In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing.

…

Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”

So, I am not going to dive into the raw numbers, but I’m already a little turned around at

• relatively satisfied

• highly satisfied

• very satisfied

I’ll simply note that local governments are also run by Communist Party officials. So claiming the CCP has 99.5% approval (even considering how this is a decade out of date and how “relatively” and “highly” satisfied suggest a bit of a gulf in opinion) is a serious fudge of the real public view.

That said, yeah. Much higher domestic view of the state than in the US/EU block. Definitely a problem for all those NAFO-heads who pine for Regime Change in Beijing.

It came on it’s own accord.

It literally had to be dragged along hissing and scratching

And why should it need to suppress its own citizens, anyways?

The goal of the modern CCP is largely understood to be economic growth and steadily improving quality of life for domestic citizenry as a means of discouraging domestic upheavels (Tianamen and the Falun Gong lead movements being two classic examples).

That’s going to come with some level of suppression due to friction between what any subset of the population believes/wants and what the central government believes/wants.

But this isn’t - at it’s root - a Socialist policy. It is a Confucian policy, with Socialist Characteristics.

The CCP has a 95.5% approval rate.

I hope you’re joking.

There’s no shortage of dissatisfaction with the CCP from within the Chinese polity. There’s no shortage from within the CCP.

But what westerners don’t like to talk about is the Mass Line approach employed by Chinese political leadership, which legitimately seeks to minimize conflict in pursuit of maximum economic benefits.

You don’t have gonzo gunmen storming Beijing in hopes of winging President Xi, right now, because you don’t have a public openly at odds with the mission of the chief executive.

We didn’t bring cats anywhere though

:-/

A House Cat Was Brought To A Remote Island In 1894—A Year Later A Species Was Extinct

I said that cats benefited from befriending humanity

Absolutely. And I added that they’re a primary agent by which humans propagate the Holocene Extinction.

Like, we wouldn’t be nearly as successful at killing so many small mammals and insects if we weren’t bringing domesticated cats with us all over the world.

I definitely want Chinese tucker Carlson and Alex jones

I heard in America that the government will allow your father to shoot you until you die if you disagree with him politically but ask to see his gun.

I think this is a great illustration of the kind of propaganda we see online wrt any “Evil Foreign Country”. In this case, it was the British Press reporting hysterically about a father hosting his daughter’s family for Thanksgiving, bragging about being a Trump supporter, bragging about owning a gun, and then accidentally shooting his daughter (literally a room away from the rest of the family) because he’s the exact kind of dipshit that doesn’t know how to handle a firearm professionally. Grand Jury threw the charges out precisely because it was so obvious that he’d been negligent rather than willful. The rest of the family confirms it. But the Brits report it like it was an Honor Killing that the local government endorsed and facilitated.

We see this kind of manipulation of events in US media - wrt China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, France, Mexico, Antifa, Immigrants, Brown People, you name it - any time national news organizations decide they need to flog a particular government or demographic group.

Hardly unique to the US. But when you’re getting the full Clockwork Orange, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be an outsider looking in.

Falun Gong have allied with foreign intelligence services, but they weren’t created by those services. Originally, the organization was allied with the Communist Party and on generally good terms. They only ran afoul of the Chinese Communists when Falun Gong leaders became embroiled in increasingly noxious financial and abuse scandals. Not unlike how the Catholic Church’s status soured across Europe and the US East Coast following the slew of child sex abuse allegations.

That’s when Falun Gong officials started fleeing to the NATO block and issuing increasingly hysterical allegations about the conduct of the CCP towards its members.

if you look towards northern Europe instead of the US

The UK has some of the most repressive speech laws on Earth. Germany isn’t far behind. Given the groundswell of fascist tendency across the Scandinavian bloc, I would not bank on them serving as a model much longer. An uptick in Muslim immigration has kicked off a tidal wave of Islamophobia, which now dominates their domestic politics.

A recent study by the Smithsonian Institution and the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats kill about 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals each year in the lower forty-eight states. This is far higher—and probably more accurate–than previous figures, and likely exceeds all other sources of human-related losses of these animals.

Nonsense. We’re doing for the cockroach what Big Meteor did for the Purgatorius.

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

Going strong for over 30,000 years.

Dogs and cats are smart. They joined our side.

Dogs and cats are half the fucking problem.

There are so many speech restrictions and humans rights violations in China that scare the hell out of me

I hear an earful about how horrible and repressive the Chinese state government is to its citizens from the outside, largely by national media talking heads and Big Data surveillance company flaks. Meanwhile, the consequences of talking shit on the Chinese internet - account suspension/deactivation, getting in trouble with your employer/school possibly with the threat of firing/expulsion, periodic investigation by state police for threats of violence, possible restrictions on business/travel because you’ve been added to a “watch list”, potential for arrest on some bullshit charge - seem to be all the same kinds of consequences periodically doled out to western citizens.

I’m told Americans have “free speech”. But then the Supreme Court lays so many caveats down that even a silly toothless joke is strictly prohibited under US laws. I’m told Chinese officials are brutal and draconian and mean-spirited, but they don’t have anything approaching our prison population. I haven’t seen evidence of any kind of mob-rule social media gang dedicated to doxing Chinese dissidents, either. So they manage to stay ahead of Canary Mission and Project Veritas in that regard.

I hope one day there is more free speech for people in China who deserve to be able to say what they want.

I want to know what that’s supposed to look like in practice. Where can I find the Free Speech that the Evil Foreign Country is supposed to one day get?

Because if the dream is an American style system of free expression… What are we pinning for, really? Chinese Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson? Uyghurs given the Palestine Action treatment? An independent Taiwan that enjoys all the diplomatic kindness we afford to our neighbors down in Haiti and Cuba?

What are we even asking for?

Your face

It’s a race to the bottom in either case. What comes of living under a fascist regime crippled by it’s fealty to an even bigger fascist regime.

Industrialized nations are experiencing significant population decline driven by fertility rates falling below the replacement level of 2.1, caused by increased urbanization, female education, and high costs of living. Over 90 countries face shrinking populations, with major economies like Japan and Italy projected to halve by 2100.

Yes, but primarily in countries with little to no internet.

Beerus is a cosmic demigod not native to Earth. Idk if he counts as an “Animal Person” in the same way as Oolong or the Pilaf Gang’s Shu. That said, both continue to exist in Z, GT, and Super as minor supporters/antagonists.

Incidentally, in interviews, Toriyama admits he forgot about the animal people between DB and DBZ for the most part. But mainline characters still show up from time to time.