Yes. The single individual. Forcing this country of over a billion people against their will to have their own sustainable food supply. On his own. Like a dictator.
Believing that over a billion people are all unilaterally controlled by a single person is not only peak great man theory, but also just another extension of rabid racism
From observation it seems really handy for crushing all nuance, too. Who did the Holodumber? Stalin. By himself. WIth a big spoon. Don’t ask why Ukrainian communist officials in Ukraine were genociding Ukrainians. Stalin did it, alone, by himself.
The cultural revolution? Mao did it. Just Mao. No one else was involved. We can condemn the entire country because the entire country is just one dude on a framed propaganda poster. Or like “we’re going to sanction Saddam” or whoever, because sanctioning hte dictator is justifiable, whereas people might ask why we’re pushing millions or tens of millions of people because we don’t like the guy that supposedly single handedly runs the entire country.
4chan calls us Chinese people “soulless bug men” and it’s just so cool and good that the Economist is printing the polite version of that.
Bu… But you’re brainwashed! YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY NEED FOOD! DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!
Do not, my friends, become addicted to food. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
That was such a brilliant, wonderful, terrible line. Just… so much… political bullshit and lies and dissembling and cruelty and indifference is tied up in that line.
It’s a great film; so much of it could easily have come across as hokey or dumb, but somehow it all works.
I found it really authentic because everyone was totally bought-in to the camp. The things that would have been camp were part of these people’s lives, and there was so much attention to detail in how they spoke, moved, dressed, and acted that it sold the whole thing as real people in a real culture living their lives. Like the war boys weren’t dumb, mindless thugs throwing themselves to their death for nothing like in an 80s action movie. They took time to show how they were devoted to Joe, they had religious beliefs, they genuinely thought of themselves as heroes fighting for a worthwhile cause. They invested the warboys with so much depth and character that I, at least, never thought they were silly. These are warriors from a warrior culture who have their rituals of war, their symbols of valor, their pride, their pathos. When the one guy takes a bolt to the head and his buddies are praying for him to get up so he can die as a hero there’s just so much realness in that moment.
And for me, personally, I know a little bit about guys like General Butt Naked in the Liberian civil war, and some other pretty out-there gangs and warbands and mercenary companies, so a lot of the “over the top” elements were recognizably similar to things that warrior cultures do in real life.
Xi jinping failed to consider that food isn’t a universal right under capitalism. How are we supposed to condemn China as capitalist and fascist if they do socialism?!?
Nooo you can’t just make food to feed people without a profit motive!
Real “why are the cells multiplying and building tissue without a profit motive?!” energy
President Biden, please start bombing. My country yearns for hunger.
Communism too much food?
This reminds me of a quote from Catch-22, it has the same naked obsession with the ‘rightness’ of profit that reads like it isn’t supposed to be satire but which I can’t help be seeing as comedy:
Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen." — Catch-22, Joseph Heller
I thought Catch-22 was a satire
It is, I guess the ‘dry’ delivery reminded him of this.
fixation on food security
caring more about feeding people than feeding profits makes you a monster to The Economist
it’s not the feeding people that they’re even mad about so much as the freedom of action that a country has when it doesn’t rely on trade with other nations for essentials like food and energy
Leverage. It’s all about leverage.
B-B-B-BUT muh COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE. This isn’t PARETO EFFICIENT, and that’s against the RULES. (Please ignore the inseparable intertwining of economic and political power and just play along like dupes)
Guevara has a bunch of speeches about this. IIRC, he differentiated between “political freedom”, the power of a people to make their own decisions and act on them, and “economical freedom”, the power of a people to decide over their production and trade. He argued that a revolution aims for the former; after that, the post-revolution state builds the latter.
good for feeding people
not valuable
choose one, piggy
The wealth of farmers is not more important than the food security of a nation. We do not need modern day kulaks, which is probably what the economist wants in China.
not even just that, capitalists want all nations to be dependent on imported food so it can be used as leverage
Yeah,
said it best. Look at your plate and where your food is from if you want to know who the imperialists areDang, spitting bars.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
I think it is actually authoritarian that we’re not allowed to hunt economists for sport
Or writers for the Economist
Nice profile pic, comrade
Thanks! The art from ghost is one of my favorite styles I’ve seen
no no thats a philosopher and the socratic argument successfully made them into a protected species
Going to the Philosophical petting zoo and giving Focoult some head pats as he exists in existential dread.
going to an uni campus and selling homemade bread called foucaulcchia as part of my
for the week
I like how they took a photo that is clearly very mundane and used a filter to make it look like literal hell. Very subtle.
