@Blue Republic
two of which are full on propaganda mouthpieces tied directly to the CIA - NPR

Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio?
by Edward Curtin Posted on September 10, 2019

and Falun Gong's Epoch Times' mouth piece China in Focus:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfoRGG_j5x4&t=763s]
Here's updated information on the "hukou" system

100 million have settled in urban areas as part of China's hukou system reform
08-Oct-2020

China has helped at least 100 million rural population to settle down in towns and cities, elevating the nation's urbanization rate of registered households from 35.9 percent in 2013 to 44.4 percent in 2019, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

Meanwhile, the dual "hukou" system, which has lasted for over half a century and divided the people into rural and non-rural population was abolished. It was a very important move in the country's goal of hukou reform from 2016 to 2020, marked as the 13th "Five-Year Plan" in China's development.
...
According to the latest data of the Ministry of Public Security, under the reform, by the end of 2019, rural students moving to towns and cities could bring subsidies with them, which benefited over 14 million migrant workers and their children. Starting from 2014, at least 100 million migrant workers have received professional training in cities and towns.

As for insurance systems, the old-age insurance system was unified as well across the country, and by the end of last year, over 63 million migrant workers have joined the insurance system, and more than 86 million got employment insurances and 49.6 million got unemployment insurances.

As China Lifts Migration Rules, Growth Will Follow

For decades, the hukou system has impeded upward mobility. It may finally be on the way out.
By Adam Minter
June 30, 2020

List of countries by home ownership rate - 2019
China 89.68
Russia 87.3
Canada 66.3
United States 65.3

Innovations in Poverty Eradication in China
...
In 2014, China’s government implemented a strategy of Targeted Poverty Alleviation, which allows the government and local officials to address the needs of individuals and households rather than entire villages. Local officials use data from a local registration system containing information from more than 128,000 villages to identify and provide support to poverty-stricken areas. According to China’s President Xi Jinping, Targeted Poverty Alleviation follows an approach based on policies in five areas:

Industrial development
Social Security
Education
Eco-compensation
Relocation
...

There are now two times the number of Chinese in the middle class (PPP) than the entire population of the US. This is one of the prime reasons that 90% of the Chinese people approve and support their government. Worldwide approval rate for the governments of both China and Russia is higher than it is for the US. The US is sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of it's own making.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

to a whole lot of Chinese, methinks, to find out that their society is based on

the notion that any rent-yielding resource – banking, land, natural resources and natural infrastructure monopolies – should be in the public domain to provide basic needs to everybody – freely.

given how many have been forced off their farmland and homes so that corrupt officials could profit (but who became corrupt because of the bad example of Western capitalist exploiters?). Are the spoiled daughters and sons of the Chinese elite going to be giving up their Lamborghinis, Rolexes and Vancouver, B.C. mansions to improve the lot of migrant laborers in Beijing? I don't think so.

By the way, those laborers, or anyone living somewhere where they do not have official permission to live, are relegated to second-class status and, among other difficulties, not have access to basic social services:

Migrants also face a formidable set of institutional barriers in their attempts at success in the city. Chinese society is organized in a system of household registration known as hukou. If you are born in a rural area, it is usually impossible to change to an urban hukou regardless of how long you work in the city, a system that bars migrants from certain jobs and prevents access to health care and education for their children. It dates from pre-Communist China, but in the second half of the 20th century, it became so decisive in determining life opportunities that it has been compared to the caste system. A 2018 study in Baoding found that migrant workers who, in some cases, had lived in the city for decades had little emotional attachment to it, and their lack of security and happiness was central to this feeling. Researchers found that limitations on their hukou rights had determined much of their outlook on their lives.

As China’s first wave of urban migrants approach retirement age, many find themselves locked out of urban pensions. Their hukou remains in their hometown, which means their only option might be to return to meager countryside pensions in a place where they have not lived for years. If they do return, they are likely to find that their villages are nothing like how they left them, and not in a good way. From 2000 to 2015, nearly three-quarters of all rural primary schools—more than 300,000 in all—were permanently closed. Many of those who stayed behind lost their jobs as agriculture became more and more automated.

source: Atlantic, 2019

China has been razing villages by the thousands and forcibly relocating millions - perhaps as many as 100 million people in the last five years, with the goal of doing more than double that. This is about greed and total control of the populace.

Even NPR couldn't manage to put a favorable spin on this:

A farmer from Shandong province along China's east coast, Liu recalls how during Chinese Lunar New Year in January, he went out for a walk and came home to discover local officials preparing to demolish his home.

When he called the police on the demolishers, they arrested him instead, saying that the police would "assist the work of the local government."

"To demolish my home, about 100 security officers surrounded and subdued me, and detained me," Liu said on a recent visit to his village, Liushuanglou, near the city of Heze. He was released from detention the next day.

Like most of the more than three dozen Shandong residents NPR interviewed, Liu requested only his family name be used because he fears being physically threatened again by the authorities.

After building some of the world's largest cities, erecting entire districts of gleaming high rises in the span of a few years, China is now kicking plans into high gear to overhaul tens of thousands of its rural villages.

