this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Seeing the state that so called communists go all-in on has got me questioning my own faith in communism to ever not be..... Like that. Like holy DAMN you really to be simping for power in weird ass situations.
Wait did the bear write this?
his total inability to comprehend what you wrote is astounding. π
Eh, it wasn't worth it. I don't know why I thought I should pile on. I'm not going to be the guy who makes him think Muslims might have gotten genocided and that it's okay to call our respective leaders donkey-brained genociders.
Bro I am in Urumqi right now, if there was a genocide going on, some of the friends I made would have told me about it.
I can criticize China's leaders for actual policies, not imaginary shit.
And there's a whooooooooooooooooooooooooooole loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot of policies that I would pick to excoriate Chinese leadership over, believe me!
It's just that they're, you know, real ones. Not made up shit like "social credit points".
You haven't seen the state, you've seen silly stories western media comes up with. Occasionally those stories are supported by facts taken wildly out of context to the point of being deceptive, other times they're fabricated from whole cloth.
China isn't some kind of utopia, but it is a model of good, responsive governance. It's actually difficult to make any general statements as it's massive, and there's a high degree of local control, so the same problem will be tackled a dozen, sometimes contradictory(eg, expanding public transit while inducing greater demand for cars) different ways, with varying levels of efficacy. Sometimes the inferior solutions are quietly replaced by more the ones proven more effective, other times
spoiler
they build like 10 toilets with TVs, heated seats, attendants, etc for people to show on xhs or whatever and say the problem is solved, and then the rest of the city's public toilets are the same 3 squat, 1 pedastool, with a basket of shitty toilet paper next to each, that you can smell from a block away.Well a bear wrote it.
They disappear people for writing erotica. Ghosts and time travel are banned in fiction. What's good about this?
And yet I can buy ghost stories and time travel stories (Hyperion and Endymion heavily involve time travel) in any decent bookstore here.
Mysterious how that works. It's almost as if you're making shit up or taking highly-localized happenings and claiming it's country-wide. Which would be about as honest as me taking the Brown University shooting and claiming it represented the USA as a whole.
No, wait. That's probably a bad example.
Did you expect me to get defensive about this? That does represent the US as a whole. It might be too much for you to comprehend, but I can criticize more than one country at a time.
And yes, I fully believe you can buy stories where there was "time travel" that turned out to be all just a dream or where it was actually part of an in-universe fictional story, but everyone's heard about Back to the Future being banned for having actual time travel in it.
Did you have to use a VPN to access Lemmy, by the way, or is it too small for the Great Firewall to know or care about?
P.S. "Everyone's heard" a whole bunch of bullshit about China. Like the complete and utter bullshit of "social credit points". Let's use some evidence-based research instead, m'kay?
Taobao, the world's largest digital souk, is China's favourite place to buy shit. (It's my favourite place to buy shit too. There's nothing like it anywhere in the world. I've seen a jetliner for sale on Taobao. Or a nest of live Asian giant hornets.)
Here's a whole bunch of "banned" Back to the Future merch from a trivial search. Indeed here's the video itself on sale. Pretty fucking lame ban, isn't it? Let's add some more. Time Child is a movie in theatres now so I can't link you to a DVD/BR but I can link you to a shitload of merch. Here are a couple of older ones.
Oh, and here's Ghostbusters on sale. But ghosts are banned in China! HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!? How? Easy. They're not banned. That second link is a ghost story (Silk) from 2006. (There's a 2022 movie (The Curse) whose title is a single character (ε) that is also used in a lot of Taobao Buddhist content. I can't be arsed to go finding that one movie among all the Buddhist stuff so you'll just have to believe that it's there. Or not. It doesn't really fucking matter since I already proved twice over that ghost stories aren't banned.)
Seems what "everyone's heard" is utter bullshit.
Is there anything else you'd like to incorrect me on?
screen shots if the links don't work outside of China
This is tangentially related but not intended as an argument or anything. I'm just curious if you have any insight into why skulls get censored in China. I'd rather hear from someone living there than wade through AI slop and propaganda/misinfo.
...
They aren't? Not even slightly?
I can get the Skull card game from a hundred different places on Taobao. I have skull and skeleton enamel pins I bought from Taobao. (Some of them verge on the pornographic. The pornographic parts are censored.) I have skull-shaped bead bracelets and a skull-shaped keychain. None of them were censored when I bought them.
Here's a Taobao search on skulls. If the search link doesn't work, there's a screenshot behind the spoiler.
screenshot
Neat! I remember... I think it was World of Warcraft? I thought had to censor skulls/skeletons before releasing there. But if that wasn't the case then I'm happy to be informed!
Well, that's a ban in a specific context.
I suspect that something perceived as being for children will have skeletons/skulls removed for reason of not disturbing them. (How bad is it? When I was teaching here, on my first Halloween I played the movie Ghostbusters as a treat. People didn't realize it was a comedy and were terrified by it. These are students between 18-22.)
