etirabys:

The only China-related blog I read posted something that deviates from its usual “just translate the top posts on Weibo” post format. It’s about the position of women in China:

https://weibo.substack.com/p/feminism-and-the-position-of-women

It and the (extremely fucking dark) post it links to in its second paragraph have been on my mind for several days. I’ve kept the browser tabs open despite having finished reading & having no desire to reread them.

I found the feminism post illuminating – things I’d 80% understood about the CCP’s “strategy” wrt gender snapped into place, and I feel foolish for not having clearly seen that angle before:

The problem, of course, is that the gender ratio in China has been off for a very long time now. Inevitably, there are going to be a lot of men who will never find a wife. And inevitably, those men are going to be precisely the most unstable elements of society—the poorest, working the most menial of jobs, with the least hopes of ever getting promoted, with the least education. Under these circumstances, relying on market forces is not an option. Women would never willingly marry those people when they have perfectly good careers of their own.

So the first step, then, is to fuck women out of careers. …

China is in an equilibrium that it cannot coordinate to get out of: if you have a daughter, you don’t want to invest in her when the norms are that her husband will provide for her / that she won’t have a career after marriage. If you have a son, you need to to invest in him, because his marital/reproductive prospects aren’t great unless he has a job, a car, and an internal passport that lets him live/work in a city, where he can have a future.

It might be a little unbelievable to you, that a country can just sacrifice half its population to stabilise the other half. … China doesn’t pass laws or enforce laws to protect women for the same reason they don’t pass or enforce laws to protect sweat shop workers. China is competitive on the international stage precisely because it is willing to look the other way while you make a sweat shop of people work unpaid overtime 80 hours a week while you pay them a quarter of minimum wage and don’t give health insurance or retirement benefits. China is competitive on the international stage because it’s willing to look the other way while you dump industrial waste right into the ocean.

Chinese internet trolls are adopting American racism to taunt Black users

Rest of World reviewed Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, and Douyin — TikTok’s sister app in China — and found hundreds of users with profile pictures of uniformed American cops or American-sounding usernames such as “Sheriff Roberson,” “Captain America,” and “Florida Jack, No. 5314.” Others have changed their names to “Abraham Lincoln”, noting in parentheses that they “regret liberating Black slaves.” These accounts post racist remarks, harassing Black influencers and users with slang such as “emptying the magazine,” referring to how some U.S. police officers have fired multiple rounds at suspects.

unatkozorobotok:

crazy-brazilian:

ALT

View on Twitter

radiofreederry:

eightyonekilograms:

OK, I’m seeing some bad posts from some of the usual suspects, which, whatever, but in these bad posts I also see a couple intelligent and well-meaning people getting tripped up, and so I’m here to help.

Whenever the issue of Taiwan comes up, you are guaranteed to see pro-PRC people saying that “well the ROC also claims sovereignty over China, so they’re just as bad”. This is an vile and disingenuous claim, for two reasons:

First, nobody in Taiwan– not the KMT, not the Greens, nobody– expects or even wants to reconquer China, now or any time in the future. It’s not just that they know they obviously can’t, it’s that they no longer even want to. Anyone who tells you otherwise is bullshitting you. Formal independence and statehood is the most radical thing anyone in Taiwan wants, and most people don’t even want that; their preferred option is indefinite extension of the status quo. Claiming sovereignty over the mainland is a dead letter symbolic gesture with no intent behind it, and everybody everywhere knows this.

Second, and more importantly, the PRC forces Taiwan to keep claiming that it will reconquer the mainland someday. No I’m not being stupid: I’m serious, and it’s true. The government of Taiwan is required to keep saying that it is the legitimate ruler of China, no matter how ridiculous that is, because formally renouncing this claim is equivalent to a declaration of independence, and that is the PRC’s immediate red-line to go to war.

So now you see what an evil catch-22 it is to say “look, Taiwan says it is the rightful ruler of China and they’re going to invade someday!”. If the ROC does make these claims, they’re accused of imperialism. If they don’t, they immediately get invaded.

Don’t fall for this trick. When you see this claim, you now know how to shut it down completely.

What do the Formosans think?

prospitianescapee:

This one is pissing me off because there’s cheese in it. I’m not sure there’s a period of Chinese dynastic history wherein the type of dudes likely to be having rap battles would also have been familiar with hard cheese. There’d be political fucking implications to that. Fermented dairy products were often seen as uncivilized foods, and were associated in particular with northern “barbarian” cuisine (see: <lactose intolerance in Eurasia>), whereas competitive poetry was viewed as a civilized and scholarly pastime appropriate to civil servants and courtiers. Mentioning cheese in a verse which also references the heavens could be seen as an effort to legitimize the presence of these dangerous foreign elements within Chinese society, and, thus, as seditious. If dairy were to become a common theme in rap battles, it might be viewed as a dangerous sign of poor morale and defeatist thinking among the literati. “Emperor, we have got to move the capital to the south. The scholars are rapping about cheese. It’s all falling apart.”

argumate:

nanavn said: Omg, Xi finally has his squad just like TSwift *squee*

reminder not to wear your “TS 1989” hoodie in China