You'll never wrap your head around the fact that China is a pragmatic country and not a dogmatic one. That was the whole thesis of Deng Xiaoping, to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic. To balance Mao Zedong Thought with Western free market capitalism; to build China's domestic industry and uplift their people from poverty and desolation into prosperity and freedom.
You will never understand the difference between what something is in the real, material world vs. what something claims to be in an imagined, ideal world. That's why you don't understand how a country could block something officially but retain access to it via a VPN: because it gets the job done of protecting national interests. Practically. Pragmatically. This is observable fact when you take a look at the reality of China's domestic industry outpacing foreign competitors in many sectors (Western companies always complain about this, how they cannot compete because of state backed help in China) and separately their resilience to foreign interference (as the CIA confessed: China is now impenetrable on a societal, there is zero possibility of influencing their people to be against the CPC).
Highway speed limits must confuse you for the same reason: "I don't get it, if people can technically break the speed limit, what's the point of the speed limit?" It doesn't matter because in the real world it gets the job done, everyone understands why we have them, there is no mass sentiment against them, and life continues.
You don't actually care about free speech itself, you care about it because you think it grants you "freedom" and therefore grants you a prosperous life. In your imagined world, absolute free speech is the fulcrum of living in a free society when the reality is your "free speech" is powerless in eliminating the
material conditions of extreme debt, crime, and further degradation of industrial capability/infrastructure: you are not "free" from any of those things. You think "free speech" is the fulcrum because it enables a critique of those things which
must be a prerequisite to doing something about them, when the reality is it does nothing.
Ask the rail strikers if free speech helped them stop our government from making it illegal for them to strike in 2022, a breathtaking violation of labor rights. There are protests all the time but they lead to nothing in our country, just further degradation and red tape. Our quality of life and satisfaction with our government continues to drop.
Meanwhile in China protesting is taken seriously and the government reacts with new policies when people protest. This is an undeniable fact because again we can take a look at the material reality of China and how the quality of life and satisfaction in their government/system continues to rise despite protests. That must mean protests in China are an effective form of
doing something about societal problems, and
doing something about societal problems is the point of free speech, right? But let me guess 1 billion people are lying about being satisfied because they're afraid of being put in a gulag and the bullet trains and megacities for housing people are all CGI to fool the West into thinking China is great. Yeah, likely story.
You will NEVER accept this reality which is why the propagandists at NYT/Fox/Whoever have such an easy job: they know you don't want to accept it because that would mean a complete breakdown of your world model. You'll start asking yourself: well if Chinese people ARE continuing to live better and better lives with no practical downside all without subscribing to our ideological dogmatism, what exactly are the benefits of our own system?
Do you get it now? The Chinese system is designed around the material and practical needs of its people. Ours, the one you defend, is designed around an ideal and imagined notion of liberty that doesn't translate to a better quality of life, in fact our quality of life is degrading over time.
Chinese materialism vs. American idealism. The practical vs. the "delusional."
MY COMEDY FILM:
I have this image in my head of the propagandized Westerns shouting at the top of their lungs:
"You guys are not free! You're living in an authoritarian hell state! Don't you get it? You can't read about whales on Wikipedia without using a VPN! Don't you get it? You can't call your President Winnie the Pooh! Don't you get it? You guys only have ONE political party not two like us, how can you possibly live in country that actually listens to you if you don't get to pick your favorite color every 4 years: red or blue!?"
And on the other end there's Chinese people sitting in a bullet train going 300mph, people getting their lunch delivered by drone, people walking down a clean street without the risk of getting mugged and stabbed by a crackhead, people being able to afford apartments and houses to raise their families in, people rapidly and frequently building mega infrastructure like miles long bridges that go through mountains, flying cars everywhere, people pushing technological innovation in the smartphone and EV market, the list goes on and on and on.
And then we turn back to the Westerner who says:
"Well you know what? All of those people are actually oppressed by the government that enabled all those things for them. Because at least in my country we can talk freely about how bad everything is getting! Yes, whenever we try to do something with that free speech like organize a rail worker strike we get crushed by our authoritarian regime that literally made it illegal for us to continue striking but hey, at least we can talk about it!!! Screw bullet trains and affordable housing, I wanna TALK some more!"
Delusional indeed.
www.mintpressnews.com
I can see why it would be entertaining and enjoyable actually.