I never said the US was better or different. I was close to editing in that young people everywhere are getting fucked in the ass.

But, to humor your misplaced sarcasm, when you look at youth in America, they're much less blindly patriotic than older people.

You link Noam Chomsky saying that the US is the greatest threat to world peace to most young people and their response would be "yea, no shit."

If you ask them if America is #1, young people will more accurately point out that America is indeed not #1 in many metrics.

The older generations that got to live the American dream would obviously be patriotic about it. Most young people will tell you that dream is dead.

At least from the people I know, there are a lot that argue that because China does have local elections which filter upwards in their one-party system, there is an element of representative democracy that isn't that different from America.

In China, the candidates are heavily filtered and selected by the ruling party. The same can be said for the Democrats or Republicans selecting their own candidates to put up in primaries, heavily biasing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression, or the election system itself selecting for certain types of people -- namely people with enough inherent wealth or influence to run.

So, is the sarcasm obvious? Maybe if all you read is fairly unsophisticated and biased media. But, when you look at the nuance, is it obviously sarcastic to say Xi was elected fairly and freely? It's about as obviously sarcastic as saying Trump was elected fairly and freely.

That just shows you don't understand Chinese elections.

Xi's reelection was not "free" or "fair." There are no national level elections in China. It is a one-party political system with indirect elections for all higher level officials.

When the candidates at the local level are already filtered by the ruling party, that is not free. When those candidates are in turn used to insulate all the higher ranking levels from accountability, that is not fair.

Alternatively, it would've been such an American/capitalist thing for Moderna to give the technology to China for profit when that technology was funded by American tax dollars.

The implication that young people understand as much or are that appreciative is pretty funny.

Yea, sure, they're not slaving away on a farm doing hard labor. Instead, they're a recently graduated worker who can't find a job because of a shrinking white-collar job market that is due to government policies like driving away foreign employers, destroying the tutoring sector, crushing their own big-tech companies, etc. They're a lonely and desperate young man who can't find a wife because of the imbalance between the male/female populations created by the one-child policy. Alternatively, they might just not be able to get married because owning a house is often seen as a requirement for marriage and housing prices are out of reach. Maybe they're a one-child policy single child saddled with the pressure of needing to take care of 2 aging parents. Maybe they're a young couple who can't afford to have a kid because of the cost of doing so.

Young people in China have gotten fucked in the ass by the CCP.

KMT is pro One China as that was the status quo for years. That is very different from unification. They should not be lumped together.

The DPP is also not really pro Taiwan independence.

To both parties, Taiwan's relationship with China is a wedge issue. It's used to divide and increase voter fanaticism.