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Seems like a pretty basic social desire to want some kind of say in how the place you live in is run. And if there's no official mechanism for doing that, then people will end up going through unofficial means. It's probably not very likely that the Chinese federal government will back down much, seeing as how much work it's put into repressing people throughout the rest of China and consolidating power, but you can't fault the protestors for trying. Unlikely things have happened before I guess. Best of luck to them. And if you're going to make weird comparisons to other countries, it's worth noting that there have been big powerful countries that did do things like agree to leave regions as autonomous or concede to local populations deciding to secede, like the US letting the Philippines become independent or the way that the British conceding to letting India and South Africa go independent. Just because some democracies fail in various ways, it doesn't mean the entire concept of democracy is worthless and everybody should just resign themselves to arbitrary autocracy.
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Sep 11, 2019 18:12
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Could they just stop grinding up and snorting endangered animals for like a minute though.
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Oct 13, 2019 06:50
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A lot of places in theory have the muscle to totally exert their authority over another place, but you still gotta put in the effort of sending in people to do the murdering to force them to acknowledge the conquest before it counts. Which sometimes doesn't go so well. Of course, it's entirely possible that when push comes to shove, China would not only invade by force but be willing to scourge every man woman and child that may oppose their assertion of dominion, but they haven't done it 'til they've done it.
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Nov 8, 2019 23:50
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Snipee posted:Except this supposed non-interference policy is total CCP propaganda to justify its own practices of domestic human rights abuses and essentially only maintained when convenient. I mean that's basically the caveat you gotta take with everything a totalitarian government with no accountability says. Nothing means anything because everything will be thrown away the moment it's convenient. You can try guessing what they will consider convenient to predict their movements, but otherwise you're hosed.
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Nov 11, 2019 19:03
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Raenir Salazar posted:A lot of reductionist kneejerk bad takes that seem to suggest that China should just NOT industrialize at all if industrializing means any increase in GHG emissions and any suggestion that maybe the global north should do something to help the global south avoid the dirtiest part of developing; for example helping establish a global UBI so people dont have to work because having to be employed means emissions. The US and most of the developed world wastes more than enough food to supply the global south; if they provided the excess to the world to alleviate hunger that's a lot less farming that needs to be done. I don't understand your tense here. They have already industrialized. China is industrial. They are not developing, they're developed. They're not some scrappy underdog trying to make ends meet in a harsh and cruel world, they're the second largest economy on the planet. If you're gonna say that countries can skimp on environmentalism until they've got on their feet, China has to be past that point by now, or else nobody is. These are all sounding like the arguments why we in the US need to stay invested in coal for the sake of jobs. Yeah, it can sometimes be economically risky to invest in environmentalism and start raising costs on fossil fuels, but somebody's gotta be willing to take the hit at some point, or else it'll never get done
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Dec 17, 2019 02:49
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CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Western media got excited when there was a protest against a crematorium in Shenzhen but dialed it down immediately when the authorities caved and stopped its construction. It doesn't play into the narrative that the CCP runs the country like a bunch of cackling supervillians when they are responsive to protest movements that don't involve collaborating with foreign powers to overthrow the current regime. Can't imagine why there is continual coverage over events that are still happening while things that happen and then get resolved don't continue to make headlines long after the fact.
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Dec 19, 2019 18:56
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Worth noting that other government officials and agencies stumbled over eachother refuting president idiot's claim and saying that there's no evidence at all. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/top-us-health-official-contradicts-donald-trumps-claim-coronavirus/ https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intelligence/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/06/politics/pompeo-wuhan-lab/index.html Although yes, him publicly lying (one of thousands of public lies) gives the conspiracy theory more momentum that might lead to something more. His toadies tried to gin up more data to back up the lie, but failed because it's actually pretty hard to entirely fabricate crimes against humanity. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/cia-pushes-back-at-trump-efforts-to-link-coronavirus-to-chinese-laboratories Also while Trump does tend to try start feuds with China on shaky grounds as part of his own agenda to assert US economic dominance, he generally tends to praise their domestic acts as an authoritarian autocracy out of respect for the idea of totalitarianism. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/04/donald-trump-praises-xi-jinping-power-grab-give-that-a-shot-china
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May 19, 2020 22:22
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Raenir Salazar posted:Governments don't often do things just to be dicks Yeah right.
