more adventures on rednote mostly because it’s entertaining how mad people get when i talk about it :3 /halfjoke
this was posted 12/31 btw so i don’t think “the mods haven’t gotten to it yet” is a real thing
#le is common in parallel to the anglosphere’s #wlw which i think is adorable
my number one qualm with little red book so far is there is no native translation like tiktok has. lots of google translate is necessary to get the social media to social :P
necessary disclaimer: fuck the CCP and all the real violence and repression they do. just want to give credit given where due, and so far here im just seeing a lot of assumptions with no evidence? so im gonna post what my experience is :) i welcome all to do the same
From what I've seen, a lot of queer people are afraid to be themselves there. Some may even experience backlash and threats of violence for being LGBTQIA. There's a lot of hostility to us across that entire nation tbh.
On top of that, there is constant scrutiny with mass state surveillance. Queer and POC may be silenced or even face imprisonment for expressing themselves. And don't forget that nation's concentration camps, genocide, torture of political prisoners, and barring people who don't toe the party line from residency and citizenship.
Oh wait, that isn't Red Note. That's the USA and my small town.
Damn u got me at the first half ngl
I mean…that’s both vampiric superpowers. China and the US.
There's no such thing as a benevolent state, to be honest. Nations and borders only divide and subject us. Every day, I feel more sure that we need to build communities in spite of states and to do what we can to disrupt and abolish them, so thank you for mentioning this glaring example.
However, I will say when we in the US point at China, we've got three fingers pointing back at us. Pretty hypocritical of us, and largely racist.
I meeaannn… of course the US has an imperial bone to pick with the other imperial nations. So the same attitude and conditioning to “other” the competing nations applies equally to Russia and china. So I think I have to disagree on your point that there is inherent racism in the china conditioning. Does racism get borne out of the antagonistic relationship? Of course. But everything said about china is said equally (at least in spirit) about Russia.
And you’re absolutely right, there is no benevolent state. A state’s first and only goal is to sustain itself and secondly to increase is standing. And I’m def with you that we need to not let borders come between the global working class.
My whole point is there is a tendency on the more communist-leaning left to reverse the conditioning by just swinging all the way to the other side. “The US is bad, china/Russia is better.” They’re both equally imperialist, they’re both equally exploitative, and they’re both equally heinous. It’s absolutely a mistake “western” leftists make to embrace the other superpowers in an attempt to denigrate their own. It’s necessary to remove that lens when we discuss these kinds of issues to see the entire picture, because swinging to the other superpower nations and embracing them as better is such a limiting (and incorrect) way to think about it. It’s a simplified first step in realizing your home nation is wrong. Going against them for being wrong should not mean embracing their equally wrong counterparts.
I mean, the US is pretty substantially worse than China, by almost any metric.
And if you think it's not a racial issue with China, I think you have some investigating to do. You obviously haven't spent time on mainstream White Supremacist platforms such as reddit, Facebook, or the comments threads on any mainstream news article. Oh wait, I also see it here on Lemmy. There's a constant othering of Chinese people in a way there's not of people in Russia. (I even find it curious that Russia seems to appear out of nowhere in any conversation about China for no apparent reason, hmmmm.... now why is that?)
That's why Xiaohongshu/Red Note has been so illuminating for people. It's been nice for me. Answering questions about each other's languages and judiciously sharing pictures and videos has been cool, but I already know and talk to people from China, and my dad taught social studies. For many people, this is their first realization that we've been fed racist propaganda all our lives.
Now yes, people could react by romanticizing the state of China itself, after seeing the many ways in which it is better than the USA, but they will learn. And I hope the most important lesson they learn is that, as you said, states are made-up tools of the oppressors that only exist to divide and subject, to protect the state for the state's sake, at our expense. Always at our expense.
BWAHA you had me in the first half ngl 😆😆
You might appreciate this.
This guy asked people on Red Note if it's ok to be gay, and I laughed at the response:
SLSKSKSKSKSJDHD