It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
Their own citizens…except for LGBTQ people or uyghurs of course.
Also most people only see the living conditions of the top 1%. Going to beijing and being amazed by it is like going to hollywood or manhattan and then ignoring the rest of la or upstate ny. And then we havent even gotten to the really bad ones… And then europe also exists. We still exploit poorer countries(which now china also does and the us as well of course) but basically we have the best living conditions in the world and also some of the best places for queer people. Like literally my country that counts as a shithole in europe(hungary) is still somehow one of the best countries by a lot of metrics in the whole world, usually only behind other european countries.
Every time I read a headline about how there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, it’s in the same newspaper that insists Israel Has The Right To Defend Itself and Yemen needs to be bombed to powder.
At some point, it reads like liberal agitprop. An excuse to scare liberals into hating a foreign country so we can justify… what? Tariffs? TikTok bans? Nuclear war?
Same with LGBTQ rights. We’ve got a DOGE department doing a pogrom on “woke” government workers while I still get an earful about how mean China is to minority groups?
What am I supposed to take away from this?
That the world isn’t black and white, and both sides can be awful at the same time.
Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.
In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.
At some point “Both Sides Are Bad” doesn’t cut it. You have to address your own nation’s sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.
The Uyghur genocide situation has been confirmed by multiple countries, please don’t start a genocide denial debate here.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/13/michelle-bachelets-failed-xinjiang-trip-has-tainted-her-whole-legacy/
The Western response to UN officials investigating Xinjiang and failing to find confirmation of the salacious rumors is to call the UN a failure.
The same criticisms hurled at UN investigators attempting to confirm these accusations today are mirrored by IAEA efforts to find nuclear weapons in Iraq. You’ve got Christian nationalists pushing far-right warmongering and fear mongering, in an attempt to curb China’s growing economic clout in the region. And it has culminated in the Trump presidency, and the full collapse of the US as a credible source of intelligence.
Well if you want a first hand account: I went to Shanghai with some friends recently, one has family and friends there, so knows the city. We went to the only lesbian bar in all of this huge metropolis. Note that I’m a guy. But due to being closed down before, the place seemed to be rather glad to have some euro faces in there, as a show for the cop car parked right in front of it the whole night.
My friend also told me, that the amount of beggars was really low this time, because they all got picked up and brought to somewhere else.
So all in all I think it’s an efficiently run country, but you don’t get around pushing some people out if you want efficiency. Humans are all different, if you want to consider everyone’s opinion it takes a lot of time (which China did not have in the last few decades). So some opinions are forced out rather brutally.
But, all in all: Go there, experience it yourself.
I can’t speak to Shanghai. I’ve only been to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Zhuhai - just outside of Macau - and with family (my eight year old niece isn’t much of a clubber yet).
But all the youth culture I experienced there was thriving. Not exactly going up and asking people their preferred sexuality, but there were plenty of groups that had all the iconography of queerness. There’s still a social stigma against queermess that’s held over from prior generations. But there also isn’t mass shootings or vehicular manslaughter targeting queer communities.
My father in law (a diehard libertarian Cold Warrior type) was taken aback at how clean the cities were and how safe he felt the whole time he was there. Might be due to his overexposure to Western cinema that paints China (and Mexico and Brazil and South Africa and really any country without a critical mass of white people) as dens of vice and violence. But for some reason, having streets devoid of poverty in the US is aspirational. Having them devoid of poverty outside the US is dystopian.
The low homelessness might have something to do with China’s stellar public housing policy. The dedication to clean streets and regular maintenance of buildings may have something to do with their prioritization of long term durability over short term profits. And the degree to which they’ve adopted industrial technology makes these enormous, low cost mixed use urban centers possible. It isn’t just random people being wisked away to El Salvador at the whims of a partisan government.
Chinese civil government doesn’t operate in the same adversarial climate as in the US. You don’t have Crossfire hosts screaming at each other or Palestine protesters and Zionists brawling on college campuses. You don’t have bloggers and AM Radio guys stoking stochastic violence against minorities in order to generate private fortunes or billionaires buying up major publishers in order to suck up to or strong arm political leadership.
Mass Line theory of government tries to be more scientific in it’s approach to polling public sentiment, reaching public policy, and mass marketing changes to traditional views. China’s approach to domestic reform is slower, more small-c conservative, and focused within the party rather than between parties.
Americans don’t understand that system, so it frightens them. But Americans have made an industry of frightening one another. So Sinophobia is just one more buggabo.
America has a greater percentage of Americans locked up than China has Uyghurs locked up and we don’t have a Thorium reactor either.
I dont give a fuck about the US either. Nice whataboutism tho.