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May 23, 2020 17:59
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China usually prefers to keep its human rights abuses within its borders, which aside from the affect on the individuals that it's hurting, provides a workable model for other oppressors around the world. Although here in America we tend to only see its immediate effects on our media. Often mass oppression can also result in refugees spilling out into the rest of the world, but it seems like so far the Chinese are keeping a tight lid on things. Even aside of the morality of things, there are pragmatic concerns that come with China's local oppression But it seems like maybe those borders are going to be a-movin'. Grabbin' more land and more people to exterminate the local culture of (and failing that, exterminating the people).
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May 26, 2020 19:13
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He can't just scoot his armies a bit to take slices out of African countries, so they get more complex policies to maintain Chinese influence.
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Jun 21, 2020 17:46
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It keeps happening. https://twitter.com/emilyrauhala/status/1277571321862504449
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Jun 29, 2020 17:15
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It wouldn't surprise me for an autocratic government to have issues with inconsistent policies over the years from capricious internal maneuvers.ToxicAcne posted:What's funny is that at least in Canada, young Muslims (I'm using it in a cultural sense) are in my experience the most sympathetic to Revolutionary Marxism. This whole Uighur genocide apologia is a massive turnoff. I'm not sure what bearing the acceptance of revolutionary marxism would have on the nationalist authoritarian Chinese government's opinion of people.
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Jul 2, 2020 06:21
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Weka posted:This is just as true for a democracy. The capricious maneuvers of democracy tend to be external rather than internal, so major changes are accompanied by big waves across the country of people fighting over which direction they'll go next. If Britain was a full authoritarian autocracy, Brexit would've happened in a day after 5 years of internal debate and the public only hearing rumors, and the only reason given would be Boris Johnson mumbling something about a bus. Although certain large democracies tend to structure themselves fairly autocratically, and I'm not sure whether they'd get more or less capricious if they moved further away from autocracy.
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Jul 3, 2020 18:07
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Australia is opening up immigration for Hong Kong in a way that's a big step up from their normal "hell prison island" immigration option. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/09/asia/australia-hong-kong-extradition-intl-hnk/index.html
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Jul 9, 2020 19:34
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Spectral_beard posted:China had no choice - the strategic need of controlling the source of China's major rivers requires them to be there. They will never pull out, they can't. Does Egypt have some kind of existential need to annex Sudan to have more control over the source of the Nile? Do immediate tactical concerns nullify the meaning of sovereignty or human rights? Is there a point to crafting some excuse for why China really wanted to do what it did? So far as I know, China made its territorial acquisitions for about the same reason that most states do, it had the power to exert its power and thought that it had something to gain from doing so. It's seldom that sort of territorial acquisition is done with the full consent of the people being acquired, and usually after the fact countries hold onto their territory bitterly until the last (with some notable exceptions). People just like to get on China's back about it because it was 70 years ago instead of 160 and it dovetails into all the other general accusations of China violating human rights. There's a general theory these days that modern state governments should have some kind of broad consent of the governed that a lot of countries don't do so well at, and it's not like any European secession movements are having much success, but either way China's still on the low end of the scale for accepting input from the population at large.
