The worst part is. China didn't change. Its just that now one perceives the propaganda machinery of a totalitarian power masterfully manipulating democratic activists & sensitivities and wielding them like the tools they are.
Every time one sees "news" out of china, by a chinese news source, one is being talked to by one, single entity.
The wishful thinking that there is a democratic, liberal society behind the imitation game, is by now a dangerous delusion.
And furthering the goals of this voice, is support of genocide. Those who did will have to answer for that. Cheering on a todays stalin or hitler, because you are in opposition to some factions of your democratic society, makes you a complicit in their atrocities.
Doing business with those force drafted henchmen kept in with mafia methods, makes you a criminal.
The US didn't have to pay for going to war with Irak while lying about wmd and against the UN vote, nor pay for its mass surveillance program or the secret torture bases.
Why do you think China will pay for anything ? If a country is powerful enought, it will get away with anti democratic behavior without any consequences.
Today nobody can oppose china. They have more population, provide the entire world with most products and have the nuclear weapon.
They will keep doing what they want, and people will fake outrage and do nothing. In fact, US companies will keep complying with their abusive requests, like censorship, to not lose the market. CEO will pretend to care on twitter and keep it up.
After all, did we stopped buying phones and clothes from china when we learned they were made by child slaves ? We didn't. We can't even care as individuals, I don't see how our systems, which are groups of individuals, would bother when we dont.
You mean it shuffled money around from the federal budget into the pockets of American companies. The money does stay in the US for the most part (well, and even that which they sent in containers probably didn't disappear into Iraqi pockets).
So block any trade with nazi-germany? The biggest engineering hub of the world? Who control whole europe? So sanction the USSR? The whole eastern block?
A real one. One that is not engaged with history revisionism. Or did china do a holocaust, or start WW3? I don't think so. China is a totalitarian dictatorship, but not really the only one, nor the worst. But they are not Nazis.
Apart from that, how about blocking trade with countries, that do attack other countries, based on caught lies and propaganda? And various other black things?
Last time I checked, Mao is not in charge anymore. Since a very long time. So anyway, you claim, china is worse, than the nazis regime? I would like to get some evidence of gas chambers then pls.
Also, how many wars did communist china started, compared to the US?
> how many wars did communist china started, compared to the US?
China's very prolific in using soldiers, to kill people, in the national interest. Similarly, the US and China both engage in large scale violence to promote their culture. A difference is that China's actions are performed within their borders (more or less) and are not as highly publicized.
As a qui gong practicer and mountaineer, I am very well aware of chinas atrocities.
But like you said, the US is maybe using soldiers to kill in national interest, too. And ethnic issues? How about black lifes matter?
But yes, the very big difference is, that in the US there can be a open discussion about, with potential political implications - while in china state cencorship is build in and the one party rule is not to be questioned.
If the argument is, opposing trade-embargo with china means also opposing trade embargo with nazis - then I think it is valid to point out the historic faults with that argument.
China was involved in regional conflicts like helping north korea in the korean war, one of the bloodiest wars in recent history. They were also helping the communist party in Vietnam both against the French and the US.
And later they were also fighting Vietnam. I never claimed china is nice.
I claim trade embargos on countries that are not nice, are not helpful. As there are not many "nice" countries out there. Only a couple of small ones, come to my mind.
"Murder" by its definition has to have intention in it.
Framing "the great leap forward" as murder qualifies as propaganda in my book.
It was indeed a horrible, human life neglecting catastrophic event, conducted by fanatic extremists imposing their ideology on others. Or rather a series of it. In effect manslaughter on mass scale - yes. But you cannot compare that in honesty to the holocaust - where with gas chambers the clear intention was to murder an entire race.
Such framing is not helping anything, definitely not with communication.
And about the list of chinas wars ... did you actually compare that to
But would refusing to trade with China improve the life of the average Chinese person? Would it free the economic slaves you're concerned about, or would it force hundreds of millions of people into poverty?
What you suggest sounds nice in principle, but it would devastate the Chinese economy and most Western economies too. Sometimes, there is no good choice, no principled stand that doesn't make the world worse. With China, we have to choose between bad outcomes and very bad outcomes.
As China continues to expand they make more people's lives worse, as we saw recently in Hong Kong, not so long ago in Tibet, and may soon see in Taiwan.
That expansion is fueled by trade. So even if you're right that refusing to trade with China would not improve the life of the average Chinese person, it might improve the lives of people near China.
So, did US recent military interventions improved life of the local people?
I really see no benefit of creating a new iron curtain.
Rather the contrary.
And collective punishments usually just tighten the collective bonds. So the best way to unite the chinese people behind their government would be the "free" world uniting against china.
Why were the Soviet Union's people finally fed up with it? The poor standard of living was surely a part of that. By the same reasoning, trade with China helps sustain the CCP.
