All: if you want to comment on HN on a divisive topic like this, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure you're commenting in the intended spirit: curious, thoughtful, respectful conversation across differences. Note, for example, this guideline—we really mean it:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Many users can't seem to resist hurling flamebait and feeding flamewars. Please don't be one of those. This is not a site for smiting enemies or being an internet warrior, regardless of how right your views are or you feel they are, and regardless of how much badness there is to denounce. None of that is what we want here, because it's repetitive, predictable, and self-reinforcing. HN threads thrive on diffs, not repetition. Diffs are what's interesting.
There is a diff between not being a troll and being respectful of alleged human rights abuses. Suggesting that we must be respectful in the light of massive human rights violations is how those human rights violations get to take place. This is the same sort of peak Silicon Valley technocrat mindset that led to things like apologizing for not sourcing parts from forced labor in China and sites like reddit holding on to jailbait, involuntary porn/voyeur, and literal hate subreddits out of fear of taking any stance.
I'm saying you have to be respectful of this community and its rules if you want to participate here. That's reasonable: you're getting something, so it's fair for you to give something in return. The HN guidelines explain clearly what you need to give.
Angry internet noun phrases like "peak Silicon Valley technocrat mindset" are a distraction from this, not to mention (god help us) porn/voyeur. All we're trying to do is have an internet forum that doesn't suck. IMO that's a goal that benefits everybody here, and everybody here should do their part.
Users hurling nationalistic insults and ideological talking points at each other goes in exactly the wrong direction for that. This shouldn't be hard to see. It also, by the way, does nothing to help vulnerable human beings, and invoking something noble like that to excuse garden-variety internet mudslinging is a smidge distasteful.
I'm not particularly educated on internet conflict except PG's disagreement hierarchy, and personal experience in hacking social expectations on Reddit (e.g., call it the "inoculation" instead of "vax" or "vaccine" to avoid tipping your political hand).
Is there any "best practices" on handling a sticky situation across an insanely diverse absurdly large crowd of individuals in a low-context communication channel? I believe this would be a #1 go-to for absolutely any social network, and I imagine there are a dozen people reading this who are looking for precisely that.
I think the intention is more to try an avoid every comment just being "China bad, F*ck Intel"
We all know there are human rights abuses in China, but no amount of emotional comments on an HN thread is gonna fix that. It would be more productive to have some sort of more thought provoking conversations.
The maximum effect a comment on here can have is making a statement that changes someone's mind. Overly emotional, shallow, or terse responses aren't going to have that effect.
I get your point, but disregard for decorum here isn't going to solve any of those problems. At best it's shouting into a void, at worst your fooling yourself into thinking you're part of the solution while fixing nothing.
I think he meant to not devolve to into calling everyone a tankie bot or genocide denier if I were to ask you what non-editorial non NED or weapons manufacturer funded primary data you're referring to when you talk about "massive human rights violations".
So should we start criticizing every american company, person and entity in every thread concerning anything american since US government kills innocent civilians on an even bigger scale than Chinese government? Because you know that is exactly happening.
If the US currently commits anything close to what's happening in Xinjiang, particularly with the emphasis on it being on a helpless minority of its own citizens, you would have to link to it. Many of us don't think that is happening.
So stop denying that systemic racism, racial profiling of minorities and targeted police brutality is not happening in the US. Did you vote for Trump? Because that would explain why you think those things don’t exist.
Nobody is saying that other countries haven't done horrible things. That's a separate issue, unless your argument is that it is okay for the CCP (not the Chinese people, this is political, not racial) to commit crimes against humanity. The response to the possible horrors in Xinjiang, and Tibet, should not be countered with whataboutisms. Don't we all want everyone to have a quality life free of suffering and abuse by others?
Wall St. does not care, so these companies can not care. Apple just gave BOE 20% of their OLED business to diversify away from Sanding and LG:
Note that BOE is being propped up by the CCP to the tune of $100M a year in losses over the past decade as economic warfare against SK.
Manufacturing is where today’s wars are being fought because these people know it gives them the power over those that would complain otherwise.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Intel’s supply chain now has components that couldn’t be built without a lot of delays if the CCP snapped their fingers (since they have also funded the conglomeration of specialty materials companies: these new companies are cheap when all you have to do is devalue your currency (is. steal a few dollars from all your citizens)).
Hopefully these conflicts stay entirely in the economic and manufacturing realm, because real war is hell.
You can't expect an independent company to take on a nation, the US and other Western governments either need to admit they don't care about human rights or commit to flat out banning trade with China
People talk about potential war with China without realizing China has been waging war on the West for decades, China's military doctrine counts economic warfare as equal to kinetic(traditional) warfare. These state backed companies are arms of the military being used to crush foreign nations and Western governments do nothing. Trillions of dollars in damage but they don't care because bombs didn't do the damage and many of the politicians got rich by allowing it to happen
Totally agree. In addition, billions of dollars every year are spent on various propaganda wars through advertising firms, political campaigns, and policy groups to convince people that the current state of manufacturing and nationality in the world is both inevitable and desirable.
Forget about the trillions of dollars--the real casualties are social stability, self-sufficiency, and the overall individual strength of the "west". The grandchildren of the people who invented the modern supply chain are wholly incapable of rebuilding it or in most cases even understanding it. How many people involved in the "national discourse" know what a kilowatt is, or have any idea what the country imports and why?
Many of these large companies dont believe the claims of human rights violations in Xinjiang because the research is shoddy and funded by problematic orgs that have massive ulterior motives (mostly winning large defense contracts) .
Some of you are just as confident of what is going on in Xinjiang, with 0 evidence, as you were of Iraq's WMDs it seems. Ask yourself how much you really know.
As someone that's been there, I agree with this sentiment. I also happen to know people with cotton farms there, I even know how much they make, and nobody around is using slave labor.
(and no I do not support / happy with the CCP - this is just what I've seen/experienced)
If there are anyone who do care about Chinese workers, pleas stop using TikTok, because programmers in ByteDance are really the one working around the clock like slaves. Just check out the 996.icu project, which ranks as #1 on GitHub.
This is something that I can attest to being a problem. I visited friends in China, and when we were done with our dinner, they went back to the office... I also know of some couples that have sex like, once a month, because all they do is work.
Interestingly, small companies like FairPhone work to improve their suppliers' labor conditions.
Intel of all the companies is in a position to do the same or more. However they choose to whitewash their brand by blaming the chinese government of their lack of care. Their hypocrisy backfired, and they let China win on all counts.
Ironically they ended up helping whitewash the chinese government.
For once they could try. They can have rules for their suppliers and factories, and enforce those. Other companies do. Even a tiny company like FairPhone does. But no, they chose for decades the cheap labor, and now they turn around and say "no more" just to defend their reputation.
In any case, apparently their apologies to China will not stop them from moving away from Xinjiang working, even if just for show.
Why do you write ,,even''? You are talking about a product where the main feature is fairness. I'm sure it misses some features that non-fair phones have in return. It's all about what the customer cares about.
They could do a better audit of their supply chains. I'm guessing silica is a big thing for them? Excuse my lack of knowledge on raw materials for processors, just jumping to silica = silicon. I do know the region produces a bunch of it used in solar panels.
Intel could also refuse to sell chips to companies that facilitate this genocide - and they are soon going to be forced to more broadly than the current sanctions list.
I don't know if any companies like DJI, surveillance camera companies, etc use intel chips but with the new law just passed companies like Intel will have to do a better job making sure their product does not come from or is used to facilitate uyghur human rights abuses.
Any facility or employee on Chinese soil is a potential hostage of the Chinese government. "China's hand is forced" == your factories get nationalized and your employees' families get imprisoned or worse.
A quick search shows as of 2019, Fairphone's suppliers included the Chinese company O-Film [0], which at the time was using forced labor from Xinjiang. They probably had no way of knowing this; Apple [1] was burned by the same firm. The company transported Uyghur victims to a factory southern China (Jiangxi in the Bloomberg article), so Xinjiang wasn't indicated as part of the supply chain anywhere.
How much actual impact do these kinds of corporate efforts accomplish? How much merit should we credit these "best-effort" attempts, when when's all said and then, there's still (probably) concentration camp labor in the end product?
>"The Australian Strategic Policy Institute said in a report last year that Ofilm used at least 700 Uyghur laborers from Xinjiang at a factory in the southern province of Jiangxi. The workers were sent there in late April 2017 as part of a state-sponsored labor transfer program, the think tank said."
>"The Uyghurs were expected to “gradually alter their ideology” and express gratitude to China’s ruling Communist Party for their work assignments, the think tank said, citing Chinese-language news articles."
It's really absurd to call any labor performed by Uygur inside China forced labor. Are Uygurs so lazy to deny any labor? Or can they not prefer working in factories than, say, farming or herding cattles?
As to the ideology and gratitude part, I think people may alter their ideology if they so choose. After all, the Romans switched to Christianity, and slavery was once legal in the States. And people should be able to express gratitude to people giving them a chance to work for a better life. Even now, people from abroad are moving into the States to work, are they all forced labor?
Your comment makes no sense. No one claims that all Uyghur work is forced labour. As the parent comment and article make clear this is about actual forced labour.
And notably the roman empire doesn't exist anymore and the States have outlawed slavery as it is an abhorrent practice that should be outlawed everywhere.
It's interesting to see that people on both sides are angry -- for different reasons. People on western Internet are angry at Intel for having issued an apology. People on Chinese Internet are angry because they view it as a non-apology, i.e. Intel still goes ahead with the ban. I see people -- including Chinese diaspora -- calling for banning Intel.
Personally, I'm angry at Intel for not having actual convictions.
It looks like they're doing the ban, not because they actually believe that there's slave labor in Xinjiang, but because their stockholders will be mad if they don't. And they issued the apology, not because they realized that there is no slave labor in Xinjiang, but because they don't want China angry at them. They're trying to just get on with being a business. (And to some degree that's fair. Intel is a business, not a moral crusader. Still, I'd like them to either take a stand, or not take a stand. Don't try to "take a stand" just to make people happy.)
("Angry" is too strong a word. "Disappointed" might be better. But I said "angry" to match the wording of the parent.)
As long as corporations are legal persons, I'm going to hold them to a moral standard, and I think the American public as a whole has a duty to do the same. If they can contribute to politicians, then we all have a personal stake in their ethics.
If corporations are people as the Supreme Court would have us believe, they are most certainly psychopaths. Natural people need to be clear-eyed about this. Don’t look to corporations as moral leaders. They will fail almost any moral test you can throw at them.
I doubt it. China is not there yet w.r.t. semiconductor independence. There are people who say, buy AMD, but AMD is also subject to US laws...
So what will happen instead? From what I've seen so far, China is careful with counterattacking US because they know the US is stronger. I think the govt will just issue an angry statement but do nothing concrete internationally, while continuing their domestic efforts of semiconductor development as they already have, and also continuing with restructuring Xinjiang's economy (i.e. replacing foreign customers with domestic customers, as happened with cotton)
They will choose AMD because AMD doesn't make this statement clear but Intel explicitly mentions "Xinjiang" in its annual supplier letter. I guess AMD did take this factor into consideration.
There are companies that are competitive in CPU design. But CPU manufacturing is a bottleneck. At the low end, they lack scale (until the new factories are built). At the high end (beyond about 14nm), they either lack an independent supply chain (and are thus susceptible to sanctions) or ability (beyond 10 nm requires EUV).
Furthermore, what we're talking about here is replacing x86. There is indeed a joint venture with AMD, but at the end of the day x86 is still US intellectual property and thus susceptible to sanctions.
It would be a different matter if they decide to replace x86 wholesale with something else, e.g. ARM or RISC-V. That is certainly more feasible today than a decade ago, with Android being a major platform and no longer being constrained to just Windows. But it's probably still a large amount of effort.
I think AMD has less (possibly much less) in China than Intel.
I spent about €200,000 on AMD servers last year. They are performing better than Intel ones would have done at the same price, so it was a very easy decision.
isn't this exactly the opposite? IIRC there was a situation where a large-ish? AMD subdivision in china was nationalized and made off with a considerable amount of AMD IP
Personally, I'm most angry that Intel refuses to properly audit their suppliers. They're not actually banned from importing goods from Xinjiang if they can prove that they weren't made with forced labor.
If they could prove that, the US government should be happy (because their stated goal of combating forced labor is respected) and Chinese people should be happy, too (better working conditions).
Merely restricting suppliers based on geography is a non-solution, since it's not like forced labor magically stops if you cross a provincial border.
I don't think it's that simple. For example BCI performed multiple audits since 2012 and hasn't found a single case of forced labor.[1][2] Despite that, they've pulled back from Xinjiang. Companies don't want to deal with Xinjiang just so they can avoid controversies, regardless of actual facts.
Also, the Xinjiang Forced Labor Prevention Act is based on the maxim of guilty-until-proven-innocent. There is no way to conclusively prove a negative. Even if you perform 100 unannounced audits you can still say "oh there's 0.001% chance that they fooled you 100 times"
Given your background and opinions on the matter, I'd be interested to hear what you think goes on in the large, barbed-wire lined, centers they regularly ship Uyghurs in and out of. Do you think they are genuinely good places meant to help an under privileged minority group?
Check out Col Lawrence Wilkerson at the Ron Paul Institute, mark 22:20, on one of the reasons why the US was in Afghanistan (which borders Xinjiang): https://youtu.be/91wz5syVNZs?t=22m20s
Check out Max Blumenthal, investigative journalist, on the quality of evidence surrounding Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/qZkxaEC1xjY
I took some time to read and watch the links and digest the info to respond:
1) I'm getting kind of conflicting signals from the sources. You promote the idea that these camps aren't what we know they are, the the third link, but the entirety of the your Twitter feed reads as a justification and comparison to the war in Afghanistan. I don't see how that would be an apt comparison unless these camps actually did exist, and actually did forcefully detain people (which means forced labor in China).
2) Let's assume they are forced re-education camps, since that's the least evil thing possible. You're comparison to Afghanistan as the 'The US uses bombs and bullets whereas China is doing things peacefully' is still bad. Afghanistan is a separate country without a government that we declared war on. The US generally follows strict rules of engagement, so it would be inaccurate to say we shot innocent people or killed them on purpose. The mission over there consisted much more of building infrastructure and public services than it did fighting. Xinjiang is within China's own borders, and benefits from already having a government and infrastructure, to a much larger degree than Afghanistan at least.
3) Let's ignore 2 and assume the US was evil in Afghanistan and China is doing everything as morally as possible in Xinjiang. Then why not let international inspection of the facilities? The UN was in Afghanistan, and oversaw a lot of our mission there. If it's the same in Xinjiang, but better, then why the secrecy?
