baaaaaaaaaaah [comrade/them]

To be fair, being fictional means they’re significantly less dimensional than real people and are incapable of holding secrets.

I mean there are real people I feel absolutely safe around, but they’re just normal people I know and have built trust with. There are no famous people I can say the same for because I don’t know them personally, even if they seem good on the surface. And for fictional characters like these, we “know” Aragorn is safe because he’s written to be benevolent, we’ve read his entire life, and the author’s dead so there’s no possibility for new material to change that perception.

Tibet was recognised by every country on the planet as sovereign Chinese territory, both then and today.

(That was also like 70 years ago, China’s last war was against Vietnam in the late 1970s)

a succulent chinese app

As soon as you are on top, your behaviour might change.

It might, it might not. America’s behavior didn’t change; from the start they’ve been aggressive and expansionist, the scope just grew as they became more powerful.

China’s been growing rapidly for decades while very seldomly acting militarily outside their borders. They don’t seem to have expansionist goals outside those declared over 70 years ago (ie Taiwan) and have even negotiated down on border conflicts. It’s not impossible but it’d be strange for China to make a complete about-turn on their stated policy of non-intervention.

The research, which involved three separate studies, found that TikTok users were exposed to significantly less content critical of China compared to users of other platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

Does this really imply that TikTok is manipulated to be pro-China, or that Instagram and Youtube are manipulated to be anti-China?

TikTok users tended to have more positive views of China’s human rights record and were more likely to consider China a desirable travel destination.

Also based on this line in particular, it seems like they’re marking travel content as “pro-CCP”, which is just nonsense. Xinjiang and Tibet are objectively beautiful, desirable, and popular tourist locations, and Tiananmen is literally the country’s second most famous tourist site after the Great Wall. That’s fact, not ‘the party line’.

Minutes before dropping the hardest track of 2025

爱 is bad

The property investment ‘gambling’ was pre-covid, according to xiaohongshu’s comment. I assume that’s what they’re referring to

I feel like China would be pushing this if this was the case, no?

I understand that the theory floated around Chinese media in the early days of the pandemic but I’ve not seen anything recently.

why’s he got a pissflag on his hat?

‘Funny’ isn’t an ethical value judgement in the same way as ‘someone I could grab a beer with’ is.

Trump is objectively funny, but he’s still scum and I’d never want anything to do with him.

For sure, they were very active during the war, both covertly as you say, and more directly through the 8th Route Army.

Really doesn’t help that China insists on calling them ‘dialects’ and not ‘languages’, which is what they really are, though the added confusion of them being basically the same when written down muddles things.

The KMT did most of the heavy lifting because they governed almost the entire country while the CPC controlled a single, very poor province.

They were an anti-Chiang faction that split during the late civil war and declared support for the CPC. They still exist on the mainland until this day.

There was also the left-right split before the war with Japan; after Sun Yatsen’s death there were rival KMT governments with the rightists led by Chiang in Nanjing and a leftist government in Wuhan led by Wang Jingwei, though the latter folded and the party reunited until Wang became a traitor during the war and sided with Japan.

Honestly couldn’t say. I know a fair number of people who still do it but I don’t want to extrapolate to wider society.

My understanding is that even in 996 they get way longer lunches than us.

I’d be really wary of trying to soften how bad 996 is. Everyone I’ve known who’s worked it has described it as pretty hellish and the government really does need to work harder to stamp it out.

Chinese children subsist on a diet that is 80% fortune cookie.

Why? You just assume TEMU uses child labour because… vibes?