Poor standard of living, no freedom, constantly being lied to - and being aware of it and having finally the courage to do something about. Because other people had the courage first. Thats how it came down.
Chinas populations is increasing their standard of living. So you think the outside world has to cripple their economy so the chinese people turn against their rulers? How would you feel about that, if you would live in china just trying to pass by - and have your income halfed because of foreign powers? Would you believe the foreign powers words that they did so because of human rights?
Boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions is how civil rights movements are fought. Of course the Chinese people won't know why other countries are pulling away, because their government won't allow that information to reach them and will blame foreign enemies instead, but blaming foreign powers only works for a limited time. And what better strategy would you suggest?
What we shouldn't do is overlook abuses in other nations simply because our own nations are imperfect.
Yeah, but since the US is NOT leading by shiny good example and continues to be allied with really bad examples like saudi arabia - the rest of the world views it all as just power struggle between china and US - which it mostly is.
Perhaps our government should cut ties with both Saudi Arabia and China. I (and I think most people opposed to the CCP's recent actions) would support that.
Of course realpolitik keeps us supporting the Saudis, but one morally wrong choice doesn't justify another morally wrong choice.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle. This is against the site guidelines: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We ban the sort of account that does this, because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for.
I don't think my account was using HN primarily for "political/ideological/national battle", but this was indeed such a debate.
Still, can you help me finding out, where exactly I was destroying curious debate here?
Because in my opinion, I was trying in honesty to actually have a rational, curious debate about the implications of a trade embargo against china.
Without attacking persons, just by arguments supported by citations. Maybe a bit too snarky at times, but I don't see, how that would validate a ban, but it is your site and your decision.
One key test that we apply is whether an account is using HN primarily to do battle about these things (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). Even when they're not breaking the site guidelines in other ways by being snarky and so on (which is very good if so, and not at all common with this sort of account), that's still out of sync with the intended use of the site. This test turns out to be useful because it's an objective moderation standard (so when people inevitably say "you're just moderating me because you don't like my politics" we can answer in good conscience that that's not true), and because it fits the data well: HN accounts really are bimodal this way, and the ones that are using HN primarily for politics are far more likely to be damaging the commons here.
Those are the principles we use. The factual question is whether your account was using HN primarily to argue about politics. If not, I'm happy to be wrong—it just looked that way to me when I skimmed quickly. Even bimodal distributions have borderline cases! But it would be good to get more squarely into the desired mode.
"The factual question is whether your account was using HN primarily to argue about politics."
I am very sure, I did not and that could be easily verified, by a full investigation into all my comment history - but that would be probably out of scope with your other duties.
So first things first, yes, I probably did engaged more with political topics lately and also received a lot of heat for it, by having non-mainstream opinions. And no worries, I feel pretty much done with that and with no intentions at all, to engage with that further.
But I am actually disappointed with that, because even though I am aware that I am not perfect in my responses and aware and in control of all my emotional triggers - I am very confident, that all in all, my position and behavior is very anti-ideological, open minded and truth committed.
And in my perception - I received a lot of undeserved hate for it. Fueled by strong tribal thinking.
For example this discussion about geopolitics. I can't help, but being reminded, that this forum is still mainly US-based. Let's just take my last flagged post in questions:
"Yeah, but since the US is NOT leading by shiny good example and continues to be allied with really bad examples like saudi arabia - the rest of the world views it all as just power struggle between china and US - which it mostly is."
In hindsight, I clearly see that I did not articulated my point very well, nor with the "desired mode" (SHOUTING is not part of it, I know) , but I really do not think that my post was factual wrong.
But after this discussion I believe, no matter how well and nice and neutral I would have articulated it - my point would still have had the strong potential of starting a flame war, or just being flagged and downvoted.
(I mean, this answer was downvoted and it didn't even criticized anyone except the idea that a trade embargo will help with anything:
So long story short: I just won't dive into these discussions here anymore.
I can live with that and probably be more productive in ways that matter more.
So speaking of it:
I am planning to do a Show HN quite soon and I would therefore not like it, if my lates engagement with controversal topics with the result of flagged posts - would influence the visibility of my Show HN Post in a negative way.
> Boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions is how civil rights movements are fought.
Boycotting a billion-strong nation is not the same as boycotting Amazon because you don't like its labor policies. China is a technically advanced millennia-old civilization with a huge army, vast geography, and a nationalistic population. If anything, boycotts and sanctions will increase nationalist feeling in China and create an unstable and dangerous situation. The U.S. and Europe do not have the economic leverage to take down the second biggest economy in the world without destroying themselves in the process.
Furthermore, as liberals never seem to learn, despite the disaster of Iraq, if you did succeed in instigating a "regime change" in China, the result is likely to be immediate destabilization of the whole region and a horrendous civil war with massive loss of life. It will not magically transform China into a happy democracy.
