News from around the world!
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
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Let's lay out the events:
Headline: "China courts Germany's far right populist AfD"
Probably a key piece of context is that they were invited
There's no information about that, so presumably given the slant of the article it was an innocuous invitation.
I have tried to find any other references but haven't.
It is not unusual for members of parliament to be invited to other countries, so information needed would include:
China would deal with AfD just like they deal with left, right, far right and theocratic governments and absolute monarchies all over the world.
That's all fair, but framing the sequence of events as entirely unilateral action by the AfD is just as slanted as the article, and we're better than that.
It is almost entirely unilateral action by AfD though.
A better article would make AfD look even more perverse by highlighting a key plant of Xi Jinping thought is "ecological civilisation", that China invests heavily in renewables and is building a $1 billion factory in Hungary (from memory) to gain more European green market share.
It could also seek comment from Chinese officials, or even AfD (I didn't see that but might have missed it?)
I mean... It's not like there's not a standing invitation for Germany's current government. Is building diplomatic ties not permissible if the party isn't currently in power?
Better fucking tell the Republicans to get out of Canadian politics, then.
of course they're courting the far right.. those guys are easy to buy..
I'm not particularly for the Green Party in Germany, but Mrs. Baerbock seemed to do something right to anger some Chinese officials that much that she needed to take public transportation for a meeting.
Is everything world news on lemmy about China? Like I've seen everything from crap articles saying China has a declining population like its a bad thing, or how the west looks like shit compared.
Like, it's nothing racist or offensive. Not to me at least. Just lots and lots of it being the primary topic in ways that I'm ain't too familiar with.
Remember that a huge part of the lemmy (and derivatives) userbase just came from Reddit, and Redditors are obsessed with China.
Since 2016 we've slid into "China bad" reporting, so there's a lot on that.
The reporting is usually pretty weak and facile, and rarely touches some of the real issues over there.
China is very active player and driving up events, especially as they may be working with nazi wannabes in the German government
Tankies: China is a world power!! It drives so many world events!!
Tankies: Nooo how dare China get in the press (good, bad, and neutral).
They feel like any China coverage is inherently imperialist, even when its "China breaks fusion record", that is meddling in China's internal affairs to them.
Tankies are so fucking weird to me, and I would consider myself a progressive socialist as well.
How can they so unapologetically support Russia and China, when both nations are objectively not socialist in any sense of the word.
China does state capitalism, just because they have a one party state installed by the communist party doesn’t automatically mean they still are. All that is left is intense authoritarianism, with dystopian ambitions on global hegemony.
Russia is a failed state in the grasp of a kleptocratic oligarchy, with an extreme degree of corruption and disturbing moral decay in all levels of society. The only thing communist about it today is the old soviet ordnance they make their conscripts die in at the ukranian front.
Modern China and Russia are antithetical to actual leftist ideals, and any tankie supporting them just screams misinformed idiot or foreign propaganda shill and should be dismissed by default.
For real. The tankie problem here is crazy. I can say something like China is trying to deny freedom of navigation of international waters on the South China Sea and somehow it becomes "BuT aMeRiCa". I don't get it.
I’ve been seeing this a lot from instances like hexbear and lemmygrad and my take is either cult members, paid trolls, brainwashed persons prone to pavlovian responses, or all of the above.
I just wish that as a user I could block instances.
It's definitely all of the above.
Hexbear is particularly vexing to me. According to the fediverse observer they're less than a month old and yet have already become one of the most active instances.
hexbear has existed and been building their userbase for 3 years, but during that time their codebase diverged greatly from mainline lemmy to include in-house tweaks and features which made it not possible to federate, and it's only within the past month that they got everything compatible
Nazi wannabes with 13% of the vote...
I mean, it's not like China is only working with AfB. They recently invited School to Beijing.
AfD holds multiple municipal seats and Hitler never won an election (he got about 36.7% in 1932). The Nazis took over because liberals (specifically Hindenburg and co) appointed Hitler and then Hitler was able to take over when Hindenburg died in part thanks to paramilitary support. Just worth noting for gauging AfD's distance from potential takeover.