4) People go along with the idea that evil things are happening in Xinjiang without much evidence because of two reasons: China has been caught doing everything claimed before already (organ harvesting, forced abortions, internment camps) and they don't just prove otherwise. Any international traveller can come to the US and visit any hospital, any prison (provided they are journalists at least) and any prisoner here has the freedom of expression to say anything they want to anyone they want. That isn't the case in China. Of course there is a lack of evidence of what's going on their now. That's China's MO.
(Part 2) As for "incompetence rather than malice":
There is a saying that aptly summarizes the issue: the central government told the Xinjiang authority to cut the hair, but they cut the entire head instead.
Local governments and police forces in China tend to be overzealous in implementing central policy. This is either because they're eyeing a promotion by showing how well they've reached KPIs, or because they're risk averse and don't want to deal with being punished for allowing a terrorist to slip through the cracks.
They also tend to brush with a broad stroke, hence lots of collateral damage which catches innocents in the process.
These are long standing issues and occur outside Xinjiang too, though slowly improving over time as competency improves. But it's especially bad in Xinjiang because:
1. Competent people don't want to be in Xinjiang: they tend to move elsewhere.
2. The central government wanted the terrorism issue under control as fast as possible. Incompetent officials and policemen focus on a singular goals and can't be bothered with something like collateral damage.
It's neither a racism nor official policy issue because:
- The head of Xinjiang is a Uyghur, and lots of government officials and policemen are Uyghurs. Uyghur policemen are trying to cut corners by racially profiling their own ethnicity.
- Official policy is give minorities preferential treatmenf through something similar to affirmative axtion. Minorities were exempt from the One Child Policy and they receive extra points on university exams. Laws are applied more leniently to minorities. This is not new and has been the case since the PRC's founding in 1949.
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Forced labor is limited to prison labor. Deradicalization centers have no prison labor as far as I know. There is no evidence of cotton, tomato or solar panel forced labor. My contact in Xinjiang is pretty furious about the recent US ban because this ban actually harms the lives of normal Uyghurs who make a living through these products.
Regarding international visits and transparency: there have been international visits.
Delegations from many non-western countries (including many islamic countries) have visited and said everything was fine, even saying they're impressed by the level of safety and development. A few years ago the UN sent a counter-terrorism expert to visit, who then wrote a positive report.
Of course, there are complications:
- The US protested that the report is not valid because a human rights expert should have been sent instead. They also protested that maybe we shouldn't send anybody to Xinjiang at all, because if the report turns out to be positive then that will give China undeserved legitimacy. Hmm.....
- Visits by non-western delegations are considered untrustworthy by western countries. The rhetoric goes that non-western countries have been bought by China. But this notion deprives those countries of their agency, and ignores the fact that friendly relations between China and the global south started way before China was rich.
If you ask me, the entire situation has been so thoroughly politicized that a neutral, objective inspection by foreign countries is not possible. Western countries won't accept any other outcome than "millions of Uyghurs are being genocided". There are a lot of dishonest reporters out there.
Which brings us to the next point...
At the same time, China distrusts western countries' neutrality and objectivity, and so they are incentivized to become less transparent.
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Regarding transparency and secrecy:
The west is essentially punishing China for being transparent. They used to divulge more about Xinjiang, but after a series of dishonest western media reports and propaganda, they became increasingly wary to the point where they'd rather shut everything down and making things more opaque. This becoming more opaque extends to issues beyond Xinjiang as well: as the US increasingly sanctions China using data obtained through transparency, China becomes more opaque in response.
China has always been clumsy in its communication with the west (though the opposite is also true). The issue of transparency is a long-standing issue. The Chinese government, and more generally Chinese people, tend to respond to any controversy by staying silent rather than through rebuttals. In Chinese culture, speaking is silver and silence is gold — a bit the opposite of many western cultures. Staying silent doesn't necessarily mean covering up: it means they gave up on communicating and are going their own way.
But of course, this behavior only makes westerners more suspicious, where silence is seen as evidence of sinister practice.
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Regarding China's reputation of having been caught and therefore deserves a guilty until innocence proven attitude:
Is "having caught" really true? You mentioned internment camps but that very issue is under dispute. So let's ignore that one for now.
Forced abortions: if you're talking about the One Child Policy, then that hardly counts has "having been caught in the act". The One Child Policy and its implications have always been public knowledge. I find this example very weird.
Organ harvesting: these claims come from Falun Gong. But where is the evidence?
There was organ harvesting, but not the kind alleged by Falun Gong. What they did was using organs of already-executed prisoners, which I agree is questionable but it's also on a whole different level than killing random people for their organs, as Falun Gong alleged. More importantly, China stopped this practice around 2015 on its own volition.
I assert that the claim that China cannot be trusted on the grounds of past crimes, is very dubious if you look deeply into the actual evidence. There are a lot of allegations without evidence. Some allegations are based on true underlying issues, but heavily distorted. Some are straight up lies. The bad reputation is built on a pile of sand, with very few actual bricks in the pile.
I saw on the ground in China early 2020 how the entire COVID issue was massively distorted by foreign media. The entire Li Wenliang censorship story was misrepresented. Wuhan was allegedly full of dead bodies which have been covered up, and everybody was forced by the government to stay at home rather than voluntarily doing so. No.
It is true that western countries tend to be more transparent (though I question your assertion that any journalist can visit any jail; can they visit Guantanamo?). But concluding that opaqueness is automatically sinister is also a stretch. This notion is especially problematic because the US is abusing transparency of foreign countries for the sake of upholding its own supremacy and for imposing sanctions, rather than as a way to truly encourage good and just governance.
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The end. As you can see, the Xinjiang issue is complex, and consists of a mix of many different issues. Multiple facts which appear contradictory are actually true at the same time.
I spent 2 days writing this. As you can imagine, with all this complexity it's really difficult to explain to most people what's going on.
(Part 1) You are raising very insightful issues. Arnaud's thread is an oversimplification. This comment is my best attempt at explaining the full picture, with the knowledge I have gathered in the past 3 years.
- There are unacceptable practices going on, but of a different scale and kind than described in mainstream western reporting.
- The terrorism issue is mixed up with the issues of Uyghur identity and separatism.
- The goal is to address terrorism, identity and separatism at the same time, using a variety of measures.
- There is difference between official policy and local implementation. Policy implementation in China is very distributed, with significant local leeway to interpret and implement. Due to incompetency rather than malice, there is significant collateral damage and impact on innocent people.
Let's unpack the above.
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About the measures:
- Terrorism is addressed through security: lots of weapons checks, barriers and surveillance everywhere. Though this is not the only measure.
- Terrorism, identity and separatism are addressed through deradicalization, vocational training, government job programs and economic development. The thinking goes: if people's economic prospects become better (able to find jobs, more income) then they are less likely to fall for extremism and to harbor separatist sentiments.
- Identity is addressed through patriotic education.
There are prisons, deradicalization camps, vocational schools. Those are three different things. A major source of misunderstanding comes from the fact that western reporting lump all three together into "concentration/detention camps", while Chinese media and diplomats never talk about the first, seldomly about the 2nd, and usually about the 3rd. So when foreign media ask Chinese diplomats to elaborate on "concentration camps", and the diplomats say "we don't have those, we have vocational schools" then the diplomats are technically correct but there is already misunderstanding from the first second.
Prisons are for convicted criminals and terrorists, e.g. those who set off bombs, and come with prison labor (as is usual in Chinese prisons, and many prisons around the world).
Vocational schools teach skills and patriotic education. They are indeed voluntary. Vocational schools are often boarding schools.
The most problematic facilities are the deradicalization camps. They are for people who have gotten in touch with extremism but haven't done anything concrete. They are sort of a "vocation school ++": they are mandatory and they "brainwash" you into believing that extremism is bad (e.g. they teach you ideas like: women have rights, killing people for their beliefs is bad). They are mandatory boarding schools but not prisons. This is not a contradiction: mandatory boarding schools exist in other parts of the world too. And the environment is less unpleasant than true prisons.
Deradicalization camps probably are problematic for two reasons:
1. The criteria for what counts as "gotten in touch with extremism" is prprobably too broad, and so an amount of innocent people have been undeservedly rolled into deradicalization camps.
2. The people enrolled into them may not have committed a concrete crime yet. Chinese authorities say that their goal is to prevent terrorism from taking root rather than only acting after the fact. According to western thought, this practice is wholly unacceptable. However, commentators from Islamic countries, which have had a much longer and much more savage history with terrorism, criticize the western perspectice on the grounds that westerners underestimate the impact of terrorism. From the Chinese government's perspective, safe streets and social stability is more important than anything else: they view it as their duty to ensure that streets are safe (and a lot of the population agrees).
The security measures probably come with a certain amount of racial profiling, e.g. Han can pass security checks unchecked while Uyghurs are checked more thoroughly. More on this later.
---
At the same time, there is a significant amount of misrepresentation (and even outright lies) from western media.
Some is deliberate, e.g. propaganda. Max Blumenthal highlighted the problems with the "x million" number, witness testimonies and more. There are real issues, but not to the extend alleged. Too many people have been undeservedly forced into deradicalization centers, but not "1 million" and they're neither prisons nor concentration camps. The BBC visited a vocational boarding school, painted it as a prison, then said people were not allowed to leave while literally showing footage of people leaving. There is no genocide: the population has grown quicker than Han, and it has been shown that Adrien Zenz's IUD number deliberately omitted a 0 (i.e. 80% should be 8%). Despite alleged systematic rape, killing etc by witnesses, there is a complete lack of a refugee crisis.
Other reports are accidentally wrong: misinterpretations due to lack of understanding of China. For example many of ASPI's sattelite image concentration camp locations turn out to be schools, farms, etc. It seems that the criteria for identifying a "concentration camp" is "it has high walls, barbed wires and fences on windows". But Nathan Ruser, a young fellow who just came out of school and got recruited by ASPI for doing this "research", apparently didn't know that a great many normal buildings in China have these features.
You really must be quite westernized if you can't talk about China anymore without using the US as a reference point, and have to rely on Westerners spreading lies about China in service of their own agenda to speak for you.
Well done, you completely ignored the actual argument in order to resort to ad hominem, while ignoring the fact that the first source doesn't use the US as the major comparison point, while also making evidence-free statements such as "westerners spreading lies". Exactly as I would expect from you.
Most of the online discussion centered around China is just US domestic political projection using an imaginary China as a mirror, or as a counterfactual which doesn't exist, and then there's the obvious propaganda too.
RnaudBertrand seems to be using China only as an imaginary counterexample to the US invasion of Afghanistan.
If you were just an average Westerner, mistaking that Twitter thread for an informed perspective would be an understandable mistake, buy I think you should be able to do better.
> Exactly as I would expect from you.
Interesting, I didn't think you'd even recognize my username.
> Interesting, I didn't think you'd even recognize my username.
You are right here, in my haste I recognized you for someone else who has been attacking me a lot lately. I apologize.
> The typical American answer to problems: bombs and bullets.
The US is a secondary supporting point, not the main point, which is Afghanistan and its terrorism problem.
> Which is a lie, carelessly slandering the policemen who valiantly risked their lives in the fight against terrorism.
This is an oversimplification rather than a lie. In the context of that tweet, what was referred to was:
1. Sending your military to foreign territory to kill the source of radicalization there.
2. The scale of the effort.
While there have definitely been fighting in Xinjiang, it cannot be compared to the likes of the War on Terror. The former's violance was at least constrained to people who shoot back, while the latter involved the killing pf many innocent people.
While you criticize the comparison with the US here, to completely take the US out of the picture in a description about Xinjiang would not be fair. For one, the US is a contributing factor in the creation of the terrorism problem in Xinjiang. Second, when one talks about counter-terrorism efforts, it only makes sense to compare the pros and cons of different approaches that have already tried. After all, it is a hard problem in which hard choices have to be made; nobody has succeeded in an approach which is completely free of violance or any kind of coercion.
I suppose you could also compare to France, but I don't think it would make sense to skip over the most high-profile example.
> So no, I'm not a CCP supporter. What I am, is being tired of all the anti-China propaganda that's on the one hand merely biased and prejudiced misrepresentations, and on the other hand a deliberate manufacturing of consent for war. I am tired of my home being constantly misrepresented and villified.
I mistakenly assumed that you would be against oversimplification.
Hey I did try to invite him to talk to me in private where I can explain a complex situation more thoroughly. But if one is only "kinda interested, but not very interested" and wants a quick summary in an HN post then one has to be contend with oversimplifications.
I understand why you criticize me, but rather than criticism I'd like to hear solutions. I had a conversation with my contact from Xinjiang yesterday (who regularly talks to westerners to explain the situation) and he told me how basically nobody in the west is interested in the complex truth; everybody wants simplifications. Which really limits the explanations he can give.
So, what is your solution? If you have a link to a better summary that you believe is
1. more accurate,
2. able to explain things from a westerner's perspective and able to provide the paradigm changes needed for proper understanding,
3. yet short enough to satisfy readers that are only casually interested,
then I'm all ears and I'll consider recommending your source next time.
And there are other independent sources showing forced labor in Xinjiang [1][2], regardless of what BCI Shanghai said.
BCI Shanghai is contradicting the BCI headquarter [3], and BCI Shanghai is not credible on this matter [4].
While there are plenty of authentic reports, and investigations documented by independent research groups, the BCI Shanghai’s statement to deny the forced labor in the region makes us just think how much pressure the Chinese team of the group faces from the Chinese government.
It is not that rare for a local Chinese branch to contradict the global headquarter, possibly due to pressure of operating in China.
For example, the local Hugo Boss in China wrote statements on Weibo (supporting Xinjiang cotton) which contradicted the global Hugo Boss headquarter (stating that Hugo Boss does not use Xinjiang cotton) [5], and the headquarter clarified that the Chinese Weibo statement was unauthorized [6].
BCI Shanghai is in a similar situation: the local branch operating in Shanghai (claiming to find no forced labor) did not represent the headquarter [3].
The problem with what you cite is not (only) with the outlet (CGTN), but with the source (BCI Shanghai).
You are like stating that Hugo Boss is supporting the Xinjiang cotton, because you find a Weibo post by the local office supporting it [5]. This is wrong [3][4][6].
And with other sources finding forced labor in Xinjiang [1][2], the BCI Shanghai statement is a red herring in this discussion.
is bitterwinter.org a reliable source? or perhaps we should dig deeper, is adrian zenz, whom most of the xinjiang genocide claims originated from, a reliable source?
The bitterwinter.org article, which is clearly labeled as Op-Ed:
1. reports that BCI Shanghai contradicts BCI headquarter (which you can independently verify, as there are other news sources supporting this, such as the SCMP article I just added).