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Jul 13, 2020 06:18
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Important China news. https://twitter.com/killhamster/status/1282841059534336000
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Jul 14, 2020 17:50
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Usually when people get into the reeds about really defining genocide, they make the hard/soft distinction. With hard genocide, it's what you immediately expect, physically trying to destroy the people. Just immediately killing them is hard and complictated, so usually it's done piecemeal, bit by bit. Mass incarceration, forcible marginalization, and removing a number of basic freedoms are usually stepping stones on the way to that, but there's also a certain accusation of intent in there, which is harder to prove. Certainly it seems like there's a lot of central organization from the government, and if they're not specifically trying to kill them all off, they don't really seem that concerned with keeping them alive. Soft genocide is a little more abstract, but more immediately evident. That's the idea of taking whatever distinguishes a people as culturally distinct and eliminating that. I think we've definitely seen the attempt to do that, with things like destroying mosques and punishing people for practicing their religion. Also that may be one of the implications of reeducation camps. There's also the forced sterilization, which I think qualifies as hard genocide, but in a less violent way, so maybe it's soft-ish. I don't think the treatment of the Uighurs is the only bad thing that the Chinese government has done, but it sure seems like one of the worst.
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Aug 8, 2020 02:51
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It's not like any country is appointed by the world community to "lead". If China wants to be at the forefront of climate change, they've just gotta get out there and spending their own political capital working deals. Although considering China's in the lead for carbon emissions, their effort would probably be best spent domestically if they want to get something done. Assuming the people in charge of China actually want to get something done. I'm also not a fan of arguments that boil down to praising the functionality of autocracy.
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Sep 27, 2020 17:36
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Sounds like a pretty big revision of history. Can't believe people are so distrusting of the Chinese government when they're prone to pulling stuff like that.
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Oct 15, 2020 00:35
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I thought that part of the basis of Guantanamo Bay was that human and civil rights don't apply because it's not American soil, just land that was rented out. So I guess that means they're claiming that Xinjiang isn't Chinese soil.
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Dec 6, 2020 22:43
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The US food stamp program was also a particularly weird way of trying to get crop surpluses off the market without collapsing the price by trying to give it as assistance to poor starving people. I don't know how China's agricultural industry is structured, but the US's solution is weird enough I wouldn't expect China to have a similarly structured program. I think Government Cheese was the most notable manifestation of that approach to using government market management and subsidies as welfare.
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Jan 27, 2021 18:41
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My opinion is that democracy is good and it really sucks to be under the dominion of an aristocracy of unaccountable autocrats who reserve the right to mass murder their own citizens when they feel it's necessary.
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Mar 31, 2021 02:04
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The Chinese government declaring that the peoples of China can't do democracy and need to consume the weird ground up bits of endangered species that Traditional Chinese Medicine proscribes is like the Texan government declaring that the people of Texas don't want any green energy and would gladly take days-long power outages that led to over a hundred deaths in order to keep the Texas power grid independent. Yeeha.
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Mar 31, 2021 18:38
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I know that I've heard stories about China behaving badly and trying to cover things up at the beginning of the pandemic, and that would deserve some kind of admonishment, if it weren't for the fact that there was such garbage response by the rest of the world after word got out that it's hard to really think how much difference there'd be.
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Apr 2, 2021 04:54
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I think it'd be pretty hard not to see some kind of improvement after decades of war finally faded.Heithinn Grasida posted:I hate the political situation here, but I do think Xi Jinping is a true believer in his brand of right wing populism and legitimately believes what he’s doing is best for China and probably does really care about lifting rural people out of poverty. Unlike US republicans, the government hasn’t been poisoned by late stage capitalism and insane anti scientific dogma, so they rightfully recognize that developing poor rural areas benefits the whole country. One reason Xi is so popular is that he’s sincere in doing that. I can believe he's sincere, it just also seems that he's also sincere about trying to stamp down on multiculturalism and all possible forms of dissent, so there's a limit to the benefits of his egalitarianism towards his subjects. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 04:14
