Xi Jinping is also a dictator.
I was gaming with friends on Discord when the topic of China passingly came up and one guy started going off about how China and Russia are both socially backward authoritarian dictatorships and how China is communist in name only, oppresses its minority groups and no true socialist should support them.
spoiler
Anyway, they’re also pro-NATO
To go off on the point about projection a thing I’ve personally noted living in both countries is that when it comes to the issues of racism the entrenched nature of it in the western social consciousness and political establishment makes it a much different beast. Like there’s no political party in china that has a platform based on the disenfranchisement of a minority group and goes around advertising the fact that the first thing they’ll do when in power is to bus them out of the country. As such while there are undoubtedly racist individuals within China, I can think of one particular family member of mine who may hold such opinions, there is no concentration of said racism or a purposeful consolidation of that sort of sentiment towards larger more dangerous actions like here in the west. Considering the fact that most western countries were and to some lesser extent still are ethnostates when it comes to who holds actual power in governance, its not surprise they tend to project that thought onto China.
Yeah. In my experience in east Asia racism is generally much more socially-acceptable in the sense of terms that are used and what’s publicly acceptable to express as an opinion.
Meanwhile I live in what is undeniably one of the most racist countries in the world - not quite on the same level as Israel or South Africa but really uncomfortably fucking close (y’know how there are jokes about talking racism with a person from western Europe and it all being fine up until you mention Romani people? That’s what people are like in this country, except for pretty much every race or nation - they’ll agree that racism is detestable, just as long as you don’t ask them to talk in any kind of detail about west Asia, south Asia, east Asia, central Europe, eastern Europe, Africa, south America…) it’s really frowned upon (mostly) to be openly racist here but as long as you’re somewhat quiet about it or you frame it in the right terms it’s totally fine.
Here we prefer our genocidal ethnosupremacist state to be nice and prim and proper - politeness is the most important factor to us because we need to conceal our virulent white supremacism even from ourselves. Policy though, especially foreign policy, that can be whatever it likes and concerns about human rights and international law be damned.
I think that’s the biggest difference in my eyes - I’ll get called a gweilo in Hong Kong or I’ll have a Japanese person tell me that I eat noodles like a Korean dog. But that ain’t worth shit compared to the atrocities that my native country has wrought upon the world in its enduring legacy of white supremacism. (Gonna make a conceptual distinction between Imperial Japan and modern Japan here for argument’s sake, although I’m standing on shaky ground doing so, but you get the picture.)
I dunno i just care much less about words than I used to when I was a lib. Sure I work pretty hard to avoid causing offence and I work to avoid words that are overly oppressive and that play into stuff like toxic masculinity but at the same time, on some level, it’s really not high priority to me compared to what else is going on.
Even if, if, China was a Han-supremacist ethnostate - what are you gonna do about it, and if you’re a westerner then what grounds do you stand on to make such an accusation and, more to the point, what are you doing about the white supremacism in your own backyard exactly?
Libs treat political concerns like bumper stickers - you just slap one that has the right wording on and dust your hands off, satisfied in the knowledge that you’ve done your part.