2. argues that the local branch (BCI Shanghai) could be under pressure for operating in China (the quoted text above).
If you don’t buy their reasoning (2 above), you can at least agree with the HKFP reporting that the local Hugo Boss Chinese branch contradicted the Hugo Boss global headquarter without authorization, and make your judgement call for why.
> or perhaps we should dig deeper...
You may want to read these sources [1][2], which I just added to my original comment and do not rely on Adrian Zenz.
> is adrian zenz, whom most of the xinjiang genocide claims originated from, a reliable source?
With those other verifiable sources [1][2], we can ignore the straw man question of whether Adrian Zenz is a reliable source.
Literally the first reference/citation of "Broad Daylight" is attributed to Zenz. The Washington post does no additional verification but attribute to "researchers" who will no doubt also quote Zenz. It's also Washington Post. There are no verifiable sources alleging coerced labour that doesn't trace back to Zenz. Bitterwinter or HKFP are also far from reliable, on par with Epochetimes bias.
>Hugo Boss Chinese branch contradicted the Hugo Boss global headquarter without authorization, and make your judgement call for why.
Global HQs making judgement calls due to coordinated pressure campaign from their primary markets, against the due diligence of their local branch who has on the ground experience. Make your judgement call for why.
The “Broad Daylight” is an academic research, which necessarily cites related work or previous work, including of Zenz.
This is how academic research works. Citing Zenz per se does not make the the “Broad Daylight” less credible.
If people are against Zenz, please judge the “Broad Daylight” report by ignoring all reference to and evidence provided by Zenz.
If you find specific flaws with “Broad Daylight”, please list them so that we can discuss.
Saying that it cites Zenz is just pointing out how academic research works, and does not invalidate the report.
> Bitterwinter or HKFP are also far from reliable, on par with Epochetimes bias.
Bitterwinter is not used as a news source here, just an Op-Ed, because all needed reporting are supported by other news sources such as SCMP.
HKFP is just reporting what Hugo Boss headquarter and its Chinese branch are doing, with links to sources. You can follow the links to judge for yourself [1], or find alternative sources reporting the same [2]: Hugo Boss Chinese branch is making unauthorized Weibo post contradicting the Hugo Boss global headquarter.
So the local branch does not represent the headquarter [2], just like BCI Shanghai does not represent BCI headquarter (as reported by SCMP).
>Citing Zenz per se does not make the the “Broad Daylight” less credible.
Broad Daylight presumes Zenz conclusion of coerced labour as basis for rest of supply chain analysis. It can only be judged in that context, which makes it, and any research that use Zenz as starting point, less credible.>Citing Zenz per se does not make the the “Broad Daylight” less credible.
On par =/= equal. HKFP better than epochetimes, but not by much. The bias of Bitterwinter/HKFP is presuming PRC branches are going off script when acting "two faced" that gets "disavowed" by HQ is the kind of face saving behavior that multinationals do to stay in good graces of east and west. What Intel is doing here. Publishers like HKFP and Bitterwinter bias is characterizing typical corporate doublespeak as unique Chinese misbehavior.
If you break the HN guidelines this badly again we will ban you. They explicitly ask you not to post like this, for deep, clear, and long-established reasons (which can be summed up like this: well over 99.9% of internet complaints about astroturfing and shillage are demonstrably unfounded, and also full of poison that we don't want here).
So 99.9% of the internet is manipulating the minds of everyone on the internet. Some of those people come to HN and post/upvote/downvote, and as a result of their lives outside of HN, they regurgitate slightly filtered PR as opinions or facts on HN.
I guess what I'm asking is, how do you guys deal with second hand shilling and PR?
Sorry for the delay. If you're asking how we deal with users who aren't consciously shilling but are regurgitating the effects of somebody else doing that, the answer is that there's no way to distinguish that case from the normal general case of people having strong opinions and/or being wrong about things—which is the default on the internet. All we can do is fall back on the general rules of the site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That means answering bad arguments with better arguments, and incorrect information with correct information, while remaining patient and respectful with each other, and seeking points to agree about as well as disagree [1].
When feelings are running high, of course, it can often be too hard to do that. In that case, there's a plan B: chalk it up to someone being wrong on the internet, let go, and walk away. When hot under the collar, wait to cool down before posting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). The internet is mostly wrong about most things anyhow.
People sometimes object to this answer: isn't that just giving in to manipulation, or at least the effects of manipulation? There's a thought experiment that I find helpful here: imagine a Sufficiently Smart Manipulator (SSM) who is disingenuous and totally sinister, but also clever enough to reliably evade detection [2]. I think most people can agree that either SSMs already exist (and by definition, we're not clever enough to catch them), or soon will exist. So we're either facing this situation already, or had better get ready for it. What should we do in that case?
The answer is that we should do what we ought to be doing anyway: answering bad arguments with better ones, bad information with better information, etc., while remaining in good connection with each other. It's in the interest of SSMs to divide and polarize the community, and it's in the community's interest not to let that happen, and instead to pool our energies to figure out the truth together [3]. The answer to the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator is the sufficiently healthy community [4].
The value of the SSM thought experiment is that it directs attention away from the question of detecting manipulators, which is notoriously unreliable (people imagine all sorts of incredible fantasies about this, and the evidence nearly always points the other way [4, 5]), and toward the question of what positive things we can do to build up a sort of immune system. There's no way to know whether it will work, but in the long run, and maybe the short run too, I don't see what other option we have.
[1] The reason for that last bit is that it introduces a human, relational element into the argument, which makes it much easier for people to do curious, reflective conversation instead of reacting reflexively and hardening into battle mode (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679).
>[FooBarWidget is] a CCP apologist par excellence, so you shamelessly referencing propagandists is not as surreal as initially perceived, just some casual undercover shilling.
>well over 99.9% of internet complaints about astroturfing and shillage are demonstrably unfounded, and also full of poison that we don't want here).
Perhaps I need to remind you that astroturfing and shilling mean being paid to say certain things. Why would I accept such payments when I already have a well-paid career? My HN profile is 14 years old, and you can see that before 2020 I basically never posted anything about China. Posting about China is just a hobby, man. I have a day job as a software developer.
There is a reason why I post these things on my public handle: to make the point that I'm not just a random bot. Unlike some other people, who post anonymously out of fear of being socially ostricized, and who have been wrongly called "bots" or "shills" merely for having a different opinion, I choose not to be afraid and not to be silenced.
You should just accept that my opinions are my own, are genuine, and are independently constructed without anyone instructing me. And that merely having a different opinion than the one you want to accept, doesn't make that person a shill.
Sorry for the delay. You were quite wrong about that, and what's worse, wrong about it in a poisonous way (I'm sure unintentionally). The evidence points decisively to that account being a person of Chinese background who simply has different views than you do. It's natural for people of different backgrounds to have different views. If you can't stretch to accommodate that, and instead need to apply labels like 'astroturfer' or 'shill' in order to explain the presence of views so different from your own, the effect of that is to exclude minority voices. (Keep in mind that on this topic, unlike most others, the HN demographic is overwhelmingly one-sided. Although this is a highly international community, the overwhelming majority is Western and comes from a Western perspective.) Another effect is to poison the ecosystem here. That's not in the interest of this community, so we don't allow users to do that.
On a topic like this one, the cumulative effect of such (unintentional) poison is literally to hound users off the site for ethnic/racial/nationalistic reasons [1]. That's definitely not the community any of us wants to have here. Yet it has happened here more than once. If you read through some of the links at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... you'll find the history. Here's one example of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358.
Also, I compiled this list of past moderation explanations a while ago for a different user who was worried about this stuff on HN. Perhaps it will be helpful to others who are worried: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod
FooBarWidget is definitely breaking the site guidelines by having posted almost nothing but arguments about China for the last couple of years. We don't allow that, for reasons I just explained elsewhere (and many times previously): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29717102. But that's a separate issue. Someone breaking the site guidelines in that way is not evidence of bad faith, let alone being a shill or foreign agent. It is far more likely to be evidence that they feel strongly about a topic for legitimate reasons, such as family background.
Hey dang, seriously are you completely delusional or are you so open minded that your brain fell out? That guy is following and retweeting actual paid propagandists for which is enough documented evidence out there and you're still preaching some completely out of touch nonsense, what the hell is wrong with you man?
You realized yourself that this guy is talking nonstop about china for the past years, did you bother to read for a second what this guy is actually regurgitating? They are certified CCP talking points white washing and justifying ethnic cleansing, are you that stuck up and confused to be blind to that?
You criticize people who call out dangerous and manipulative narratives, but protect those who are demonstrably and with certainty propagandists, citing guidelines which they are also clearly breaking to begin with.
Instead of copy pasting those guidelines try reading them yourself once in a while. You probably would even classify a holocaust denier as someone who has 'just strong opinions'. Go touch some grass Dang, this forum has completely melted your brain and spare people your self righteous stuck up babble.
You either have some severe conflict of interest in this discussion or extremely naive and out of touch or straight up evil. My bet is on all three.
You're underestimating the number of HN users with a Chinese background or some China connection (work, marriage, family, travel, study) whose experiences have led them to hold different views than you do. That's perfectly legitimate, and the idea that they must automatically be propaganda accounts is deeply inhumane. I don't want to work on a site where that sort of poison—including the poison in your comment—is considered ok.
My GP comment links to cases where users were abused and even hounded off this site by ethnic/national mob behaviors. Those users were innocent—the evidence for this was overwhelming. It was the mobs who were at fault. I think that's shameful. Like most HN users, I sympathize with underdogs, and seeing people get ganged up on gets my dander up. I'm confident that the vast majority of the community here would agree with me about that—at least when their own passions (and fears) aren't activated. None of us want to be that sort of community, but it can easily end up that way by default, so we need to take conscious care to avoid it.
I've asked FooBarWidget to stop posting exclusively in China-related arguments, because that's against the site guidelines in its own right, but that's hardly proof of, or even an iota of evidence for, the cloak-and-dagger fantasies that internet users love to sling at people in minority positions. Those accusations are against the HN guidelines for deep and good reasons. Therefore you can't post like this here, and I've banned the account.
One sign of how foolish these fantasies are is the certainty with which internet warriors declaim them. They never weigh evidence or consider other possibilities. It's always "demonstrably and with certainty"! What good fortune to be surrounded by enemies who are so evil, yet so dumb as to give themselves away at every turn. It's the best of all worlds: a chicken in every pot, a communist under every bed, and a spy (or three) in every internet thread.
What's poignant is that the users who get abused so dramatically in Western forums like this are often the very ones trying to defend and articulate the West to their communities back home—where they no doubt encounter similarly xenophobic feelings on the other side. They're in an impossible position. You don't have to agree with them, but you do have to drop the Boris and Natasha routine if you want to post to this forum. It is cartoonish and incurious, and would be silly if not for its malicious effects.
Just because people and outlets have a different opinion than you doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, or "propagandists". Some people just have a different opinion, out of their own free will and independent thought, all right?
Yes people can judge for themselves. Having said that, I believe I also have some say in how I think I should be judged, and that I am allowed to push back at others' attempts to put me in a box.
I am not "pro-CCP". I only look that way because western mainstream media is so full of anti-China propaganda that anyone who deviates from mainstream opinion look like pro-CCP.
(At this point, some will say "we are only against the CCP, not the Chinese people, and you are wrongly equating China with the CCP". I have written extensively in the past why such rethoric doesn't stand to scuritiny and merely covers up policies that will result in the real suffering of common Chinese people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29358557)
So no, I'm not a CCP supporter. What I am, is being tired of all the anti-China propaganda that's on the one hand merely biased and prejudiced misrepresentations, and on the other hand a deliberate manufacturing of consent for war. I am tired of my home being constantly misrepresented and villified.
You are right that nobody knows my situation. So I will hereby give you a sworn statement, i.e. you can hold me accountable for it in a court of law if you find me to be lying: my family is not held hostage by Chinese forces, nobody from China is threatening me and my family, and everything I say is entirely my own opinion based on my own independent research without anybody paying me to say these things.
You may not be a paid shill (I’m certainly not accusing you of it - that would be against the rules) but your behaviour is indeed curious for someone who is trying to not look like one.
For instance, why are you trying to get in touch with other HN’ers with a history of pro-China commentary?
Don’t be surprised that people are suspicious. And it’s not because of a difference of opinion - users here are very tolerant of that - it’s because of repeated behaviour (another example: avoiding answering difficult questions regarding the alleged sexual assault of Peng Shuai).
What ModernMech said. I think what that other often downvoted user said made a lot of sense and that he's wrongfully being downvoted, so I wanted to talk to him in private and share our experiences. There is nothing wrong with that.
Also, "users here are very tolerant of that" — I'm sorry, I have to disagree with that hugely. You say I'm "suspicious" because... I have repeated behavior of being suspicious? That's a circular reasoning.
Also, this "repeated behavior of being suspicious" actually means "repeatedly having a different opinion about China". How is that being tolerant again?
It is exactly because of this that many people don't dare to post alternative opinions about China on Hacker News -- for fear of being socially ostracized. By chance I happened to encounter a few people on Twitter who turn out to be one of those so-called "bots" on HN, and they told me they posted anonymously because they fear the shit that will land on them (downvotes, accusations, more) if they post with their main accounts.
There is nothing suspicious about not answering about a subtopic. I can say things when I want to and not say things when I want to as long as I don't break any rules. I also don't answer about Hunter Biden for example, and I don't have to.
I already said many times before why I have a different opinion and I post so often about it. I am Chinese and I am fed up with the lies, propaganda, villification and manufacturing of war consent. There is nothing suspicious about speaking up when you think there is something wrong in a community.
In fact, I assert that the only reason you think such behavior is suspicious is because you have been too influenced by anti-China propaganda. You and the mainstream media have such a warped view of China in your minds that any message that deviates from the mainstream view automatically looks preposterous or fake. But here I am, a westernized Chinese who posted nearly nothing about China for 20 years of my Internet history, suddenly posting about China after having witnessed on the ground in early 2020 how many lies the media told about China and COVID (and as it turns out, many other topics as well), and being shocked and enraged at that. With a non-westernized Chinese citizen you can still say "oh but he's being censored/forced/brainwashed". As a westernized Chinese I have free access to information on both sides and I understand the western viewpoint very well. As a software developer who has developed stuff that hundreds of thousands of sites around the world uses and who has helped numerous clients, I have demonstrated my ability to do independent research. If there is anybody qualified to have a legitimate opinion about this topic, it would be me. So maybe you should seriously consider the possibility that, no maybe I'm not suspicious, it's you that may be wrong and that I may be right, and that the truth is in fact so far from that what you believe that the truth looks suspicious even when it isn't.
