Meekee011

You people think 1989 is China’s shame. No. Your shame is spending decades pretending the only footage that exists is what those anti-China media deliberately exposed.. You erase the burned soldiers. The lynched PLA troops. The hijacked vehicles. The mobs. The violence. No Western country would tolerate protesters killing soldiers and seizing military equipment for five minutes. But when it happens in China, suddenly it becomes “democracy.” That is not history. That is color-revolution fanfiction for people still crying that China did not collapse.

By a wide margin, the people who say "We need to address what happened during Covid" is on the right and, by a similar margin, the people who say "stop talking about that, no one cares, stop investigating things, nothing happened, I'm not listening, la la la" is on the left

Strange, I heard Winnie the Pooh was banned in China. Somebody better tell the Lego store in Shenzhen. More Western propaganda bites the dust.

The Ryugyong Hotel towers 105 stories above Pyongyang, a concrete monument to central planning's inevitable failures. Construction began in 1987 with grand promises of completion by 1989. Thirty-five years later, this hulking pyramid remains the largest unoccupied building on Earth. Kim Il-sung's regime poured an estimated $750 million into this vanity project during the late 1980s, roughly 2% of North Korea's entire GDP at the time. The original plan called for 3,000 rooms, seven rotating restaurants, and all the modern amenities befitting a world-class hotel. Construction halted in 1992 when the money ran out and structural flaws became undeniable. The building sat as a windowless shell for decades, earning the nickname "Hotel of Doom." Central planners operate blind without price signals, profit and loss calculations, or genuine consumer demand. They allocate resources based on political whims rather than economic reality. The Ryugyong Hotel exemplifies this perfectly: no market research determined tourist demand, no competitive bidding ensured efficient construction, no profit motive disciplined the project timeline. Compare this to capitalist hotel development. Entrepreneurs risk their own capital, study market demand meticulously, and face bankruptcy if they miscalculate. The Marriott Corporation doesn't build hotels that remain empty for 35 years because shareholders would revolt and competitors would crush them. North Korea's socialist paradise produced a $750 million concrete shell that generates zero revenue and serves zero guests. Every centrally planned economy produces these monuments to waste, from the Soviet Union's ghost cities to China's empty shopping malls. The only difference is scale and stubbornness.

China’s new official obsession: Getting people to read more books. In February, China passed a new regulation to build more public reading facilities and spaces. In April, China had its first-ever national reading week. State media encourages people to put down their phones and pick up a book. President Xi wants China to become a “cultural powerhouse” by 2035, and says the revival of reading is one of its pillars. Xi quotes Mao saying, “One can go a day without eating, a day without sleeping, but not a day without reading.” In 1949, less than 20% of China's population was literate. Today it's approaching 99%. When one of the most tech-focused countries in the world says that a population of book readers is vital to their future, we should all take note.