I highly doubt that the PRC wants them in charge or wants to help them get there, though.
They're a target of the US Empire and folks that can't do media criticism gladly take the bait.
The first rule of propaganda is emphasis, which is what you're astutely picking up on. Why are stories about X and not A, B, C? When they're about X, what context is emphasized, what is fact and what is allusion, who is interviewed and given the opportunity to comment and who is not? "World news" stories are very frequently just stenography of various think tanks, often ones that are more or less in agreement with one another.
The entirety of China's actions reported in this story are that China (exactly who isn't stated, not even a group) invited an AfD delegation to meet with them. No source is cited, but maybe it's Weidel. From this they create an entire narrative by retelling past articles about AfD's foreign policy statements and ask one person to comment: "political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder from the University of Kassel". They don't mention that he's also an SPD politician and associated with a government-funded research institute with a dodgy past. Maybe his takes are good, but why they asked him and not others isn't stated, of course.
This is just folks getting easily hoodwinked by a propaganda push. Same as folks were suddenly very concerned about WMDs in Iraq or the political powers in Afghanistan and so on. They weren't, not organically - a network of think tanks, government stooges, etc all rally to provide jobs for these kinds of nerds to write these kinds of articles and have these kinds of takes. Several think tanks in Washington have converted from focusing on Syria or Iraq to focusing on Russia or China, as they know who butters their bread.
Anyways that's a long ramble in response to a simple question.
...?
Like 9 articles on my front page are US. 1 is Ukraine. 1 is China, and the rest are neutral.
Are you maybe just taking particular notice to the China articles?
edit: since I realize this was specific to m/worldnews...
2 China post
2 Ecudor post
3 US post (1 pertaining to Italy as well)
1 iranian post
1 French post
1 Japan post
I stopped there as this is actually getting redundant at this point, there's very little trend among the posts as of this time.
Not really surprising that german state media would fall in line when it comes to China reporting. The chinese have a history of playing ball with pretty much anyone from Israel to the EU and beyond. If there's even any basis to the article's thesis, it is the rabidly pro-US faction that rules Germany today which is making the main choice in this matter.
It’s already a hexbear fest in here. There is zero point posting anything about China or Russia - every comment is trounced on by hexbears.
Yes yes, if I didn’t want your opinion I should have stayed on Reddit.
Yes, yes, you got here first.
Yes, yes, I’m a brainwashed liberal.
Yes, yes, you’re actually one of the oldest Lemmy communities but you’ve only recently started federating.
Yes, yes, you’re seeing the light and can see through the western media’s bias and the rest of us are just mindless sheep.
Yes, yes, China is great, Russia is fantastic, Ukraine should pursue for peace and roll over.
Yes, yes, you never allowed downvoting so you’re used to just comment and that’s why there’s so many hexbears in here. And you’re definitely not Russian or CCP farmed trolls.
Yes, yes, all those things are true.
I’m sure I’m missing a few, but I’m pretty close to a hexbear “Bingo!” I think.
I'm loving this, AfD has been collaborating with the far-right party in our country, which accuses everyone else of being filthy commies, it would be a beautiful irony (in the unlikely event this were to be true) if they started talking up the CPC because russia can't fund them anymore hahahaha
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel and her Bundestag federal parliamentary colleagues, Petr Bystron and Peter Felser, spent almost a week in Beijing and Shanghai at the end of June.
Upon their return, Felser told DW that he supposed it was his party's good results in the German polls which had sparked the interest of the Chinese.
She spent six years living there on a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship and completed her doctorate on the Chinese pension system, before moving on to work for Goldman Sachs.
Geopolitically, said Schroeder, the AfD sees the traditional Western ties with the United States, which it regards as hegemonic, as having past their use-by date.
The member of the European Parliament from Saxony, who aligns himself with the right-wing side of his party, has attracted attention in the past for multiple pro-China statements.
For example: The party has opposed the use of components from the Chinese communications equipment supplier Huawei in the expansion of 5G mobile internet services in Germany.
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