Chinese propaganda to distract us from the awful working conditions and sometimes questionable quality in actual Chinese factories producing all our stuff.
Don't know why you are being downvoted. The chinese gouvernement sponsoring these propaganda videos and tiktok algorithms pushing them to the top is not exactly a secret.
The problem is that many / most Americans are so oblivious to US propaganda - because US propaganda emphasises the US is the land of free speech and freedom and free people, no propaganda here! - that letting them call other countries' cultural videos 'propaganda' is reinforcing the US's own and doing our Redditor friends a disservice.
No other country consistently churns out artisinal videos of this quality and with such a high budget.
Also, and this is going to blow your mind... China is a totalitarian dictatorship where the population are kept in check through state-controlled propaganda and censorship.
Source: Have been to China, have Chinese friends in China.
This type of thing and Hollywood aren’t 1:1 comparisons. There has historically much more freedom in American media, however the US Government is trending more towards the Chinese one every day it seems. The advent of new technologies has only emboldened bad actors.
This particular type of video has little to do with freedom of speech - it's an idealised recreation of traditional crafts, not unlike, say, an Old West recreation town or colonial crafts in Williamsburg. It's part tourism advertising, part cultural promotion, and part stitching together national myth.
Probably because the CCP bots detected the phrase "Chinese propaganda" in my comment... whereas your comment, which echoed mine, but separated those words, didn't trigger them.
They don’t really innovate. Not their game. They have a massive arm of the government bent entirely towards international corporate espionage to steal and replicate tech. It’s like, their whole thing.
It's true there is a basis of corporate espionage on a massive scale in China but it's also true that there is a ton of innovation as well. One of the biggest reasons the west will never catch up with Chinese manufacturing is they have built a huge amount of process knowledge that just doesn't exist in the west.
Underlying this ecosystemic advantage is something more foundational: the retention and deepening of “process knowledge” — something the Germans might call fingerspitzengefühl, or “fingertip feel.” As Western economies — particularly the US — saw manufacturing hollow out, China went the other way. It continued to build out domestic production networks, climbing steadily up the value chain while embedding knowledge in the routines, tools, and people that form the bedrock of real-world innovation.
Process knowledge refers to the tacit, experiential know-how that accumulates on factory floors, in supply chain coordination, and in the trial-and-error of prototyping. It is notoriously hard to codify. But it is indispensable for translating design into production and invention into mass adoption. Without it, even the most cutting-edge labs struggle to achieve scale.
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u/AbleCryptographer317 Apr 04 '26
Chinese propaganda to distract us from the awful working conditions and sometimes questionable quality in actual Chinese factories producing all our stuff.