saw this on a post comparing shanghai in 1987 to now.
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you can read about it on youtube
Liberal theory has at least advanced beyond books for children and Hollywood slop, but they’re replacing it with uncritically watching any youtube video where a man with a vaguely European accent talks over a map and stock footage.
“oi dont you know xi jinping invaded eastern china and killed a vuvillion uyghurs bruv. this can be traced to when mao tse tung killed a blillion tibetans because he was a cult of personality and jealous of the dalai lamas fame in tibetan eastern china lad”
chiner ain’t been the same since qin shi huang tell u fuckin wot. now theres a real geezer. none of all this woke and pronouns u see in modern soci-ety. bloke just rolled up his sleeves, made chiner, gave it roight to the bloody chirnese.
“You can read it on youtube” has me thinking it’s a bit
I think there’s a degree of truth to this; corruption was a massive problem during the Jiang and Hu eras, and that certainly affected the booming private construction industry. It is visible to a degree when you visit places like cheap hotels in lower-tier cities.
I will emphasise ‘private’ though, state projects and infrastructure never seems anything but well-built and well-maintained, at least to my layman’s eye. The Chinese HSR for example is incredibly efficient and safe (possibly the safest railway system in the world by accidents-per-mile if I recall correctly). And obviously the idea that the Three Gorges is about to collapse is just nonsense.
The hilarious part is that of course China is going to have cheap, shoddily-made buildings, builders that try to skirt regulations, local administrative corruption, and so on. Every country has that, it is simply impossible to have everything be 100% perfect, as there is no utopia and never will be.
The thing is, those things happen in China at absurdly lower rates then they do in places like the US, where oftentimes it’s legal or entirely unenforced. For every terrible building built by a corrupt company, there is an entire housing block of such buildings in the US.
It’s like using a magnifying glass to find a ding in someone’s car as proof that their car is about to explode… when your own car is on fire.
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Huh, I guess Miami apartment buildings are communism.
damn you know even when geniuenly trying to be dramatic and verbose they still suck ass at making it seem like a bad thing. like oohh no this 40 story tower that looks amazing on the outside had hanging wires. this mf doesn’t wanna see the type of shit construction i’ve seen in my home town
Looking inside your apartments dusty utility room is how you see the real quality of the apartment building (not entirely untrue, but I’d hazard a guess this post relies on how unfamiliar most people are with utility rooms)
I’m a communist party boss
thats code for xi jinping (winnie the pooh lol!)
Literally FnaF pizzerias
It’s always funny when they try and describe communism but just end up describing capitalism lol
If you want to know about shoddy electrics, china has nothing on europe.
I consider myself a CEO of communist party
When I eat too much spicy food and start having diarrhea, that’s communism. I know it’s communism because a smug balding white man on youtube told me so.
Communism is when a bunch of bad stuff happens everywhere. The more bad stuff that happens, the communister it is. That’s the definition. The only correct definition, in fact.
Every ex-communist country just stopped building when switching to capitalism. And somehow the 40 year old infrastructure that was designed to last 5 is still holding on.
To anti-communists, communism is simultaneously a good idea but impractical, a bad idea and can never work, can’t result in anything good, and must be perfect if it is put into practice at all else it’s a total failure.
Meanwhile, in capitalist countries, when the capitalists bring the weight of the monopoly on violence to bear on the working class, when the capitalists function as designed and treat people like scuz, capitalism is excused as a “flawed system, but the best we’ve got,” mistakes made are just “corruption” or “human nature”, and wanting better is called “unrealistic.”
I think it’s important to keep this in view, that the way in which anti-communist sentiment talks about communism and capitalism is rife with double standards. And importantly, they have no real answer for chronic issues under capitalism. For chronic issues in a particular socialist project, we can talk about contradictions, about dialectics, about the struggle toward better and the mixture of theory and practice to achieve that. For chronic issues under capitalism, the best they’ve got is “this is human nature and it will always suck and air conditioned suburbia hot pocket life is the peak of civilization, so stop complaining and ow I just burned my tongue, but that’s beside the point, this is the best it gets.”
But could they just use confusion of correlation with causation (like claiming that Communism cause bad climate and not that bad climate select for Communism), fake news, fake educational materials, typical Neo-Liberal redefinition of words, credibility from false flag organizations like tankiejerkers, flawed measurements of prosperity, and unreliable sources like victim of Communism who fled from Communist China but are now praising Communist China for economic prosperity.
Fair points, there’s a lot of layers of misinformation in their thinking.
“I found one example of a hastily built structure, therefore ALL structures in China are poorly built. Look, why not read some youtube if you don’t believe me!”
Even then, his worst example that he witnessed firsthand was…exposed wiring? I mean yeah you probably don’t want that where guests can see in a high-end hotel (I work IT at a high end hotel, and hiding cables was a lot of my job when we were opening), but it’s not exactly falling apart.
I was genuinely wondering on that part, if exposed wiring would be an actual hazard or not. I don’t know much about types of wiring and types of them, so didn’t want to jump to conclusions one way or the other. Like my computer cables at home aren’t exactly hidden and years back, there was one point where we had a cable running throughout our apartment (and IIRC, we used the wall and ceiling for part of it to get it from one room to the other). But that’s probably(?) a different story in terms of safety than, say, electrical wiring for a place.
So where my mind was going is like, if it’s not an unsafe kind of cables, they are literally just caring about appearances over quality from their alleged visit, which is what they claimed the communists are doing. If it’s truly a true story and unsafe wiring, I see that as a legitimate concern for safety reasons; but the claim it has to do with caring about appearances over quality still doesn’t make sense even granting them all of that, as you’d think if that were the case, they’d make dangerous infrastructure and hide the danger, not leave it out in the open for a visiting foreigner to say “China bad.” They can’t seem to get their reasoning straight on why exactly this means “communism bad.” The more I think on it, the more it looks like they started from their conclusion and worked backwards. Also, I’ve been in hotels before in the US where the first room we got had problems and we told them and they set us up in another room. The information I acquired there was that one room had problems and another did not. I did not acquire a whole picture of the hotel, much less every hotel in the entire country.
Unless it is exposed electrical wiring or something without insulation, it shouldn’t be a functional safety issue. All the cable I work with has already been insulated when you are running it, the hiding part is just for appearances/so people don’t trip on anything (which presumably they would not do on the ceiling). Now I have no idea if they are talking about electrical cable, ethernet, fiber, etc. There are a lot of cables that typically run through a hotel.
If it is electrical, maybe an issue. If it’s an exposed fiber line the biggest risk is just the guest breaking it.
Interesting, thanks for the insight on it!