>Also, "users here are very tolerant of that" — I'm sorry, I have to disagree with that hugely. You say I'm "suspicious" because... I have repeated behavior of being suspicious? That's a circular reasoning. Also, this "repeated behavior of being suspicious" actually means "repeatedly having a different opinion about China". How is that being tolerant again?
Let's stay on topic.
What's suspicious is that you repeatedly and vociferously commented about the topic (alleged rape by a CCP official) until you were challenged about omissions in your translation/interpretation. An interpretation which downplayed the allegation, blamed the victim and curiously... omitted key details.
Then suddenly, when pressed further, "There is nothing suspicious about not answering about a subtopic".
Right. Ok. There is nothing suspicious about engaging in commentary which supports the CCP's official position on Peng Shuai while refusing to even acknowledge the words she wrote. Sure.
The alleged assault is not a "sub-topic", it was the only topic. That's what the thread was about. I know it serves your purpose well to make this about anti-China propaganda (which I agree exists and is a problem). But I've not made a single comment about China outside of this specific topic. The rest of your commentary is merely a clumsy attempt at painting me as racist in order to distract from the true topic. Stop it.
As to my motivation. Like I already told you, I am close with several woman who are survivors of assault. I find your unwavering support of the CCP and their actions in this particular instance suspicious, particularly because you are Western. It should be a no-brainer to condemn what happened here. It's plain as day what the CCP is doing.
Stop painting our disagreement as "differing opinions on China". That's FUD. What we have is differing opinions on the rights of women.
Skechers is a good example. They conducted multiple inspections and found no forced labor, so they maintained business dealings with Chinese suppliers.
Why would I ever import from a supplier whose only positive is price, if I have to go to extra effort and expense - making them no longer competitive in any respect?
Posting like this is a bannable offense on HN. You can't attack another user like this, no matter how strongly you disagree with them. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739415 for a longer explanation.
Seeing this reminds me of a link I posted recently. This youtube video features investigation into supposed concentration camps in Xinjiang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI8bJO-to8I
I'm posting it again because it seems like the kind of video that needs to be seen.
The point of that video seems to be to dox the person who filmed the other video, probably with the intention of making his life a lot harder and less safe. That's really creepy.
I think it warrants inclusion, he was clearly speaking on behalf of his 'brand' and ought to be considered in the same company as other commercial entities. Or you could construe it as an apology on behalf of whatever movie studio he was working with at the time.
I would bet 100% of Western publicly traded companies that sell in China have issued apologies not to lose any revenue and mindshare from the Chinese market.
To me this sounds like a normal corporate non-apology. If I read the article correctly, Intel's policy to not allow suppliers to source from Xinjiang still stands, forced by Western regulation. They are just apologizing that the policy caused offence. I would prefer if Intel would outright condemn Chinese behavior in Xinjiang, but this particular event doesn't outrage me much.
A corporate non-apology posted exclusively in the affected country, no less. I don’t know whether it’s even right to say that Intel the global company made the statement; the people running their Weibo account are presumably in China and might not have had an option.
What do you think the "figuratively" part of the statement means? I presumed it to mean exactly what you suggested. In my mind anyway - a figuratively spineless corporation is a corporations where executives and others are the spineless ones.
Please enlighten me on what a figuratively spineless corporation is, if it is not that.
Spineless corporations Reminds me of title of TV series about Mafia : La piovra
"An epic crime saga of power, money, violence and corruption. the mafia controls everything through local and international networks like an octopus, anyone who tries to bring them down pays the ultimate price."
> "Intel (INTC.O) recently published what it described as an annual letter to suppliers, dated December, that it had been 'required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labour or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region', following restrictions imposed by 'multiple governments'."
As policies go, that one seems kind of clumsy. Assuming for the sake of argument that Uighurs are being used for forced labor in China (which I'm inclined to believe), then isn't "workers in Xinjiang region are forced labor, workers outside of Xinjiang are not" a bit of an oversimplification? Presumably there is also non-forced labor happening in Xinjiang, and probably some amount of forced labor happening outside Xinjiang.
I suppose sometimes simple heuristics can work well enough to get the job done and more complicated supply chain audits might be too hard. (One obvious alternative is to just stop trading with China at all, but that's a policy that's unlikely to be enacted by the U.S. or other large nations for equally obvious reasons.)
> isn't "workers in Xinjiang region are forced labor, workers outside of Xinjiang are not" a bit of an oversimplification?
Not if you knew there was no forced labor in that region at all, and this was all just atrocity propaganda to turn opinion against China. If it's difficult for western corporations to avoid suppliers who depend on suppliers (and so on) who have factories in Xinjiang, then there will be constant stories like this which puts this ridiculous allegation back in the news and social media so we can have our two-minutes hate against the evil empire that's ~~challenging our imperialistic grip on the world~~ ""committing genocide"".
Actually doing the supply chain management work on the ground to find individual suppliers using forced labor and getting them to change their practices is too much for a small company like Intel, I suppose.
China has got a massive consumer market, an unmatched manufacturing ecosystem with zero labor disputes among other things, minerals, arguably the most stable (in terms of violence, unrest, strikes, etc.) regions in the world, and more.
They have got anyone by their balls who remotely wants to sell anything in China.
John Cena (famous wrestler, entertainer) recently apologized to Chinese people after calling Taiwan a country [0].
The companies and people who never go beyond their own selfish self-interests, will keep kowtowing to China (and KSA as well).
I don't judge this. I possibly would do the same. But I am not a hypocrite.
Apple used Chinese slave labor [1], Cook agreed to work with Chinese propaganda arm [2], but fired a techie for writing a satire [3].
All actors and actresses (who says nothing against China, where two or three decades ago, the whole of Hollywood was very pro-Tibet) preach freedom, self-empowerment or whatever woke thing is hot in that year, and yet choose regularly to censor and/or change content based on China's demand [4].
Intel is doing nothing new, and we will see this trend continue at least for a while now.
Surprisingly, there are a lot of strikes, labour issues, and general unrest in China.
Instead of thinking about it like a 'Orwellian State' - think of it more like an Orwellian State that could go 'off' at anytime.
Note that citizens are concerned about their prosperity - as long as growth is happening and money comes in - they are content.
But they are also ultra nationalist and ultra ethnocentric to the point where it's quite easy for the CCP or leadership to simply blame 'Western Imperialism / Chauvinism' for any perceived slight against China including legitimate concerns.
There will not be any protests in China about Hong Kong or forced labour. It will be about corruption, property rights, jobs etc..
I have a sinking feeling that something horrible is going to hit China in, say, the next two-three decades. Not sure whether it'll be a cultural shift, economic collapse, but I think the way they're structured once it starts to falter it's going to explode in a really unpleasant way. Like exceeding Mao-level deaths.
The West is messier, in a lot of ways, but I think they're more fault-tolerant.
> Surprisingly, there are a lot of strikes, labour issues, and general unrest in China.
It only surprises people if they consider China as one of:
* A harmonious socialist utopia, or
* A totalitarian dystopia
unfortunately, the US government and mainstream news media are trying to paint China as the latter of the two.
----
Also, irrespective of the extent of nationalism in China, western or US imperialism is a thing. Before the 20th century it was literal empires with physical conquest, and these days it is a combination of economic influence and military interventions. Of course it also serves as a convenient excuse and distraction...
Imperialism is different than Nationalism and nobody is exempt from it.
But China is like the West in the 1930s with the level of direct control of communications and propaganda, not allowing alternative narratives to form.
Wtf, so the Uyghur movement in the US is basically right wing, pro gun, pro trump organization? Also seems to be aligning with some qanon islamophobes as well. The irony.
We've banned this account for repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines. Seriously not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Perhaps Reuters is glossing over the way in which Intel's letter phrased things, but it certainly sounds as if they were utterly clueless about the subject being politically sensitive. Vs. (say) "Per U.S. law [exact, legalistic citation], signed into law on [date] by [President], Intel is legally forced to require that [dull, narrow, legalistic description of requirement, free of any hot-buttons]." Placed amid similar citations of other new laws - some of them Chinese - which affect Intel's supply chain.
Arguments about whether or not the third rail should carry 10,000 volts can be made all day. But corporate management that gets electrocuted because they were simply oblivious needs to be replaced.
I really don't understand China, but China also don't care to understand the west one bit. China has zero cultural understand about anything beyond its borders and basically only survives on other cultures being either extremely flexible or completely dependent on China for manufacturing (or both).
We're basically just waiting for companies to pull manufacturing from China, because they can deal with the backlash at home for ever, or some western leader to snap and just tell China to "Go kill whoever you need to get rid of so we can move on".
> China also don't care to understand the west one bit. China has zero cultural understand about anything beyond its borders
Well, consider how many people in China have learned English, can read articles / online discussions in English, or have traveled to the west. Contrast that to the number of westerners who can read Chinese or have been to China.
China surely understands the west a lot better than the other way around. It just disagrees and has its own interests to look after.
It's really not about "China". It's all about CCP.
It's also not the CCP doesn't care. The CCP does care about its international image. But it's making choice between domestic control and international image. It's obvious to CCP right now that the world is heavily rely on China's market and manufacturing power. So the CCP can use it to suppress any backlash, and do terrible things domestically. The whole HK affair has firmly proved that the western world can't do anything to it. Invading Taiwan is definitely in its calculation.
It's not about culture. China has been interacting with the rest of the world for millennia. It's about mindset. It's about them not willing to let go of their chauvinistic imperial outlook they impart on themselves and to the world.
Nationalistic flamewar is not allowed on HN and posting this sort of nationalistic denunciation is not ok, regardless of which country you have a problem with.
The parent isn't ok either. I probably could, and maybe should, have posted the same scolding there. Your phrasing seemed marginally worse to me.
Re "fact": it's of course good to be talking about facts as opposed to fantasies, but it's not sufficient for good discussion here. There are many other variables, including (1) which facts people select to talk about (there are infinitely many, after all), and (2) how they talk about them. Those things are choices, not facts. Past explanations here if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If you allow me to throw in an idea, and please correct me if you see fit.
In earlier times the Confucian pacifist ways of China were not up to the aggression of Western Europe, the US and Japan. In more recent times they learned to deal better with these foreign powers. The last thing they want is to give up their autonomy and culture and get run over by all these well meaning politicians that are very much after power anyway.
The moslim communities might be seen as a threat to Chinese conformity since they often hold very tight their moslim culture. The same thing might be happening around Falun Dafa. I don't really know how it started, but where we are now, they might be seen as a threat as well, since they are now quite aggressive in their wordings towards the Chinese government.
Don’t let the propaganda fool you — like any other empire, China has never been “pacifist,” whether we’re talking about the PRC that established itself through a long and brutal civil war, or the Qing dynasty and its endless internal and external military conflicts.
The modern mainland state has been very clear — all the more so since the 3rd and 4th plenums under Xi — that every aspect of the Chinese sociopolitical superstructure is there to ensure the Party remains paramount. In today’s China, 法治 means not that law rules the Party, but that the Party rules by law.
In their syllogism, any threat to Party leadership is a threat to the Party; any threat to the Party is a threat to its ability to legitimize itself to the people of China; any threat to their legitimation is a threat to the nation. Therefore, any attack on Party leadership or actions is, to them, existential. (I say this the same week the Tiananmen Square “pillar of shame” memorial came down in Hong Kong.)
Thus, the big lie they’re promulgating is that Intel et al. are disparaging the nation or government of China, rather than the Communist Party, because the theoretical basis of the state admits no light between them. Anyone doing business on the mainland needs to understand that they will have to subordinate every interest and goal they have to whatever the Party considers important — hence the “we apologize for pointing out that slave labor is not popular” walkback.
> In earlier times the Confucian pacifist ways of China
Imperial China was not pacifist. A basic model of Chinese history, which IIRC came from scholars in imperial China, was that China repeated a three stage cycle (from memory, the terms won't be exactly right): ascension (of a new dyansty) and prosperity -> decline and corruption -> chaos (and war) -> ascenscion ....
China's borders reguarly changed through force. Look up historical maps, for example. However, China had no peers in size and wealth nearby, and therefore didn't fight existential wars.
I'm not sure Confucian philosophy is pacifist, regardless.
> China were not up to the aggression of Western Europe, the US and Japan
They were not up to the technological advantages of the industrial revolution, and took a long time to recognize it and to change. In the early-ish 19th century, the Qing emporer wrote a famous letter to the king of England saying that China did not need their trinkets (industrial revolution technology) that the subordinate king (I forget how that was implied or expressed) offered, apparently not realizing the severe disadvantage. Even after the subsequent brutal, imperialistic attack on China, seizure of ports, and forced trade, the Chinese emporers tried to minimize change, IIRC first trying to just buy military tech without the infrastructure of knowledge, training, skills, etc.
Even today, the CCP seems to think it will have a wealthy capitalist country without a free market (which itself requires freedom and free thinking).
That makes perfect sense to me. What China fails to understand is that this approach have it’s own problem, in respect to their role in the world. It protects China and it’s culture, but makes it impossible for western nations to depend on the country.
Posting this sort of hellish flamewar comment to HN will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, and regardless of which country you have a problem with.
The US has never supported the CCP. The US supported trade with China the country and with the people of China, and also their freedom and rights. The trade also benefitted the CCP.
It's long been believed, and many times it's happened, that as countries grow middle classes they become democratic and free (Taiwan, South Korea, etc.). So far the CCP has forstalled that, but despite the trend in disparaging democracy (also in democracies, bizarrely), there's a long history showing that it wasn't a crazy idea and, despite recent setbacks, hardly impossible.
I wonder if they would use the same dehumanizing terms back at us? What makes you want to refer to humans as "beasts", and why use the term "beast" in the first place? Do wild animals frighten you?
We can start by not buying anything Made In China as much as possible, however I fail to ever see that happening, as most are quick to forget their morals when it hits their wallets.
It's also become increasingly difficult, and in some cases nigh impossible, to avoid items from China.
I'm older and don't need a lot beyond the food and shelter I work for, I have plenty of "stuff".
But buying clothing, gifts, electronics, well, the list is long and I won't try to cover everything here, that doesn't have at least part of it's assembly provided by China is not easy to avoid. It's not just people's wallets, it's time, it's lack of knowledge and one's ability to figure out how to get what they need without involving China in the acquisition.
I agree with you, but let's not pretend that we don't stop "buying from China" because we're all too lazy and greedy to do so. We could use some legislative and corporate support and I think a lot more people would get on board.
> It's also become increasingly difficult, and in some cases nigh impossible, to avoid items from China.
