Oh come on tokenadult, it's not like China's the same place it was in the 70s and 80s! Not only has government policy shifted immensely just since the 90s (start and end of one child policy, WTO joined, passports and international travel freely available for (almost) all citizens, internationalization push for the RMB just to name a few big policies) but honestly, most places are unrecognizable since Y2K!
China's mode of governance, while responsible for some horrible problems and extremely frustrating to be on the wrong side of, is not without its positive points. Hand-waving it off as a "dictatorship" implies there is no internal political change, that political terms are re-granted to the same power-base, that secret police stalk and raid the population with great frequency... something much more aking to Lee Kwan-Yew's Singapore. That's simply not the case, and I know that even my government-critical Chinese friends here on the ground believe that the reigns of power are wielded to some extent differently by different leaders, and that within the communist party exist factions and new ideas.
Almost the only thing Chinese people pretty much ever say when political issues are raised is "the population is too large ... there is no other option!" (人口太多了！没办法！) While hideously frustrating for westerners (consequently Chinese people rarely complain, disbelieving that fighting to leave feedback with bureaucracies has any effect) it is immensely pragmatic from another perspective. Remember, the population which incorporates entirely disparate language families (everything from Turkic to Tibeto-Burman to Sinitic to Tai) now effectively has total literacy and a mutually comprehensible spoken language... Mao and his legacy, for all his terrible failures, did achieve that, and nobody can argue otherwise.
Shouting "dictatorship" when basically China would have been another India without the events of the 20th century, which nobody could have foretold, falls hollow and in fact riles these ears... those without experience in the country hear too much of this fallacious drivel through the media already. You don't need to fuel it.
PS. Before I am accused of being some kind of victim of propaganda, I literally never watch TV or read Chinese government media and my 15 years in and out of the country has been tempered with roughly equal time on three other continents.
China's mode of governance, while responsible for some horrible problems and extremely frustrating to be on the wrong side of, is not without its positive points. Hand-waving it off as a "dictatorship" implies there is no internal political change, that political terms are re-granted to the same power-base, that secret police stalk and raid the population with great frequency... something much more aking to Lee Kwan-Yew's Singapore. That's simply not the case, and I know that even my government-critical Chinese friends here on the ground believe that the reigns of power are wielded to some extent differently by different leaders, and that within the communist party exist factions and new ideas.
Almost the only thing Chinese people pretty much ever say when political issues are raised is "the population is too large ... there is no other option!" (人口太多了！没办法！) While hideously frustrating for westerners (consequently Chinese people rarely complain, disbelieving that fighting to leave feedback with bureaucracies has any effect) it is immensely pragmatic from another perspective. Remember, the population which incorporates entirely disparate language families (everything from Turkic to Tibeto-Burman to Sinitic to Tai) now effectively has total literacy and a mutually comprehensible spoken language... Mao and his legacy, for all his terrible failures, did achieve that, and nobody can argue otherwise.
Shouting "dictatorship" when basically China would have been another India without the events of the 20th century, which nobody could have foretold, falls hollow and in fact riles these ears... those without experience in the country hear too much of this fallacious drivel through the media already. You don't need to fuel it.
PS. Before I am accused of being some kind of victim of propaganda, I literally never watch TV or read Chinese government media and my 15 years in and out of the country has been tempered with roughly equal time on three other continents.