Memes

Yeah, I mixed up the location of the foxconn factory fair catch. Doesn't change the core point though.

Those nets were a Foxconn-specific response to a cluster of suicides at one company, not a national symbol of "China." If you actually look at the data, China's suicide rate is 8.9 per 100k, ranking around 65th globally. That's lower than the US (15.6), Canada (9.4), Australia (13.1), UK (9.5), Japan (14.7), South Korea (20.6) and much of mainland Europe.

China makes everything from cheap trinkets to (most likely) the phone you're typing this on. It's not a monolith. Yes, working conditions were harsh during the early offshoring boom, that was the brutal calculus of catching up. But that strategy lifted nearly a billion people out of absolute poverty. China now has the world's largest high-speed rail network, metro systems that dwarf most Western cities, and excess overtime has been explicitly ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, with enforcement ramping up.

On the system itself: China is in the socialist transitional period. Contradictions remain because capitalism is still hegemonic globally, but the commanding heights (finance, energy, telecoms, heavy industry) are publicly owned. The state isn't a neutral arbiter; it's the tool through which the dominant class enforces it's power, in China that is the masses (the proletariat). Harvard's Ash Center has tracked Chinese public opinion since 2003 and consistently finds approval of the central government above 90%. Chinese people don't view their system through a Western liberal lens, they see democracy as whole-process people's democracy: elections, consultation, grassroots feedback, policy adjustment, all integrated. The NPC has nearly 3,000 deputies, including representatives from all 55 minority groups, hundreds of frontline workers (manual labourers) and farmers, and workers from every sector. That's structural representation. You can critique labor issues without falling back on orientalist tropes that flatten 1.4 billion people into a caricature.