I have the opposite experience. I find it's becoming increasingly easy. I'm finding myself surprised that most things aren't made in china. So far the only thing I haven't been able to get was a waffle maker -- I can do without! Or I should just actually get a $300 waffle maker instead of something stupid that will probably break after a few runs
The hardest to find was a power drill.
I suspect that much of this is labor costs in china going up and manufacturing moving to India, Pakistan, Thailand, vietnam
Also -- I don't buy much from Amazon anymore, so this is going to b&m establishments
I picked up USA made waffle iron from C. Palmer Manufacturing. It's super basic and almost 2-3x more expensive than the first few results on Amazon, but it's great! (https://cpalmermfg.com/waffle-irons.html) Hope that helps with your waffle making.
At first I suspected made in USA could mean assembled in USA from Chinese castings and other parts. But man is it so freaking satisfying to see at the top of the page next to "About us" is a link to their tool and die shop. They're a freaking casting shop that decided to make waffle makers. Fantastic.
Some random niche waffle iron company just saw a spike in online sales. They have got to be wondering what just happened. You’ve been “hacker news hugged” would probably just confuse them.
"Made in USA" is often code for "made with prison labor". Louisiana is said to make a point of incarcerating particularly black citizens on made-up charges and excessive sentencing to maintain a ready prison labor pool.
So, it is probably important to verify that such products are not from prison labor.
China has is rightly criticized for unjustified incarceration, particularly in Xinjiang, but the US incarcerates many more on largely similar pretexts, which amounts to a much larger fraction of its population. Reducing US incarceration rate is a moral imperative.
They do a very great deal more than that. Places with strong unions restrict what they do just so they don't compete with union labor. But that leaves enormous leeway, which is reliably exploited.
Many private prisons have contracts with states guaranteeing them a quota of prisoners, on pain of monetary penalties. It becomes the job of police and courts to deliver that quota, regardless of behavior, because there is no money budgeted for penalties.
Everybody can be found guilty of something, if you want to.
Even if something doesn't say "Made in China", the chances are that many or most of it's components were made in China.
You have a bit better chances if you instead whitelist countries with stricter rules of origin (for example, Made in USA requires 50% of the components to be made here) but even then much of the supply chain for that item will probably trace back to China.
> but even then much of the supply chain for that item will probably trace back to China.
You're still doing one stage better; but also you'd be surprised how much of that supply chain doesn't come from china, especially now, with supply chain issues and manufacturers using it as opportunity to re-tool their sourcing.
Depending on where you live and what you like....DeWalt and high end Craftsman make drills in the USA. Makita makes some in Japan. I believe Bosch does some in Germany, but don't quote me on that.
I suspect in the next few years that will be less of an issue. There are companies currently ramping up in Japan, Germany and the UK that are making 3D printed solid state batteries that will be lighter, higher capacity, higher C rating than the current batteries. The tech exists, is safety certified but not yet in mass production.
Fairphone have an analysis on their complete supply chain, of every component. Lots come from China, but more interesting: components of components have a source too, raw materials too, as does travel.
An example of the latter, Fairphone used trains to move the assembled smartphones to EU. Those trains moved from China through Russia, dven during and after Crimea conflict and MH17 disaster.
Its a shame I don't have a link handy to their supply chain infographic. It is so detailed, includes all corporations and locations, that it would warrant a HN submission within its own. OTOH, they yet have to make it for their recent product, FP4.
On a positive note, most modern electronics have a bunch of "bent metal", screws, and memory + microprocessors. The first two are very low value and frequently produced directly in China. The last two are high value and most frequently produced in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, and various parts of Europe. When you look at the "value added" by assembly of an iPhone in China, it is astonishingly low. The vast majority of value (for hardware) is added outside of China.
Chinese companies also make low-middle-end microcontrollers (gigadevice etc.), passive components, switches and connectors (clones of Japanese designs mostly) that are much lower cost and 'ok'. There's also PCB manufacturing and stuffing, tooling, injection molding (using Chinese or German machines), final assembly. For things like Bluetooth speakers, it's all local.. a wifi router might me be all local appart from the SOC.. iPhones yeah different story.
For electronics in general and CPUs in particular, "Made in China" is becoming the Clipper Chip for the 2010's/2020's. So yeah, this thing with intel is very disturbing. They're paying for the rope that'll be used to hang all of us with this.
It is hard if you want to say "Buy American" or something like that
But I find it easy to avoid chinese products, for example I just recently was in the market for some cookware, I thought my choices were expensive American made pans, or cheap China, but in reality I found some very good cookware coming out of South America for very good price
Hence why I took care to hint as much as possible, definitely there are goods impossible to get elsewhere, others are relatively easy to find if one cares enough.
there is an app where you can scan beauty products and it will tell you what is in them, it gives you warnings about dangerous chemicals in certain products. it's called think dirty. there is another app for food that does the same thing called yuka.
i wonder if there is an app where it will tell you the origin of a product or a rating on the company based on ethics. like ethically sourced rating or something along those lines.
I agree that legislative and corporate support would be helpful, however in my experience the only pretending is that more than a small number of people care. Look at your own post - on the one hand, you would be financially supporting genocide, on the other hand you want to buy gifts. That this is even a question is sign of where things really stand and I think you are putting more effort into it than most people. See also how many people aren't willing to take minor precautions to avoid killing their own family members.
Yep, who needs foreign policy when we can buy different sneakers? Clearly shaming consumer habits will scale better. If we just all act without self-interest, there is really no problem!
> as most are quick to forget their morals when it hits their wallets.
I realized the other day that if I saw a tray of "Made in China" utensils and a comparable tray of "Made in Africa/Europe/USA" utensils of roughly the same quality I'd happily pay a dollar or two extra, no questions asked for the ones that doesn't originate in China these days.
I ended up not buying it at all since there was no alternative that was not made in China and I really wasn't in the mood for buying anything Chinese after their recent bullying of Lithuania.
I am in the mood for buying something from Lithuania though, almost to the point of ordering a bag of fresh Lithuanian air for about $10 or $20 bucks just for the point of it if someone offers it.
It seems that pure Lithuanian air cans are all sold out. As an alternative, you can buy Lithuanian cow dung in a can here: https://dovanusalis.lt/lietuviskas-karvutes-sudas-skardineje I couldn't see an English translation of the website, so you have to translate things or guess a little to navigate there.
I guess customs aren't too happy to allow cow dung across the borders, but otherwise this is brilliant: at the moment I want to buy Lithuanian cow dung more than buying anything from China :-)
This is mostly the fault of big box retail stores sourcing most of their merchandise in China. It will take consumers totally boycotting Chinese merchandise in order for them to stop ordering more stuff from China.
In modern day, American companies have more to gain in China than they have to lose in the USA. The market they are chasing is 3 times larger than the US and the only "regulation" in sight is basically bribing local government.
Don't be surprised if the companies you boycott simply move operations to China and cut ties with the US.
China devalues its domestic currency on purpose so that oligarchs use the stronger American dollar as a vehicle. Once the companies move to China they can strengthen their domestic currency, shed the dollar, and then Americans will be making Ipads in factories with suicide nets and China will be sipping Starbucks wearing inexpensive "Made in USA" Apple watches
This is completely ignoring the fact that China doesn't want foreign companies operating inside their borders unless they form a joint venture with a local Chinese owned company that owns >50%.
China is also an authoritarian regime that does not care about laws if a company doesn't play ball. They will just be shut down. This doesn't sound like a good market to put all your trust into.
3x larger in people is not 3x larger in wealth. I think US and China are comparable in that regard. And I dont know if the opportunity going forward is so incredible given China's debt levels and impending population bust.
China is in debt because the government wants to be in debt. They have to be to have population control. If there were no debt their population would have already busted.
The oligarchs who rule China don't use Chinese currency. So they are not impacted by debt levels. China also doesn't promote their currency internationally as a means of keeping domestic purchasing power low.
If you threaten China they will reverse these decisions and actually try to compete for quality of life. That's where western civilization as we know it ends. That's where the American empire falls and the Chinese empire rises.
> If you threaten China they will reverse these decisions and actually try to compete for quality of life
This would require political revolution. The system is set up and dependent on a complex net of patronage among the elites. Competing for quality of life would mean taking their chips. People don't like it when you take their chips.
This might have been possible to do peacefully before Xi. But he's shown the cost of the competition is high. If you come in second place, you don't get another shot in five or ten years. You lose the chance of a lifetime, and will likely see yourself and your family persecuted by the state.
I wouldn't say people forget as a lot of people don't have the extra capital to shop for soy vegan lates every morning for breakfast. These decisions are firmly in the realm of the political economics.
Either cut off the product supply through embargoes or taxes or build a competing supply chain...
> and basically only survives on other cultures being either extremely flexible or completely dependent on China for manufacturing (or both).
yeah, china only exist since 1940, it's a known fact ;)
> We're basically just waiting for companies to pull manufacturing from China, because they can deal with the backlash at home for ever, or some western leader to snap and just tell China to "Go kill whoever you need to get rid of so we can move on".
the west is just waiting to make more profit from its own people, if that means building their factory in china and destroying jobs, families and lives, they'll do it
in the meantime China is already on the far side of the moon and is about to land on the moon with its bases
--
if we want to improve our society, we must stop being blind and repeat what ever propaganda we hear in the west about China
China is doing exactly what we are doing, if you mad at china, be mad at yourself for building this society
China eradicated extreme poverty in its country, what the west did to its people? the US still doesn't have universal healthcare
between the 2 model of society, China's is looking more human and is willing to advance humankind more
i'd rather empower China than what ever the English block is trying to do ;)
This is one of those "damned if you, and damned if you don't" type situations.
I'm sure all they really want is to maintain their margins, which makes turning the other cheek to potential human rights abuses that much more sinister... but making a commitment to higher ethical standards risks putting them out of business (Intel has been poorly managed for years already), which would make this a futile effort.
If they were mining rare earths there I doubt this statement would have made it past the "hey this sounds good and makes us seem friendly" stage of marketing...
So Intel saying "forced labour bad, mkay" is bad. After facing ban saying 'is not how we feel about it". Really? Mhm, mkay. Not sure what is worse now. Getting WW2 IBM vibes now kind of. This is like calling for global boycott. Come on Intel, we know you can do better
I personally never understood the issues, is there any human right abuses in China? Sure.
Each citizens is free to vote with their money and boycott whoever they want.
But I am surely not gonna blindly follow the US on this. China is lying about human right issues, but they are right about the fact that it’s indeed an American tactics to hurt them economically.
Who in their right mind would follow the US on this? We all remember Guantanamo, the fake mass destruction weapons by Powell and the thousands of innocent civilians killed during an illegitimate war.
I am definitely not siding against China on this. They are lying, they are probably torturing innocent Uighur but if I had to apply the exact same logic, I would be boycotting US products and services as well (I don’t)
As a Chinese, I think the logic of certain Western countries is ridiculous. Because Xinjiang’s human rights situation is considered to be problematic, so Xinjiang’s companies are banned. As an analogy, can I think that the human rights situation of African Americans is terrible, so I need to ban companies that employ African Americans?
These bans will only make the living conditions of minorities worse, because they may lose their jobs because of the ban.
By the way, Uyghurs live and work in every province in China, especially in the catering industry. I have never heard complaints about forced labor. American propaganda makes me feel ridiculous, but it seems to be working.
> I have never heard complaints about forced labor.
So does this mean they don't exist?
> These bans will only make the living conditions of minorities worse, because they may lose their jobs because of the ban.
but they are slave labour, so whether they have a job or not doesn't really matter? or would you say thats not the case? If so they could move and get a job somewhere else?
Given GP never hears about forced labor, GP may want to express that the percentage of people who are being forced to labor is low, or nearly impossible. "sth doesn't exists" is somewhat extreme.
There's a huge gap on the opinions of Xinjiang between the Chinese side and the Western side. Don't put your words for Chinese side on HN because no one would vote for you and your comment will be eventually grayed out.
I can't recall seeing downvoted comments on HN that were defending China while making good points, with sound logic, avoiding whataboutism and crazy comparisons, and being respectful. The problem is that almost every pro-Chinese-policy comment that I've seen here violates one or more of those things.
In the specific case of the GP post, they're making a bad analogy in their first paragraph.
The situation of African Americans nowadays is nowhere near comparable.
The issue are the “jail looking” camps which are officially “education centers”. Forced labour happens there, which is basically slavery. Western companies don’t want to be associated with slavery. It’s hard enough when people are paid almost nothing, but here they are literally not paid and obliged to work. The living conditions of people in the camps won’t change regardless of what western companies do. Also mass sterilization occurs in these camps which is considered a genocide by many.
I know western media bias is a thing and that most Chinese people have no idea this is happening and are good people. But this is one of these things where there’s just way too much smoke for there to be no fire. There are too many testimonies and photos. As uncomfortable as it is, it is unfortunately true. This is not a western conspiracy.
When these allegations first appeared, I waited cautiously for evidence. Maybe something happened around me that I didn't know?
When the BBC interviewed Xinjiang but failed to find evidence, and then only used video filters to render fear, I questioned the authenticity of these allegations.
Later, the "evidence" displayed by the Western media had a lot of traces of forgery. After that, I didn't believe these allegations even more.
It's a pity that people who have been immersed in Western media propaganda for a long time have been implanted with a concept: China is bad. This makes any news that is bad for China seem to be true. Whoever says China is good is the CCP propagandist.
But people living in China know that Western media reports are very biased.
It's also an irony that people who have a slightest hint of saying China is not all good are easily regarded as traitors on the Chinese internet.
Also some people living in China know that Chinese media outlets (all state-run) might be far more biased.
But hey, I'm not playing whataboutism. It just seems so ironic to my Chinese eyes.
Did you live through the late 80s when Japan had a similar psychological hold on a lot of US companies and decision makers?
It may be somewhat entertaining, but it is not a good thing. That said, it will be very funny if China suffers the same sort of historical path that Japan did after the failure of the 5th gen and the bubble. Housing prices as a multiple of income are actually worse in Shanghai right now than they were at the peak of Japan, Inc.
> Intel, which has 10,000 employees in China, said in its apology that it "respected the sensitivity of the issue in China."
This reminds me of a recent British politics round-table interview, where a member of the ruling party told the world that we shouldn't call politicians liars - despite the current Prime Minister lying through his teeth at almost every opportunity simply because he can get away with it - because it would undermine people's faith in the political system that keeps lying to them.
It seems that saying the things that need to be said about the political systems that need to be called out is not as important as getting the money (or savings) that the countries attached to those political systems can generate.
Or, as a great man once sang:
For china (f'china x 4) is a country that can bring us to our knees.
Not sure there's a solution to this though. Power will always corrupt.
