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I think I would extend it thus:
In America, the rich controls the government - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside). In China, the government controls the rich - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside).
...and with a bonus few:
In Russia, the top of the government controls the rich who control the rest of the government - to screw anyone they can get away with screwing while waving the "just remember we have nukes" flag. In Europe, the leaders keep flip-flopping about who they should be screwing so they just take turns footgunning while announcing "I meant to do that", and then slapping each other on the wrists for appearances. In the UK, the rich and the government take turns visiting the pawnshop with anything that isn't screwed down, then acting shocked when swathes of the government end up effectively owned by other governments.
Completely vibes-centric analysis. If the Chinese government were screwing the population, how come every western polling org agrees that the government has at the very, very least 86% approval rates, far above any EU nation, let alone the US?
I don't even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.
Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as "analysis" sits that low.
I'm not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
I don't even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Did you notice I used the word "extend"? ...and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human "bot" with the naive agenda of waving one team's flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the "winning side" of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as "leadership" pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no "winning side" for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I'd just say they (who am I kidding, "he") needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.
I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people's lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->"fake nice" spectrum, and getting on the "actual kindness" and "mutual respect" bandwagon. But lately I'll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.
Bonus evidence of Chinese government screwing everyone in the country.
Here's the report explaining how a typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty