I know not everything said by governments are lies, but when you see a graph with “how happy are you” and China and north Kora are at the top of the lists you gotta wonder.

I wish I could leap through the screen and shake you emphatically. Why?! Why do you gotta wonder!? Listen to your inner voice answer the question. Then continue.

No seriously. Home ownership in China and Cuba is higher than in the US. China accounts for nearly ALL global poverty alleviation. Chinese people went from living on a dollar a day to having purchasing power parity with the richest countries in the world in 70 years. That means from Grandma being born to now she has seen her family go from rice farming and dying of infections to driving an electric car. It’s quite literally stunning.

But more to the point, Harvard University spent 15 years studying Chinese sentiment about their government. Harvard. A US university, that propogated and profited from race science and the slave trade. That has graduated so many US presidents. That university spent 15 years studying Chinese citizens and determining that the Communist Party of China enjoys a 95.5% approval rating by the people in China.

That not the Chinese government saying that. That’s a Western imperial institution saying that.

As for North Korea, just think of the history. In 1953 they had no buildings and were living in caves because the Americans bombed literally every structure in the territory and then started dropping napalm on the people. They were literally living in caves to avoid the US raining fire down upon them.

And now they have a nuclear ICBM. They built an entire nuclear program and an entire rocketry program in 70 years after having every single productive capacity completely annihilated. You don’t do that without food, so they had to build their agriculture back up, while they were under the world’s worst embargo in history. They had to rebuild all of their power infrastructure. They had to rebuild all of their transportation infrastructure. They had to rebuild all of their manufacturing infrastructure.

Every single industry had to be built from rubble and they are only 70 years into it. And their people are fed, they are safe from invaders, they are safe from the Americans specifically, and they did all together as a unified society.

I would be very unhappy if my country was bombed to the raw earth, but honestly after decades of working side by side with my neighbors to rebuild my home, my village, and my country, I think I would be pretty happy.

The only reason you say that it seems fantastical that Chinese or North Korean people are happy is because you are starting from the assumption that the people live under a tyrannical government that deliberately impoverished them while they get rich and force everyone to comply with corrupt whims. That’s the propaganda story, not reality.

The reality is that corruption is everywhere in all governments, and the West loves corrupt governments because it can bribe anyone to do anything anywhere in the world. When countries like China implement anti-corruption programs, Western propagandists call it authoritarian and say it’s terrible, but it’s only terrible because the people getting purged are compromised by the West.

The reality is that Russian and Chinese spies can’t really do too much damage to the US because they don’t have the global network of terrorists, death squads, and paramilitary groups that the US has. On the reverse, US spies in China or Russia could cause massive damage because they have been working for 70 years to cultivate armed paramilitaries and terrorists to destabilize entire regions on command. So when China implements counter-intelligence and national security programs, we hear on the one hand US intelligence officials saying things like “the CPC has crippled our spy networks in China” and on the other hand we hear news reports of draconian authoritarianism for no reason other than being evil and bad. Which is it? Did China apply it’s authority to keep the country safe from the CIA’s deep and wide network of spies or does China just enjoy punishing it’s people for no reason?

Back to what started this, why do you think it makes perfectly logical sense to believe the Chinese and North Korean people couldn’t possibly be as happy as reports indicate they are? What specific things do you think make that impossible, and very importantly, how did you come to the conclusion that those specific things are true?

Because I know what I used to think. I used to think “It’s obvious! Everyone knows this! It’s all over the news all the time! Look at the great firewall, look at the social credit score, look at how they censor pooh bear!”

And what I found out was that none of that shit came from my own research. It came from the Western propaganda machine. And when I finally started to actually dig in, I found out it was just paper thing garbage. Chinese ecommerce in China sells Winnie the Pooh kitsch just like anywhere else in the world. The social credit score is for businesses that harm the public, and while they did try it out for individuals it was so easily abused the government shut it down to protect their people.

I don’t know how to convince you. I probably can’t. But maybe this puts some doubt in your mind, or someone else who finds this thread.