> a member of the ruling party told the world that we shouldn't call politicians liars - despite the current Prime Minister lying through his teeth at almost every opportunity simply because he can get away with it - because it would undermine people's faith in the political system that keeps lying to them.
I didn’t follow the event, but I have to agree with whoever said that. There’s nothing more toxic to democracy than people just saying “ah politicians are all liars anyway”. That’s exactly what post-truth politicians like Johnson, Trump and Putin want you to believe - it’s all a big joke anyway, so who cares?
What's toxic to democracy is politicians lying, and then telling us that p;ointing out their moments of hypocrisy is what's doing the real damage. Describing reality is never bad.
There's a world of difference between "This politician is lying to you." and "All politicians are lying to you." One is a statement against a single incident which can be refuted or supported by additional facts. The other is an unprovable blanket statement which begs the question of whether the government can be trusted.
The question "can government be trusted" is long answered with a resounding NO it can not
Government like fire is a useful servant, but a fearful master.
This is why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, and a federalist system in the US, because we understand government can never, and should never be trusted.
Government is control, government is fear, government is power. Power Corrupts, and the only way to prevent that corruption is to deny power, to check power, to distribute power.
Ironically I view giving democratic governments more power as abandoning the weak to the whims of the majority, which we have seen time and time again in history even recent history
Democracy after all is 2 wolves and lamb voting on what is for dinner, a constitutional republic backed by distributed governance is the lamb having rights to tell the majority to f' off
Politicians have been lying since the origin of politics. The modern press’ penchant for shouting liar every time a politician they don’t like speaks is juvenile and patronizing to the audience.
Why not both? The media is full of liars, yes - two words "Daily Mail" or "Fox News" if you are American.
Politics is also full of liars. Boris Johnson being a prime example.
I don't know what the solution is but I suspect it lies in removing egoism from the system. Something more like Switzerland's governing council rather than an individual leader that just attracts narcissistic individuals.
I think there's a difference between "all politicians are liars", and "several people currently in positions of power are repeated being untruthful with absolute impunity because of the system of politics that is enabling them to do so without consequences"
Which, now that I say it out loud, do sound very very similar.
But this feeling that they are all liars is not new.
In fact, at least with politicians they have a very easy "tell": You know when a politician is lying because their lips move.
(That joke has been around since before I was born, and I was born in the 80s.)
The difference isn't that the country thinks politicians are liars. That has not changed. The difference is that there has always been this "honour code" in politics, where if your sleaze was found out, you fell on your sword. But this was not ever backed up with any law with teeth, and so when the likes of Boris repeatedly lies, he can just throw another flunky under the bus to appease the crowds, or do something stupid to make the crowds laugh, and carry on as normal.
I don't think politics ever needed any outward credibility. It never had any. It needed external accountability. And without encouraging the media and the public to hold them to account when they do lie, we'll never get that accountability. In effect, the post-truth weakness you describe should never depend on public perception. In a well functioning government, repeated unrepentant deception should always trigger some form of legal jeopardy.
That's exactly the kind of easy cynicism that serves no-one.
Yes, everyone lies, politicians and non-politicians. "you're looking good", "our product already does this", "i was just about to do that", "it's our highest priority"... and in a job where you are constantly being asked to satisfy everyone, of course there are going to be fibs.
But there are relatively honest politicians and there are absolute sociopaths like Johnson, and it's important to differentiate the two
Part of the problem is good politicians are agents of compromise. When a culture ceases to be able to find compromise, a direction online echo chambers and social media are driving ours, then a politician who wins 90% in exchange for giving 10% comes back a liar. They said they were going to get 100%!
I think we should stop using China for cheap Labour in general given how hostile their government are becoming. Where possible I try to buy Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese electronics.
Don't many of these companies still do final assembly in China? Foxconn is notorious for it's labor practices in China, but is a Taiwanese company. How can someone separate Chinese assembly from the rest of the product?
I've actually had some time to ruminate on this and as ever I think Ray Dalio probably knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. This is an extremely worthwhile watch:
We can never go to war with each other and as such should continue trading and competing (maybe on fairer terms) to avoid such things - the destruction just from cyber warfare alone would be beyond insane.
Oh just because the government is hostile.
So if the government is "friendly" we can safely keep exploiting the workers?
That pretty much describes how the US is going.
That there is any controversy in this statement is insane, but I would be very wary of ever making this statement non-anonymously, because I know I'm more likely than not to be cancelled for it.
China has mastered the manipulation of the west's successor ideology better than those in the west that instituted it.
Edit: I had to ask you about this just recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555995). Continuing to abuse HN like this will end up getting you banned here, so please don't.
It can when materialistic quality is a factor in purchasing decisions. For example, I recently had to buy a new rice cooker and based on my prior experiences of owning both Japanese and Chinese brands; the former outlasted the latter by thirty years. Just because it was cheap and easily sourceable doesn't discount expected quality assurances.
I'm not saying this applies to all Chinese made products but something I keep in mind for all future purchases.
For one, chinese made Teslas are superior in quality to American ones. So looks like you are right, not every chinese product should be seen as inferior to japanese or even American.
Ancient Athens had ostracism [1]. It was against a single person and not against ideas but given that the numbers where smaller and heads carry ideas, it was more or less the same thing.
China is famously very accepting of all ideas and would never ban or ostracize members of its own society for perspectives that disagree with the majority's belief.
Cancel culture isn't that either. Cancel culture is a rebranding of 'shunning', which I bet predates humans as we know them. I bet our social monkey predecessors had such tactics figured out.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously here, and made it worse downthread. We ban accounts that do that repeatedly, and I'm dismayed to see that you've been doing it a lot.
The comments below mine just don't look like i "made" something worse, quite the opposite, the comments below mine are leaning more in that or the other direction, i am fine with that i don't see a problem here...but anyway...accepted.
Then you need to do a better job of moderating the bad comments in the first place. We're all trying to make HN a good and enjoyable place the best way we can, and you warn "both sides" like that helps anything.
You seem to have an unrealistic picture of what moderation can do, if you think we ought to be moderating all the bad comments in the first place. That's not remotely possible.
How so? Even if the intent of such programs might be positive, is there not a risk of them being used to limit, coerce, or change user behaviour? (it wouldn't be the first time)
Social credit is offensive and freedom-limiting by definition. You can't make any small-d-democratic argument in favor of a massive central social credit system because the two are antithetical.
A vaccine passport system could turn into something similar, but that's not necessarily a given. It's the slippery slope fallacy taken to the extreme - "because it's possible to imagine a situation in which a vaccine passport system goes way beyond its usefulness and becomes oppressive, that means vaccine passport systems are oppressive." In addition to that sentiment being wrong, HN also has a pretty violent knee-jerk reaction to anything that could even potentially be taken as anti-vax sentiment. As can be seen by this garbage[0].
Zero trolling here. I am modestly in favour of a COVID-19 vaccine "passport". And yes, I have considered the oppression side of the argument. Why am I modestly in favour? Look at how yellow fever vaccination status is handled. In areas of the world where it is still endemic, travelers are denied entry without a recent vaccination and an official UN/WHO card to prove it. (Please leave aside for a moment the idea that these cards can be fake. Assume they are accurate for this discussion.)
Almost by small-d-democratic definition, the yellow fever vaccine requirement is oppressive. However, it helps to reduce the spread of yellow fever.
I've never traveled anywhere yellow fever is endemic so I don't know a ton about it other than the vaccination requirements you mention.
I carry my vaccination card in my wallet so I'm not immediately opposed to some sort of verifiable way to confirm one's vaccination status. There are absolutely some instances where it makes sense to mandate it, but it's wrong to try to structure society so that you can't take part unless you're vaccinated. There's a point at which mandates and guidelines aren't helpful anymore and they become theater. I'm not going to put a mask on at the entrance to a restaurant, walk ten feet to a table, and take my mask off. That's theater.
I have unvaccinated family members. They're not changing their mind, I'm done trying to change it, but they're still in my family and they're not disowned or excommunicated because they happen to be wrong about something. Omicron seems as transmissible or slightly more-so, but much less deadly. That sounds like exactly what we thought multiple variants would lead to a year ago. It sounds like things are in the right track and we're on our way out of the forest, so to speak. But, government being government, I don't see mandates slowing or going away any time soon. I think what's here is here to stay, whether it works or not.
I'm not informed enough to comment on the virus or quality/efficacy/safety of any of the vaccines, but I am vaccinated, and have friends and family in both camps. All I know is that this is not a naive virus, I know about a dozen people who have had it, not everyone has survived, but everyone who has was genuinely afraid for their lives. That anecdotal evidence is enough to convince me to accept a vaccine/medication because I feel the risk/reward is favourable.
I can't bring myself to support mandated vaccination or making pariahs out of those who don't share my risk/reward considerations, however, because I think clawing back individual liberties that we give up is much harder than finding the compromises necessary to hold onto them in the first place.
I might be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time, but I would prefer compromise and tolerance to a knee-jerk reaction. There is already too much bad legislation born from "times of emergency" and such, no need to stoke the flames.
Thank you for your honest and balanced reply. I spent some time to think about it.
How do you feel about "anti-vaxxers" (a weird term by itself) refusing to get measles vaccines? (It is regularly quoted as one of the most infectious human viruses.) In the United States, some communities that have a high ratio of people whom refuse to vaccinate their children have seen outbreaks of measles. (Southern California!) It's a devastating disease for children who don't yet control their own destiny. Frequently, parents are themselves inoculated, but refuse the same vaccines for their own children.
I can understand and appreciate: For adults the decision for COVID-19 vaccine is a bit different. They are only controlling their own destiny.
> Social credit is offensive and freedom-limiting by definition.
Yes, I agree. I was defending this exact point. The commenter I replied to originally seemed upset about the original comment condemning vax passports.
To put a proof of vaccination on the same level as a social credit system is just beyond, if you don't have a passport you cannot travel into other country's, if your dog is not vaccinated against rabbis, he cannot travel to let's say Georgia.
I am upset because a Quanon goat thinks a vaxpass is the same as a social credit system, and was just made for that "ultimately"
There's a risk of a baseball bat being used to limit, coerce, and change people's behavior, and there are documented cases of them being used in that way, but nobody would say that the Louisville Slugger is crypto-authoritarianism.
Your statement isn't offensive and nobody is offended by it; it's just, as the comment above said, stupid. There's a difference.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You have a long history of doing this, even though I know you've also posted lots of good things.
Umm, with respect - it is the US anti-Chinese rhetoric that is changing, rather than Chinese government policy.
There are many repressive aspects to the Chinese regime (and government specifically I suppose); but this is probably less the case today then, say, 30 years ago. Certainly I doubt very much repression has been tightened over the past few years.
If I'm mistaken - please provide references, preferably to non-US-aligned media sources.
>If I'm mistaken - please provide references, preferably to non-US-aligned media sources.
Here's an official Chinese government source defending the use of labour/"re-education" camps in Xinjiang:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201903/19/WS5c9033f0a3106c65c... . In past the Chinese government didn't send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.
> In past the Chinese government didn't send large numbers of people to camps based on their ethnicity.
Before 2003 the Chinese government just randomly pull people off street and if they can't prove (i.e. by showing an ID card) they live in this city they go to a camp [1], and this happened everywhere.
and this is why I was making the point that such policies are not new.
That being said - the article you linked to really sends chills down one's spines, and just reading the Chinese government's self-justification for forced interment of people not convicted nor charged with any crime indeed serves to emphasize the repressive nature of this practice.
It has tightened e.g. in HK and significantly so. With these things it’s not a matter of averaging oppression to judge the level. If a specific group of people, geographic area, etc. are being targeted you don’t really judge based on how the rest are doing.
Do you actually believe there is some sort of repression in HK? Black people are more repressed in the US than anyone in HK… I just visited HK on a business trip (had to quarantine) and there were no signs of oppression or any sort of police brutality at all.
The final judgement at https://chinatribunal.com makes somber reading about forced organ harvesting from prisoners in China and its increase in the last 20 years.
Funny how people blindly trust a private company with no public mandate just because they called themselves a “Tribunal” and call their press releases “judgements”.
> Umm, with respect - it is the US anti-Chinese rhetoric that is changing, rather than Chinese government policy.
100% - but such a sentence also needs to come with a disclaimer explaining that it doesn't mean the CCP regime isn't guilty of killing millions of its own people over the years and that any ideology or technology they export needs to be viewed as such.
Well, OP didn't really complain about government policy or repression, but rather about hostility. Even if there are no repressive aspects (but I agree with other replies that they do exist!), the behaviour would still be problematic in itself.
And it's not just an US thing, btw. Many nations perceive dealing with China as walking on eggshells.
The burden is on the person making a claim, not on others to disprove it. Furthermore, "no US aligned media sources" is ad hominem. Objective facts don't become falsehoods because of who is saying them.
Since you've formed the opinion that Chinese government policy hasn't become more repressive, and that opinion is clearly educated, surely you have plenty of links to give us to back up your position.
Objective facts can become very hard to discern in a highly partisan environment though. That's the problem with how lots of US (and UK, etc) media works: there's obvious partisanship which can make it hard to extract the truth. Everything ends up as "the truth + highly political framing devices". There is no outside to observe from.
There’s obvious partisanship in uk and us media, but the difference vs totalitarian states like China, is that the partisanship is in a thousand different directions. So in the US or UK you have access to all agendas and can reason for yourself about what is true. If Fox says something untrue MSNBC will point it out, if the New York Times gets something wrong it’ll be all over OAN. If AOC lies about something you’ll have Lauren Boebert screaming about it. By having a free media it allows you to form the correct view by holding your views and others up to scrutiny.
In comparison, in China if the state media decides to lie for its partisan reasons then there is no where you can go to hear the truth so you never can distinguish the truth and we have a thousand different examples of that happening.
> If Fox says something untrue MSNBC will point it out, if the New York Times gets something wrong it’ll be all over OAN. If AOC lies about something you’ll have Lauren Boebert screaming about it.
And if all these media outlets say Russia/China/Iraq/Iran is evil at the same time, then it must be true, right?
Listen to the Sinica podcast. It covers China-related topics "without fear nor favor". You'll here politicians and experts talk about the increasing, and often baseless, hostility of Western media over the past 5 years.
To add to that - putting aside the present state of Sino-US relations, our prior beliefs should reflect what academic work on lying in politics tells us (1):
* lying in official diplomatic relationships between countries is rather rare
* within countries, democratic leaders are much more likely to lie to their population than autocrats
* countries with imperial ambitions and long-distance ventures lie more often than others
* within great powers, the depiction of the rival great powers is especially lie-ridden
In other words, for a person living in the US - it's likely that whatever US news sources tell you about China (or Russia) is mostly lies or exaggerations
Sure, I avoid both to some extent. What worries me the most though is smart people taking sides based on mostly propaganda and feeding an escalation of a situation already on the brink of a war.
