A photograph of two Chinese athletes hugging after a race has been censored on Chinese social media because the women’s race numbers inadvertently formed a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
How fragile is their regime if it is threatened by race numbers?
This may sound stupid, but from the view of a government this is actually advantageous. Better censor something before it can be used by the resistance as an identification mark that flies under the radar than to let it gain relevance have your late censorship get even more public attention than it would have otherwise.
They are own goaling their economy with these counter productive pencil pusher jobs that provide zero or negative input to the economy.
Real estate crisis, reduction of jobs especially in the younger population, lack of investment from overseas because of zero covid for too long forcing companies to move supply chains and that's before picking a fight with everyone causing uncertainty which makes it less investable.
Cutting down the "private" sector which provided the majority of the jobs because that would threaten pooh bear.
It'll make China weaker in the long run, but the people in charge won't care, they'll be long dead before then. All the people in the top powers are all multi billionaires, even if they lost 95 percent of their wealth they would still live extremely comfortably.
As for the general populace, I like to use the Kim Jong Un anology - a fat man within a nation of skinny men. Not really of importance to the ruling elite.
Well let's see, I don't know because I don't live there. Not everyone/everything lives in/revolves around America.
In any case I'll bite then. Everyone I know who's in business degrees are of minimum big 4 or in an investment bank at a minimum, the smarter ones have their own small business.
Are you seriously saying those are less productive than someone who censors information and makes it harder for people to conduct business?
And to your second point the overproduction of housing is two fold, firstly it's one of the very few investable resources there and second the local government needed to sell the housing to raise taxes and needed to build despite demand or lack of due to keeping people in a job.
So if small businesses aren't what you call producing anything of value then what would you consider would be something that does produce something of value? Out of curiosity.
Because those small businesses are providing services to the community/other businesses which wouldn't be able to function without them. That's not the case with the censorship pencil pushers the businesses there would be able to function better without the extra layer of bureaucracy.
And big 4 accounting and investment banking is required, they fill a market in outsourcing by providing expertise where it doesn't make sense for every company to have a full time employee on it. Good for short term projects the places I worked in all use them. Investment banking well you have to spend money to make money so yes they're providing value by providing the investment for other businesses to grow.
Lol, the Asian Games have been a roaring success in Hangzhou for nearly two weeks. From a spectacular opening ceremony to the joy of the athletes competing in an open and friendly environment, it been studiously ignored by the so-called global media yet they wallow in this like pigs in shit.
You all love to call anyone who is vaguely pro China (or anywhere else US/Nato doesn't like) shills but the whole of western corporate media are nothing less.
I didn't say censorship was good, I said western media will pick up any shit it can find in order to bash China while ignoring anything positive that might come from there. It's not just China, they do the same for everywhere that US/Nato doesn't like. A small handful of corporations controlling everything you know about the world.
In this case trivial shit motivated by fear, jealousy and hate spread by US government friendly media organisations and amplified by bots and shills eager to get their percentage of America's $300,000,000 anti-China propaganda budget.
Of course the US doesn't censor news, they don't need to when a compliant media simply doesn't report things their leaders don't like.