one thing most any leftist will say about china despite supporting the country is that they're a very traditionalist culture, and so LGBTQ issues in particular are a blight on leftist westerner's otherwise positive view of china.
upon scrolling thru rednote, i think that's bullshit now. i really don't think you're worse off being LGBTQ in china than you are in america. yeah, you can't get married, but that right is under constant threat of being taken away in the US anyway and let's be real- it probably will be taken away. meanwhile, china is making progress on that front, the US wants to regress.
i saw multiple LGBTQ people on rednote. i saw a lesbian couple, one of the girls even said "LGBT is completely normal in china now, especially in the cities. even the older generations who might not accept it mind their own business". can that be said about america? how many queer people here have been accosted by some boomer who couldn't mind their own business? i saw the gayest fucking dude i've ever seen in my life (that's a compliment). he was also wearing makeup and sassily singing along with destiny's child. completely comfortable in his skin and with his identity, and while all of the comments and his speaking were in mandarin that i couldn't understand, you can tell by the vibe it was all positive. meanwhile in progressive america, if you're a guy who wants to put on makeup and go live on tiktok you're gonna face all sorts of homophobia and bigotry.
one of the few things western liberals could really say about china, that even those of us who are left wing and pro china thought to be at least somewhat true, appears to just straight up not be true.
Mainland people would often state that systemic discrimination is not a thing since there are 55 recognized minorities which have certain privileges. Two of the most contentious one that Han Chinese people would state are: The one child policy and the fact that minorities need lower scores to pass the standard test to get into universities. However, the first one is not a privilege no more since the One child policy is no longer a thing. As for the lower scores for entry exams, there is a caviat attached to the fact that education is often pegged to there you are born and since the reform and opening up, regions where minorities live are underfunded to the point that if you don’t perform above average in a B-tier high school, your score for entry is going to be affected to the point the free credit you get will not tip the scale on your favour.
One of the most flagrant systematic discrimination is in the rental market in my city. Some local region will often ask landlord to do extra check up on rentors’ background that is not done on local people (aka Han). It is often applied to minorities from special regions (read Xinjiang) or permanent residents (a lot of them in my cities are from Africa). Since my city has a lot of human movement it is a easy market for landlord to pick the rentors, it is often done by picking people who demands the least paperwork needed barring people from having access to rentals (their excuses are most likely a matter of convenience). You can see the effects of this kind of behaviour since there is an area of the city called Little Africa which is de facto a ghetto.
Of course, you can probably drag the landlords in court for discrimination to court and might win (if you have money, level of education and language proficiency), but the might issues still persists, why some local municipalities require background checks for certain individuals in the first place.
Oh sorry I thought you were saying systemic discrimination against LGBTQ people, is that not what you were talking about?
Can you describe what you mean by a ghetto? What are the conditions, etc?
I was talking discrimination in general. Sorry
There are some improvements in same-sex union within the legal dimension (still no wedding). Even with more progressive laws passed, the problem with China is mostly the difficulty to implement laws in a systematic way and with uniformity. There was a new regarding some people unable to sign up for legal union as a same-sex couple because the local bureaucrat basically said it is not a thing.
These incidents tend to happen more in the inland which happens to be economically disadvantaged. I think there is an implication that the driving force for LGBTQ+ rights in China tends to happen in more urban and more developed (read richer) areas and the main obstacle is the inequality within the country.
yeah that makes sense. all in all it sounds like any of the systemic discrimination you are describing is endlessly better than the systemic discrimination here in the US. I don't hear about people being murdered walking the streets, poisoned by their own drinking water, beat up by police, enslaved in prisons, denied access to life saving health care, denied access to education, denied access to housing. This is what systemic discrimination means here. It sounds like what you are describing are very small issues in comparison.