The difference is that capitalists aren’t desperate. They commit crimes just to make numbers get bigger. Just fining corporations for doing crimes doesn’t do anything, because then it just becomes a cost of doing business. You must attack the people in the corporations making the decisions to make money, and the death penalty is one of the tools for that.

To understand the use of the death penalty, imagine how many worker hours a capitalist who steals a billion dollars takes away. Assuming the average US salary (~$66,000) and working lifespan (77.43 years - 20 yr childhood), they’ve stolen the entire life earnings of 264 Americans. These calcs look even worse for any non-U.S. country because the theft is usually done in the USD, but all the workers make a much less valuable currency.

As of now, China mostly uses death sentence with reprieve for financial crimes, which means that if the sentenced person doesn’t commit another crime in a couple years, their sentence gets demoted to life sentence. Actual execution has only been used for extreme cases, such as Sichuan mining tycoon Liu Han, worth $6.4 billion, for his crime syndicate of gambling, loan sharking, illicit arms trading, contract killing, and actual lethal shootings.^[1]

When the heck did I say that LLMs are going to run society? AI is much more than just LLMs, though LLMs are the manifestation of the current stage of development of AI.

Companies like Walmart are already using automated systems to optimize product distribution and maximize profit.^[1] There is no reason why we can’t use improved versions of these AI systems to centrally plan country-wide economics in the future to maximize well-being and other democratically-defined goals.

Perhaps the punishment should be set after consultation with the victim. Sexual abuse absolutely must be punished and prevented though.

Definitely. I hope China will be the first country to find a good solution to the birth crisis faced by all developed countries, since no capitalist country has found a solution yet. Reducing working hours, providing social support, increasing household wealth and living standards, and decreasing stress from raising kids should hopefully fix this.

But better AI should be able to pick stickier shits, which will save work in the long run. I agree that AI should not be used to hurt workers, but will be very important for fully automated luxury communism.

Thanks for the tip! I’ll gather a few more answers here and make a separate post in a day or two.

I agree on allowing culture to change naturally. When you try to abrupty impose social policies that oppose aspects of people’s culture, they naturally push back. I feel that much of the hostility towards LGBT and the like seems to be due to people’s desperation so they think that doing what “God” likes will get them more stuff. Naturally, if everyone has all the stuff they need, then no one will need to care much.

Death penalty is good actually, as long as it isn’t used just on minorities. Super useful to scare capitalists.

At this point, I can’t tell if people like him talk about this because they believe it, or they talk about this just to make the article acceptable to an American audience.

Here’s the article’s claims point-by-point:

Palmer is perfectly correct about corruption in the CPC; that’s well-documented.

This is why Xi Jinping did a massive anti-corruption campaign and initiated reforms of China’s anti-corruption state institutions. In 2018, China transferred the task of investigating corruption to a new department from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the National Supervisory Commission (国家监察委员会), which has broader powers to investigate corruption within both the government and the Communist Party via its co-located sister agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中国共产党中央纪律检查委员会). This lets China attack corruption at the state and party level.

In the US, corruption is legalized as lobbying or conveniently free vacation gifts.

China also has the awful distinction of executing the most people of any country on Earth, including for non-violent drug crimes.

All the US-funded sources just say 1000+ executions per year, no hard numbers, IDK where their stats come from. Give me hard per-capita numbers. China is the 2nd-largest country on Earth, so should on average execute the 2nd-most number of people. IDK why India doesn’t execute anyone, lots of gang rapists there deserve it.

Culturally, Chinese people broadly support execution. China doesn’t have US-style racism, so minorities aren’t falsely executed.

The cited WaPo article talks about China executing 4 Chinese citizens, who failed to report their Canadian citizenship to the Chinese government, on drug smuggling charges. Think about how many people’s lives those drugs could have destroyed. I think they deserve it. Interestingly, Canada didn’t complain about their arrest, imprisonment, or sentencing, only their execution to make China look bad.

Its human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority— although cynically seized upon by anti-China politicians like Marco Rubio who couldn’t care less about human rights—are still real and horrifying.

How can “socialists” still believe this debunked shit? Is China bombing Xinjiang like Israel is nuking Palestine?

Working conditions in many Chinese sweatshops and factories are abominable, just like the European factories and sweatshops of the 19th century that Karl Marx railed against.

I’m not knowledgable on these cases. Can someone else look into this?

Perhaps not by coincidence, the Chinese government has even cracked down on Marxist students and banned websites dedicated to Maoism—a curious action for a supposedly communist state.

I’m not super knowledgable on the first bunch of cases. Can someone else look into this?

The first article talks about several cases, including one where students were arrested for supporting an independent trade union. China has an official national union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Interestingly, most independent trade unions in China operate as US-funded NGOs.