I mean why choose between Chinese authoritarian regime and the US aggressive and destructive foreign policy?
But avoiding Chinese products doesn't necessarily mean taking a stand in a propaganda war. Is China using forced labor? If so, is that worth a response of some kind? These questions are orthogonal to whether the US is worth protesting for its own sins.
It is propagandist and borderline racist. There are factories in China with working conditions comparable or better then in the US. Remember the middle class is growing in China and diminishing in the US.
It is interesting that nobody discusses the psychology around bringing up the other sides perspective.
Why do these discussions tend to be so NOT nuanced or objective? Each side has a different view of the same events, different populations are fed different propaganda. Why are we seeing certain stories in the news and not others? Why at this time? Why the aggressive downvotes at the mention of other perspectives, with replies kind of shouting back and forth? Isn't there anything to be gained examining things from both sides? etc
There's too many discussions in the past that have gone bad. I mean, there are too many times when the subject is what China is doing in Xinjiang, and people bring up slavery or US militarism or whatever, not because they want to compare and contrast and learn, but because they want to distract from an honest discussion of what China is doing in Xinjiang.
And the exact same thing happens on the other side, for the same reasons. Try to talk about US militarism, and people bring up China and Xinjiang.
So when you're in a discussion about one side of that, and someone brings up the other side of that, the priors lean toward it being bad faith. Because there has been so much bad faith in the past, it's hard to believe that someone bringing it up now is doing so in good faith.
If you want to actually have that discussion, you almost certainly can't do it in a thread that started off talking about one side or the other. You'd have to begin in a neutral place. (I don't know if you can pull it off even there...)
Your downvotes are not because of propaganda. They are because your entire argument is whataboutism. When someone says X is bad and you respond with “but Y is also bad,” that’s not an argument—it’s off-topic and irrelevant.
Any time I want to show someone what whataboutism is, I send them to a China thread on HN or Reddit. It’s evidently one of the only tactics left in the “defend China” toolbox.
Please don't invoke canned arguments like "whataboutism" as flamewar ammunition on HN. It's a classic type of generic ideological tangent that the site guidelines ask to avoid. It's also bad logic, despite how often and how eagerly people repeat it.
Whataboutism has become the very thing it sought to avoid. You are the one who has now taken this off topic. The comment above me is not a direct response to the article, it is a response to a suggestion to boycott China. And my comment is a response to that comment, specifically about the fact that they are being downvoted.
You embody exactly that which Whataboutism seeks to overcome.
Flamewar comments like this are not ok on HN. Please don't take threads further into generic flamey hell—it's repetitive, predictable, and tedious. And definitely please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. That's seriously not cool.
Dozens of millions? You want to talk history? How many slaves were taken from Africa? How many Indians did Churcill starve? How many Native Americans died from colonialism?
You think you have a big number, but you don't even know the half of it.
Slaves taken from Africa seem to be about 12 million over the course of 400 years. Churchill apparently was responsible for about 1.5 million dying by famine, plus another 2-3 million by epidemics (this is dwarfed by the up to 73 million that died by famine in the 200 years of British rule that preceded Churchill). Native Americans who died by colonialism is harder to count, because of very poor estimates of how many people were around before 1492 -- estimates range from 15 million inhabitants to 145 million. Current estimates seem to be about 100 million dying as a result of both disease and intentional genocide over the course of 500 years.
Put all of those deaths together, and we'll say
So all that to say, a lot of people have died in the things you've named, coming out to a little under 1 million per year. So dozens of millions dying per year is still a staggeringly large number (though helped along by how many people lived in the 20th century, compared to earlier centuries -- I didn't compare using a percentage of the world population.)
Lots of people have narratives preset in their minds. Often supplied by the evening news. That applies to both the U.S. and China. So it's interesting to hear a different perspective, isn't it?
China is involved in no less than 18 different border disputes. Is encroaching on India territory. Bribed Solomon Island government to switch. Refuses to abide by the law of the seas. Is debt trapping nations in Africa and claiming they aren’t because they don’t directly take control of the projects and instead have Chinese businesses buy large portions of ports and natural resources. Abusing trade agreements. Threatening everyone under the sun. Lied about covid. Tried to cover it up. Spreading propaganda about how it started everywhere other than China. Holding Canada citizens hostage. Persecuting races and religions and ethic minorities. Destroying religious buildings under the guise of “illegal structures”. Building wind and solar farms on land stolen from farmers.
Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this a ton - in fact you may even be using HN primarily for nationalistic battle at this point. That's seriously not ok (regardless of which country you have a problem with) and we ban accounts that do it. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, I'd appreciate it.
As I seem to have already told you more than once, I don't want to ban you because you've been here for a long time and also made good contributions. But if you persist in not using the site as intended, we're going to end up having you. So would you please fix this?
I can’t win with you can I. Basically mentioning the word “China” is to get a reply from you claiming I’m stating a flame war.
I stop replying to certain people or to comments cos you keep warning me with stuff not mentioned in guidelines, and now you’re claiming I think my country is superior. Basically you just don’t want any discussion that might invoke a response.
I even avoid replying to tombh insulting me and I still get in trouble.
I guess I want you to ease up on the China comments. I realize you surely don't intend it that way, but your comments are coming across as those of someone with a fixed nationalistic agenda. You're far from the only one, but it's really destructive.
You are so out of your league here. Whilst you state facts, it is comical to imply that China can hold a candle to the West's atrocities. 18 different border disputes, 18!?? I mean how can you seriously think that's a big number? Just take the American continent itself. Honestly, think about it for a second, what if North America was inhabited by Mandarin-speakers from northern China and South America was inhabited by Cantonese-speakers from southern China? Of course with the occasional "Euro-towns" scattered around selling pizzas. It sounds like a dystopia doesn't it, so why was it ok for Europe to do that? Don't you see how blinded by propaganda you are?
You've broken the site guidelines egregiously here.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Not only does it take the community further into hell—just what we don't want, and good for nobody—but you actually discredit your own point of view when you post like this. If you happen to be advocating for the truth, or some aspect of it, that means discrediting the truth as well. This hurts everybody.
I know how difficult and frustrating it is to be advocating a minority/contrarian view whilst feeling surrounded by endless wrongness on the internet, but at least on HN, if you're going to wade into such swamps, you need to build capacity to do so thoughtfully, neutrally, without swipes, and so on. That's not easy, but we all need to work on it.
Railing and fulminating against wrongness (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661759) actually feeds the wrongness you're seeking to counter. You're gifting it with new feelings of validation and righteousness when you do that. This is not in your interest, and it's damaging to the community (such as it is) here.
Thank you for your thoughtful, even-handed and constructive reproval. You clearly took the time to read and digest my comments. I feel embarrassed for doubting my capacity for patience. I will strive to not let your good intentions and efforts go to waste.
Don’t you see that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind? Hey you know what, at least we can both criticize the West’s atrocities and not fear being disappeared by an authoritarian government.
In what way did George Floyd not disappear? Blackness isn't even an outspoken geopolitical position, yet significantly more African Americans have disappeared, whether literally, or effectively in prisons, than Chinese dissidents. I don't want to suggest your white and middle-class, but the world really is only politically safe for what is actually a global minority, namely the white middle class.
But it's way, way worse than that. At the most surface level there's Julian Assange, he's not even from the country that he'll be disappeared in. But deeper than his case are the cases that he actually highlighted, US war crimes. The US with formal support from Europe has had a decades long foreign policy of violently destroying communism (see the history of South America and South East Asia). Communism has its fair share of evil, but like it or not, it is a fundamentally valid criticism of the West's capitalism. 10s of millions of innocent well-meaning communist supporters have been killed whether directly or through Western support, by the West.
China is not good, but it's just not comparable in scale to the West's evils. Indeed I believe it shows a profound, albeit typical, ignorance of history to think that China is a comparable threat to the world.
You seem to be attacking Western governments assuming we want to defend them?
Our identity it's not tied to our governments, unlike you, we criticize them ALL the time. They do horrible things, but because a Western government has done horrible things doesn't mean China gets to do it too.
We are not attacking you as a Chinese citizen, we are attacking the governments who do wrong.
This comment chain is specifically about China's government's atrocities. If every time we criticized one government, we had to include all of them in the same post, that would be insane trying to list every single thing.
It seems you may think I'm Chinese? I'm actually 100% British.
I think something to bear in mind with the topic of comparing the West and China is that they aren't actually 2 independent entities that have now come of age, each imposing its unique stamp on the world. What China is today is fundamentally defined by European colonialism. Chinese culture is actually thousands of years older than European culture, and for the majority of human history was the most advanced, richest and successful, at least certainly in comparison to Europe pre and post the Romans. Now recall what Europe did to Native American, African and Australian cultures, which cover almost half the planet. China has something called The Century of Humiliation[1]. Those colonial forces that banished the Cherokee, the Inca, the Mbundu, the aborigines, to the pages of history, eventually arrived in China, and I think quite understandably China fought tooth and nail to avoid the same fate.
So when I criticise those in the West that criticise China, I'm not just trying to equalise the argument to include criticism of all governments. China is not just another evil empire. Modern China is specifically what happens when you have the desire, and more importantly means, to defend yourself against the forces of Western colonialism. China famously burnt its colonial fleet in the 15th Century[2], they are actually not a naturally colonial culture. A metaphor could be something like: when you punch so many people so hard, that most of them die, it's impossible for them to criticise your behaviour, because they're, well dead. So when one of them, after seeing all the dead people, and then getting punched themselves, manages to survive, and even starts to return punches in order to survive, those "fists" of criticism are an extremely understandable survival instinct.
Pointing the finger at China's "punches" is profoundly ironic, because not only have we thrown more punches, and caused more destruction, but we incited those punches.
Please don't post generic flamewar comments to HN, and certainly not generic nationalistic flamewar comments. It's against the site guidelines and everything we're trying for this forum to be.
No, I'm not defending genocide. I'm just trying to defend this forum from burning itself to a crisp. There are lots of other places on the internet to hurl platitudes at enemies.
It's not that simple. The news was on topic and it's possible to discuss it thoughtfully and substantively, so that's what users here need to do. The topic isn't an excuse for breaking the rules.
I don't mean to pick on you! this problem is obviously widespread.
sinocentrism is the belief in wich han culture is seen as superior and others need to assimilite or "go away". its a thousand old practice. most people seem compliacent with this view supported by the government. 92% of china is han and 56 minorities take the other 8%.
I disagree. They genuinely don't believe it is genocide. There's even international disagreement about the proper characterization of it. Most countries sufficiently propagandize their own citizens to inoculate them against the view that their own actions represent crimes against humanity, regardless of how they come to be viewed decades or centuries later.
I don't think the core of your idea is wrong though. The disturbing thing, to me, is that pro-China writers both in this thread and elsewhere think that disproving the charge of genocide (by linking to blogs or China's own view on the subject, mostly) they have cleared China of wrongdoing. It's obvious to me as someone with a modicum of moral intelligence that this is not really the case.
As an American, I am happy to admit that my understanding of the situation in Xinjiang is probably tainted by anti-China ideas being spread in my country. However, even if I take China entirely at its word about what it is doing, it's still quite obvious that this is horrifically bad and wrong. I would support boycotts entirely on the basis of China's own characterization of its actions.
That's really the sad, disturbing thing; people are supporting China by "showing" that Western media characterizations of the camps are inaccurate. I'm happy to admit they might be, but I believe it is a great moral failing to not denounce China's actions on its own terms.
What is uncontested: China is sending members (~1.3M per year) of a religious / ethnic minority (Uyghur) to internment camps for the purpose of preventing / deterring terrorism and to promote their social integration into China as a whole.
This is chilling to anyone who knows anything at all about the history of interning ethnic minorities. It was bad and wrong when the United States sent 125,000 Japanese people to live in camps during World War II. Anyone who protested or boycotted the United States for the purpose of ending that internment was, or would have been, justified. I am fully ready to apply the same standards to other countries, including my own, as I apply to China.
Likewise, whether it fully qualifies for the term "forced labor" or not, work done by people while imprisoned is inherently questionable and deserves heavy scrutiny. I believe that the conditions in prisons in the United States and the very-low-wage labor done by our prisoners are an abject moral horror, and it's important to turn the same critical eye to China's use of Uyghur labor.
Again, that's just looking at China's own view of it. The facts of the matter are likely to lie somewhere in between, which is even more concerning. It's hard not to see the shadow of some of the 20th century's fascistic horrors in China's discriminatory policies towards the Uyghur population, especially if anything in this piece turns out to be true: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...
The US incarcerates many, many more than China, as a much higher fraction of its population. Probably at least as many are on no better pretext, and are similarly exploited for prison labor.
Thus, a boycott-US movement would be (also!) justified, but better would be to check on practices and boycott specific companies that do not take particular care not to rely on prison labor in any country. That is more work, but supporting liberty everywhere is always going to be very hard work. However much, it is worth doing.
I type this posting on a phone. We are all almost as complicit as we can be.
In fact, there have been a great many Americans railroaded into prison for, essentially, being Muslim, for refusing to try to entice other Muslims to engage in attempts at domestic terrorism so that they can be imprisoned, just to burnish somebody's resume.
But mostly black people are railroaded into prison for being black. Do you imagine that is less bad?
A 'crime' is a legitimate pretext for putting someone in jail.
Being of a certain ethnicity is not a reason for putting someone in jail.
I can't believe I am reading this.
And your statements about 'putting Muslims in jail for being Muslim' and But mostly 'black people are railroaded into prison for being black' are completely false. People are put in jail for crimes, whereupon the justice system in some cases may not be fully equally applied and FYI if anything the Justice System is heavy in the US to the point whereupon supposedly privileged group face nearly equally excessive oversight from the system - which is altogether a different problem.
Your ability to believe is not salient. And, it is a fact that black people are overwhelmingly over-represented in the US prison population. It is not because they commit more crimes, but because black people are arrested more, convicted more, and sentenced more, for identically the same behavior as non-black people. If that is different from being incarcerated because they are black, the difference is too small for me to perceive.
You seem to be insisting that racism does not exist in the US. Noted.
I wonder how many people in China know facts about their country's labour camps and Xinjiang policies and still find that acceptable, not considering this a genocide.
China has a population control policy. They've exempted minorities from this policy for decades. That they are now enforcing their laws equally is not genocide.
>Intel joined other prominent U.S. companies Monday pledging to do more to address systemic racism in the wake of the killing of an African-American man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis.
