You did serious damage with this post. Please do not use HN for nationalistic or ideological flamewar, or other flamewar. This comment is exactly what we don't need here, and led to a whole bunch more of exactly what we don't need.
You've broken the site guidelines egregiously before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23639749). We ban accounts that do these things repeatedly, so please stop that and follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
If you don't have anything to add to the conversation besides "but what about what the rest of the world is doing", then why bother to comment? I don't know why any post mentioning China makes you people come out of the woodwork to argure that the rest of the world is just as bad.
I'm very sympathetic to your criticisms of the UK/US, but I think you are taking for granted the great many freedoms you enjoy (I assume you are from one of these countries but apologies if not) and are being naive (or just perhaps it's driven by cynicism) over the very real differences here.
Yes the USA commits human rights abuses. But this is a thread about China, and we shouldn't stop criticising China just because the US does something bad too.
PRC does lack proper civil society, and it all started with Mao and his cultural revolution. Compare PRC and Taiwan the difference is night and day in their respective governments' respect for human rights. It has nothing to do with orientalism and everything to do with authoritarianism.
I don't understand how you can give 'American cops routinely kill people' as an example of human rights violations that are being ignored.
Is change lacking? Yes. Is there outrage? Also yes.
Of course, had you were to make the point that Western politicians are complete hypocrites then I would wholeheartedly agree. Although, I also don't think that's a uniquely Western phenomenon.
When mass uprisings are necessary for even a serious discussion of the problem (intention to resolve it is nowhere in sight) - then, yes, killing by cops is being ignored and has been ignored.
_You_ aren't ignoring it - your representative have been ignoring it (and effectively and mostly, still are; they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away.)
The group that was being attacked was something like 'Westerners who criticize China' (I can't find the exact quote since the OP is no longer visible to me). I'm part of that group and that is why I replied.
Your point that "they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away" is true regarding the establishment. I don't see how anyone would disagree with that.
But we have a right to vote and a right to loudly voice our disagreement. And that's different from China. Right now in HK the government is now basically saying that voting against legislation proposed by the establishment 'might be' a violation of the national security law. That's insane.
You’re completely ignoring the fact that protest and speech are exactly how things change in a free democratic society. Try that in China and you’re likely to find yourself in a “re-education” (concentration) camp. It’s not apples to apples comparing the US to China in terms of human rights and civil society... China is truly an authoritarian regime.
China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. They're using machine learning to generate social scores. If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave. Try doing that in China. Dying in a free zone is preferable to the enslavement that the Chinese are subjected to. Freedom has a price, and it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them.
Hi, sorry I am not sure what you consider nationalistic, or a flamewar. I am not solely criticizing the east, in another post I consider the US stuck in the 50s. I have family in China+HK and do not like the cultural values now. What would have been a better way to post that? I think the comment is relevant in a thread about Huawei and 5g and why people are pushing back against China.
A prison is not a concentration camp, US has a justice system with the right to trial and appeal, and if the people in prison actually committed crimes then I'm not sure what the problem is.
When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights. It’s more akin to the U.S. being ‘the skinniest kid in fat camp.’ Congratulations on being better than China and Saudi Arabia I guess...
> When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights.
Would like to see some examples of this, and numbers of this. I really doubt this is widespread.
And further, if it does happen, it would have to get through prosecutors, jury, governors, etc - all of who will completely eaten alive by the press if the kid could even be misinterpreted to be a minority in the USA and the whole world would know about it. Where if someone mentions China is not exactly a good actor we get a whataboutism shitstorm.
There were judges that were convicted of sending black kids to for profit prisons they held stock in. Believing there isn't systemic racism in the prosecutorial system at this point is the same as believing there isn't systemic racism in policing. Just because you aren't personally affected doesn't mean a problem isn't wide spread.
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand and was another whataboutism off shoot from the main topic.
Many people in prison in the US did not commit the crime they were accused of; thanks to wildly inflated sentencing, many people choose a 1-year plea bargain over a 10-15 year roll of the dice.
> Many people in prison in the US did not commit crimes;
By all means cite %, and still does not make it a concentration camp.
Further the DAs are themselves elected locally in many jurisdictions or appointed by locally elected officials and people can vote for change if they want it.
> You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient.
And this would be immoral and if you are suggesting the US is doing this you would need to actually back that up.
> Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
Even if it was, that is not an example of tweaking the law to make a criminal out of anyone inconvenient, it is a case of tweaking the truth to fit the definition of something which is a crime, and should be a crime.
There's also indefinite detention and family separations at temporary immigration detention facilities.
Most of the people in the US who make a stink about the Uighurs and forget about US human rights transgressions would quickly forget about the Uighurs if they moved in next door.
Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
The US certainly flirts with this kind of politics too.
However:
- Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish.
- Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed.
I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
Then give examples where they actually did far exceed what China does.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
I don't think debating counterfactuals is a productive way to have this discussion.
I also want to point out that the reason I mentioned Gui Minhai was to counter the claim that escaping the grip of China was a simple matter of moving abroad.
With respect to this original topic, there are also various examples where Chinese who moved abroad are threatened either by phone calls from China (with reference to their family) or by Chinese agents (presumably) in the new country. (I could list some if you want, but I assume you're familiar with them.)
These are things that the US does not really do.
But, yeah, US's track history in foreign policy is terrible. But China has its own take on terror and it's not pretty by any means. If you care about things like democracy or freedom of speech I will assert that China is emerging as the bigger threat by far.
(I take terror to refer to the systematically frightening people with the threat of violence, to make them behave in a certain way.)