Oh and it seems I forgot, that this is a nationalism inducing topic. My point was, if you would base trade on countries that follow strictly basic humitarian rights - there would be not many options left.
So if you actually want that - maybe do so based on clear criterias.
Now what whould those criterias be?
The CCP has China's economy integrated heavily with economies around the world. A multi-lateral trade agreement between the parties that will replace the goods provided by hardworking Chinese - to curb away funding to the CCP.
The actual worst part is you are also describing us:World Uyghur Congress is funded by NED and one should at least query this? , "Depending on whom you ask, the NED is either a nonprofit champion of liberty or an ideologically driven meddler in world affairs." https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-searc...
> Cheering on a todays stalin or hitler, because you are in opposition to some factions of your democratic society, makes you a complicit in their atrocities.
Absolutely. I see really hard to fathom log from fellows who scream "There is no Democracy in America!," and then decide to run to China.
Never met such personally, but I know such are all around the tech industry here. Chinese medias are exhilariating about them day, and night.
They are your new Earl Browders, and Zara Witkins. Not poor people, not unpriveleged people, not marginalised people, who go bark at America, and its system, while making tons of money in China very much thanks to their priveleged status, and opportunities America gave them.
""There is no Democracy in America!," and then decide to run to China"
Are people actually saying this today?
I mean, I was discussing with one guy who claimed the corona dictatorship is so bad, he rather goes to north corea.
But he didn't go and I stopped wasting time arguing with such people. But this person for instance would have qualifed as mentally ill and drug abuser. Not a normal person.
So what normal person is saying this today? Or is this a straw man?
Because what I don't like in this debate, when you cannot "bark at america and its system", because china is worse. They clearly are. But this does not negate valid criticism of the US hegemony.
> So what normal person is saying this today? Or is this a straw man?
Not normal persons, but people in the tech community who quietly cynically sympathise with fascist ideology, and some more or less actively working as apologists.
Sure you can, with just an ounce of courage. This is shameful behavior. I hope that the leaders that frequent this forum can do better and set an example.
I agree with you. A month ago I found myself in a debate about the moral equivalency of the US empire vs CCP. My opponent seems to think that any form of power is equaly bad and that the goals and intent does not matter. Therefore, US and China are ''both equals''. I fail to understand how can this form on one-sidedness can come from...
I wouldn't argue that they are equals, but consider that the people you talk to might not care for the stated intents ("we will bring peace to the middle east because we're altruists"), but rather the obvious results ("we've removed stabilizing strong-men and now we have open chattel slavery back in Libya").
China is doing lots of shady stuff, and they too claim that it's for the best -- only in this case we (as in most people outside of China's sphere of influence) ignore the claims and look at the moves as as power plays with a PR narrative. The people you talked to might do the same for US actions.
I was referencing things like their grab of Tibet, power projection in the South China sea, projects in Africa etc. Please don't try to read everything in the worst possible interpretations.
Classic false equivalence. Compare US democratic and republican parties. While they both have their issues the modern D party versus the R party is a clear winner. One supports the general welfare and has humane policies while respecting the will of the majority while the R party recently tried to install a fascist leader over the votes of the majority of the country, the same leader which also tried to have Congress removed from power by sending his demented minions to attack the Capitol building.
I'm a bit out of touch with American politics, please remind me which one is the 'fascist leader' : village idiot that won previous elections or creepy uncle that won the recet ones?
There's a lot I disagree with in your comment so let me offer my perspective:
1. I don't think Trump was actually "fascist". That word has lost all meaning, and has been used as an empty political attack for nearly a century. George Orwell literally wrote back in 1946, "he word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’." (https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...)
2. It is completely legal to challenge election results, and both parties don't just blindly accept what you're calling the "will of the majority" when it affects their own power. Democrats have challenged election results many times in the past, for example in Bush versus Gore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore) in the 2000 presidential election. They also did the same in 2004 and again in 2016 (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/democrat-republic...). Even right now, during this very election cycle, there is a case where Democrats are challenging election results for a House seat, with Pelosi's support (https://time.com/5950292/iowa-congress-election-rita-hart/). Additionally, although most of Trump's cases were never heard and dismissed on procedural grounds, he has actually won 2/3 of the cases that were actually heard by the court (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/03/exclusive-accurate-...).
3. Trump did not send his "minions" to attack the Capitol building. The transcript of his speech on January 6th (https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-sav...) explicitly calls for a peaceful march and protest. Twitter's own blog post announcing and justifying their ban of Donald Trump's account (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...) does not provide any clear evidence of Trump doing this. All it has are vague opinions and hyperbolic claims like trying to suggest that Trump's plan to not attend the inauguration is somehow a "glorification of violence". Keep in mind that there were tens of thousands of people in DC attending Trump-related events and rallies on January 6th. There were thousands even just in front of the Capitol. Only a few hundred actually went past the barriers. Let's also not forget about Democratic politicians encouraging a capitol riot of their own back in 2018 (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kavanaugh-protesters-arrest...) - it didn't receive the same coverage in news media but was a very comparable incident, and resulted in Capitol police arresting hundreds.
