it’s steadily improving, even if it’s not universally free at point of service yet

That’s like saying American healthcare is steadily improving (pointing at ACA) even if it’s not universally free at point of service yet.

China’s health insurance model is just as systemically broken as the US’s health insurance model, and the only effective resolution will be dumping the entire system.

The cost argument is a cop out, just look at Cuba.

I can accept that Xi wants to focus on strengthening the CPC’s foundations (particularly after the more liberal period) and develop China’s productive capacity.

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I do not know, but that does not seem implausible.

China (the state) certainly can be commended for building a whole lot of infrastructure and making new cities amd expanding old ones… it would not surprise me if the Chinese province of Inner Mongolian has been developed so much that it has attracted Mongolians from Mongolia proper as well as other parts of China to live and grow there.

So first off, I am by no means purporting to be some kind of expert on China, especially as I cannot read or speak any Chinese dialect to be able to actually experience their media, news, culture etc.

That being said:

China is not trying to erase those other languages

If the entire European union /somehow/ decided to standardize language to… I dont know, Esperanto, or Interlingua, and as a matter of policy, forbade schools generally accessible to the vast majority of public school children from teaching the language of the country they are from, would you consider that ‘erasing languages’?

As to Taiwan …Self determination is not an option.They are going to be in the US sphere of influence or the Chinese.

Well, I think there is a large difference between self determination and being in a sphere of influence.

Ukraine is now very, very much more obviously in the NATO sphere of influence militarily, and the EU’s sphere of influence economically. But they still have self determination. They can elect leaders, vote, blah blah liberal democracy, but the self determination does functionally exist.

True they are not an island, but they were considered to be a weak, liberal democracy, contested by two powerful spheres of influence… should the ideal situation for be either loss of self determination and formal annexation/absorption into Russia, or perhaps Poland?

Conversely, (though also not an island) the Palestinians have barely had any real self determination since the Nakba, as they have been made, and are still, so totally beholden to Israel economically that even though they do have their own government, its decisions and goals are constantly rendered functionally void as they have no real effective means to alter their situation meaningfully on their own.

They have even less functional power to use their self determined leaders and government and quasi governmental organizations to meaningfully act on their own, and are basically totally economically beholden to Israel, and basically in military terms are caught between Israel + US, and various other Middle Eastern states and organizations.

Should they give up what little self determination they have left, and formally just join Israel (who certainly will not let them do this as they are currently busy genociding them) or a nearby Arab state (all of whom will nearly certainly also not do this?)

You can go even further with your logic here.

Should the Kurds give up their struggle to carve out a formal right of self determination and simply acquiesce to being ruled, divided, by autocrats who claim the territories where most of them live, or simply all migrate their territory within one bordering autocratic state and just hope to not be oppressed there?

The point I am trying to make here is that I do not believe that the general principle of a small, relatively weak people should simply acquiesce to a total loss of self-determination simply because they are massively influenced by larger nearby powers.

If, as another commenter mentioned to me somewhere in this thread, the Taiwanese people actually use their self-determination to voluntarily integrate with the PRC, I would respect that.

But just using the logic of ‘they have powerful neighbors so they must obviously give up their autonomy to one of them’ is not compelling to me at all.

I didnt say anything about whether or not Taipei is or is not oppressed by China.

I am curious as to how you determined that the UK’s surveillance is more strict than China’s though.

If a peaceful, amicable reunification is possible without war, and is genuinely supported by the Taiwanese people, then that seems vastly preferable to a military take over.

Though, I would expect if such a thing looks likely to occur in the near or medium term, the US would probably do some shenanigans/bullshit/assassinations/subterfuge to prevent that from happening.

They do manufacture something like 80% of the worlds microprocessors, and that is just a bit important to modern economies, militaries, etc.

Seeing as I have no upvotes on that post, no, apparently not anyone here other than myself.

I mean my computer got destroyed when I was illegally evicted, but there was a time /after/ China started cutting network connections based on keyword/phrase scanning, but /before/ games that could be played internationally started autoremoving such things from their chat so that Chinese players wouldnt be banned.

It didnt happen often, but I do remember a few times it did.

I honestly would love to provide more than just my personal anectode here, but I am quite serious when I say my computer was destroyed when I was evicted.

Well ok, either that, or one of the two corrupt maintenance people that were charging the whole apartment complex 20x the city’s actual utility rates by shoving it through an obvious fake scam company based multiple states away… maybe one of them kept it for themselves.

I doubt theyd be able to figure out the boot level password, luks2 encryption password, and my actual user password though.

Probably parted out and sold.

Wow what a shitty thing to do, damn!

No, it wouldnt be evidence of US government overreach, mainly because the US government was not involved, you were basically just exploiting the game itself. The US /just listens/ to more or less everything you send through its networks.

China is a whole different beast, a whole 'nother realm of extremely invasive direct government censorship all throughout their own sort of internal internet within the Great Firewall of China. Combined with requiring internet users to basically now have a government ID that is the only way they can use the internet legally, requiring users to simply use their real names for all their online handles… there is so much control over the internet inside of china it is truly breathtaking, far too much for a currently homeless tech nerd to go into right now.

Anyway, its also not a common thing, ever seeing a chinese player banned for spamming verboten and already flagged material at them in a game, due in large part to… why would an American or European player ever connect to a Chinese server? Ping is terrible, no one speaks English, and video game hacking is extremely common in China, as, for a very long time, the only way they could really get their hands on a lot of video games was by already being an adept enough hacker to even /get/ a video game not made in China… which there were not many of until relatively recently… point is, if you have played enough games that let you connect to serves all around the world, you know that connecting to a Chinese game server is probably a bad idea.