Stop trying to sound smart, Godric. The US government is owned by capital. Profit based journalism is still 1/3 smaller than profit-based Public Relations. And that doesn’t cover the defense budgets for propaganda, the State Department, and other government agencies.

You’re right, the US government doesn’t give much of a fuck about public opinions so they don’t need to force the media to run only pro-government stories to stay afloat

They run constant pro-capitalist stories, orientalist stories, Russophobic stories, anti-Iranian stories, anti-south-american stories, and on and on and on. They’ve been manipulating their school curriculum across all grade levels for over a century. The West has been using manipulated narratives to justify invading foreign nations since at least the British launched the opium wars against China.

In a capitalist society, the government is literally the apparatus by which capital coordinates its global class warfare. You can’t separate them by saying “oh, capital owns the media, the government doesn’t”, when quite explicitly it’s both/and and also there is no difference between capital owning the media or the government owning the media.

The reason the ruling class needs to propagandize its own people is to prevent revolt. That’s why people think China propagandizes its own people, right? To make them content with their situation? Capital, since the merchant class launched the first tri-color revolution, has also needed to suppress revolt in its people, and they use domestic propaganda for the same reason. However, they also use violence.

The politicians are incentives to care more about their constituents than the country as a whole, and it functions, in a way.

Princeton University demonstrated that there is no real way to construe the US as a democracy, that is, a government run by the people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6w9CbemhVY

In China, however, the politicians have incentives to care about all the people in the country. The indigenous populations in China are given autonomous zones, similar to how the USSR maintained autonomy for different nations. In the US, there are many indigenous languages with fewer than 10 fluent speakers, not a single institution uses those languages, and the people who are trying to learn these languages are mostly extremely educated. In China, Tibetans speak their native language from grade school all the way through university. There is no ability for the majority ethnic Han Chinese to impose cultural genocide on Tibetans the way the US does to its native population because the Chinese government understands that maintaining the interests of the state, the nation, and all of its peoples are required for a functioning society to eventually become sustainable.

What are the incentives that Chinese politicians have that US politicians don’t? Chinese politicians know they are nothing without the support of the people, while US politicians know they are nothing without the political will to launch wars of aggression and starve millions of people to death with sanctions. So, will China use domestic propaganda to increase the support of the people? Absolutely! And the US will use domestic propaganda for the same reason, because if the people revolt they won’t be able to continue war profiteering. And yet, despite the US having the most powerful and most effective propaganda in the world, they can’t convince even a simple majority of their population to support the government, whereas in China 95.5% of people support how their federal government governs the country.

I don’t know how much back bending you have to do to try to square this in your head. The Tienanmen Square incident is a classic study in US propaganda and if you actually read the news wires from the US reporters who were on the ground at the time you’ll see that you have to choose between the propaganda and the facts. And no one should forget that Hong Kong was literally a British colony until 1997, and under colonial rule Chinese were second-class citizens while Brits were immune to Chinese to law. The protests were literally about whether or not criminals in Hong Kong could be tried under Chinese law and the youth who were fighting were literally fighting within the historical context of maintaining British colonial structures, which is why the parents of the youth who were protesting would literally kick them out of the house because the parents knew that life under British rule was absolutely terrible and that integration with the mainland structures is critical for establishing a stable society. The youth, however, have no context for this and only see that the UK turned Hong Kong into a global financial center that creates narratives about the freedom to become land-owning millionaire financiers and rentiers. Again, it takes a special kind of gymnastics to look at a youth protest seeking to maintain British colonial structures that were imposed after the British completely destroyed China by getting 40% of their population addicted to opium and then launching a devastating war after the Chinese tried to outlaw opium and seize the drugs at the port. The results of the war gave Hong Kong to Britain, as well as other territories, and in all of those territories Chinese law was suspended for all foreign merchants (literal immunity) and China was required to legalize the opium trade. The protests in Hong Kong were literally against the incremental dismantling of those colonial legal structures. But go on about how China is bad because they had protests just like the US had a BLM movement.

The US has non-public trials, with secret evidence, and even secret charges. China is nowhere NEAR the top offender on these issues. Not even close.

Hong Kong was a literal British colony and China has allowed Hong Kong, a city that was stolen by Europeans and completely changed, to have its own system of laws and politics based on the British colonial project, and the politicians on Hong Kong that demand that freedom have Euro-centric financial interests since the UK made it into a global finance hub. The idea that these politicians were “pro-democracy”, but the Democratic People’s Republic of China was arresting them for being “pro-democracy” is about as smooth-brained a take as “they hate us for our freedoms”. It’s propaganda and the fact that you parrot it demonstrates you know nothing of the history or present of China, Hong Kong, and like Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The subversive activities of the “pro-democracy” politicians is primarily their alignment with a Hong Kong independence movement, which is effectively a secession movement led by a pro-European minority that wants to keep financial ties with London and the US. It would be like New York City trying to secede to maintain its ties to Holland.

Also, China ranks poorly on democracy indexes, freedom indexes and human development index.

Most of these are Eurocentric, meaning orientalist and anti-communist. None of them are unbiased. 95.5% of China’s own people support how their government is serving them and supporting them. Whatever the fucking fascist Euro-colonists think “democracy” is, it’s curious that includes apartheid states, genocidal states, and monocultural states but excludes incredibly happy, incredibly diverse nations that have managed to life 800 million out of poverty in 60 years.

But yes, individual freedoms and civil liberties are foundational to political agency

Do you think that Chinese don’t have individual freedoms and civil liberties? If they didn’t, do you think they’d have a 95.5% approval rating over 15 years that was increasing among the most poor in the country while also managing 5 separate a distinct autonomous regions where unique cultures speak their own language in the millions? If individual freedoms and civil liberties are so foundational to political agency, then what’s up with the entire Western hemisphere where the colonist have stripped everyone of their individual freedoms and civil liberties except the land-owning white people? How’re those Nicaraguan Death Squads and Haitian assassinations and US trained coups, and US and Canadian genocidal policies against millions of natives - how are they doing? Do they impact those “indexes” you mentioned?

You cannot engage freely with political issues you can’t freely discuss. This should be self evident.

It is. And you’d be surprised just how much dissent there is in China that’s open, written about, etc. There are protests, there are essays, there are factions. You’re getting confused by the US media painting legitimate government intervention with universal oppression. The fact that 95.5% of people approve of the government should tell you this, alone. But even just doing a little bit of research on your own would disprove everything you believe about China. For example, Winnie the Pooh is not banned, nor are products bearing its visage, nor are websites with the content, etc.

It’s really astounding how much projection you exhibit here. You say China does poorly on indexes, but you don’t question why those indexes look good for genocidal mass murdering settler-colonial states. You say Chinese people lack individual freedoms and civil liberties but don’t think about the binding arbitration epidemic, structural racism, deaths of poverty, the Princeton report demonstrating zero democratic influence in the USA, monocultural oppression throughout most of Europe, refusal of colonial states to repair the damage they did up to and including levying debt on all of Haiti for each black person freed because the slave owners need their money back (that debt is still generating profit through interests and fees and Citi is the one currently collecting that profit).

Just take everything you criticize China for, look at the North Atlantic, and you’ll see the North Atlantic does this so often and so thoroughly that OF COURSE China has to do it worse, and then actually research China and realize that every single source you’ve ever believed on what’s happening in China is just bald-faced lying to you, completely outright, shamelessly. It was fucking eye-opening when I did it. I’m sure it will be for you, too.