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.
I don’t think it’s communism anymore but the Chinese gov are actually looking after their own citizens in my opinion. I kind wish Xi was in charge of the UK honestly.
They tend to think of everything long term and all of those projects are paying off, also Healthcare free education etc they are investing more in their own population than anyone else. US is in my opinion as UK guy pretty much done they’ve picked a fight that they won’t win.
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?
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Or are you denying Uyghurs are being persecuted?
The UN inspection committee could not find evidence to support your claims.
Why are you asserting the existence of a genocide in Xinjiang while endorsing the engineered famine across the border in Afghanistan?
I love how almost none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other accusing the other of supporting genocide.
Our species is so cooked. We must be the first species to evolve with our heads up our own asses.
I’m posed to snarl because I’ve seen this so many times before, as a justification to invade and destroy advanced industrial states that don’t bend the knee to the US State Department.
The reason you get thorium reactors out of China and Mars landers out of India comes down to two words “Peace Dividend”.
There’s a brighter future on the horizon. But you don’t get there by taking Marco Rubio at face value.
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.
Talk to people that live within the system is all I can tell you. I can absolutely understand the frustrations with the US, but China isn’t perfect either. The culture is less openly confrontational, but money still plays a very important role. Carrot on a stick goes a long way.
You mean the relatives we were visiting?
I’ll never understand the absolute terror Americans have for “imperfect China”
I think you are missing the point I’m trying to make. Glorifying a system can never be the answer. It isn’t for the US (as we can all prominently see right now) and it isn’t for China. Or any system, country, whatever. There will always be drawbacks and things you won’t know about. Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system. By just blindly praising it, it will turn sour at some point. The relatives you visited too will tell you about their daily troubles living within their system, if they have the feeling they can do that. Not american by the way. From a country that has a history of quite intense surveillance, if that gives you a hint. Maybe that’s part of what makes me critical after seeing the billion electronic eyes of Shanghai. A system that afraid of it’s own citizens can’t be perfect.
Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don’t need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.
There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of “enemy” nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.
Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.
Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn’t a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It’s just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.
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.
“Anymore” as if it ever was. Even USSR never claimed to be a communist country
P.S. They claimed to be a socialist, then “developed” socialist country that’s “on the path of building communism”.
Communism is a goal, not a government system.
I don’t know what they are but I know they look after their citizens more than we do, and they’ve really started taking over the entire Tech space in the last few years mainly due to that.
I’m UK but if someone held a gun to me and demanded where would I live USA or China I’d honestly pick China.
I’m Kinda looking forward to the US picking a war then realising China has quantum radar etc and getting schooled, hopefully it doesn’t go Nuclear but I’d still put my own money on China winning.
I’d advise you to read more on how Chinese government and spin dictatorships work. There’s a really good book written by Treisman and Guriev
It’s not really a country you’d choose over US even despite all it’s massive (cough healthcare and consumer protections cough) flaws
Idk… I have my ifs and buts about China. If you don’t believe in human rights, well love China! I’m not saying everyone in China is bad (but there are evil individuals like in US and NK). And watching Human Harvest, jeez…
Human rights they do have imo, true they execute billionaires who try to screw the rest of the population which in my opinion puts them ahead even more
The fact they don’t let billionaires run rampant improves my view of them a lot and I’m actually happy the ones who try end up dead.
https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-weekend-reads-china-health-269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c https://skepchick.org/2023/08/maker-naomi-wu-is-silenced-by-chinese-authorities-and-why-i-blame-elon-musk/
Whatever that link is it doesn’t load for me, UK censorship I guess.
The “human rights” standard of western imperialist countries is laughable hypocrisy. The US alone makes China look like the paragon of justice.
Tell it to the Uyghurs.
Fake ass western propaganda “genocide” my ass
You’re uncritically guzzling the CIA line
All of the supposed “evidence” comes from Adrian Zenz, who is a religious zealot who thinks it is his “god-given mission to destroy China.”
https://medium.com/@braisedporkblog/debunking-the-uyghur-genocide-a-resource-list-a31dd0ea3d87
Your username is very accurate. You uncritically accept Tankie propaganda supplied by a totalitarian dictatorship.
Says the mf who has never done any independent research and guzzles CIA propagand
Says the mfer who has never done any independent research and guzzles CCP propaganda.
Tell it to the American Blacks in prison. Glass houses. We’re all bad.
They’re not being subjected to a genocide.
There are 2x as many Blacks in prison in the US as Uyghurs in China. But we don’t call it genocide just like we call our rich Billionaires instead of oligarchs. At least for now we can make fun of Trump without being arrested. But I don’t know how much longer that will last.
We don’t call it genocide because words mean things and that does not constitute genocide, whereas China’s attempts to wipe out the Uighurs do.
“Genocidal attempts to wipe out” one of the few ethnic groups that had a full exemption from the one-child policy lolol