Graph of the day – Internet use and abuse in China and Taiwan

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Today’s graph follows the same theme as yesterday’s graph. As I mentioned, I’m working on a blog post on China and Taiwan. The post will not only cover economic developments as shown in yesterday’s graphs, but also politics. Governments plan and implement policies in many ways. Policies in dictatorships and democracies are made from widely different views on individual rights and constraints on the executive powers.

China and Taiwan represent the two extremes on the above-mentioned spectra. The two countries also pursue foreign policy in two extremely different ways. While Taiwanese foreign policy follows diplomatic rules, Chinese foreign policy is aggressive and tries to influence decision making in different countries in different ways.

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Graph of the day – GDP per capita and life expectancy in Taiwan vs China

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I am trying something new today. I usually update my blog only two or three times a month. I do a lot of reading, writing, and editing between those posts before I decide what to write about and then finally how to write it. It does not always turn out well as some readers might have noticed.

As my few readers have noticed, I like to use data to support the arguments I put forward. Sometimes in forms of tables but mostly in forms of graphs. I produce a lot of them when I prepare posts for my blog. Some of them are used in the posts while most find their way in some remote part of the hard disk. Some of the graphs and tables are nice even though I do not use them. Therefore, I begin this new routine.

The graphs and tables will either be used in a future post or were left out in a previous post. Or maybe an update of a graph that I have used in a previous post.

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Autocratic regimes are liars.

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Spoiler: Autocratic countries disseminate false information to influence their own and foreign citizens than democratic countries. Countries which disseminate false information, also restrict of suppress freedom of speech and freedom of the media. China, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela are among the ten countries that abuse the Internet and social media in this way. Latvia, Taiwan, and USA are among the ten countries that are most abused by foreign governments dissemination false information.

The Kremlin regime also frequently use associated political parties and candidates to disseminate false information at home and abroad. Russian government and party dissemination of false information abroad increased significantly after the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution.

For regimes like China’s and Russia’s, disinformation campaigns are key foreign policy instruments. Often campaigns to get the autocratic regimes’ opinions, narratives and lies, picked up by media in the target countries.

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The hypocritical Victory Parade

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Spoiler: Kremlin weaponizes history. The regime undertakes great efforts to erase it’s the Soviet pact with Nazi-Germany. Soviet participation in WWII did not begin 22 June 1941, it began 17 September 1939 when Soviet attacked Poland in the back. Then Soviet attacked Finland but failed to occupy her. Unfortunately, Stalin succeeded to occupy the Baltic countries. Imprisonments, deportations, torture, rapes and killings followed and were continued when the Soviet Union liberated the countries from the Nazis.

The Kremlin has made Russian history books a farce and introduced laws that criminalise the truth of Soviet-Nazi cooperation and Soviet war crimes during WWII. The methods to change history also includes inventions of other countries’ war crimes.

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