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China courts Germany's far-right populist AfD
(www.dw.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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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.
I wonder where they got that obsession from? Could it be their entire view of Geopolitics was shaped by the moderation and administrators of Reddit? Strange how Reddit seems to want people to say the same things that the US state department like to say.
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.
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.
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.
Because they had grievances about the west, which we all have if we're being honest, but were successfully coerced from people into this completely bizarre state of mind into thinking that China and Russia are some sort of garden paradise utopian societies of peace, love and sunshine, not the reality of both countries being insanely unhinged places.
In both China and Russia, there is no rule of law, no respect for basic human rights or respect for anyone's culture or ethnic background, complete control of the press, anti-LGBTQ+ hate that is literally put out from the government, anti.......
Well lets just put it this way, Chinese Nationalists and Russian Nationalists make the KuKluxKlan look like Bernie Sanders voters in comparison, that's how insane these people are and the respective governments do everything they can to keep that silent and breaking out into the international community.
I know people from China who barely escaped that country and there's just endless horror stories that you can find all over youtube
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
On kbin you can block domains. It's the next best thing.
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.
Nazis, not Nazi wannabees, with current polls having them at 20% nationwide and up to 33% in some states. You know, the ”we should found an SA [the paramilitary Nazi organisation] and clean up"-party. The party whose youth organization is officialy declared right-wing extremist.
...?
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.
it's the active sort. it prioritizes topics people feel heated about by weighting posts with more comments higher. it also doesn't decay the weight quickly enough with time so those posts stay on the top as long as people are arguing in the comments.