When do you think this conflict started? Because if you’re not aware Israel has been bombing Gaza for decades. The bombing of the desalinization plant I mentioned happened in 2021 and Israel has bombed water infrastructure in Gaza far before that.

Don’t avoid the question this time. In such circumstances what do you expect Palestinians to do? Because as far as I can tell the only answer you have for them is death.

What do expect Palestinians to do? Do you want them to waste away drinking contaminated water because Israel attacked their sole desalination plant? That isn’t peace either.

This is such a wildly naive and orientalist view of the Middle East. If you actually studied the modern history of the region you would know that since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire western powers have ceaselessly meddled in the affairs of the people there.

They’ve supported coups in order to overthrow democratic governments. They funded right wing jihadis including the precursors to and allies of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. They’ve enabled war crimes left and right. They even invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and continues to bomb the whole region with an extensive and secretive drone program. Even now the west continues to defend authoritarian and genocidal regimes like Saudi Arabia or Israel as long as they serve their western interests regardless of their destabilizing effect.

The reality is you have no idea what a Middle East would look like without western intervention. To pretend that you do only reveals your complete ignorance and racist arrogance.

That’s just what kids are taught in high school in the US and most people don’t question it. You have to go out of your way to learn otherwise.

They aren’t wrong though. The media has long lost the truth about what actually happened that day. Here you can read a piece by a journalist who was the Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post at the time.

https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php

I don’t think we have any reliable polling data to say what the approval rating of the government was during the Great Leap Forward. However, Mao did lose a lot of influence within the CCP as a consequence. As such I think it’s safe to say there was lots of dissatisfaction at least within the party itself.

As for why the CCP doesn’t drop their communists principles it’s simple. They’re still communists who believe in Marxism-Leninism. They just don’t have a principled aversion to markets as long as they’re useful for raising living standards and economic development.

They do however have an aversion to political liberalization. This was in part informed by what they saw as a failure of the joint market and political reforms happening in Eastern European socialist countries. The CCP’s fear was that political liberalization would empower a nascent capitalist class which could lead to economic disaster. I don’t think they were necessarily wrong in this regard as that’s exactly what happened to Russia only a few years later.

If you want the CCP to stop what you see as a silly socialist experiment you’ll have to give them better reasons to. The CCP isn’t irrational. They’re just working from a different set of assumptions than you are.

The Taiwanese government would have to negotiate those terms with the mainland before any such referendum could happen. However, that’s unlikely to occur in the near term if the DPP, which is the “pro independence” party, wins the upcoming presidential elections. When combined, parties interested in negotiating with the mainland are polling higher than them. However, the DPP maintains a a slight lead with a plurality of support. Needless to say it’s a complicated situation. I doubt the issue of Taiwan’s future will be resolved anytime soon.

It’s true that you will hear limited critique for Republicans and Democrats from private media outlets. However, there is usually very little criticism directed at things that both parties can agree on, like their hawkish stance towards China.

That said, I think we have vastly different perspectives on how the economy functions. What you view as a petty competition for more money I think is an existential threat to the privileges American business elite currently enjoy. If the industries they are invested in are no longer competitive in a global market, they will not be able to extract the wealth that currently funds their extravagant lifestyles. They will happily try to influence US policy if they think it can prevent that from happening.

Lastly, I agree China’s favorable in western aligned countries have been negative since around 2008. However up until around 2018 they were still hovering close to where they were in the 2000s. It was around 2018 when Trump started implementing tariffs against China that negative opinions on China spiked. It’s not like Trump cares about human rights so why did his administration take such a protectionist measure when Republicans have been pro free trade for decades? Well that also happens to be around the same time China’s economy likely surpassed the US in purchasing power parity. That gap has only widened so it’s not surprising to me that Biden has chosen to keep those tariffs in place while also implementing new trade restrictions with China.

The problem with pursuing full independence is that not all Taiwanese people currently want the island to be a separate country given the deep cultural, familial, and economic ties they have to the mainland. That of course doesn’t mean those who are against independence trust the CCP. Unfortunately I think that nuance gets lost in western media.

The thing is those examples you gave really are not comparable to the massive and sustained economic growth China has experienced since their economic reforms in the late 80s. Putin has only overseen a modest economic recovery following the disaster that was economic shock therapy in the 90s. As for Hitler, he provided the German economy with whatever you would call the exact opposite of stability.