What matters to normal people are the results. When you bomb their houses, cause ruin, starvation, mass displacement etc. etc the victims do not give a shit about your "noble" goals. To them you are just as bad if not worse.
If you study the US empire’s clandestine coups and embargoes and the resulting mass casualties, it’s a valid debate. I still think the US is the slightly lesser evil at the moment. The bigger point is that none of this should be happening. Saying “well your side is worst” is a moral misdirection. Rather, there should be mutual agreement that these are atrocities that need to end.
Agree. But we have a United Nations and international courts... so countries violating human rights themselves are setting a defensible precedent for others.
It’s not whataboutism or moral misdirection, it’s about fairness: how come you are allowed to do far worse things, but I am not allowed to do this?
This applies to human rights, climate change, foreign aggression... This is actually the issue we (the world) need to solve.
Imagine a country that locked up over 2 million people of a particular ethnic background[0]. Then when challenged about it ran propaganda about it being necessary. When activists rose up in peaceful protest they were assassinated[1].
It does feel a lot like it would be better if we tried to become better rather than encouraging others. There's plenty of room for improvement everywhere, but something about specks, eyes and beams.
I spent almost a year in Germany and one thing I learned, and really appreciated, was that they were open and honest about the Holocaust and their role in it. It’s taught in schools. It’s never brushed over.
Compared to say Japan.
EDIT: not sure why the downvotes. Japan's whitewashing of war atrocities (eg Nanjing [1][2]). Is this Japanophilia? Or just that I'm not denouncing the current German education system?
I went to Japan in the 90s. The amount of leftover Nazi symbols (carved everywhere, marked on city maps where old depots were, etc) and casual use of Nazi references in literature was shocking.
Manji are oriented correctly. They are ALL over. The signs for what is and is not a swaztika are also at every temple.
Any inhabitant of the temples will explain how german visitors would (infrequently) vandalize the temples. Not the intentional decoration (which is obvious) but the crude carvings into random wooden walls. I'm a little surprised that you can no longer find images of these carving after a few minutes of searching on the web. That's unfortunate, but I stand by my observations.
This is some tired-ass whattaboutism shit[0]. Say what you will about the USA, but it is at least a flawed democracy. The Black Lives Matter movement is having a real impact. Can you imagine the Uighur equivalent in China?
Oh for sure, for sure. A country where there's systemic bias against a racial group in the judicial system, and a famous activist who was murdered 50 years ago is *totally* the same thing as an ongoing totalitarian system of high-tech cultural genocide and mass incarceration/'reeducation' of an ethnic group.
It's unbelievable that PRC partisans think this shameless nonsense will elicit anything but incredulous fury in anyone familiar with the facts and not, well, a PRC partisan.
If I were a disgruntled person with enough time, I would have tried to start a grassroots "Uighur Lives Matter" campaign targeted at all the sports teams, universities and corporations that are too cozy with China. And watch their P.R. machines spin and try to reframe the message as a dog whistle for white supremacy in an effort to distract the public from the issue.
One day, we will have a collective hangover from all the China ties of today. Unless Xi dies soon, the development towards a full blown Cold War II seems to be inevitable.
Having been born in Czechoslovakia in times when the Iron Curtain was a real, operational kill zone with attack dogs, electric fences and land mines, Cold Wars are not fun. But sometimes they just cannot be avoided. Be prepared for some interesting times.
Edit: haha, -2 points. Still does not change the fact that China is a human rights hellhole and hypocrites in suits conveniently forget it in the name of money. And academia, which loves to dump on capitalists otherwise, is fully invested into this racket.
There was a very narrow attempt at this where t-shirts with messaging on them were given out to people going to sit and watch NBA games that would be broadcast [in China]. They'd remove people initially if they didn't take off the shirts but in places like Toronto where you'd have many people wearing them and too much backlash, they just stopped having cameras showing the spectators in the stands.
There seems to be some space for flooding Twitter, Instagram and Facebook with photos and short clips taken by activist fans. The NBA bosses would then have to attempt to ban people from carrying their mobile phones to a game - a measure very unlikely to succeed.
The CCP wants to prevent the truth from getting out. We can't have a wild west where people can irrationally incite violence based on lies/propaganda of bad actors. We also can't allow a single government entity the power to control or manage that fully - as that is easy for tyrants to takeover - or their preferred method of implementation. There's nuance to the solution - however we must educate society fully on this, as part of military-security efforts - to secure freedom and democracy. Part of countering this needs to be full-time people working to counter the propaganda and educating the population that see it and may be impacted by it; some 3 letter agencies may already be monitoring it but it should be a public, fully transparent effort, where there are counter-propagandists who are known and engage actively on social media, etc.