Meanwhile in America:
https://fortune.com/2023/06/08/how-long-will-smoke-new-york-city-air-quality-last/
…Why are yall supporting the CCP forcing farmers to do something against their will? How do you expect underpaid, overworked farmers to turn a profit and provide for their families if you’re making them grow a bunch of dirt cheap rice?
Well it’s a good thing they’re in a country with a robust social safety net in that case.
Wow what a fucking hack job.
It states there is, in fact, a guaranteed standard of living. Moreover China has a guaranteed residence for every citizen. If that out of work rural worker wants the minimum income and a roof over his head, all he has to do is go back home (using heavily subsidised transport). Which sucks, but losing a job and having to move back to your hometown isn’t exactly something unheard of in Western nations.
China has a way to go in terms of healthcare and other benefits, but given it’s providing a better safety net to vastly more people over a larger area with 1/4th of the USA’s GDP and an industrial base that is still largely rural it’s doing an astounding job.
guaranteed standard of living
For people under the poverty line, which is only $2.30 a day. So their “standard of living” is $840 a year to get by on. Even in China that’s not fucking sustainable.
China has a way to go in terms of healthcare and other benefits
So you’re saying you’re cool with Chinese farmers not being able to afford going to the hospital because Supreme Leader Xi forced them to grow the cheapest crops imaginable?
If that out of work rural worker wants the minimum income and a roof over his head, all he has to do is go back home
Lol. Lmao even. "Losing your job and abandoning your home because of authoritarian regulations is ok’
Even in China that’s not fucking sustainable.
Post a source. There are many places in China where you can buy a meal for less than an American quarter
You can even buy breakfast with 40 cents in BEIJING
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/breakfast-40-cents-what-chinas-deflation-looks-like-2023-08-10/
” The Center for Strategic and International Studies CSIS lists major funding from defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Company and General Atomics.[35]
Significant funding has come from the governments of the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates.[36]”
lol
What’s your point? State funding = facts and numbers are irrelevant?
Do you believe that the United States and its allies have a geopolitical agenda or not? Do you think they are incapable of lying to further that agenda? Are you familiar with the lead up to the Iraq War?
"Acktually tankie, Don’t you realise I think US bad too?
Anyway, now to return to my angry rant against China where I uncritically parrot US state department sources."
Libs: “I love critical thinking and debate.”
Leftists: “Okay, here’s why your sources might be biased.”
Libs: "Noooo, not critical of my wholesome weapons manufacturers and fascist governments like that!:
provide for their families
Not a problem in a socialist country, the CPC is not stupid, they will make sure adequate social protections are in place for the people who represent the sickle in the hammer and sickle symbol.
Bernie, the man you support, would agree with this decision, to fight hunger and ensure food security for the citizenry.
China is socialist in name only.
Their mode of production is called a “socialist market economy”. The leadership uses socialist theory to guide their decisions on running the country. Why would this not be socialism?
Oh well if they say their production is socialist guided then they’re tooootally socialist! Just ignore the privately owned factories paying people $2 a day and the fact billionaires still exist.
Socialism is a mode of production that is in part defined by class war between the elites and the people, with the state being on the side of the people (as shown by their desire to bolster food security). In our current globalized world, China is not in a position to bring about full communism, liquidating all the elite, without incurring apocalyptic economic punishment from Western capitalists.
China is a country with flaws, but a country doesn’t need to have achieved a fully functional planned economy to be called socialist, as the label is contingent on the ideology that the state employs in the governance of their country.
The factories aren’t privately owned, they’re owned by the country and rented by private companies. Stop talking. You don’t know shit. Start reading and educating yourself instead of spreading US state department propaganda.
