• Hawanja@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      China is a country where they have to put nets on the roofs of factories to prevent people from throwing themselves over the side because they work 14 hours a day for a slave wage making garbage that is sold in our 99 cent stores. Sounds like capitalism to me.

      • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        The nets were at foxconn in capitalist occupied Taiwan. You clearly have never been to China or researched China beyond just absorbing western headlines with no scepticism.

        • Hawanja@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          The nets were at foxconn in capitalist occupied Taiwan.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides

          The Foxconn suicides were a spate of suicides linked to low pay and brutal working conditions at the Foxconn City industrial park in Shenzhen, China, that occurred alongside several additional suicides at various other Foxconn-owned locations and facilities in mainland China.

          Care to modify your previous misinformation?

          • QinShiHuangsShlong@lemmy.ml
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            4 hours ago

            Yeah, I mixed up the location of the foxconn factory fair catch. Doesn’t change the core point though.

            Those nets were a Foxconn-specific response to a cluster of suicides at one company, not a national symbol of “China.” If you actually look at the data, China’s suicide rate is 8.9 per 100k, ranking around 65th globally. That’s lower than the US (15.6), Canada (9.4), Australia (13.1), UK (9.5), Japan (14.7), South Korea (20.6) and much of mainland Europe.

            China makes everything from cheap trinkets to (most likely) the phone you’re typing this on. It’s not a monolith. Yes, working conditions were harsh during the early offshoring boom, that was the brutal calculus of catching up. But that strategy lifted nearly a billion people out of absolute poverty. China now has the world’s largest high-speed rail network, metro systems that dwarf most Western cities, and excess overtime has been explicitly ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, with enforcement ramping up.

            On the system itself: China is in the socialist transitional period. Contradictions remain because capitalism is still hegemonic globally, but the commanding heights (finance, energy, telecoms, heavy industry) are publicly owned. The state isn’t a neutral arbiter; it’s the tool through which the dominant class enforces it’s power, in China that is the masses (the proletariat). Harvard’s Ash Center has tracked Chinese public opinion since 2003 and consistently finds approval of the central government above 90%. Chinese people don’t view their system through a Western liberal lens, they see democracy as whole-process people’s democracy: elections, consultation, grassroots feedback, policy adjustment, all integrated. The NPC has nearly 3,000 deputies, including representatives from all 55 minority groups, hundreds of frontline workers (manual labourers) and farmers, and workers from every sector. That’s structural representation. You can critique labor issues without falling back on orientalist tropes that flatten 1.4 billion people into a caricature.