But there's no particular cultural or governmental ban on skeletons in general. There may be context-specific bans. (I'm not really in the video gaming scene so I don't know what happened with WoW directly.)
From my perspective it was cartoony enough that I never really thought of it as scary but if you aren't exposed to media like that often or it's not culturally prevalent I could see how it might be good to adjust it for broader appeal. That makes some sense. Thank you for humoring my curiosity and teaching me a bit!
No troubles!
Just as a general tip, though: don't trust press reports. On much of anything. There's a powerful incentive in modern 24-hour news cycles to establish a narrative quickly, ideally a simple one, and then ignore the facts thereafter. Hence it's "China bans skulls" (or time travel stories or ghost stories or) as a simplistic othering "THEM THAR FURNERS SHOOR IS FUNNAY!" approach, even ignoring the geopolitical motivation ("CHINA IS DUH DEBBIL!" in the USA or "THE WEST IS KUH-RAZY!" in China), so you tend to have to look past the headlines and even the bulk of the stories published to find the truth.
And in this case the truth is skulls and skeletons were removed because it was deemed they would disturb children. π€·ββοΈ There are similar issues behind the "time travel is banned" myth or "ghost stories are banned" myth or even the ever-popular "Winnie the Pooh is banned" myth. A tiny kernel of truth wrapped in layers of wilful ignorance, narrative-building, and geopolitical skew.
That's exactly why I wanted to ask and why I'm appreciative you took the time to give your first hand experiences. Funnily enough, I've been trying to do that ever since I ended up playing an MMO that has only been launched in China. Was a very eye opening experience once I was able to handle the language barrier.
Not the guy you're responding to, but hexbear and .ml are the only blocked instances, feddit blocks all of Asia I think because I couldn't load its images in vietnam either.
Typical Feddit.
Did you really stop reading at that sentence so you could leap in and make a point I MADE IMMEDIATELY AFTER IT!?
I'm going to assume you were "educated" (for want of a better term) in the USA from this.
When I was using a big Lemmy instance I needed a VPN, yes. This one is just far enough under the radar to not really need it. (Same thing with one of my Mastodon accounts and my Pixelfed account.)
So you really think it's okay that your country blocks you from visiting foreign websites? Like, I'm perfectly happy to criticize all the dumb shit that's wrong with the United States. Our government is a pile of shit. But you need a VPN to use ordinary websites, and you still think China's laws are "good"?
It's not my fucking country. Just like your country isn't my fucking country. I live in it. There's a decided difference.
And you know what? Given the choice between living in a country where the only response to more-than-daily mass shootings and regular school shootings is "thoughts and prayers" and a country that stops me from seeing some web sites outside of their borders unless I use technological trickery ...
... Well, the latter, while certainly not ideal, is MOTHERFUCKING ENDLESSLY BETTER, yes. (It's why I live here and not in the shithole you come from.) Thank you for asking.
Do you feel like the government represents you?
Have you ever tried to get politically involved? If so, what was your experience?
The government represents the government. This is true of any society. Only the strategy differs.
Personally I'm an anarchist (specifically an anarcho-syndicalist). I don't like any governments. I just think some are easier to live under than others. Plutocratic (direct or indirect) governments are among the worst to live under, however.
As a non-citizen, I'm not permitted to join the Party (nor would I really want to, to be fair) and thus I'm not able to get officially involved in politics. For the grassroots side, as a foreign guest I am more careful about what I get involved with because I could very easily be invited to exit. With great alacrity. This would disrupt the pseudo-family life I've built up for myself here and would harm people I genuinely care about.
When I was teaching (2001-2016) I did very carefully insert some material for students to think about into the curriculum. The duller of them would not have spotted it, but the sharper among them did and talked to me about it outside of class. I did not, however, participate in student protests (like the ones that had students knocking down over a kilometre of brick wall over SARS restrictions way back when), nor any other such disruptive activities as such. I worked with more finesse and subtlety than that.
I never said the US was better than China, but you sure seem determined to think that only one of them can be bad, so I don't see any point in continuing this.
No reponse, then, to my thorough dismantling of your claim that ghost stories and time travel stories are banned in China?
Didn't think so.
That would involve something an American is incapable of doing: confessing ignorance.
Is the "thorough dismantling" in the comment you deleted? How am I supposed to reply to something I can't read?
But sure, let's say you're right about that -- you replied to those examples and not my mentioning erotica being banned, so I presume I was right about that?
You know what, I just noticed you also cited "math is hard" as a "typical American" attitude, but if you're going to go this hard on defending Chinese censorship, I might as well point out that "math is hard", in the context of talking dolls, was thoroughly clowned on by literally everyone when it happened in... [checks] 1992.
you have to be a bot writing like that. XD