I guess not having freedom of press and a very censored internet is an easy way to have the population like the government. You could feed people worms if you don’t let them know there’s other food out there, they’ll like you if you tell them out there not even worms exist.
The people of Hong Kong absolutely LOVED having their democracy suppressed by china’s (#1 best democracy of the world!!!).
I guess nobody even asked the Uyghurs how they feel about their government. Or they’re <10% of Chinese population so who cares, they don’t need democracy.
There is no freedom of press because there isn’t even freedom of speech. You can’t mention tiananmen square. You can’t show imagery of Winnie the Pooh (because it was used to depict the supreme leader of china in a non-positive way), and you can’t show support for taiwanese independence. Neither of those are baseless conspiracy theories.
The topic of east-germany deindustrialization I’ve been recently aware of it, so I might be wrong about some of it. As I understand it, first, east Germany’s infrastructure was stolen by the soviets (railways dismantled and sent to the USSR). Later, when Germany was unified, east Germans wanted to exit communism so hard (and they voted like so) that east German companies didn’t have time to adapt to their new market. East German companies benefitted from protectionism and weren’t competitive when markets opened up and they were competing with more efficient west German companies.
How is that fault of west Germany? They were crippled by the USSR, didn’t improve due to the USSR’s policies, and then they voted for a fast reunification. The deindustrialization of east Germany looks to me more like it was done by the USSR and east Germany, not west Germany.