"The Chinese consulate in Hamburg promptly threatened the Carlsen publishing house with filing criminal charges, demanding the recall of the book as well as a public apology."
> "The virus comes from China and from there it spread over the entire world", he says. "When you get infected, you can get a strong cough and fever. Sometimes also the lung gets sick, so that you can't breath well anymore."
When I traveled to China about 10 years ago and we were about to land in Beijing everyone was shown a short movie on the inflight entertainment system (of China Southern airlines). It started with: "Swine influenza comes from America, spreads around the world."
Are you refering to those creepy youtube videos, about how happy the uighurs are? Or those fake offence videos, were they claim to be offended by news they cant even watch behind the great fire wall?
They are probably referring to concentration camps and forced sterilization [1]. The situation is described as a genocide by some human rights organizations [2].
Not really. They just have to keep up this pressure and people who have financial interests in China will make it go away.
The then Norwegian PM and later ones bent over backwards on behalf of Norwegian salmon when the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel prize, for instance.
It is shameful, but the Uighur genocide is largely being ignored. Nobody wants to be punished by the Chinese market forces.
Australia is riddled with this kind of Chinese pressure, particularly at universities.
My university went as far as to install an ugly out of place confucious statue. This was followed by being pressured to cancel a talk from the Dalai Llama. Then more recently PRC supporting students engaged in suppression of pro Hong Kong students with no consequences.
>PRC supporting students engaged in suppression of pro Hong Kong students with no consequences.
Could you give more details, here? What were the PRC-supported students doing against the pro-Hong Kong students, and how did the university respond? That sounds pretty insane.
I went to UTAS and they also have a random out of place Confucius statue, are you from a different University? I heard some rumour that it was donated kinda randomly, and they didn't realise how big it was going to be.
Just like Confucius centers that spread propaganda like in the USA? I have no problem if they want to set up a private NGO but they shouldn't be on public university grounds or be connected to them or contributing money to public universities.
It's remarkable how much soft power China has. I've seen some Australian news videos on YouTube that highlight the issues you're referring to. In America, I've been seeing the same, although in a quieter way:
China is seemingly the only power that can quiet the American far left, who have for the past several years been obsessed with "justice" and "equity", EXCEPT when it comes to China. As a recent example, LeBron James took to Twitter to speak against new voting laws in Georgia (https://thepostmillennial.com/lebron-james-boycott-georgia-m...), and drew much criticism in Twitter replies because of his hypocrisy on more clear cut issues of human rights. He's been mostly quiet on the NBA's ties to China, and has even made comments in the past that have been described as repackaged Chinese government propaganda (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/what-did-lebron-james-...). Similarly, Apple is known for being "woke", and has a history of left-leaning political activism like curating app store content or enacting changes like replacing the pistol emoji with a squirt gun emoji (https://www.newsweek.com/apple-replaces-gun-emoji-water-pist...). But Apple and others reportedly lobbied against bills that would ban the use of forced labor (https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/30/apple-nike-coca-cola-lo...). Tim Cook has also sat quietly as over 150 Asian activist groups asked him for more concrete action (https://www.imore.com/coalition-activist-groups-pen-open-let...).
I guess in the end everyone only cares about issues to the extent it does not affect their own finances, and to the extent they can continue feeling membership in their political tribe even if they're being unprincipled.
They've also used influence to keep the Dalai Lama and others from speaking, it's kind of the opposite side of the cancel culture phenomena. The wikipedia article has dozens of examples of China trying to influence local/national politics under the guise of the "Confucius Institutes". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Confucius_Institu...
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadEvery time one sees "news" out of china, by a chinese news source, one is being talked to by one, single entity.
The wishful thinking that there is a democratic, liberal society behind the imitation game, is by now a dangerous delusion.
And furthering the goals of this voice, is support of genocide. Those who did will have to answer for that. Cheering on a todays stalin or hitler, because you are in opposition to some factions of your democratic society, makes you a complicit in their atrocities.
Doing business with those force drafted henchmen kept in with mafia methods, makes you a criminal.
Why do you think China will pay for anything ? If a country is powerful enought, it will get away with anti democratic behavior without any consequences.
Today nobody can oppose china. They have more population, provide the entire world with most products and have the nuclear weapon.
They will keep doing what they want, and people will fake outrage and do nothing. In fact, US companies will keep complying with their abusive requests, like censorship, to not lose the market. CEO will pretend to care on twitter and keep it up.
After all, did we stopped buying phones and clothes from china when we learned they were made by child slaves ? We didn't. We can't even care as individuals, I don't see how our systems, which are groups of individuals, would bother when we dont.
