows: influence the wider information environment first, allow preferred narratives to become familiar and “common sense” in everyday online discourse and then let those narratives travel—with the help of local intermediaries—into mainstream media agendas and, eventually, national politics.

According to this report, a Chinese academic who’s just participating in a research program in Europe is part of China’s “FIMI” (their buzzword for disinformation/propaganda) efforts. But that, and the examples cited throughout here (except maybe AI which I’m willing to say is a different kind of phenomenon) is just a normal part of a country integrating itself in the globalized world.

If Algerian students start coming to European universities, and Algerian traveling influencers start talking about how cool it is to travel to Algeria, and Algerian artists make media that is consumed in Europe, European people’s opinion of Algeria will improve. And I think that it would be perfectly OK for that to happen, and for the governments of Algeria and Europe to try to cultivate that cultural exchange and bringing down of barriers. Same with literally any other country on earth (especially the ones that I’m very critical of, e.g. USA and Israel, because it still is cool for people to be less ignorant, although with the US particularly I think people are already extremely familiar with their culture and it dominates everything).

Why is it any different with China? Why are Chinese people treated with this suspicion? Why are we contributing to sinophobia by acting like it’s crazy that young people kinda want to be Chinese?

Is it Chinese propaganda that living conditions and future prospects in the Western world are really bleak and young people are coping by imagining how much better life would be in the biggest country in the world that doesn’t seem to be suffering from those problems at quite the same level?

It’s not just a TikTok thing, though. And isn’t the fact that TikTok has gotten as large as it has (despite its current status of being run under US oligarchs for US users), and how many USAmericans decided to start using RedNote when it initially was banned in the US, also evidence to the claim that China is having a big cultural moment?

I can at least say anecdotally that random people I’ve met who aren’t politically involved have been getting more into specifically Chinese cultural products. Games, movies, etc. And among my inner friend group (who, admittedly, are definitely much more inclined to support China politically, not just culturally) we make jokes about Chinamaxxing too.

Also, there is no equivalence between the relationship between TikTok and Chinese culture as a whole versus YouTube and Google products. “TikTok is to China as YouTube is to Google products” is not valid because TikTok is to China as YouTube is to the United States. And while checking how people feel about a country based on trends on social media wouldn’t be the ideal way to gauge things (polls are obviously better) it still seems reasonable.

It’d also be nice to see a few more viewpoints.

Unfortunately, hasty defederation has made this impossible. It’s too easy for people in a community to ask for defederation instead of confronting other people’s viewpoints. Not to mention that when very contentious topics are brought up and there are whole communities full of people who dedicate a lot of time to reading about and thinking about those topics, it can create a poor situation where that community suddenly starts an outburst of too many disagreeing viewpoints. Compound that with the extremely fractured state of information and media where people live in completely different realities. It gets to be too much, and it’s exceedingly difficult to have a civil conversation when the gulf between 2 communities is so large.

Communist Party of China

but at what cost?

I’m saying that the meme is correct insofar as Western oligarchs can commit crimes and participate in extremely large criminal conspiracies, as proven by the Epstein files. No such scandal has been proven of China.

I would conjecture that the political system of the PRC is more resilient to the kind of corruption and abuses that need to exist for decades for a conspiracy of that scale to develop. I don’t really have hard proof of that but it’s at least inarguable that comparing the West to China, China is 1 - 0 in terms of not being exposed for having a giant ring of pedophiles that control everything.

Is your assumption that an equivalent conspiracy exists, despite no evidence? And to the extent that there are abusers and evildoers in the CPC: why aren’t they in the Epstein files? There’s people from almost every other country on the planet on there, why no one from the second largest country on Earth and the main trade partner of the US, where most of the people involved are based?

And yet where are the high ranking members of the CPC in the Epstein files?

But Xi’s support for mixing private and public ownership structures was purely pragmatic. It had value, he said in another forum, because it would “improve the socialist market economic structure.” Xi’s assessment is echoed by Michael Collins, one of the CIA’s most senior officials for Asia. “The fundamental end of the Communist party of China under Xi Jinping is all the more to control that society politically and economically,” Collins argued earlier this year. “The economy is being viewed, affected and controlled to achieve a political end.”
…
The party’s overarching aim, though, has remained consistent: to ensure that the private sector, and individual entrepreneurs, do not become rival players in the political system. The party wants economic growth, but not at the expense of tolerating any organised alternative centres of power.
…
“[Capitalists] act as if they are being chased by a bear,” wrote Zhang Lin, a Beijing political commentator, in response to these comments. “They are powerless to control the bear, so they are competing to outrun each other to escape the animal.”

source
quoted from China Has Billionaires

China’s known for handing out the death penalty to high profile white collar criminals. This article is from 2013 but AFAIK it’s continued to happen since then, maybe Western media has caught on that people actually love this stuff so they haven’t reported on it as much more recently.

Can you elaborate on why you think that?

Okay.

The situation is most definitely not the same. If it was the same then corporate media wouldn’t spend much time criticizing China, they’d be happy with having yet another country to freely exploit.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78nrx309kzo

This kind of thing never receives serious consequences in the US anymore. Hell, do enough white collar crimes and pedophilia and they make you president.

It wasn’t, but that time America was not an active participant in the game. They were amongst those trying to provide aid to Gaza (or atleast that was the official stance).

WTF? They built a pier off the shore of Gaza that lasted less than a week and airdropped a few crates of food. This is entirely outweighed by the unconditional support of the Israeli government’s genocide. They provided everything Israel ever wanted and never made an actual ultimatum to Netanyahu’s government. They absolutely were active participants (in fact, the main instigators).

The abhorrent behaviour of Trump government is a radically opposite stand. Concentrating the people at aid centers, by taking advantage of their hunger, and then nake them sitting ducks.

This did get a lot of media coverage in early 2025 but AFAIK it’s not exactly unprecedented and Israel had already been doing similar things in the early stages of the operation post Oct 7th. At the very least, it’s hard to say whether these tactics, as cruel and horrifying as they are, were any more lethal than what they were already doing for a year before that.

How one appreciates the good poorly, until the real bad arrives

Was the Biden administration before Trump’s good even after more than a year of genocide in Palestine?