Russian security forces raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow Friday night, less than 48 hours after the country’s top court banned what it called the “global LGBTQ+ movement” as an extremist organization.
Police searched venues across the Russian capital, including a nightclub, a male sauna, and a bar that hosted LGBTQ+ parties, under the pretext of a drug raid, local media reported.
Eyewitnesses told journalists that clubgoers’ documents were checked and photographed by the security services. They also said that managers had been able to warn patrons before police arrived.
I can only assume it’s for reasons such as:
Language: there is a very large Russian/FSU diaspora in Germany, while there is only a very small Russian community in China; and LGBT+ Russians are more likely to be proficient in English than in Chinese. It then follows that integrating into society and accessing services would be easier in Germany than in China, since Germany has a high English proficiency, and a large enough Russian population for many services to be provided in that language, or for Russophones to be able to find community on the basis of shared first language. German itself, of course, is also more similar to English and Russian than it is to Chinese.
The state of LGBT+ rights: rights for LGBT+ people are better in Germany than in China. This is not to erase the strides that China has made in terms of LGBT+ rights, nor the difficulties that LGBT+ people face in Germany and the very real possibility of regression as right-wing sentiment grows in Germany; but it’s also just a fact that LGBT+ Hexbears obviously acknowledge, that it’s in many ways just easier to be LGBT+ in the core than in the periphery or semi-periphery. It sucks, but that’s the way it is, for now.
Ease of applying for asylum: becoming a refugee in China is more difficult than becoming a refugee in Germany. Last I checked, China does not officially grant asylum, and has all refugees living in the country processed by the UNHCR. Germany, on the other hand, does grant asylum. While it’s obviously a good thing that people can flee from dangerous situations and seek asylum in another country, and China really should grant official asylum to refugees; one should be aware that systemically, the imperial core’s policy towards refugees is a form of economic domination over the imperial periphery, meant to provide themselves with cheap labor and drain the capital of the periphery.
China does not need more communists: it’s not like it’s a bad thing to move to China by any means — there’s a lot of good that can be done there — but it’s also not a bad thing to move to the imperial core in order to fight the good fight “in the heart of the enemy”. That’s more people to do activism, more people to join and contribute to organizations, and so forth: if we want to build socialism around the whole world, obviously we’ll want to live around the whole world.
I dunno, these are just some of my thoughts on potential reasons why an LGBT+ Russian socialist might prefer to take refuge in Germany rather than China… Like, it could’ve also just been that Kaplya just stated the name of the first country Kaplya thought of, and the comment wasn’t meant to be read into to this extent, but either way it’s a good writing exercise.
Or, you know, it’s because nobody wants to immigrate to China? Ever notice that unlike Europe and Canada and Australia and the US, China doesn’t have an immigration problem? I wonder why that is?
In case anyone wants to know, there have been over 40k undocumented Chinese immigrants to the US this year alone, and the numbers are growing. Fortunately they are pretty easily able to claim asylum and are easily integrated into existing Chinese-American communities.
It’s so strange that we don’t see any Americans immigrating to China.