Don’t you think you’ve been influenced by propaganda? You have admitted yourself that you couldn’t even find information on Naomi Wu.
I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe. It’s also a very diverse region so it’s hard to generalize. But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers.
But regardless, I’d take having a 0.001% chance of my wallet (which contains zero valuables) being stolen versus being silenced by the government for criticizing the regime or being unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation. Let alone all the history rewriting and censorship.
> I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe.
Really, where?
I have been robbed in Belgium and in France, have had a knife on my throat on a Sunday morning, and have had burglars twice (once in Antwerp, once in Leuven). About five of my bikes were stolen, and I've been conned by construction workers several times.
Southern Italy. We’ve had burglars once actually, but that’s about it. I’ve since then also lived in Switzerland and Sweden, which are obviously much safer. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see the point in worrying about this. I take my precautions like anyone else and that’s about it.
Anyhow, sorry to hear about your experience. That’s how statistics work I guess. For any particularly unlucky person there’s a correspondingly lucky person that averages them out.
Conning is definitely more of a thing, but I wouldn’t place it in the same league as pickpocketing of tourists. Which of course is a thing, I don’t want to deny it. Just that using it as a reason to avoid Europe is absolutely blowing it out of proportion.
I think you're severely underestimating how safe China has become. Nowadays people don't even lock their motorbikes, and can leave their laptops in coffeeshops unattended for half an hour. You definitely can't do either of that in Netherlands. Maybe in some small village where everybody knows everybody else it's still possible.
That is the baseline that Chinese are comparing to nowadays. That's why even many what we call safe places feel unsafe to them.
Also consider that just 15 years ago, China was definitely way unsafer than many European countries. China upgraded from a low public trust to high public trust society in front of people's living memories. This is what you have to consider when considering why Chinese people are happy with their government. All this voting stuff is just theoretical benefit. In Netherlands, our politics have been a mess for more than a decade. Voting certainly didn't solve the problems.
In general Europe is quite safe, but tourists scammed in some more popular destinations does happen quite a bit.
But Europe is also quite heterogeneous. E.g. in Scandinavia getting scammed or pickpocketed is really rare, but in say Barcelona or Rome the chance is a lot higher. Violent crime like robbery is in general very rare everywhere.
> But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers.
it's not propaganda, i am talking some thing like 'yelp', real people share real experience after travel to EU. sure there are many good ones, but lots of bad ones.
> unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation
you can. but not in the public media. people share LGBT content on the Internet all the time. Right now the most popular influencer on chinese tiktok is a crossdresser
not intent to change your view, just some clarification.
Thank you for your clarifications. I don’t really know what to make of these experiences, I know for sure that it can’t be much more than a small percentage of tourists getting pickpocketed. Plausibly, the people with negative experiences are a loud minority.
I also now realize that my original comment may seem harsher than I intended. I fully understand your point of view since I was also born in a comparatively poor place, and I realize how uplifting it is to see everything around you improve at a rapid pace. But despite this, cases like that of Naomi Wu are egregious. Nobody can say for sure how much each “inconvenient” aspect of her online presence (accusing companies, being openly gay, having an Uyghur partner) has contributed to her shutdown, but the fact is that this person can’t publish her videos on tech anymore. This is very hard to justify for me.
Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your opinion. It is very valuable to get your perspective here.
I was also somewhat emotional, after all, relations between China and the EU are more hostile than before, and that naturally affects how people view each other. As for Naomi Wu, she was never that popular in China to begin with—after all, ordinary people don’t really know much about things like open-source licenses. As for her disappearance, well, she disappeared, and not many people really care. Other comments have already pointed out that she was involved in many issues, including violations related to open-source, and possibly some interactions with Linux; it’s hard for me to sort out exactly why she was “banned” on the Chinese internet. Her videos are still there; I don’t know if she still updates them, but indeed, no one really talks about her anymore.
Personally, I don’t quite agree with this kind of action, unless there’s a clear law that she violated. But China isn’t very transparent about such matters, so sometimes what the government does is right, sometimes it isn’t. Each case needs to be studied specifically. However, this lack of transparency is indeed a weakness.
I mean, the reasons for her shutdown are pretty clear: she walked into national security terroritory and attracted attention from paranoid security officials. The reasons came out of her own mouth, as reported by The Dailo Mao. See my other comment on this topic.