How do people keep up with all these petty laws? If my country banned hotdogs there's a decent chance I'd miss the announcement and accidentally put a frankfurter in a bun. I could miss it completely and I have internet! How does your average person on North Korea find out about this ban on putting sausages in bread?
The fact is that these authoritarian states don't want the possibility of any cultural mingling between societies, each has to be as alien as the other for the bubbles of ideology to sustain themselves.
China is state atheist, of course they'd try to ban christmas, that's not abnormal for a dictatorship to do. See theocracies in the middle east, for example.
But FOOD? What the fuck do they think, americans are putting secret cameras in the hotdogs? This is so obviously bs, and RFA is a well known propaganda source, dude.
Only in your brainwashed circles bud. The fact is that these authoritarian states don’t want the possibility of any cultural mingling between societies, each has to be as alien as the other for the bubbles of ideology to sustain themselves. That makes it easy to vilify the other. A lot of European societies are largely atheist now, and they still celebrate Christmas, it's about sharing and enjoying culture festivities versus preventing cultural dissemination, at least bidirectionally.
Maybe, but it talks about popular street food in another part of the article so it seems not all food is hand delivered from the government. And a hot dog is "just" a sausage in a bun, I'd think bread and sausages would be reasonably common where food is a problem but maybe I'm wrong.
Well I noticed the article has a picture of a completely different type of hot dog than what I assume they actually banned*. Does that count as a hotdog sausage?
* In New Zealand a "Hot dog" is more similar to what would be called a "Corn dog" in the US. A hot dog sausage in bread would be referred to as an "American hot dog".