this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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China has built entire ghost cities, bridges, subways and malls using Tofu Dreg construction. So yes, that is technically correct. China does indeed "build things."
The point of critical infrastructure is that it's supposed to endure, not have to be torn down again in a couple of years because it's unsafe to occupy or use.
Actually planning for the future if something the US can't even fathom doing. Remember this fearmongering article from the daily mail about a "ghost" subway station in Chongqing?
Here it is now:
Western countries look at China building a city where no people are, and project waste, when in reality its just the PRC properly planning and building cities, anticipating housing and infrastructure, before they need them.
Meanwhile the US doesn't do anything beforehand and cities become a sprawling suburb, car-centered wasteland. They let private capital seeking short-term profits build their cities, and turn the country into a wal-mart parking lot.
My general opinion on China over the past few years have evolved to "OK they aren't perfect, but at least they seem to be trying, instead of actively making everything worse."
I've lived inside the western propagandasphere most of my life, and I'm always surprised at how obscenely xenophobic and dishonest it is. To the point of being an inversion of reality.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I held on to many of these "china bad" media narratives and was reluctant to let go of them when confronted with reality. I can say now how wrong I was and irresponsible it was for me to perpetuate that bullshit. I won't excuse my old attitudes, but I do recognize that I didn't invent them either; I just sort of absorbed them.
The closer I look at China, the more my opinion improves. Especially with regard to geopolitics, the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS, renewable energy and infrastructure building. It's a success story of the process of socialism; they are effectively constraining and directing capital to improve material conditions for the working class. Planning society to meet the needs of its populations works. Building peaceful and productive partnerships around the world works. Of course nothing is perfect and any rapidly industrialized society comes with growing pains, esp given China's own historical context, but I've come to regard China as close to as a model society for our point in time in many ways. And yep... I've also been guilty of having stupid ultra-left "iT'S NoT ReaL ComMuNiSm" takes too. I honestly wish I had been raised with a Marxist education in my early life so I could have found a sane way to understand the world much sooner.
As the empire collapses, I think it's becoming clear to more people that the western media narrative is a bandage over the rotting wound of capitalism; ignoring its own decay and falsely demanding that we believe everywhere else must be somehow worse.