Yeah the stories themselves are not interesting, more that war in Taiwan is taking up so much bandwidth. Can’t ever remember being like that
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Obvious distraction from people on the streets trying to get their money back? Lack of food for the people? Job losses?
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I think that is definitely one read. The tennis scandal tbh is by far the biggest deal right now and they want to distract people from that.
But who knows? Weibo is the same, Taiwan related stuff is trending.
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One sex scandal isn’t going gather any momentum to push for reforms. It can easily be blamed as the act of an individual even if that person has deep connections to the party. The party can even try to cover it up, until it comes too unpopular to do so, and immediately punish the offender and the public would be appeased. It’s something the CCP has done regularly.
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No but they accumlate. This is one of the biggest public scandals of the last five years. It creates distrust of the party.
This is a huge issue. It’s not a sex scandal, it’s the leaders using their political power to manipulate women. It’s basically a feudal system where even celebrities can’t say no .
That’s the first issue people are upset about, the abuse of power. The second issue is that you can’t talk about it. Any mention of it and your account is deleted. Right now even “tennis” is a sensitive word on Chinese social media.
This is China’s metoo moment and people and women have no Voice. Censorship isn’t apparent to a lot of people usually, but this is something that everyone knows about, is annoyed about and wants to talk about, but can’t
Women in big cities in China are same as elsewhere in developed world. They are becoming strong, independent and successful,but the State has just stamped it’s foot down on feminism in China.
Zhang Gaoli is such a looker though, I’m sure a famous tennis player like Peng was overjoyed to be coerced into having sex with him and becoming his mistress
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You mean he grabbed her by the pussy? Thank God that never happens in other countries.
Well at least can talk about it and get annoyed about it. That’s the main point.
Yikes. He looks positively reptilian.
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Lock up your daughters when the sexy boys are in town
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About the war talk on social media: Bloomberg (linked below via today’s Taipei Times) thinks the authorities are trying to tamp it down.
Guy
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We are talking about a regime that survived starving 45 million people to death and then followed that up with persecuting social elites a couple of years later that caused the deaths of at least another 4 million. They then massacred students protesters and their teachers and families. Now they are committing genocide of the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples.
You are saying the people who tolerated all those events would rise up because of a sex scandal?
No didn’t say that.
I said things like this accumulate.
Post Tiananmen, the social contract has been “you close your eyes and mouths and we will get you rich”. This party has had a lot of success in this era and became popular.
This era is clearly coming to an end as the economy slows and government becomes more restrictive. Most educated people in China I think understand the situation, but keep their mouths shut. Little pinks are only 3% but vocal online.
The silent majority isnt stupid and these incidents will pile up into major resentments.
Also … I already said it’s not a sex scandal. It’s an abuse of government power followed up by mass censorship. Yes people are affected much more by that than Xinjiang
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That social contract is built on the support of the US, Japan and Taiwan which provided the initial financial, infrastructural, and technical support to improve living standards, in hopes of China becoming less oppressive to its people and become a member of the global community.
I don’t have an argument against that, but people saw dramatic improvement in quality of life that it’s hard for us to even conceptualize.
My first gf in China used to wash her clothes in the river as a child and now runs a photo studio in Beijing with all the same trappings of modern metropolitan Life that you would find from someone in Manhattan.
Economic wise and in terms of Infrastructure, the party has performed well over the last 30 years.
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The implication here is that minorities in China are not “people.”
I get that this is how Beijing’s architects of genocide see them, but I don’t agree we should recirculate this kind of discourse, here or elsewhere.
Guy
That wasn’t the implication and I’m not sure why you think that or get annoyed about.
More say, the ‘general public’.
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I also get that you don’t get it.
This “phantom public” as Bruce Robbins discussed some years ago could also use some scrutiny.
You’re an educated guy. I hope you can figure this out.
Guy
“People are more concerned with a Hollywood celebrity getting sexually harassed than the homeless situation in major cities”
Ok, let’s put this into a more neutral context. In this sentence would you think that the implication is that homeless people are not people. I mean maybe you would detect that, but I think most wouldn’t.
Anyway ， back to work
You could say the same thing about Taiwan through out the 60s to the 80s, that doesn’t make KMT a great party.
Their prosperity has less to do with the party and more to do with geopolitics, the size of the population, and the support of the US and its allies.
In Taiwan’s case, Japan provided the technical support in addition to the US because they could communicate with the older generation of Taiwanese people in Japanese. In China’s case, that support came from Taiwan.
The US helped China because China is in the position to complete the encirclement of Russia. However, since the 2010s, it has been Russia and China working to encircle the US and cut it off from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa. It’s an alliance of autocracy and so far, their attempts of expansion has yet to be challenged by the rest of the world.
Yeah I don’t think I said the CCP was good though. I despise them
They have been successful in terms of promoting skilled technocrats to top positions in the last 30 years.
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