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Heithinn Grasida posted:What reason is there to not believe that? The Chinese government is controlled by repressive, reactionary CHUD types who are not interested in making sure working class people have living wages, Heithinn Grasida posted:I hate the political situation here, but I do think Xi Jinping is a true believer in his brand of right wing populism and legitimately believes what he’s doing is best for China and probably does really care about lifting rural people out of poverty. These are opposite statements. Unless you're giving Xi plausible deniability for anything the government does under his consolidated rule on the old monarchy argument that it just so happens most of his subordinates are rotten independently of their well-meaning leader. Heithinn Grasida posted:Unlike US republicans, the government hasn’t been poisoned by late stage capitalism and insane anti scientific dogma, so they rightfully recognize that developing poor rural areas benefits the whole country. One reason Xi is so popular is that he’s sincere in doing that. You say that like that's the only source of ill in the world when it's very much not. I guess you're trying to say that it's better if they're bad people for the right reasons? Which is dumb and meaningless. By some analyses of the current PRC government, not even really true.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:34
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Not So Fast posted:What's happening in Xinjiang is less like the Holocaust and more comparable to the residential schools in Canada or Australia. It is very much part of the poverty alleviation program done in the rest of the country, only the government believes they won't eliminate poverty in Xinjiang without completely reshaping religion and culture in Xinjiang as well. If you're talking about the programs to take native and aboriginal children away from their parents to exterminate their culture, I guess it's an apt comparison, but it's still genocide. The theoretical good intention through a lens of racist imperialism also rings a little more hollow because they're doing it to adults and using them for labor and organ harvesting in the meanwhile. On top of that, it seems like there's a lack of any intention to accept any of them as actually being "reformed", because they criminalized so much of the Uighurs and have apparently even done work in identifying them to persecute by DNA and other biometrics, and you can't "reeducate" those away. Also the forced sterilization and abortions to more actively eliminate their genetic presence on the planet. I've even read about them baiting Uighurs back into the country just to persecute them further. You'd have to combine the taking native children away from their families with the height of Jim Crow and the convict leasing system in the early 20th century in the American South with a sprinkling of eugenics and wrapped in the increased efficiency of modern organization and technology. Or to make a lot more quick and convenient of a comparison, basically like the holocaust in Germany before they got around to the death camps (which came fairly late in the whole process so they're not a good barometer).
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Apr 3, 2021 17:47
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Gripweed posted:I don't see how China having bad policies towards ethnic minorities disproves the assertion that they have also done a lot to uplift rural people out of poverty. It's more just that specific group of rural people definitely aren't being uplifted. Otherwise the claims are unrelated. The idea of improving quality of life without granting political rights also feels weird to me because one way or another they'll just kinda end up getting buffeted by autocratic whims instead of getting the improvements that they specifically want. But I guess democracy's not on the table either way.
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Apr 4, 2021 05:29
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sexpig by night posted:So when the government didn't apply the one child law to ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, was that them trying to destroy Han culture? I mean, until like a couple years ago even with one child increased to two Han in minority-majority provinces like Xinjiang were actually kept to the old rules, so that must have been Han genocide, right? Honestly in my opinion the one child policy was horrible and invasive and was already one of the classic examples of the Chininese government being incredibly oppressive of its citizenry, so it doesn't really increase my opinion of the government much for them to just not enforce it on some people. Possibly it could've even been pragmatically not stressing their authority in a more distant region that they might otherwise have a harder time controlling. That's a pretty common administrative tactic. While the Uighur genocide is probably the worst and most clearly bad thing the Chinese government is doing right now, and ends up dominating the thread as a result, it's definitely not the only thing.
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Apr 4, 2021 20:11
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I've seen some instances where the Chinese government has claimed that their measures in Xinjiang are a necessary response to terrorist threats, which combined with general racism really makes the whole thing seem more familiar and not like some uniquely Chinese thing. Seems like the sort of thing that could easily have happened in the US or France in the last 20 years if it weren't for the fact that those countries have built-in civil protections for their citizens. India was actually in the process of building mass-detention camps intended for muslims, but they needed to strip muslims of their citizenship first, and the big program to do that apparently died or got shelved after the pandemic hit. It's not a surprise that something similar had already started in a country without the pretense towards democracy or civil protections and so lacked the need for a major procedural step or broad public support.