On the contrary, it paid about $3 trillion, depending on whose estimates you believe.
So block any trade with china?
What sort of question is this?
Apart from that, how about blocking trade with countries, that do attack other countries, based on caught lies and propaganda? And various other black things?
How would that help?
Basically the same when Germany would now be ruled by the Nazi party, and you would claim they didn't really do anything bad.
Also, how many wars did communist china started, compared to the US?
China's very prolific in using soldiers, to kill people, in the national interest. Similarly, the US and China both engage in large scale violence to promote their culture. A difference is that China's actions are performed within their borders (more or less) and are not as highly publicized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_China, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong, etc
But like you said, the US is maybe using soldiers to kill in national interest, too. And ethnic issues? How about black lifes matter?
But yes, the very big difference is, that in the US there can be a open discussion about, with potential political implications - while in china state cencorship is build in and the one party rule is not to be questioned.
I claim trade embargos on countries that are not nice, are not helpful. As there are not many "nice" countries out there. Only a couple of small ones, come to my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Peo...
Framing "the great leap forward" as murder qualifies as propaganda in my book.
It was indeed a horrible, human life neglecting catastrophic event, conducted by fanatic extremists imposing their ideology on others. Or rather a series of it. In effect manslaughter on mass scale - yes. But you cannot compare that in honesty to the holocaust - where with gas chambers the clear intention was to murder an entire race.
Such framing is not helping anything, definitely not with communication.
And about the list of chinas wars ... did you actually compare that to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mi...
?
First of all, either you say China is worse than Germany, or PRC is worse than the Nazi regime.
And to answer that question, yes, Mao killed way more people than Hitler.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogen...
What you suggest sounds nice in principle, but it would devastate the Chinese economy and most Western economies too. Sometimes, there is no good choice, no principled stand that doesn't make the world worse. With China, we have to choose between bad outcomes and very bad outcomes.
That expansion is fueled by trade. So even if you're right that refusing to trade with China would not improve the life of the average Chinese person, it might improve the lives of people near China.
I really see no benefit of creating a new iron curtain. Rather the contrary.
And collective punishments usually just tighten the collective bonds. So the best way to unite the chinese people behind their government would be the "free" world uniting against china.
How did the sowjet union fall? By trade embargos?
Or that its people were finally fed up with it?
Chinas populations is increasing their standard of living. So you think the outside world has to cripple their economy so the chinese people turn against their rulers? How would you feel about that, if you would live in china just trying to pass by - and have your income halfed because of foreign powers? Would you believe the foreign powers words that they did so because of human rights?
What we shouldn't do is overlook abuses in other nations simply because our own nations are imperfect.
How about: leading by good example?
There are plenty of chinese people outside of the great firewall regulary going back. So that information would get in.
Of course realpolitik keeps us supporting the Saudis, but one morally wrong choice doesn't justify another morally wrong choice.
More explanation if desired:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Still, can you help me finding out, where exactly I was destroying curious debate here?
Because in my opinion, I was trying in honesty to actually have a rational, curious debate about the implications of a trade embargo against china. Without attacking persons, just by arguments supported by citations. Maybe a bit too snarky at times, but I don't see, how that would validate a ban, but it is your site and your decision.
One key test that we apply is whether an account is using HN primarily to do battle about these things (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). Even when they're not breaking the site guidelines in other ways by being snarky and so on (which is very good if so, and not at all common with this sort of account), that's still out of sync with the intended use of the site. This test turns out to be useful because it's an objective moderation standard (so when people inevitably say "you're just moderating me because you don't like my politics" we can answer in good conscience that that's not true), and because it fits the data well: HN accounts really are bimodal this way, and the ones that are using HN primarily for politics are far more likely to be damaging the commons here.
Those are the principles we use. The factual question is whether your account was using HN primarily to argue about politics. If not, I'm happy to be wrong—it just looked that way to me when I skimmed quickly. Even bimodal distributions have borderline cases! But it would be good to get more squarely into the desired mode.
I am very sure, I did not and that could be easily verified, by a full investigation into all my comment history - but that would be probably out of scope with your other duties.
So first things first, yes, I probably did engaged more with political topics lately and also received a lot of heat for it, by having non-mainstream opinions. And no worries, I feel pretty much done with that and with no intentions at all, to engage with that further.
But I am actually disappointed with that, because even though I am aware that I am not perfect in my responses and aware and in control of all my emotional triggers - I am very confident, that all in all, my position and behavior is very anti-ideological, open minded and truth committed. And in my perception - I received a lot of undeserved hate for it. Fueled by strong tribal thinking.