>“Black lives matter. Period,” CEO Bob Swan wrote in a memo to employees Monday, embracing the rallying cry of contemporary civil rights activists. “While racism can look very different around the world, one thing that does not look different is that racism of any kind will not be tolerated here at Intel or in our communities.”
We've banned this account for repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
What is wrong with clavicat's comment? He is pointing out the hypocrisy of Intel claiming not to tolerate any form of racist. Genocide is by definition racist.
It is the same as when Western branches of various multinational corporations redesign their logos in rainbow colors for the Pride month, but their Middle Eastern branches do not ... offending Islam or the CCP comes with enough downsides to make them think twice.
I think the best default way how to view corporations is "perfectly immoral psychopathic beings always heeding the current Zeitgeist for maximum profit and cheap P.R. points among the class that locally matters".
I am happy to change my mind about some of them if they prove otherwise (e.g. by turning down a massive contract for ethical reasons, or standing up to a Twitter mob sicced on by influential people), but this is my default view in absence of other evidence.
The worse part, at least to me, is that that these shallow gestures presumably work, that somehow empty posturing on progressive-cause-du-jour actually does buy them goodwill in the western world.
It's either that, or this entire thing as a corporate strategy is run by some HR echo chamber with minimal forethought, and any downside is farmed out to external PR crisis management teams.
I'm starting to think it's the latter, given the amount of backpedalling and policy changes as of late (think google employee walkouts, publishers dealing with wrongthink books, netflix employees trying to scuttle the company's IP etc)
What you're seeing is a tiny peak of issues that pop into public consciousness essentially randomly, sometimes because you did a gesture and other times because you didn't do a gesture. Shallow gestures are common because, the vast majority of the time, the only response is some people saying "oh that's nice".
your going to have to clarify, there is no consensus to be found in your link:
* The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue
* Deluded or fake awareness.
* When you look at the simplest thing and call it racist because you want black people to be victims. Other minorities don't matter. - a black conservative
* "Wokeness" occurs when a white, upper-class person pretends to hold opinions they imagine a black lower-class person might hold
* To be asleep and uncritically accept whatever nonsense social science professors dream up to advance Marxist goals. As with most liberal speak the meaning of the word is the opposite of the word's standard meaning.
* "Being completely deranged, hysterical and seeing racism/oppression in virtually everything."
* being aware of the social. and political environments regarding all demographics and socio-economic standings.
You're wrong, there is a very strong consensus. The first few entries are highly up voted. Take the first 2 as a basic definition or idea of the concept and the 3rd one as an example.
am I? I don't think they are the same at all. I would take all the top" entires as entirely different on face value so what are you extrapolating from them that is similar?
can you please concisely describe "woke" for us as it seems I am not the only one who is confused as to the meaning.
Glad I could clear that up for you. Really the word is very common, my 60 year old friend used it the other day at her birthday. I've even seen the old dinosaur mainstream media corporations use it. It really isn't some outlandish word that's impossible to grasp.
Even if you were correct — and the Wikipedia page shows the pejorative uses becoming common are a fairly recent step of the euphemism treadmill — that doesn’t help resolve @pjc50’s request’s the term be defined in a way that allows someone to pattern match against Intel’s behaviour.
The comment @pjc50 replied to has been flagged, so I can’t be certain exactly what this is about, but the article is literally about a company responding to legal regulation which is itself ostensibly about a genocidal concentration camp.
None of that is either (1) pretension, (2) deluded or fake, (3), about specifically black people.
I am correct, and most people can deduct and extrapolate and draw from other experiences and observations and don't need everything spelt out for them to "pattern-match".
> don't need everything spelt out for them to "pattern-match".
At least three people you’re responding to here don’t see how Intel is being “woke” in any pejorative sense.
If I do as you suggest, deduct and extrapolate and draw from other experiences, I have two hypotheses:
1: you personally do not believe that there is a genocide occurring in these concentration camps with forced labour in them, and anyone who says there is, is just saying so for political points.
2: you personally think that forced labour in genocidal concentration camps is not a real crime, and anyone who says it is, is just saying so political points.
Do you perhaps want to suggest a way to apply “woke”, as the pejorative you insist it must be, in a way that makes you look better?
> At least three people you’re responding to here don’t see how Intel is being “woke” in any pejorative sense.
That's because they (claim to) not know what it means and are unwilling or incapable of finding out.
And your hypotheses are laughable. My hypotheses is that they are based on nothing but an infantile emotional reaction to somebody using the word woke, which is now well entrenched in common vernacular whether you like it or not.
EDIT: You can see the deleted comment if you change your settings.
> That's because they (claim to) not know what it means and are unwilling or incapable of finding out.
The definitions which you yourself have given, lead to my hypotheses.
The fact you are digging in, using insults like “infantile” when you’re being given the chance to supply an alternative, actually makes me think worse — I always prefer to assume good faith, and in this case good faith was to assume you didn’t realise what you look like to others. Hence showing you and asking you to do better.
All it would have taken to not lead to me thinking you’re using “woke” as an insult rather than an actual description would be for you to, y’know, not be snarky.
To communicate is to put thoughts into someone else's head. Those thoughts — and one of those options was that there isn’t a genocide — were what your words put into mine.
I want to think better of you than that, which is why I keep asking you to do better, even though from my point of you it’s you that is lashing out.
If someone misunderstands me as badly as you say I’ve misunderstood you, my general response is of the pattern “oh no that’s not what I meant, what I meant was…”, but I can’t fill that ellipsis in for you.
But if you don't care to, I'm not going to push it. My fursona isn't a sealion, if you get the reference.
Not buying products from forced labour concentration camps is generally not an issue of 'wokeness'.
Hypocritical wokeness (in the pejorative sense) would be Nike shifting from performance atheletes to SJ athletes like Kaeernick, who sadly has made a direct comparison between the NFL selection process and slave auction. And Nike of course sources shoes in Asia from factories with very suspect labour practices.
The US et. al. should absolutely ban anything coming from districts where people are making stuff from concentration camps.
If China were a small country, they'd never be able to get away with it, it's not a huge story because everyone is afraid of the consequences.
> If China were a small country, they'd never be able to get away with it, it's not a huge story because everyone is afraid of the consequences.
In Libya, refugees are carted off to "prisons" not much above concentration camps by the EU-financed "Libyan Cost Guard" [1][2], slavery and other forms of human trafficking are blooming across popular migration routes [3]. And no one gives a fuck, despite all of this happening literally in Europe's neighborhood.
Syria's Bashar al-Assad used barrel bombs [4] and chemical weapons [5] against his own population, and "thanks" to Russia protecting him, no one has (and likely, never will be) been prosecuted for these crimes.
No matter if you are a small or a big country, the lesson "never again" from the horrors of the NS dictatorship in Germany seem to have been forgotten entirely.
You're not wrong. But I think that's more a culture thing.
The media - not just traditional print media - is feeling increasingly fragile since the shift away from newspapers.
So while there's an appetite for it, news sites will cover any topic that needs covering. So, for example, the existence of Bolsonaro would have mostly gone under the radar had the septic spraytan not endorsed him, at which point the media felt it could start calling out the BS that was coming from there.
But it isn't just the slimy swampcleaner salesman, when antisemitism scandals that mention Israel erupt, that becomes an acceptable time to talk about their bad behaviour, under the guise of "these are the legitimate criticisms that this person is / could be raising". Do Israel stop being human rights abusers when antisemitism is not in the news? Of course not. But it isn't seen as newsworthy enough unless something local has piqued our interest.
When people are killed in racist attacks by american cops, BLM activism and systemic racism become part of the news cycle again. Does racism stop whenever there hasn't been a high-profile racist murder recently? Of course not. But without that hook, people looking to follow the story won't be clicking on every link.
And unlike traditional newspaper, where you could buy the thing just for the crossword and the advertisers will still pay, only the individual stories and individual page loads bring revenue. And so the media can no longer afford to finance investigative journalism that might not resonate with the public.
So I don't think it's that the rhetoric that has changed. News cycles are responding to what they think our attention span is, based on the numbers they see in the ad revenue. And in this specific instance, while China has had an uneasy relationships with the Uighurs since at least the 1950s, it's the secret and courtless detention and "reeducation" centres that have really got people riled up (shhh... don't mention Guantanamo) and that's only been happening since around 2017.
In the United States prisoners are required to participate in "work duties," which are defined as essential functions of the prison. For example you can be made to wash laundry because you are using bed sheets and clothing.
You cannot be forced into doing external work where the benefit of your labor falls to a private entity. Of course you can choose to do so and the primary benefit is not the wages (which are unfairly low in my opinion) but the "day for day" that reduces your sentence.
The wages are paltry yes, but as I understand it US prisons charge absurdly high rates for basic services such as phone calls and even individual emails, so there's a very coercive incentive on prisoners to work anyway.
That is just so far from true it is hard to understand why you believe it.
There are states that have such rules, and others (particularly in the South) that explicitly do not enforce any such rule. Often a rule exists but is meaningless; if they want to be able to have visitors, or to get outside to exercise, they are obliged to engage with outside labor.
Prison labour is the unfortunate exception to the Thirteenth Amendment that allowed effective slavery to continue. The whole system is corrupt. It allows prisons to pay prisoners peanuts (~25 cents/hour) and pocket the difference giving an economic incentive to incarceration and an unfair competitive advantage with people who can't choose not to work because doing so will generally extend their sentence.
But you know the difference?
I can say that without it being taken down by the government or some company acting on their behalf. I can say it without it hurting my "social credit score". I can say it without being "disappeared" and ending up in one of the sprawling "re-education" camps in Xianjing that are so prevalent you can track their massive growth on Google Maps.
There is clearly an organized effort to extinguish a people and culture here, just like it has been and is in Tibet. Given the history of this sort of thing, it's astounding to me how many will defend, deflect or deny this.
Every time a valid criticism of the CCP comes up some shill pops up and downvotes any criticism and/or leaves some "but what about X" lame justification. It's actually depressing.
Once you are already in prison it's hard to say whether you are forced to do it or not. It's not like you have a lot of employers and professions to choose from. And if the incentives include things like easier to get parole then refusing to participate would mean more time served. It'd be pretty hard to prove some labor is not "forced" in a prison setting.
> And if the incentives include things like easier to get parole then refusing to participate would mean more time served.
So what? That's just serving the original sentence. That doesn't sound forced to me. Is it forced labor when someone chooses to take a community service option instead of being locked up?
I don't pretend to be unaware of that. I think it's a separate problem.
Like, okay, we say that anyone improperly imprisoned is being forced into labor.
What about everyone else? The argument above was that it clearly is forced labor, even when your sentence is completely valid. I disagree with that.
> US citizens are not uniquely criminal, but US incarceration rate is by far highest in the world. You don't get there justly.
It's a mix of things. Even if you fixed all the bias in the system, you could still have a high incarceration rate with harsh but not inherently unjust laws.
Nobody has a legitimate reason to want a high incarceration rate.
The only reason to have a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the whole world is, specifically, because you want to have your underclass ready to hand for slave labor. Or, generally, to repress them.
If you are relying on threat of incarceration to discourage criminal behavior, having the highest such rate in the world is reliable evidence that your method is failing to achieve that aim. Other countries are demonstrating better methods you could learn from. If you wanted to, that is.
I never said anything about wanting a high incarceration rate.
There can be other reasons for harsh laws. Don't be so weirdly absolute. If a country does something wrong that doesn't mean it necessarily has the one specific motivation you're mad at and no other.
Also this has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make, which wasn't about the US specifically.
To restate it, just to be very clear: 1. find someone that was legitimately sentenced to a fair duration of prison 2. offering them the ability to labor to reduce their sentence is not forced labor
Or, as we actually do, just assume they were legitimately sentenced to what we just assume is a fair duration.
Letting somebody innocent out "early", even if we extracted undue labor from them, could be a net good. But the incentives are all in the wrong direction, and we see the effects writ large all around us. Making fine points about a theoretical situation of justice and legitimacy is a harmful distraction in present circumstances, where we demonstrably don't have those.
The violent gun murder rate in the US is 5x what it is European countries. Those are stats based on deaths, not criminal prosecutions.
The number of 'high speed chases' etc. is considerably higher.
In some 'high crime / poverty' areas of the US, the amount of crime again is multiples of those of other nations.
Moreover, the US has the right to put people in prison for crimes in a different manner than say Sweden, who might only have someone in jail for 4 years for murder.
China is putting Uyghurs in jail for their ethnicity, not for any crimes committed, so the issue is moot.
The people convicted of crimes in the US are not inherently worse people than their counterparts in other countries. We have more crime because we have chosen to have more crime, blamed them, and incarcerated them because we have chosen to have that. In other countries people have made better choices, with a better outcome.
The problem is that privately run prisons require prisoners to pay for things that are realistically necessary despite not being legally mandated. They overcharge more than airports, and pay next to nothing.
They suffer because of it, and non-prisoners suffer as well, as they're competing with what is functionally slave labour.
> I mean are they being forced to do it and not being paid for it
Slavery is forced labor, which is orthogonal to being paid. If you are forced to work but are also paid (perhaps rare, but not unheard of), you are still a slave regardless of the pay. If you aren't being paid but aren't being forced to work, you aren't a slave (that's called volunteering.)
Prison labour is fundamentally slave labour, especially in the US. The US prison system expanded massively after slavery was made illegal, especially privately run for profit businesses that are allowed to sell prisoners as laborers for below real market rates.
China has a Justice System, and most people are in prison for crimes.
China does not have a Justice System - it's entirely politicized (people are put to death in private trials with fabricated evidence), but even then, we are not banning stuff 'because Chinese prison'.
We are banning specifically from concentration camps where 100's of thousands of Uyghurs are imprisoned not for any crime, but merely because of their ethnicity.
So if Cali started taking Japanese citizens property, throwing them in jail, and forcing them to work and to 'retrain their thinking' i.e. even worse than what happened to some in WW2, then we could start to talk about moral equivalence.
"We apologise for the trouble caused to our respected Nazi customers, partners and the public. Intel is committed to becoming a trusted technology partner and accelerating joint development with the Third Reich,"
Hell, working with genocidal governments didn't hurt IBM's bottom line, why should Intel be afraid of it? We have zero history of holding companies accountable for being spineless hypocrites.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Many users can't seem to resist hurling flamebait and feeding flamewars. Please don't be one of those. This is not a site for smiting enemies or being an internet warrior, regardless of how right your views are or you feel they are, and regardless of how much badness there is to denounce. None of that is what we want here, because it's repetitive, predictable, and self-reinforcing. HN threads thrive on diffs, not repetition. Diffs are what's interesting.
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