It definitely can be called propaganda but for different reasons usually related to market pressures.

Private news organizations don’t like going against the status quo. That invites controversy which their advertisers or investors may not be comfortable with. Even non profits outlets like NPR don’t want to upset their large donors.

Additionally, finding reliable sources is a difficult and expensive process. As such, private news outlets are more likely to use government officials as primary sources especially when it comes to foreign affairs. They may also rely on privately funded think tanks and NGOs which may have often been created to push a particular narrative.

Taken together, that means private news outlets are heavily biased in favor of the interests of their local business elite and existing foreign policy.

With regards to China, their economy has technically outgrown the US economy if you look at purchasing power parity. That’s deeply concerning for US business elite who have enjoyed an almost hegemonic control over the global economy since WWII. In my view, that’s why you see far more negative stories about China today than there were a few decades ago, despite the fact that China’s political system has not meaningfully changed.

Thankfully I never equated them.

I’m not convinced the CCP has to be bad news for the latter. The CCP has a very economistic mindset when it comes to dealing with internal strife within China. As such, I think they would potentially settle for an economic union with certain security guarantees which would allow Taiwan to remain politically independent.

While I would agree that many in the US have strong feelings about their party affiliation, I don’t think it’s quite the same.

For one thing, by joining the CCP you are actually required to participate. I don’t know the numbers off hand, but I imagine far fewer people in the US actually participate in their local Democratic or Republican party clubs. Additionally, the approval ratings of democrats or republicans is lower than the CCP’s even if you only poll their respective party members.

The CCP is a democratic centralist party. As such, factionalism has always been heavily discouraged. None of that is new.

Additionally the role of president, for which term limits were abolished, is not a particularly powerful one in China. The president serves at the behest of the national people’s congress standing committee and only has leeway to engage in foreign diplomacy. Xi likely has more influence over Chinese state affairs as general secretary of the CCP which never had term limits.

That said, it’s weird to see western media trying to read the tea leaves so they can write salacious stories about China’s palace intrigue when policy debates are happening out in the open. I’m willing to bet most western experts on China just don’t actually read any of the primary sources.

I mean just go read the CPC constitution. There are translations of it in English readily available.

As far as I can tell, the party constitution gets updated at every party congress and doesn’t afford Xi any special powers. He is included as an ideological leader in the party’s general program but that’s not unique to him. The same can be said for every CCP leader since the constitution was first adopted. Additionally, the constitution still clearly states that all party leadership is subject to oversight. It also lays out rights every party member has that no member of leadership is allowed to curtail. I don’t know how you could read this document and come away thinking it gives Xi total control over the party unless you’re already biased to interpret it that way.

What evidence is there that Xi consolidated all the power? Is it that he led an anti corruption campaign and has been in power for ten years? Is it that he isn’t directly elected by the people? Because by those standards Angela Merkel would also be a dictator.

What evidence is there for this beyond mere speculation? Most articles on Xi from the western press read more like gossip magazines than investigative journalism. They’re full of things like “body language experts” and other fluff but not much else.

The same is true for the “spy balloon” or “wolf warrior diplomacy”. While we don’t know what the balloon’s purpose was, the US has basically admitted that it wasn’t collecting any data. As for “wolf warrior diplomacy” it amounts to minor Chinese state officials being sassy on twitter. There’s no evidence that such behavior was state policy.

Concluding that China is bound to collapse based on this kind of flimsy evidence is so silly.

The thing is, you can’t really separate the Chinese people from the CCP. Something like 7% of the population are members and the party has very high approval ratings. That’s not just because the CCP are good propagandists either. Rather the living conditions for the average Chinese person have improved dramatically over the course of only a few decades thanks to policy decisions made by the CCP. As such, opposing the CCP and wanting the Chinese people to thrive may be seen as a highly contradictory perspective to people living in mainland China.

It’s not that corporate news in the western world has to be well organized to put out the same perspective. Rather, they operate under the same kinds of selective pressures and as such they develop similar biases.

A good example is all the reporting on WMDs in Iraq that went unquestioned by much of the western press until well after it mattered. Unfortunately nothing has really changed since the invasion of Iraq.