For example this discussion about geopolitics. I can't help, but being reminded, that this forum is still mainly US-based. Let's just take my last flagged post in questions:
"Yeah, but since the US is NOT leading by shiny good example and continues to be allied with really bad examples like saudi arabia - the rest of the world views it all as just power struggle between china and US - which it mostly is."
In hindsight, I clearly see that I did not articulated my point very well, nor with the "desired mode" (SHOUTING is not part of it, I know) , but I really do not think that my post was factual wrong. But after this discussion I believe, no matter how well and nice and neutral I would have articulated it - my point would still have had the strong potential of starting a flame war, or just being flagged and downvoted.
(I mean, this answer was downvoted and it didn't even criticized anyone except the idea that a trade embargo will help with anything:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26679748)
So long story short: I just won't dive into these discussions here anymore.
I can live with that and probably be more productive in ways that matter more. So speaking of it:
I am planning to do a Show HN quite soon and I would therefore not like it, if my lates engagement with controversal topics with the result of flagged posts - would influence the visibility of my Show HN Post in a negative way.
Boycotting a billion-strong nation is not the same as boycotting Amazon because you don't like its labor policies. China is a technically advanced millennia-old civilization with a huge army, vast geography, and a nationalistic population. If anything, boycotts and sanctions will increase nationalist feeling in China and create an unstable and dangerous situation. The U.S. and Europe do not have the economic leverage to take down the second biggest economy in the world without destroying themselves in the process.
Furthermore, as liberals never seem to learn, despite the disaster of Iraq, if you did succeed in instigating a "regime change" in China, the result is likely to be immediate destabilization of the whole region and a horrendous civil war with massive loss of life. It will not magically transform China into a happy democracy.
So if you actually want that - maybe do so based on clear criterias. Now what whould those criterias be?
- funding and supporting of terrorism?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
Involvement in overthrown democratic elected governemnts?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
use of Torture?
etc.
If you try to make things simple, do so consequently and see how that works out. Usually not too well.
Absolutely. I see really hard to fathom log from fellows who scream "There is no Democracy in America!," and then decide to run to China.
Never met such personally, but I know such are all around the tech industry here. Chinese medias are exhilariating about them day, and night.
They are your new Earl Browders, and Zara Witkins. Not poor people, not unpriveleged people, not marginalised people, who go bark at America, and its system, while making tons of money in China very much thanks to their priveleged status, and opportunities America gave them.
Are people actually saying this today?
I mean, I was discussing with one guy who claimed the corona dictatorship is so bad, he rather goes to north corea. But he didn't go and I stopped wasting time arguing with such people. But this person for instance would have qualifed as mentally ill and drug abuser. Not a normal person.
So what normal person is saying this today? Or is this a straw man?
Because what I don't like in this debate, when you cannot "bark at america and its system", because china is worse. They clearly are. But this does not negate valid criticism of the US hegemony.
Not normal persons, but people in the tech community who quietly cynically sympathise with fascist ideology, and some more or less actively working as apologists.
China is doing lots of shady stuff, and they too claim that it's for the best -- only in this case we (as in most people outside of China's sphere of influence) ignore the claims and look at the moves as as power plays with a PR narrative. The people you talked to might do the same for US actions.
Let’s not stretch the meaning of genocide.
Republicans = Fascists and Literally All Nazis
Democrats = Marxists and Literally All Pedophiles
We do not see the normal people who vote one way or the other, they are not news worthy. We see some fanatics and make our opinions based on that.
This is not different from how France is seen abroad, but somehow many people do not correlate these two facts.
1. I don't think Trump was actually "fascist". That word has lost all meaning, and has been used as an empty political attack for nearly a century. George Orwell literally wrote back in 1946, "he word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’." (https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...)
2. It is completely legal to challenge election results, and both parties don't just blindly accept what you're calling the "will of the majority" when it affects their own power. Democrats have challenged election results many times in the past, for example in Bush versus Gore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore) in the 2000 presidential election. They also did the same in 2004 and again in 2016 (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/democrat-republic...). Even right now, during this very election cycle, there is a case where Democrats are challenging election results for a House seat, with Pelosi's support (https://time.com/5950292/iowa-congress-election-rita-hart/). Additionally, although most of Trump's cases were never heard and dismissed on procedural grounds, he has actually won 2/3 of the cases that were actually heard by the court (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/03/exclusive-accurate-...).
3. Trump did not send his "minions" to attack the Capitol building. The transcript of his speech on January 6th (https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-sav...) explicitly calls for a peaceful march and protest. Twitter's own blog post announcing and justifying their ban of Donald Trump's account (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...) does not provide any clear evidence of Trump doing this. All it has are vague opinions and hyperbolic claims like trying to suggest that Trump's plan to not attend the inauguration is somehow a "glorification of violence". Keep in mind that there were tens of thousands of people in DC attending Trump-related events and rallies on January 6th. There were thousands even just in front of the Capitol. Only a few hundred actually went past the barriers. Let's also not forget about Democratic politicians encouraging a capitol riot of their own back in 2018 (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kavanaugh-protesters-arrest...) - it didn't receive the same coverage in news media but was a very comparable incident, and resulted in Capitol police arresting hundreds.
