Did You See What They Did?

I spent some time this evening wandering down a short rabbit hole of a few different news articles about how people in China see the United States. More specifically, how they understand violent crime, mainly mass shootings, in the United States. While there is a general accusation that Chinese state media, along with the government, sensationalizes the events in order to cast themselves as caring for their citizenry by comparison, I'm not sure that domestic media does a much better job of placing mass shootings into a useful context, either.

But what I found to be the most interesting thing about this is what one might understand as a point of agreement; in order to prevent citizens attacking and killing one another, what is needed is control. And some people welcome that level of control, while others recoil from it.

Faith in institutions to act on the best interests of people who are not themselves direct members of the institution is always a matter of individual outlook and worldview. The governments of both China and the United States each tend to cast the other as institutions that don't deserve the faith that people, whether their own citizens or others abroad, place in them. Each plays up what it understands to be the sins of the other while keeping quiet, via various measures, incidents that it understands might give others grounds to criticize. This is not to say that the two are equivalent, mainly because their methods are different. While supporters of China might claim that it's all a pack of malicious lies, my general understanding is that China's Communist government is somewhat more, shall we say, heavy-handed in its public-relations apparatus than the government of the United States could expect to get away with. The two-party system we have here may be a disaster for many reasons, but each party looking to call the other one out for any missteps made while in power does have some benefits.

The thing about the criticisms that the governments level at one another, however, is that they never really seem sincere. Sure, Chinese Media might proclaim that "Racism a poison running through [the] American body politic," after an event like the shooting at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, but as a Black person in the United States, I don't feel that the Chinese government cares any more about the situation of Black Americans than the Soviet government did. Likewise, who honestly thinks that the United States honestly gives the treatment of the Uyghurs in China a moment's thought outside of using it as a means to flog China for its human rights record? Each side stands up and calls the kettle black because its in their specific interests to do so.

Which is the way of the world. Transparent pretenses that ethics or principles are important are what is expected. It's the way the game is played, even when there's no apparent prize for winning. There isn't going to be some sort of worldwide referendum on which government people would rather have. And the number of people who base their purchasing decisions on such matters is vanishingly small. (As an aside, I'm always tickled when politicians talk about bringing jobs back to America from overseas. Because who would take those jobs at the rates of pay that offshore workers command? Or would by the products whose costs reflected what domestic workers would want?)

I admit to not understanding it. I think because I can't really convince myself that anyone in this entire business is being genuine; I couldn't make those sorts of arguments with a straight face if my life depended on it. Not that I think that people in China don't honestly think that their government is the best around, and the same for people in the United States. But there's that part of me that thinks that there's more looking the other way going on, than genuine blindness.