The context of the chain is that you can leave the US or the UK, but you can't leave China. The original comment literally said - if you don't like the US, you can leave, but if you don't like China, you can't leave.
If you are an enemy of the USG, you can't leave the US. If you are an enemy of the Chinese State, you can't leave China. I fail to see the difference.
I assure you that US citizens that move abroad and act in ways that conflict with the USG are also surveilled. The tactics are different, because the US has sufficient power to surveil you without needing any threatening. If ever the threat of violence is judged effective that is what will threaten you. First under the threat of extradition (which is violence), if that fails the US will make phone calls to the government of the country where you live in, and if that fails and you're still worth it then it's covert action.
Maybe if you live in the Anglosphere China is a bigger threat, but in that case it's not a big threat at all. But for people that live anywhere else in the world or have done so the US has done enough terrorizing and threatening to see that the US is a bigger threat to your freedom. What good is democracy when the US controls your economy and defence? What meaningful freedom do you have of acting according to your interests when that boot is against your neck? Both China and the US are exactly the same threat. It is absurd to give more power to the US to isolate China. If what you care about is freedom, the best scenario is actually to have both China and the US in economic competition.
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
If you are a US citizen, you are expected to pay a certain amount of US taxes even while living abroad. Presumably, this is because you still benefit from bring US citizen while living abroad.
> No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
No, that's hypocrisy, which is a totally different thing from racism.
Or the fact that most people are inclined to look upon the actions of their own country with rose colored glasses, where they are less likely to do so for other countries. There's nothing racist about that.
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
This is not the same as being physically restrained from leaving, and they would find these stop if they renounce US citizenship.
> The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
But we don't, neither to the same scale nor intensity.
It's not racist to criticise the actions of another country, even if your own isn't perfect. You can criticise both, and you can call out which is worse.
In this case it is the undemocratic nation suppressing speech and political expression, while commiting racist, demographic genocide within its own borders.
> The notion that China lacks 'proper civil society' is in my mind rooted in a western sense of orientalism and good old fashioned racism.
And this is good, old fashioned bullshit.
Chinese citizens do not have the same rights and protections westerners do, nor a democratic system. They don't have the right to speak freely, congregate as they wish, protest or foment change in their own society.
Western societies are imperfect, those rights are not protected or executed perfectly there. But they do exist, and the problems with them are orders of magnitude smaller than their total lack in China.
> I'm constantly seeing westerners whine about Chinese human rights violations while simultaneously ignoring the HR violations occurring everywhere else, especially in the west. American cops routinely kill people.
There has been protests for more than a month in the USA and the west because one black man was murdered by police. The police officer that murdered him will be charged and brought to justice.
There has been nowhere near this level of outrage against the actions of China, and nobody will bring the perpetrators there to justice.
To suggests that HR violations in the west is being ignored is laughable and dishonest and is evidence of your ulterior motives.
If you think Adrian Zenz is some kind of fraud there's nothing I can post that will convince you so sources are pointless. Google "China re-education camps" and you'll find hundreds of articles on the subject from news organizations all of the world
With zero sympathy for Chinese ethnic cleansing, Nazi concentration camps were perhaps a different league. Maybe people never even got to stay there: unloaded at the rail terminal, ushered into gas chambers, then burned in the crematoria.
> Every nation does this with their indigenous population.
And it is always wrong.
> Yet you don't seem to be outraged at the fact native americans are raped and murdered almost everyday in america.
Not under sanction of the state, and Non native americans are also raped and murdered almost every day in america. These things are crimes in USA regardless of the victim, where in China the state is sanctioning it and doing it.
It is a bit weird that there are whole movements like BDS setup against Isreal, a wholly democratic and liberal country where people of all religions enjoy the same rights and nobody is placed in concentration camps, while every time someone mentions that China is a bad actor we get asked why does BDS not exists.
BDS does exist, and China is a bad actor and should be opposed.
I assume you are referring to the Democrat controlled US House passing a resolution with bipartisan support and a 398-17 vote which condemns BDS[1].
BDS is still allowed to operate and the condemnation has no state-actionable consequences against BDS. And there are members of the US congress who openly support BDS.
Yea I'm just pointing out it doesn't work in the slightest. I agree with you for the most part. Especially in the case of China which for the most part is self sufficient. While israel relies on american intervention to even run sufficiently. But I also want to point out the groups perpetuating this in america are the republicans who dont actually care and are doing for xenophobic reasons not for the best interest of the people in these camps especially when they run their own.
> and you think they will let you know how many they killed in Hong Kong.
In the case of Hong Kong, there is no need to rely on the CCP to tell us how many they killed. Hong Kong has much higher levels of press freedom than China, and deaths would likely be made known in other ways.[1]
China is literally running concentration camps to persecute religious minorities. This is happening at a huge scale and without any oversight on human rights.
> I'm constantly seeing westerners whine about Chinese human rights violations while simultaneously ignoring the HR violations occurring everywhere else, especially in the west. American cops routinely kill people.
Say what? Haven't the previous months' worth of protest illustrated quite well that exactly the HR violations you use in your example are very much not ignored?
Besides, HR violations in a free and open society can be talked about and acted upon. China is a dystopian hellhole where even raising the plight of the Uyghurs in concentration camps, or the lack of free speech, or arbitrary arrests, or …, is dangerous. Full stop. For all its problems, the West is in a completely different league where it comes to HR violations. For sure we have problems, but China's are orders of magnitude bigger. So no wonder we "whine".