But Liu and other residents allege that the authorities are coercing them into signing away their older, much larger farm homes, demolishing them by force if necessary and not adequately compensating residents for their homes. The residents say the new, smaller houses or high-rise apartments they are being moved into are either too far from their fields, too expensive or ill-suited for their needs as farmers.

"Our leaders have been distanced from us regular people at the bottom. They do not know our basic needs. They are completely cut off from us," Liu said.

Thousands of villagers in Shandong, meanwhile, have already been rendered effectively homeless since local governments began forcibly clearing away houses last year.

If that's anyone's idea of socialist paradise you are welcome to it. Start a Gofundme campaign and I'll scrape together a few yen towards a one-way ticket.

Yes, the Chinese leadership is playing a smart and long-term game, and the US with its militaristic bluster has been undermining itself. Russia and Iran are in no sense natural allies of China, they have moved closer to China having been pushed by disastrously wrong US policies. We should have been trying to make nice with them long since.

But you don't have to like or support stupid US policies to realize that China is a highly authoritarian oligarchy with every intention of expanding its power globally and asserting total control over its population. Neither do you have to have a problem with Chinese people in general to recognize the CCP as a corrupt, totalitarian, dangerous entity that would be happy to have the very idea of "government of, by and for the people" perish from the earth...

How life in China turned a leftie-liberal Californian into a Trump voter:

@CB

the increased propaganda on both China and Russia and have been calling it out so I am not sure what warmongering you are seeing. Linda's essay was not pro war either, so I am not sure what you are seeing here. Hate to see you go when your opinion here has always been valued.

ETA

If you want to see warmongering of old like over there then check out the link I posted. That will tickle your fancy for seeing warmongering. I am reading the new comments and my neck is sore.

It has started to remind me of the war mongering that went on in DKos. Libya, Syria, Russia, now China. I was correct about the first three and I will be correct about China.

Same old, same old... I'm tired.

Anti-Chinese Propaganda Reaches All-Time High

If I were China, I’d abandon Earth for a friendlier planet in another corner of the galaxy. Have you read the news from Google lately? The rulers of the internet just don’t have anything good to say about the Chinese. And I mean nothing at all. Isn’t it strange to anyone else? I mean, how can anyone in the west hope to have cordial political relations with a country so implausibly hated?
...
Finally, even when the good news about China or Russia does appear in the western press (3 pages into Google News), there’s always the sub-plot, the insinuation that these countries are not as good as western nations.
...
Just to be different, I think it’s important that I report here that China is now Europe’s leading trading partner supplanting the United States. China’s Generation Z is emerging as the most economically advantaged and empowered generation in Asia, and most of the world. And China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission is already sending back fantastic images and data from the red planet. I’ll bet not one of my colleagues in America bothered to search down 14 pages in Google News to find this good China story. But you read it here on NEO. Yes, China can fly to Mars. No, the Chinese are not some banana republic. And yes, our media is brainwashing Americans to keep us scared, angry, and pretty stupid.

Hey, maybe the Chinese are planning to leave Earth for friendlier pastures!

Anti-Asian Racism Never Stopped Being an Outgrowth of U.S. Imperialism
...
The New Cold War on China is first and foremost a military campaign comprised of four hundred U.S. military bases, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and over sixty percent of all U.S. naval assets stationed in the Asia Pacific. But the U.S. strategy to contain China includes political and economic sabotage. Sanctions have been placed on Chinese officials and tech corporations and the U.S. has waged an endless campaign of interference in China’s internal affairs relating to Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the city of Hong Kong. Both corporate and so-called progressive media such as Democracy Now have obsessively focused on the reproduction of negative stories that mirror the U.S. Department of State’s official posture toward China. The endless stream of anti-China propaganda has been effective; eighty percent of all Americans currently view China unfavorably, according to recent polls.

“The U.S. strategy to contain China includes political and economic sabotage.”
...

What We’re Really Seeing With All These Anti-China Narratives
...
“We are being bombarded with anti-China hate for a reason and it has nothing to do with human rights,” journalist Rania Khalek commented while sharing Goodrum’s thread. “This is just a tiny fraction of it. At the same time anyone who questions the state department narrative is being accused of loving tyrants and defending genocide. Sound familiar?”
...
The repetition of these negative stories has more of an effect than the contents of the stories themselves because of something called the illusory truth effect, an odd glitch in human cognition which leads our minds to mistake info we’ve heard repeatedly for fact. Just by repeating something over and over again, our minds can be tricked into believing that what we have heard is a verified fact and not a completely unconfirmed assertion.
...
Because hot conflict is taken off the table in cold war confrontations between nuclear powers, planetary-scale propaganda campaigns take on a much more prominent role to pave the way for each new escalation. That’s what we’re seeing in all this recent promotion of anti-China hysteria.

You can understand the establishment China narratives by grasping just two points:

1) We are in a slow-motion third world war between the US and its allies and the nations which have resisted absorption into this alliance.

2) Propaganda is used to move this slow-motion war along.

Understand these two points and you can understand the entirety of why the western political/media class is behaving in the way that it is when it comes to international news. With China, and with all nations which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob.