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Raskolnikov38 posted:so just to summarize before i gently caress off to make lunch and play video games This is correct. Realistically no country can force another to end human rights abuses without committing ones themselves, and there's no real way to know if it will be worse until you uncover the full extent of the abuses going on. Personally, I don't give any credence to a nation committing abuses because ultimately it doesn't matter if it's intentional or not; it's happening all the same. Just like the individual level: when someone sincerely informs you that you are harming them and you continue to do so you are now intentionally doing it, regardless of your internal and stated motivation. You've decided the harm is outweighed by whatever benefits you derive. As such, I regard what China is doing to be cultural genocide, similar to what the US did to native Hawaiians. Regardless, the USA doesn't work to prevent human rights abuses for fun, just for profit, just like every other nation. If there wasn't some broader strategic goal here it would result in just verbal admonishments, not economic sanctions. fanfic insert posted:Sure, but theres as far as i can tell no reports of them manipulating textbooks and adding propaganda into them. Theres reports of banning of textbooks for unclear reasons but thats not the same thing you're outlining here. There's lots of potential reasons for China to do it. They may be doing it to head off a potential bloody confrontation, they may be doing it to further homogenize their citizens in an attempt to strengthen the national identity, they may be doing it because gently caress 'em, they may be doing it to test how effective this kind of operation is, or they may be doing it for another reason I haven't thought of yet.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:23
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fanfic insert posted:You don't see the problem with this? The victim of an oppressive regime speaking out against them is extraordinarily common. Are you contending that he is wholesale lying about his past?
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Mar 25, 2021 19:30
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Cerebral Bore posted:the problem here is that finding a bunch of emigrés willing to make poo poo up to support the official us narrative is also extraordinarily common. examples abound. You could make this statement about anything negative said about the US as well. People will sometimes exaggerate their abuses but that doesn't mean the abuses didn't occur. Given that the broad consensus is that China is doing something hosed up, but the severity is unclear, it seems odd to dismiss someone alleging that something hosed up is happening.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:36
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fanfic insert posted:No I'm saying he set up shop in the most (legally) corrupt city in the world starting up a publication which states Everyone involved in international relations is a propaganda tool. I'm not surprised that he would find funding for this in a nation motivated to take down China, but that doesn't make his claims false. I agree that means we need to be careful about what we hear and not accept it uncritically, but this is a fight between a rising power and a declining power, so both are highly motivated to obfuscate the reality on the ground. Is the US using this in an attempt to strength its hegemony and maintain power because it's being confronted by a competitor? Yes. Is China trying to strengthen its own position in the face of that? Yes. But neither of those means the people claiming to have been monstrously abused are lying, it simply means their stories are being used by the powerful to maintain or extend power. The powerful have always used stories of oppression to extend their power, but that doesn't mean oppression doesn't exist. To be clear, I would be less inclined to believe the claims made if they were truly outrageous, like Nazi level stuff with industrialized death camps or even Armenian Genocide level mass graves, but it's not. It's the same kind of hosed up thing the US and other Western nations have done multiple times. It's not Trail of Tears level, but it is residential schools level.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:52
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Cerebral Bore posted:except that just because something hosed up is happening doesn't mean that every hosed up thing that someone is alleging is happening That's true, we need to be careful about the claims made, but in doing so we can't simply reject them out of hand, or reject the person making them unless they have a clear pattern of lying about poo poo. Even if we think it's suspicious that doesn't justify, imo, outright dismissal.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:54
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Cerebral Bore posted:like, basically every single war or conflict that the us has started since forever has been based on more or less blatant lies, many of which came from political emigrés precisely because of the air of authenticity that it gives the narrative. if you're the imperial hegemon you can always find someone willing to go out and bullshit up any story you can think of. I'm not disputing this. I've literally agreed with this point. I just also apply it to a rising power that wants to supplant the US, because why wouldn't they use the same tactics? They work brilliantly. It's in China's best interest to beat the US at their own game, here. fanfic insert posted:This is my entire issue with this. This problem we're having in this thread is born from the fact that the US constantly lies about these things in order to justify their own atrocities, so in my opinion it falls on us to reflexively reject anything coming from the US state or anything affiliated to it until there are independent trustworthy sources, until then it should be viewed as empire doing empire and if we let them do it unopposed we're going to be accomplices in creating a situation much much worse then the one in Xinjiang right now on a much larger scale. But how do you define independent trustworthy sources? What does that look like? Because I largely agree with you, but if we can't define what a trustworthy source on this looks like it amounts to us doing the same thing anyway. Being in a Boy who Cried Wolf situation is hosed up, yes, but unlike the story there's more than one person doing that here.
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Mar 25, 2021 20:32
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I do want to say that even though I think totally dismissing all claims is too much, I'm glad this thread exists because I've tried to say the same poo poo I've said here on other webzones and it does not go over well, and by that I mean when I've said that the US lies a lot people get crazy defensive.
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Mar 25, 2021 20:46
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Ferrinus posted:You say "multitude" but in fact all your non-academic sourced keep collapsing back to the same several individuals or think tanks and unless I skimmed too aggressively you haven't posted any academic sources yet. Even the narratives of psychos like Zenz, when actually read rather than imagined and generalized from, end up describing this empty business like... there are boarding schools. There are cops. Etc. This isn't true. So this is a single example, but for me is one of the big reasons I simply accept that China is committing cultural genocide (the distinction between genocide and cultural genocide is quite slim): In Zenz's report "Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control" (PDF) he makes the claim that 80% of net IUD placements are taking place in Xinjiang (calculated as placements minus removals). Chinadaily attempts to rebut that claim here, but they get the claim wrong: quote:Rumor: In 2018, at least 80 percent of the new surgeries of IUD placements in China were preformed in Xinjiang. Zenz specifically stated this: quote:By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilizations), with actual shares likely being much higher. In 2018, 80 percent of all net added IUD placements in China (calculated as placements minus removals) were performed in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population. Net IUD placement, not overall. Chinadaily also helpfully posts this image from the China Health Statistics Yearbook 2019:  Now Xinjiang is the very last row, and the second column is total placements, with the 4th column being removals. Using net IUD = placements - removals, then: (328475 - 89018)/(3774318 - 3474467) = 239457/299851 = 0.7986 ~ 80%. Here we have something we can all easily check using China released information that Zenz is right about The attempted rebuttal by Chinadaily doesn't even get the claim correct and the information they show even confirms Zenz's claim. Based on this, I'm not sure why I should immediately dismiss the claims of others. Zenz's claim was crystal clear, so Chinadaily is simply purposely strawmanning this in order to muddy the water, because they know most people won't even perform a cursory check.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:37
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Ferrinus posted:It looks like you're right that China Daily hosed up or even lied when it came to representing Zenz's claim here. However, the measure of "net IUD insertions" itself is extremely weird. Offhand I can't find population studies anywhere else that attempt to make that comparison, probably because if you don't know who is actually installing versus removing birth control devices and why the number gives you almost no information. If all women were to get an IUD at age 20 and then remove that IUD at age 40, for instance, then net IUD insertions would be zero, but there would nevertheless be a very strict birth control regime in place. If, 20 years later, only half of the next cohort of 20 year old women were to get IUDs, while the entirety of the original, now-40 cohort got theirs removed, then "net IUDs installed" would be negative... and yet, we're talking about a situation in which half of all young women are prevented from having children! The issue with the IUD's is that one of the common claims by women is that they are tricked into or otherwise forced to get an IUD, so this kind of extreme overrepresentation of IUD's in a province that doesn't have that many people lends credence to there being a sterilization program and backs up their claims. The kind of obfuscation done by Chinadaily here is exactly the kind of bullshit the US pulls when trying to trick the world about our abuses, and seeing China do it in response to a serious accusation doesn't just make me suspicious, it makes me think the claim of genocide is not just more probable than not, but is actually likely. Importantly, it shows that even if Zenz is a motivated researcher, his claims can't be wholly dismissed. I understand why people are wary of him and things source from him, but skepticism doesn't equate to outright dismissal. If someone keeps crying wolf, we still need to check even if it's incredibly annoying because the consequences of not doing so are disastrous.
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Mar 25, 2021 23:55
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Ferrinus posted:I don't believe that China Daily is engaged in obfuscation there because their error is just too easy to point out. Zenz may think he has a mission from god, but he isn't flatly incompetent; he's not going to literally punch numbers wrong into his calculator or something. I think they were excited to catch an unusually egregious error and failed to look a gift horse in the mouth. I would agree, but I've seen the same rebuttal done again and again (not here, but elsewhere). This is one of the few things that is easily checked because the statistics Zenz used aren't free to the public (which, imo, makes his claims weaker since he could have at least provided a loving table). If that Chinadaily article didn't post the actual scanned page from the Health and Hygiene Statistics Yearbook I never would have even been able to check the math. quote:Another evidence also confirms that Zenz's data was totally fabricated. The number of new surgeries of IUD placements in Xinjiang did not show obvious fluctuations from 2015 to 2018,and actually, the number of new surgeries of Xinjiang in 2018 decreased, compared with 2015(See the table "Family planning operations in various regions" Selected from China Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook 2016 and China Health Statistics Yearbook 2019.). I'm not sure what this is a response to. We know Zenz's claim about the 80% net IUD thing isn't fabricated, and the article addresses that separately, so I think this is in response to this claim of Zenz's: quote:Between 2015 and 2018, Xinjiang placed 7.8 times more net added IUDs per capita than the national average. Which is a confusing as hell sentence, but after reading it a few times I think he means the cumulative net added per capita. I don't know why he uses per capita rather than just sticking with his initial method, even if that method is strange as well. In any case, I can't independently verify his specific numbers here since I don't have access to the previous years statistics, but I did eyeball the values off this figure:  and the overall ratio is (1400 + 800 + 900 + 1000) / (400 + 50 + 50 + 25) = 4100/525 = 7.81. Again though, I have no loving idea where the actual values on this plot came from and I honestly don't know what units are being used. If the Y axis is supposed to be per 100k or per 10k, fine, but otherwise this poo poo doesn't make any sense. Even then, per what capita? In Xinjiang? In Uyghur women? In all women? From what he shows, it does look like the rate of net IUD's added is stable (the trend per capita over the last decade fluctuates around 1000), while the rate of net IUD's added drops nationally. Since I don't have the raw data over this period, I can't check to see if this is simply due to a higher rate of removal nationally (which we may expect, especially since the 1 child policy was rescinded for Han families), but considering that the Uyghur population went from ~54% of the population to ~60% over the same period, it doesn't immediately make sense for that rate to remain the same in the province. Overall, that claim and the rebuttal are unconvincing either way since I can't get at the actual data for it.
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Mar 26, 2021 01:53
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Throatwarbler posted:Hey guys as a former resident of the XUAR and one with close family ties to the region, I just want to point out that there are no restrictions on travel or tourism to any area in Xinjiang. All the arguments here about whether this or that mosque was demolished or whether this or that building is this or that seem very dumb to me because someone could just...walk over there and check it out? It's like people in China who have never read a thing about America having some drawn out debate over the American genocide in Baltimore, MD based on images from Google Earth, because Baltimore, MD is a black hole of information? Wait, is China actually letting Americans travel there right now?
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Mar 26, 2021 01:57
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Varinn posted:people have posted zenz's work in this thread lmao wtf People haven't, I have. That's where people in this thread said the biggest problems with any claims were and I never actually looked at his stuff too closely because he's a crazy person, but for claims like this I like being able to say exactly why they're wrong or not. Also, I had a lot of time to try to find the CCP's statistics yearbooks online only to fail because they require you to have a research account with them or something. Admiral Ray has issued a correction as of 02:04 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 02:01
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Ferrinus posted:After having taken some time to think about it, I am increasingly convinced that the reason China Daily refuted an imagined claim about raw number of IUDs added, rather than the actual claim about net number of IUDs added, is that "net IUDs added" is an insane statistic which communicates nothing. The people getting IUDs are different from the people removing IUDs! There might be a lot of young people entering the workforce who want to put off childbirth while, at the same time, the fact that IUDs weren't in widespread use prior (due to poverty, medical access, culture, whatever) means that there's no matching cohort of aging people who either feel ready to have children or who simply no longer have the need to bother. Yeah I have to back off a bit on saying they were being deliberate in that. I don't tend to give media sources, especially state backed ones (eg, NYT to a large degree, Chinadaily), much slack on things like this since it's their entire job, but it is a bizarre metric that I can't say they were being purposeful in lying about after thinking about it for a while. I checked the numbers on the other provinces and since there's net negative removals in some provinces the "80%" is a lot more menacing than it seems. Xinjiang is still over-represented in the IUD stats, but it's not to the degree stated by Zenz. Rather, it is to the degree we might expect from a crackdown on a group that was previously allowed to flout the child policy in China. It's still horrific, and leads to cultural repression and erasure, but honestly going through Zenz's bullshit so closely makes me want to do the same to the other sources for this, because right now the nonsense he put out there makes me doubt the strength of my previous conclusion.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:23
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Throatwarbler posted:Travel to where, China generally or XUAR in particular? For China generally, I'm not sure but they probably should just keep American plague rats out on principle. I don't know what COVID specific restrictions are in place right now, but I'm not aware of any specific restrictions on Americans or any other nationality with respect to traveling to and within the XUAR, in contrast to Tibet, where there has always been a requirement that you registered and travel with a tour group. Millions of Chinese obviously travel in and out of the XUAR every day. China in general. I was gonna say that if the CCP was letting in plague carriers from the plagued states of america they really couldn't deny they were trying to kill their own people.
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Mar 26, 2021 02:25
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Prince Myshkin posted:I see my earlier post has already been addressed. Do you think the comparable numbers in Hebei and Henan mean there is a crackdown going on there? No, because the numbers aren't so overrepresented in those provinces. Xinjiang having 1.7% of the population of China but 8.7% of all IUD insertion surgeries is a red flag. Hebei and Hunan each have ~3 times the population of Xinjiang, so it's not suspicious that they comprise about ~8% of the total IUD insertion surgeries. eta: This kind of thing, though, is why I wish I had access to the actual hygiene and population yearbooks going back decades. It'd be easy to make a time series of this and correlate the rate of Han growth in the area with birth control surgeries and compare with the rate of Uyghur growth and birth control surgeries, compare those to the rest of the country, and see if the growth rates and surgery rates changed in response to specific policies being enforced. But instead I have to rely on lovely scanned pages and warmongering scammers. No joke, if China wants to totally neuter this whole genocide thing I think the easiest thing to do would be to release their Chinese and English versions of their statistics yearbooks for the last two decades, then publish these kinds of comparisons. It would show human rights abuses, just like the US prison numbers do, but it'd be pretty hard to hide genocide. Even moreso, China could just say "and here we started ensuring the enforcement of our reproductive laws, and that's why the numbers look so scary. They are lopsided, but not so lopsided as the US rate of imprisoning black people" and it'd severely weaken the moral high ground of the US on this matter. That's a deflection that isn't related (and doesn't include coerced or forced sterilization), but it'd work. Admiral Ray has issued a correction as of 19:50 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 19:37
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Gringostar posted:on thing that's been bothering me is that while everyone here 100% acknowledges that most (all) western reporting are at minimum tainted by adrian zenz and the us state department and should be looked at with a poo poo load of skepticism no one has talked about how chinese media isn't also tainted as hell when it comes to reporting on issues inside their own boarder as well I talked about this a lot. That was like 10 or 15 pages ago and everyone I was talking with also agreed, but the interpretation of what that kind of thing means differs. For me it means I'm willing to assume the worst until evidence arises against it, for others it means they'll extend benefit of the doubt to China until shown otherwise.
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Mar 26, 2021 21:48
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comedyblissoption posted:this means you will fall for american foreign policy talking points over and over again instead of giving it the skepticism it deserves What? No it doesn't. My assumption of the worst case scenario is based on the fact that we already know China engages in human rights abuses, so why wouldn't they engage in something worse? I don't grant the government of China special dispensation just because they aren't the US. If they want to prove they aren't committing crimes against humanity, let them prove it.
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Mar 26, 2021 22:39
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The Oldest Man posted:Wait what? You will automatically believe any country that already conducts human rights abuses or genocides is committing any other human rights abuses or larger/worse ones? Would you believe that China's leadership are feasting on human flesh nightly if someone got an op ed to that effect published in WaPo and then expect the Chinese goverment to disprove it? Moving from enacting population controls to cultural genocide isn't a leap. Going from population controls to bizarre Alex Jones conspiracy bait is. The point is China has a history of pretty severe human rights abuses, and committing another atrocity on top of that isn't beyond the pale. I don't grant the US any quarter here either, so if someone was to say that were doing something horrific, it'd be on the US to disprove it in my opinion.
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Mar 26, 2021 22:45
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comedyblissoption posted:i mean wouldnt this principle mean you should credulously believe iraq has wmds or iran is about to nuke israel or qadaffi is about to butcher civilians or that morales stole the election No, not really. If someone said that Saddam was about to gas the Kurds again, well, he's did that before. When the US claimed that Iraq had mobile enrichment centers for plutonium, lol, that's insane. Iraq had chemical weapons, but to claim they somehow developed nuclear ones like that was just stupid. Iran is belligerent with Israel, but they aren't stupid. They may want to eliminate Israel, but they'd like to exist afterwards too. States do things in their interest, even if we think that interest doesn't make sense or it offends us. I didn't flesh it out in my previous comment, but if a country has a clear history of human rights abuses, well, why couldn't they commit another? And believe is too strong a term, entertain is probably more accurate. I'm willing to believe these kinds of things about nations just like I'm willing to believe a lot of the accusations thrown at cops, even if I don't have hard evidence for every single one, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to believe literally any accusation.
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Mar 26, 2021 23:35
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