So, what you’re saying is they’re not owned collectively by the workers? Tell me again why independent unions are illegal in China.
This is grasping at straws to find justifications for hating china as much as the state dept. tells you to while telling yourself you’re a leftist. I’ll report you to Bernie for this.
Just ignore the privately owned factories paying people $2 a day
Chinese average labor costs were $6.5 per hour in 2020.
They’re using the people’s land to produce crops. The crops they produce should be for the good of the people.
they’ll never get rich but they’ll also never end up starving because they grew a cash crop that they couldn’t eat. Xi is trying to make sure that no one in his country ever goes hungry. I wish we had leaders in the usa that cared as much about that.
How do you know that? People in China go hungry all the time. Official poverty rates might’ve been reduced significantly, but the poverty line in China is much less livable than the poverty line in America. If you make $2.31 a day in China, you’re not technically in poverty!
Not to mention similar homelessness rates to America
rice farmers complaining about profits are definitely not going hungry
poverty in china nowadays is pensioner age old people whos kids have left for the cities for better economic opportunities because their village is located inside a literal cliff 18 hours and a mule ride from civilization and the only viable occupation there is subsistence barley farmer/part-time chicken keeper
poverty alleviation isn’t about making sure these people can turn a profit, it’s about relocating them to places where they can be made less hostile to the concepts of electricity and running water, because otherwise they would just be content to stay inside their cliff and head into town once a year to collect their poverty check/trade in their moonshine for ibuprofen
but the poverty line in China is much less livable than the poverty line in America
The poverty lines are calculated using the same formulas to determine livability for each country. Everybody should theoretically have a somewhat similar standard of living at the poverty line across countries
The poverty line for USA is a 14500 salary. 80% of Americans live in a city. How many cities in USA exist where you can live well on a 14500 salary? Not to mention a single healthcare incident will instantly wipe out whatever scraps you can save off a 14500 salary
People who make 2.3USD a day in China live in a place where it is possible to live on that cheap salary
Not to mention similar homelessness rates to America
Can you link a source? The most recent data I found dates back to 2011
https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm
Purchasing power parity of China is 4.022. So let’s look at the overall poverty line of $2.30 in China. That would be equalivent to $9.25 a day in America, or $3,376 a year.
China makes their poverty rates appear so low by making their poverty line absolutely ridiculous and actually much lower than comparable countries.
Of course I couldn’t any PPP rates for just rural China (although it’s pretty obvious $3,376 isn’t going to suddenly becoming $30,000 because it’s rural), but see this:
Our results indicate that the mean subjective poverty line of the rural households is 8297 yuan per capita, which is far higher than the national poverty line (2800 yuan). Statistically, 29% of the surveyed rural households who are not objectively poor feel subjectively poor.
29% of people who are not objectively poor feel subjectively poor?
I said that amount is livable in China. That study is about people’s feelings. Hardly related
Not to mention I work in Silicon Valley as a software engineer and it’s literally common for people here to be making 200-400k to complain about being poor and not saving much all the time
How many people living in the Midwest or the south on a 20k salary do you think would feel subjectively poor?
Conveniently ignoring the fact a $3.3k salary isn’t livable anywhere in America.
Spoiled middle class westerners complaining about being poor is totally different LMAO. Americans will complain about being poor when living in a decent house in suburb, being poor is seen totally different in 2nd and 3rd world countries that are, yknow, struggling much moreso.
Conveniently ignoring the fact a $3.3k salary isn’t livable anywhere in America.
Well that’s why the American poverty line has been calculated to be 14500
14500 is the poverty line in America and 845 is the poverty line in China
PPP isn’t a perfect comparison between every single combination of all 200 countries in the entire world
But the poverty line is specifically calculated for every single country
you didn’t say anything about the rates of hunger in China. Those people that are in poverty still don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from
Give me a break. Stop lying. 35 million Chinese go hungry.
maybe this is why they’re focusing on growing food crops
China, state whose economic decision you disagree with, hunger rate of 2.50% in a country of 1 billion people.
America, state whose free market approach to food security you generally agree with, hunger rate of 10% in a country with 1/3 the population.
