Thanks for your reply!

I know about the distribution of power, that has a kind of pyramid shape, sorry for the lack of vocabulary. I have also seen videos, of cause one sided, from people that lived in China for some time and displaying their view. One very popular story is the “they paint their grass green”, which I understood as follows: There is the goal of having a certain amount of green land in the country, so each region trys to reach that goal and show the higher ups how good it is going by having green grass and hills. This is of cause a very simplified scenario, but I have read a few other things that aren’t so great. Of cause you can say the same thing about many other western and global north countries, but very few people are so emotional and strong opinionated as supporters of China, some north korea or Russia. I feel like i have not read a comment with such a strong opinion about any other country here on Lemmy.

I see that the view of most westerns is shifted from reality, but I have not read a comment that seems to see both sides of that country, it seems very extremistic.

Now when I think of China, these things come to mind:

• the Uighurs
• not quite working democracy
• extreme surveillance
• stories of people getting herassed by the police for criticising the state or being different (Naomi Wu on yt for example)
• impressive industrial development in the last few decades
• high working ethics
• creativity in engineering
• skilled labour
• high building rates of solar and renewable energy sources
• also high coal production and high building rates of coal power plants
• high censorship, as it can be seen with deepseek and other AI or media
• stories about testing radioactivity on a village
• striving for higher environmental regulations in the industry
• affiliation with Russia, that invaded Ukraine (after the Nato got closer of cause, which might be seen as a provocative move)
• affiliation with north korea, which is a different conversation
• their problem with Taiwan and tsmc
• hard working conditions in factories (owned by western companies sometimes, but the government is supposed to protect the citizens in my view)

Now this is of cause not at all everything and I am aware its a view fuelled by western media. But if half of those things are true, its still not going great.

I don’t want to talk China down, I want to understand why so many people in this space are pro china, when I see the government as pretty critical. I know the us is putting a ton of effort into discredit other forms of government or markets, and there are for sure a few points in this list that is heavily influenced by them.

I literelly don’t know which “side is right” in this argument. In a country where there is propaganda and social media is strictly moderated by the government and not a lot of independent journalism (like YouTube or blogs even get pressured to shut down) and which has a social score controlling your life and thougs - how would one make a actually independent and fair survey? There is no democracy, so why turn against it if you have no way of changing it?

Of cause we are a bit brainwashed by the west and Chinas enemies and I think trump helped a lot to remove the elusion of a “good and strong america”. But it still feels like the people are more free in the west, we have democracy and solid education and independent social media and journalism which is very important to me.

And its very impressive what China achieved in the short amount of time, compared to the west, industrially speaking. But socially (like what the government does) I really would not want to live there at all.

I feel like many people here on Lemmy have just the same black and white thinking of “china good, murica bad”, which is maybe just as delusional as all the MAGA idiots.

Plus there are many other western countries that are quite solid and doing well mostly, which often get overlooked in this debate

Any thoughts?

That resolves my confusion. I was wandering what is going on, if its a meme or what. But that’s actually pretty funny. Its a way to gatekeep kernel dev for people who are willing to put in effort, which shows it’s important to them making commits more serious I guess? Like it hinders people to do the AI spam shit that curl reported, on the other hand it also hinders getting into Linux dev a bit by making it more complicated than just a little pull request