The claims in this article are, in the words of its author, easily debunked by visiting China and seeing how the Chinese live.
Have you been to China?
The author isn't saying China is perfect. He's simply pointing out Western anti-China propaganda.
https://www.cnn.com/world/china
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/destination/china
https://www.wsj.com/news/types/china-news?mod=nav_top_subsec...
https://www.economist.com/china
Just browsing the headlines, most of the stories are boring reports and wouldn't incite outrage even in a wolf warrior. But those aren't the ones that get shared around as anti-chinese articles, so...you know...selection bias.
> journalists with on-site reporting
Despite China's best efforts to deport foreign journalists, there are still more than a few left.
When the general public sees all this on television, it is extremely influential (such is the power of television media). And, of course, all of this is repeated on social media. So I don't think it's a strawman at all.
Fundamentally, the question you have to ask yourself is: if China really is the hellhole that's described in Western media, why do most people in China have such a positive view of their country? The facile answer is that Chinese people must be brainwashed, but consider the difficulty of brainwashing 1.4 billion people who experience China every single day, vs. the relative ease of brainwashing (or lightly rinsing the brains of) people who have no direct experience of China.
Moreover, they've seen how well liberal democracy works for USA, UK, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Hungary, and so on, and they aren't fooled. The question is: why are we?
The Chinese believe they enjoy just as much freedom as we do. They are informed by their international travel. Every year, over 100 million Chinese travel the world over. They've seen our freedoms in the US, UK, France, Germany, etc.
Given that only 120 million Chinese even have passports, 100 million traveling the world every year seems a bit optimistic.
Stats do show at least 120 million Chinese have travelled outside the country every year (except, of course, during the pandemic years). This is not speculation requiring optimism.
But if what you say is true, that means most Chinese with a passport are taking international trips every year. If we discount Hong Kong (which doesn't require a passport, and anyways, is part of China, though it does count as an international trip from the airport's perspective, and you have to go through emigration, you also didn't say if you were counting HK residents also, so I guess we could have a bunch of different numbers there), I don't see how that could be true given the dearth of people with passports who are even capable of taking trips abroad.
But perhaps you've never experienced poverty, so you may not know.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-02/hong-kong...
1.6 million out of 7.3 million people is definitely serious, but hardly a majority. I've been to the SAR a few times, and don't think it is especially poor, especially when compared to even China's richest city like Shanghai.
As for my own personal experiences, please don't make assumptions like that. You have no idea what I've been through in my life, and it is rather not relevant to this discussion.
When you add these to the people who are living in poverty, that doesn't leave for a lot of travelers.
That's up from 100 million in 2013, so the number was rapidly increasing before the pandemic (and it will probably begin rapidly increasing again).
Regardless, the point stands that at the moment, there's no mass rush to escape China. Most people in China think life is getting better year for year, and are fairly optimistic about the future of the country. It's not a democracy, but it's not the dystopia it's caricatured as in Western media.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068495/china-number-of-...
It's not liberal democracy. It's not democracy as defined in the West.
It's the Chinese model of democracy, or what is known as "whole-process people's democracy."
And it works for the Chinese. That's the big takeaway.
That's why the Chinese regard China as the most democratic nation in the world, according to Latana's Democracy Perception Index 2022.
That's what the author meant by Western arrogance. We in the West think we are entitled to define what is and isn't democracy. On what basis? Because we dominate the world politically?
I've had people in China asked if our country has been destroyed by the pandemic, inflation, energy shortages, BLM protests, etc...and well my answer is "no, you're just being lied to by CCTV." It isn't like the misinformation goes both ways.
Food for thought.
Your comment makes no sense to me.