Similar amount go hungry in the US
US has 4-5x less the population of the PRC. The PRC is doing a better job, with room to improve, of feeding its citizens.
Which means, given the government’s record in improving the quality of life of China for the past 50 years, the CPC is on a trajectory of virtually solving food insecurity in China.
Now, let us be honest. All of your questions in this thread are just begging the same questions other federated instanced posters are asking:
Why don’t you share our hate for China?
Personally, hate doesn’t make me happy. I don’t hate China because if their prosperity would mean US decline, it means there’s something wrong with the economic system that treats survival in a world of post scarcity production as a zero sum game. After China is balkanized, and a decade of harvesting China and the rest of Asia occur, the US would invent new enemies and power blocs to exploit and eviscerate. An elimination of the last world powers would just reinvent the same exploitative power dynamics that the US and Europe had with the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I would live in prosperity off exploiting others or in perpetual misery supporting alienated, affluent, and hollow people.
Even if that doesn’t bother you, or you don’t care about China, you should still know that the elimination of those enemies won’t result in the reintroduction of a New Deal in the 21st century. Paraphrasing from someone: You’re not going to get Star Trek, or the world of Interstellar. You’re getting Elysium and then we’re all getting extinction.
Just a life of meaninglessness under the leadership of the West.
You don’t have to praise or fawn over China but you can’t delude yourself into believing that the collapse and dissolution of America’s enemies would mean that their spoils would be shared with you. It’ll be shared among the masters, administrators, and enforcers of annihilation. And all that cheerleading, xenophobia, and chauvinism would just end up wasting your own time and your colleagues time in preventing the annihilation of meaning and solidarity between humanity.
Aint reading allat propaganda 🤣🤣
Man, the thought terminating cliche rigging of the brains of people on these subjects is really depressing.
We make long well thought out good faith posts and get dismissed as propaganda, even though we’re just regular people with earnest opinions. Like come on, have some intellectual curiosity. Think. This isnt even a enthusiastically pro-China post. Please. If you’re going to come to our instance, please, please actually come here in good faith.
@Bernie2028@midwest.social
I’m saying your China hate isn’t going to make you happy or wealthy. No one on Hexbear here hates China with you, and you just come off as a nihlistic anti-intellectual loser.
You’re probably a troll, but it still bears worth typing out why I - and others who share my view or are malleable to it - don’t waste our time scapegoating a country for a decline in quality of life here in the West.
You’re smelly. You have poop running down your pants and piss making squishy sounds on your shoes. I, and all humanity, cringe at you.
That’s really rude, you asked a question, someone gave you an answer, and then you dismiss the answer as propaganda without reading it because it’s difficult to read. This isn’t what Bernie would do.
2.5% is the hunger rate of China according to your source. So I decided to look up the US and see how it compares. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-security-and-nutrition-assistance/
10% or in other words china is currently 4x better at feeding the hungry than the US is. 10% of 300+million is also around 30+million, so a comparable number but just out of an incomparably smaller population.
So you, following the advice of people who cannot get hunger below 10%, in a country with enough food waste to solve the problem, think that people on the other side of the world, whose hunger problem is only a quarter of your neighbors, should fix their hunger by growing LESS FOOD in favor of cash crops? Is that correct?
If I’m misrepresenting you please let me know
So I decided to look up the US and see how it compares.
Whataboutism.
That isnt whataboutism, it is a comparison.
I completely support forcing business owners to do something that improves people’s lives.
And if you do not, you are my enemy.
if you do not, you are my enemy
Feeling fashy today aren’t we?
facism is when you call people enemies
I’m now a fascist because I called my friends the “enemy team” on Valorant last Thursday.
Video games are a tad bit different than the real world honey.
So is shitposting on the internet son.
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life
-I dunno some quote libs are fond of
great bit
Right? “Bernie2028! Socialism sucks, starve people!”
Shit he’s giving food to people with his comically large spoon!
Communism with Chinese Characteristics
Oh no
XI FLIPPED THE SPOON LEVER! HE’S PUTTING GRAIN IN PEOPLE’S BOWLS! REVISIONISM! ABORT! ABORT! 🗽Xi’sd to feed you
But what of the price of cotton Mr. Lincoln?