The second article talks about fallout after the arrest of Bo Xilai, Party Secretary of Chongqing, and associates for corruption and corruption-initiated murder. According to court proceedings, Wang Lijun, chief of police and vice-mayor of Chongqing, learned that Bo Xilai’s wife Gu Kailai murdered British businessman Neil Heywood because he charged too high a fee for illegally sending tons of money out of China. After finding out and trying to talk about the issue with Bo Xilai, Bo retaliated against Wang Lijun, first demoting him and then attempting to arrest him. In fear of his life, Wang Lijun went to the US embassy for protection, then to Beijing once the Chinese government found out. Initially, the central government did not believe Wang Lijun’s accusations, denouncing him as a traitor. Later they changed their tune and arrested Bo, probably after finding out the depth of Bo Xilai and co’s corruption. Because Bo Xilai had a lot of political allies, and had garnered some public support due to some of his policies, his takedown caused a bunch of chaos that the Chinese government tried to calm with selective censoring.

The entire saga is somewhat reminiscent of the corruption case shown in the Chinese TV show In the Name of the People. Watch that to understand the political chaos that ensued.

Feminist activists, too, have been imprisoned for things like reporting on the #MeToo movement or handing out stickers.

I’m not knowledgable on these cases. Can someone else look into this?

Other restrictions on public speech and artistic expression are equally impossible to defend, like the ban on supernatural horror films and all forms of pornography (including eating a banana in a way authorities deem too “erotic”).

China is culturally conservative. Pornography of real people is probably not good for people’s development.

Not any messaging app funded by the NED’s software funding arm, the Open Technology Fund:

Current funding: https://www.opentech.fund/projects-we-support/supported-projects/

Past funding: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.opentech.fund%2Fprojects-we-support%2Fsupported-projects%2F

Agree. I assume Disney pushed this through simply because they already put money into it, and they saw that they still managed to make money off of live-action Ariel.

In theory, casting non-white actors helps to sell their movies to a more global audience, thus making more money. In practice, I think global audiences prefer companies to put more effort into actually telling their stories rather than just shoving them into white stories.

It’s just to get more views and clicks. Notice how many more views the video got compared to his usual reporting.

I don’t think he really cares either way other than to discuss its performance in China.

His day job is working at Shanghai Daily, a Chinese state-owned English language newspaper. Reports on China is his side project.

I don’t really see how him commenting on China’s lukewarm reception of live-action Snow White counts as anti-woke or whatever (BTW the term ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ sounds so fucking stupid, meaningless, and lacking analysis). China has no history of using Africans as slaves, so it has literally no stakes in American interracial conflicts. I also don’t think Chinese people have any obligation to watch Disney slop, and would much prefer their ticket money funds Chinese culture and films than Disney.

It’s just kind of funny how a character named Snow White for their white skin can somehow be cast as a non-white character. It’s sort of fundamental. Ultimately, Disney’s live-action princess remakes are just cheap, low-effort moves to try to use non-white faces to capture a broader audience and appear falsely progressive with no actual regard to the art, culture, or fighting actual racism.

This remake has the same issues that casting a black person for Ariel did. Instead of writing a new story for a Latin American princess, or an African princess, they instead decide to shove them into a white European story as if non-white cultures have nothing of worth to write about.

See my comment with resources on the topic.

Here’s a great overview of the current political conflict in Taiwan from someone living there: https://m.youtube.com/live/DU0LSsWBtx8

The pro-US DPP is losing popularity because their independence stance is hurting the economy (because China is Taiwan’s largest trading parter, so cutting it off for the US is fucking stupid). All the DPP does is yell about independence and the China threat while Taiwan’s econony is stagnating and living costs are increasing.

In response, a former DPP-aligned mayor Ko Wenje broke away and founded his own party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019. The party positions itself as centrist, but in practice votes with the KMT more often.

In the most recent 2024 legislative elections, the DPP got 51 seats and lost its majority, the KMT got 52 seats, and the TPP got 8 seats. Because in practice the TPP votes with the KMT, the DPP essentially does not have control of the legislature anymore. However, the DPP still controls the presidency and executive branch, winning 40% of the vote in the 2024 presidential elections.

In response to the KMT and TPP’s success, the DPP used the executive-controlled prosecutor’s office to arrest Ko Wenje on dubious corruption charges. This had resulted in massive protests against the DPP in Taiwan, denouncing them as anti-democracy.

The DPP has used its US connections to institute a media blackout on the topic. Notice that these protests have almost no visibility in the international media and are only reported on by a select few Taiwanese news outlets. ^{[1] [2]}

This is fucking hilarious. You would think that the Trump ICE would at least be able to judge whether the person looked fucking white or not as a filter for whether to arrest them or not. Apparently not.

Hopefully she gets out and advocates for the others. Being a wealthy white woman, her voice has a lot more influence.

Have you watched Red Dawn (2012)? Same plot, except the invaders are East Asian communists with Russian help. The producers wanted to show the movie in China, so they changed the communist villains from Chinese to North Koreans. Of course, all the actors still look Chinese, though.

The sheer audacity to think that Chinese people wouldn’t know. Of course, the movie performed extremely poorly in China.

That might be just you. Hotpot pots have very wide bases, so spilling is actually kinda hard.

You have nothing to be ashamed of. Shame on them if they think they’re better than you just because their parents got lucky or H1B visas.

I’m a Chinese American student also, DM me if you’d like to talk.

Trump should take the money ‘saved’ by DOGE to carve his face on that too! /s. There’s a bill for it already: https://luna.house.gov/posts/breaking-rep-luna-introduces-legislation-to-carve-president-trump-on-mount-rushmore

Here’s an official promo image from the representative herself: