Summary
China condemned JD Vance on Tuesday for calling Chinese people “peasants” in a Fox News interview, where he said, “To make it a little more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry labeled the remarks “ignorant and disrespectful.”
The backlash exploded on Chinese social media, garnering 140 million Weibo views.
Critics mocked Vance’s own “hillbilly” background and pointed to China’s advanced tech and infrastructure, highlighting rising tensions amid Trump’s trade war.
I knew a girl from China and this is a huge insult to them. Being seen or labeled as rural is very embarrassing in their culture. She was ashamed because she grew up on her uncle’s pig farm.
Farmers should be respected like other workers, they are feeding the world.
But then they vote republican…
You have a point US farmer voted Trumpican.
Republicans seem to have changed a lot over the years. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/09/reagan-trump-republicans/679746/
Many jobs are equally essential, I don’t get why people lose their asses over farmers specifically. It’s not like they feed the people out of charity, it’s their job to do so, and they get paid to do it.
I respect farmers as long as they aren’t ignorant and conservative.
I respect farmers as long as they’re not abusing migrant labour at illegal wages… So, I barely respect farmers.
exactly and they should be equally respected like other workers.
Well, in as much as they’re workers, yeah. When instead they’re landowners who illegally employ immigrants in order to pay them misery wages under the counter, fuck them. Farmers can be extremely reactionary and exploitative too, in a way that say, a supermarket cashier, simply can’t be.
you are right but if you compare landowner you should compare to other owner like supermarket owner, store owner, there are also store owner who hire illegals worker/casher paying them miserable cash wages.
Exactly my point: many farmers aren’t working class, they’re petit-bourgeois, which explains why there are so many reactionary tendencies among them. The farmers who are working class deserve praise, the ones who are landowners don’t.
Yup that is true.
I agree. I was just providing a cultural perspective as to why this would be such a big deal for them.
That’s just because all the development happened in cities. It’s easier to educate people when they live in a place with more funding.
In 2020 or so the income inequality in china was equal to that of USA. Meaning that rural places didn’t have sufficient funding.
But now the gini is down to 0,36. Meaning that there’s more widespread funding.
China seems to be willing. While the inequality in USA is by design to attract capital
I think the shame is on the part of all Americans as this is on them sadly even the good ones.
Meanwhile they all can be gulag’d at any time by their cruel dictator. They are all serfs in that aspect.
Man yeah, a country where you can be sent to an extra territorial jail with no due process and absolutely no recourse because the Man said so.
That sounds scary!
Agreed. Hence why most people would find it reprehensible.
What’s the incarceration rate in China? You guys are so fucking racist by swallowing the Anti-Chinese propaganda I swear to god.
What’s the youth unemployment?
The answer is it doesn’t matter, its a dictatorship that curates the truth.
Have you not looked at western media during the GENOCIDE in Gaza? All of them collectively talking about “war in Israel and Palestine”, playing both sides, and curating the truth. For fuck’s sake, the average Republican in the USA lives in a completely different world of covid denialism, and thinks Elon performed an accidental Roman salute.
Does Bernie Sanders get arrested and put in a reeducation camp for speaking out against it, as he would in China?
They are victims, not “peasants” or “serfs”.
Serfs were victims, it’s roughly equivalent to slavery to be a serf
Right but it’s a nicer word to use imo.
Why are we softening the image of slavery? A spade is a fucking spade
Why do you think the article is upset at Vance? He should have said “We borrow money from them to buy the things they manufacture.” Mentioning ethnicity or the word peasant is clearly racist. Even if he wanted to drive it home, he could have said “We borrow money from these victims of slavery…” but it wouldn’t have made any sense of course that way. It was racist.