It’s not whataboutism or moral misdirection, it’s about fairness: how come you are allowed to do far worse things, but I am not allowed to do this?
This applies to human rights, climate change, foreign aggression... This is actually the issue we (the world) need to solve.
And we sit idly by.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luth....
A flawed past is the worst excuse against striving for a better future.
Compared to say Japan.
EDIT: not sure why the downvotes. Japan's whitewashing of war atrocities (eg Nanjing [1][2]). Is this Japanophilia? Or just that I'm not denouncing the current German education system?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35349619
Any inhabitant of the temples will explain how german visitors would (infrequently) vandalize the temples. Not the intentional decoration (which is obvious) but the crude carvings into random wooden walls. I'm a little surprised that you can no longer find images of these carving after a few minutes of searching on the web. That's unfortunate, but I stand by my observations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
It's unbelievable that PRC partisans think this shameless nonsense will elicit anything but incredulous fury in anyone familiar with the facts and not, well, a PRC partisan.
One day, we will have a collective hangover from all the China ties of today. Unless Xi dies soon, the development towards a full blown Cold War II seems to be inevitable.
Having been born in Czechoslovakia in times when the Iron Curtain was a real, operational kill zone with attack dogs, electric fences and land mines, Cold Wars are not fun. But sometimes they just cannot be avoided. Be prepared for some interesting times.
Edit: haha, -2 points. Still does not change the fact that China is a human rights hellhole and hypocrites in suits conveniently forget it in the name of money. And academia, which loves to dump on capitalists otherwise, is fully invested into this racket.
The CCP wants to prevent the truth from getting out. We can't have a wild west where people can irrationally incite violence based on lies/propaganda of bad actors. We also can't allow a single government entity the power to control or manage that fully - as that is easy for tyrants to takeover - or their preferred method of implementation. There's nuance to the solution - however we must educate society fully on this, as part of military-security efforts - to secure freedom and democracy. Part of countering this needs to be full-time people working to counter the propaganda and educating the population that see it and may be impacted by it; some 3 letter agencies may already be monitoring it but it should be a public, fully transparent effort, where there are counter-propagandists who are known and engage actively on social media, etc.
https://www.dw.com/en/china-gets-german-childrens-book-about...
"The Chinese consulate in Hamburg promptly threatened the Carlsen publishing house with filing criminal charges, demanding the recall of the book as well as a public apology."
> "The virus comes from China and from there it spread over the entire world", he says. "When you get infected, you can get a strong cough and fever. Sometimes also the lung gets sick, so that you can't breath well anymore."
https://imgur.com/a/fyB8CnE
You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4uEJIsbVyI
https://bitterwinter.org/new-tortures-target-church-of-almig...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNfQ4wEfUxM
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-milli...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/09/chinas-treatme...
The then Norwegian PM and later ones bent over backwards on behalf of Norwegian salmon when the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel prize, for instance.
It is shameful, but the Uighur genocide is largely being ignored. Nobody wants to be punished by the Chinese market forces.
My university went as far as to install an ugly out of place confucious statue. This was followed by being pressured to cancel a talk from the Dalai Llama. Then more recently PRC supporting students engaged in suppression of pro Hong Kong students with no consequences.
Could you give more details, here? What were the PRC-supported students doing against the pro-Hong Kong students, and how did the university respond? That sounds pretty insane.
China is seemingly the only power that can quiet the American far left, who have for the past several years been obsessed with "justice" and "equity", EXCEPT when it comes to China. As a recent example, LeBron James took to Twitter to speak against new voting laws in Georgia (https://thepostmillennial.com/lebron-james-boycott-georgia-m...), and drew much criticism in Twitter replies because of his hypocrisy on more clear cut issues of human rights. He's been mostly quiet on the NBA's ties to China, and has even made comments in the past that have been described as repackaged Chinese government propaganda (https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/what-did-lebron-james-...). Similarly, Apple is known for being "woke", and has a history of left-leaning political activism like curating app store content or enacting changes like replacing the pistol emoji with a squirt gun emoji (https://www.newsweek.com/apple-replaces-gun-emoji-water-pist...). But Apple and others reportedly lobbied against bills that would ban the use of forced labor (https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/30/apple-nike-coca-cola-lo...). Tim Cook has also sat quietly as over 150 Asian activist groups asked him for more concrete action (https://www.imore.com/coalition-activist-groups-pen-open-let...).
I guess in the end everyone only cares about issues to the extent it does not affect their own finances, and to the extent they can continue feeling membership in their political tribe even if they're being unprincipled.