元键政3：与低水平言论缠斗意义不大 - Meta Political Discussion 3: It's insignificant to engage in a battle of words with low-level arguments
由于本文可能稍有敏感，这里仅展示英文版。
Sometimes when I go to websites like Douyin, Kuaishou, Twitter, Sohu News, Baijia, and Hupu (They are all common applications/bbses in China) and search for political terms in Chinese, I am overwhelmed by the prevalent nationalism, hate speech, gender conflict, stereotypes, and unverified gossip and salacious news, often accompanied by vulgar images. It sometimes disheartens me so much that I have a feeling that "Chinese people are really unchangeable."
However, my feelings are misguided. I should not engage or even associate myself with these users or their comments. If we are to contribute to building a civil society, then we must prioritize maintaining the quality of our own platforms or communities, over anything else. Excessive exposure to bad-quality discourse may cause a dismissive & biased view of our fellow citizens.
Constant exposure to negative and low-level discourse comes with a major risk: our tendency to mimic. Assume I am a liberal. Suppose Ideliberately select and read detrimental comments from within the 'Great Firewall'. I am likely to adopt a similar offensive language to hit them back. What's more, I'm likely believe that to handle an online 'hooligan', you must be more 'hooligan' than the 'hooligan' itself. However, just as there can be high and low-level patriots, there can be high and low-level liberals too. Engaging in a low-level discourse makes me the low-level liberal as well, degrading the overall political debate, just like the graph below. This was also a mistake I made several years ago.
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| Deteriorated political debate |
Some may argue: I participate in political discussions merely for fun and entertainment, not necessarily to engage in serious debate. My counter to this attitude is although there's nothing inherently wrong with it, isn't it akin to watching a fool for amusement? Isn't political discussion meant for more than just this? Additionally, I consider all moderate liberals as comrades. I believe It's not entirely appropriate if someone picks out a few friends, relatives, classmates or colleagues of a person, and then takes pleasure in their embarrassing moments.
I don't wholly support initiatives like 'The Great Translation Movement', Esu Wiki, USA Silly, etc., which chiefly focus on exposing the worst within a group (though I don't oppose them either). This approach of 'revealing their ugly faces to the world' is a low-level form of attack, reminiscent of "the Cultural Revolution". Moreover, these initiatives don't indiscriminately share all comments, but cherry-pick the most outrageous ones for amusement purposes, which serves little meaningful purpose. However, it does serve to remind us all to take responsibility for our words and actions as 'the political opponents' are watching us.
The screenshot above is the search result for the "昂撒" (Short for Anglo-Saxons, sometimes with a derogatory connotation) on Hupu, a platform with a large number of extreme nationalists. Searching for a term predominantly used by extremists on their platform, my behavior was essentially a case of asking for trouble.
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元键政2：键政的意义何在？ - Meta Political Discussion 2: What is the significance of discussing politics?
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Appendix: Following are some decent Chinese liberal-leaning bloggers, platforms, and online communities that I recommend (most of them require a VPN to access). For the rest of you, regardless of your ideological preference, as long as it's mainstream, rest assured there are plenty of high-quality communities out there waiting for your discovery.