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Apr 5, 2021 17:42
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Owlspiracy posted:Do you know the distinction between a "concentration camp" and a "death camp"? Yeah, the Nazis were underway with a lot of their programs to destroy the jews, roma, and their other designated undesirables since the 30s, and they had been rounding up polish people since the invasion in 1939, but the death camps themselves only started in 1942. That's way late in the process, so extremely obviously if you're looking at comparisons to Nazi Germany as some kind of barometer for if there's a genocide, the existence of dedicated death camps is way too late in the process and after way too many people have died. Dante80 posted:Come on guys, CCPs ideological stance towards Uyghurs is not akin to historic Nazi ideological stance towards Jews. They don't have the elaborate bullshit race science front so far as I know, but the general principle is similar enough. I guess it has more similarities do other countries' modern anti-muslim sentiment or even to the Turkish genocide of Armenians that they tried to put up some kind of veneer of "self defense" on the grounds that the Armenians were going to rebel. The reason people keep on going to the Nazis specifically isn't just that it's the most well-known and grandest scale genocide that's ever been, it's because that was the one specifically that people swore "never again" in reference to, so it makes sense why the comparison keeps coming up when an ethnic group is being suppressed with the apparent overall goal of eliminating the ethnic group as a political/social/genetic/religious entity.
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Apr 6, 2021 18:16
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There's also the fact that China's been playing chicken with India and muddling around in the ocean trying to push its borders outward. They're pretty ambitious about territorial claims against other countries, so they're not gonna back down when their own citizens raise a fuss.Greg12 posted:As someone who only has power over my own elected representatives I mean, as someone who theoretically has powers over my own elected representatives, I'd sure want other peoples of the world to have some kind of control over their own government as well. Or at least the basic security to live their own lives freely.
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Apr 7, 2021 17:27
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Talking about bad things that China is doing is not warmongering. It's not even cold-warmongering, whatever that would entail. Nobody's talking about staging an invasion. The most I could see happening is some international sanctions or encouraging companies to stop directly enabling China in their forms of oppression, which could actually have more of a chance of getting the Chinese government to stop than the lack of approval from their own population. But that hasn't really stopped Russia, so mostly there's not really any active solutions people outside of China can push for, and it's probably much more perilous for people inside China to make a stand. Not every conversation is about encouraging activism or engineering solutions, and that's fine for an internet forum.
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Apr 7, 2021 20:11
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https://twitter.com/Independent/status/1384455840992665604
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Apr 29, 2021 14:23
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You'd think that if any government would have the power to tax the wealthy into oblivion instead of concocting weird schemes to murder them, it'd be a nominally communist (at least I think they still pay it lip service) dictatorship. Unless there's other correlations that aren't being looked at because Forbes is Forbes, in which case this is a much worse thing.
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May 28, 2021 21:54
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The idea of a "surplus population problem" is ludicrously misanthropic concept regardless of malthusian anti-human doomposters, and China will be dealing with the consequences of the one-child-policy for decades. A bad solution to a bad assessment of problems.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:30
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Well, it's definitely something to be nervous about, but it seems like if you organize a protest that's supposed to send a message to China, it's kind of a success if you get proof that China is definitely listening? Although I guess you'd also probably want other countries of the world to be listening and think about sanctions.
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Jun 30, 2021 16:08
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Here's some news that's not about America. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1410560670739976194 Sounds bad.
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Jul 2, 2021 18:25
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Possible Chinese Guantanamo. https://twitter.com/sehof/status/1427121668330197000 The Associated Press posted:While “black sites” are common in China, Wu’s account is the only testimony known to experts that Beijing has set one up in another country. Such a site would reflect how China is increasingly using its international clout to detain or bring back citizens it wants from overseas, whether they are dissidents, corruption suspects or ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs.
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Aug 16, 2021 19:04
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I've seen multiple claims before of China forcibly bringing in Uighurs who had been living abroad, but I'm not really sure what the point of that is. Apparently to silence potential critics outside their control? I dunno. Not like there's much logic behind the suppression and extermination of the domestic ones. I guess racism, Han nationalism, and allegations of islamic terrorism.
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Aug 17, 2021 21:40
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