chapotraphouse

it's treatment of uyghurs

"Muh xinjiang cultural genocide"

it's suppression of information and opinions.

Based.

It's invasive surveillance.

Imagine posting this using western internet lmao you have no idea how fucked things are

A lacking freedom of expression and assembly

Examples?

A lacking freedom of religion and belief

"If you don't allow cults like the falun gong to exist this means ur against relijis freedom"

The fact that they use the death penalty (yes I know that a few other countries also uses the death penalty, and I don't like that either)

American spies deserve worse than death.

Lacking LQBTQ rights

Valid critique but the countries you support are even worse in this faculty.

They just choose to anyway, because the government wants to stay in power or something. Whatever the reason is, I don't think it is justifiable.

"I am a brainless fool who has no idea what I'm talking about but I'm still going to post my uninformed nonsense anyways." Amazing shit, only in the West.

I will actually engage sincerely with you here in the hopes we can have something approaching good faith.

it's treatment of uyghurs

Every Islamic country on the planet has said that China is not genociding Uyghurs, including some that were, at the time at least, quite close to the United States. I don't personally believe myself to be superior or less easily brainwashed than them. There has been no evidence of a genocide campaign - what there has been are an absolute myriad of claims, including by people like Adrian Zenz, and there's been a lot of redditors finding factories on google maps and calling them death camps. Yes, I have also seen the reddit copypastas with a hundred different links for "proof" that China is executing a genocide, but there is no proof, only claims. What China has been doing to the Uyghurs is an anti-terrorism campaign that is highly imperfect, but does not involve mass killing (in fact, the population of Uyghurs has grown over the last few years and they were notably exempt from the One Child Policy when that was around). These campaigns must be contrasted with the United States' anti-terrorism campaigns, which I think is best exemplified by Madeline Albright's statement that a million dead Iraqi children is worth it.

it's suppression of information and opinions.

Imagine you were the leader of an upstart country who was opposed ideologically to an extremely powerful country somewhere else in the world, so powerful that they could spread media and buy up your own media and spread blatant lies to your population that you were doing bad things, despite that extremely powerful country actually doing bad things. The spread of this information could get so bad that they would think that you're a tyrant and try and overthrow you, but you're actually trying to do (and do in fact do) good things. What would you do? Does the sanctity of the free spread of information outweigh the very real fact that that extremely powerful country might destroy you and your projects via that same information? Would you advocate for, say, the Ukrainian government to not ban Russian media and let them spread, as they would see it, lies about their country? This isn't some hypothetical question on a questionnaire, you can't go "Oh, well, really we need to find a nice balance between the two, see, maybe censorship is too much but absolute freedom of the media is too much too, maybe we need to meet in the middle and find some kind of--" no, you have to institute actual policies and commands to your subordinates about what to do here, or millions might die.

It's invasive surveillance.

It's all invasive surveillance, everywhere! It's a universal phenomenon! Snowden had to run away from the USA to show that! Cities from London to Jerasalem are packed with CCTV cameras and phones and OSes have backdoors used by intelligence agencies. There's no way to criticize any country for invasive surveillance without it inherently being a whataboutism. Much better to criticize the concept of invasive surveillance, in my opinion, and it's infinitely easier to try and combat surveillance in your own country than one literally on the other side of the planet. You just have more power where you live.

A lacking freedom of expression and assembly

I'm a little confused by what you mean by this. China has local elections and protests are quite common over there. The problem I think that a lot of Westerners have is the equivalence of state elections with democracy. Do you think it's possible that there might be other democratic arrangements possible than the ones invented by the West? Hell, do you think that there might, perhaps, be a possible incentive for the West to tell everybody from a young age that the only possible democratic arrangement is the one that is currently present in many Western countries? It's a genuinely interesting question, this isn't a dunk, I myself have been thinking about it and looking at the local elections that go on in China and the DPRK (here's an excellent writeup by a Hexbear user on the elections in the DPRK)

Here's a question: if there were other parties in China or the DPRK or Cuba, if they didn't allow the citizens to vote for, say, a capitalist system over a communist one and instead was just "We'll do what they're doing, essentially the same economic policies, we're still communist, but we promise to expand LGBTQIA+ rights a little", would they be meaningfully different from the party in power, or would you merely say that they were essentially the same party, though with some minor differences, and the state was trying to construct the illusion of choice? Because this is precisely what I would say is going on in most Western countries. There is no choice between economic systems - we have agreed that liberal capitalism, in fact neoliberal capitalism, is the only choice here. What you can vote for is whether to hate gay people or not, or to allow abortions or not. Is having the mere ability to choose between two parties, even if they were very similar, the definition of democracy? Or, instead, would you say "Well, okay, but the citizens of that country also have to approve of the policies being enacted by that government." If so, isn't it curious that Chinese citizens have very high approval ratings for their government's policies, while a minority of American citizens like their government's policies, and most people absolutely hate the Senate?

In a democracy, is the ability to choose more important than people actually liking either choice?

A lacking freedom of religion and belief

I don't think China is much worse than any other major country in this regard. If this is referencing the Falun Gong, then: lol.

The fact that they use the death penalty (yes I know that a few other countries also uses the death penalty, and I don't like that either)

Indeed. The one thing I will say in this general area is that at least criminal penalties are used against the rich as well as the poor. Billionaires in the West don't face anything other than tiny fines for doing even monstrous acts, whereas they are at least appropriately punished in China a lot of the time.

Lacking LQBTQ rights

Indeed, though I think things are generally on an upwards trajectory, albeit a very slow one. The same cannot be said of a lot of other nations nowadays.

China doesn't have to do these things to do all the good things they do for their population. They just choose to anyway, because the government wants to stay in power or something. Whatever the reason is, I don't think it's justifiable.

I do think this point is very silly and idealistic (in the philosophical way, not the usual definition). Governments and nations are constrained by an incredibly complex web of material conditions. I very, very strongly object to any notion of "X government is doing this because they are Kind and Believe In The Power Of Love And Friendship And Freedom, whereas Y government is doing this because they are self-interested and simply interested in manipulating their populace to maintain power." I go by Lenin's definitions of the state, in which the state is, essentially, the means of one class - typically the smaller one - to magnify their power and exert it upon an exploited class. This is true of (almost) every government in the world right now. All of them are extremely self-interested in maintaining power because of class conflict and profit, not because they are megalomaniacs or deeply manipulative. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin - and, for that matter, Joe Biden or Rishi Sunak - are not doing evil laughs every day like some mustache-twirling fantasy villain called Ebenezer Bonecrusher, and it's frankly childish and annoying when redditors and twitter people and so on have such notions.

What I and many others would say about the governments of, say, China, or Cuba, or Venezuela, is that they have a much higher concentration of genuine working class interest inside them, for a mixture of ideological and material reasons. As in, the state is not just a vessel for the bourgeoisie to exploit the working class - though it can and is also that - but also a vessel for that same working class to improve itself, because the Communist governments' officials maintain a leash on the capitalist elements inside the state.