I gotta agree with you on teh agitprop and/or cluelessness—from the poster’s FR home page:
“It might be called communist, but it is actually a very Conservative nation that has implemented Free-Market policies that are very American Conservative in nature. Mr. Deng tried to copy Mr. Ronald Reagan. The communists in Beijing fought him every step. However, they gave him a chance. They allowed him to try to implement it on a “small” scale. They gave him Shenzhen to try to implement his policies.
Today, China is what it is precisely because they implemented Ronald Reagan economic policies. You will never, ever hear the liberal media admit that.
Most posters on FR tend to repost articles for “experts” on China, many of which hasn’t been to China in decades, if at all. It’s all nonsense. And, I do mean NONSENSE.”
Deng opened up the economy as much as he could, which wasn’t as much as he wanted to.
Most of the leaders in China today are from Mao’s “lost generation”. The generation that has much less education than the students of today.
Xi is ramping up the communist rhetoric again. Mao is pictured on every piece of Chinese money, his picture is everywhere and he is thought of as the greatest Chinese leader.
I watch YouTube videos made by expats actually living there. Some of it is sadly funny and some is disheartening and some just sickly sad.
There are videos about the ghost cities, cities that are built but not lived in and falling down in five years.
There are even some showing people drinking dogs milk, straight from the teat. These are hard to find but out there.
Those “experts” need to get outside of the first tier cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou) and into the third tier cities to see how the “little people” live.
The Chinese people spend more time than we do figuring ways around government edicts.
I would like to visit just for the hell of it. No way I would live there.
Anyone wanting to see the Chinese culture that westerners think of would be better off visiting Taiwan. Mao destroyed Chinese culture on the mainland.