We'll see if it keeps up. The shared global economy seems to be breaking up. China is undertaking enormous projects (Belt and Road Initiative) to build alternatives to traditional trade constellations and physical routes. The US is head-first into "America First", EU is having internal struggles, Russia is actively pursuing imperialism and the UN can't even get states to pay their bills.

And it's been so long since we had large scale conflicts that spanned globally, that once again a lot of people have forgotten that peaceful diplomacy and open relations is generally a good way to go about things.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the world economy break into far more separated blocs in this century, and if that happens these companies are unlikely to cow-tow to other markets as they wouldn't even gain entry.

What's bizarre is, he is making the claim after the Chinese put immense pressure on the NBA over a tweet, and Blizzard over a statement, a tweet/statement no one in China can see. I did not see reports of protests favoring China, at all. It's clear the tweet was not that big of deal to China's population. However, it's does show how the Chinese government responds to those who don't take the party line, and that response contradicts his position.

The irony of this statement is impressive. Not only does TD's post not actually imply that he thinks you are Chinese, he has already mentioned, in a reply to you in this thread, that he does not live in the US. Managing to incorrectly accuse someone of making a mistake and making the exact mistake yourself within a single statement takes some doing.

i think you should look at what he actually wrote "your books" not "books" or "the books" but "your books"

then with the "I live in a country" again, signaling that he does and I don't

notice how he didn't try to disagree with it - yes, it could be hadwaved away as lazy writing, but I highly doubt that's the case given others have already called me a chinese shill

i literally just said you guys are overstating and exaggerating things... that's it. I'm not defending it. There's a difference between defending the holocaust and pointing out the concentration camps didn't have sharks with lazer beams.

Pointing out that there are some wildly inaccurate and gross exaggeration ITT is not mutually exclusive with disagreeing with the sentiment behind the statements.

Yeah, they purse such things extremely hard. Like most things they endeavor, they also do it very well. My country was in a 10-year limbo from Chinese business due to the peace prize to Liu Xiaobo.

And I remember it quite well, since one of my first bosses after college was rather heavy into educational exchange with China, we several delegations over that we taught our college model too. And then boom, after the peace prize: Crickets, and all Chinese-side funding dried up overnight.

Not that their effectiveness surprised me (though the official response to the peace prize did). Merely from brief encounter I learned that the Chinese really does send their best. Even in those rather minor delegations I don't think there was a person that didn't have Ivy League or equivalent education and they were razor-sharp. I can't even imagine what kind of people they have on top-echelon diplomacy and foreign relations. Good luck to any country or company that goes up against it, is all I have to say.

Anyways, a little late-night rambling here. Perhaps without much of a point.

Read this from the WaPo:

Not to mention, Lebron sold out....and is still going to lose the cash:

From the same WaPo peice I cited in my last post:

(pils being Eva Pils)

@rick_roll before you get all frustrated, literally every person who used the phrase concentration camp in this thread would refuse to call an ICE detention facility a concentration camp. Probably most would refuse to call an invasion of Haiti or Cuba imperalism. Not everyone can be impartial. Thanks for the posts, they were an interesting take.

It's a good article and it sounds like an interesting book.

I would think any company and almost any country (pending on how large the economy is) doing business with China probably does so on the implicit understanding that they can't offer criticism of the party or its policies. You take the money and shut up, or you don't shut up and go somewhere else. Not many Chinese business partners are going to risk being under the looking glass for subversion.

Obviously for companies that attempt to have a profile on these things, I think it is fair to find this insulting and disappointing. But in the larger picture I don't think we should rely on companies to be our conscience on such matters, not when even most states are more than happy to keep their heads down.

I think the interesting question will be if China can keep it up. Sure, their surveillance state is now an almost unfathomable behemoth with capacities never before seen in any state in history. But at the same time large parts of China is now a modern developed economy. Middle-class stirrings are often very effective at driving political change.

Tianmen Square protests were college student led in an era where, by and large, only the elites got to attend college. People have also been saying growing Chinese middle class would demand social changes. Facts on the ground, especially since Xi came to power, just don't bear this out.

More importantly, the modern Chinese middle class is basically the first generation of Chinese that didn't experience the dark side of CCP first hand and has been the beneficiaries of Chinese economic growth and recipient of CCP indoctrination for the past 30 years. The younger ones grew up with Xi's propaganda during their formative years.

Xi's propaganda includes a large dose of, to put lightly, Han ethnocentrism to go with nationalistic rhetoric that would make pre-WWII regimes proud.

That the middle class grew up on CCP kool-aid is what should actually scare people about China (and to a lesser extent Russia); it's a mid-twentieth century style fascist country with 21st-century weapons. Historically, when the economy of such a country goes kaput, the government of such country will lash out and blame outsiders (we already see this) instead of implementing reforms that chip away at government power.

this american life did their most recent pod on hong kong, very interesting stuff that paints a nuanced picture rarely seen

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/686/umbrellas-up

at one point they labeled global times as a tabloid which is hilarious, i laughed for a while, that was 100% intentional shade

if anyone wants to read serious onion read the English version of Global Times, it's the most nationalistic state paper they have - the english version is far tamer as well http://www.globaltimes.cn/ manages to make the china daily seem very objective by comparision

I was about to post the exact same recommendation. This episode is very, very good.

The best thing I've seen this year.

Organ harvesting :

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-...vivors-victims

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ca...t-why-and-how/

He was a Communist Party member and model Uyghur. It didn't save him from Beijing

Hypocrite, here's what the U.S. does to people all over latin america who want economic sovereignty:



All the du jour freedom lovers in this thread would do themselves a favor to look inwards before spouting hyperbolic, hypocritical, propagandistic critiques of China.

Liar , go away, ....why isn't this man banned ? At some point liberality becomes a sickness .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre

I googled Latin American death squad pictures and picked one at random, my point still stands - or what - are you denying that the US funded said death squads?

Not to mention the immediate clampdown (also through jailing and often torture to get "confessions") on anyone in China who would attempt to report on these issues.

You are kind of taking whattaboutism to an extreme.

I’m not whataboutinganything , and if you want to hide behind narrow logical fallacies to defend hypocrisy, fine. I’m just pointing out the fact that most westerners/Europeans have not a leg to stand on when decrying human rights and other types of abuses in other countries (China). You of course have the freedom to do so, but from my point of view this is an ultimate hypocrisy and at times, laughable.

Here’s a full reply, couldn’t edit the old one :
I’m not whataboutinganything , and if you want to hide behind narrow logical fallacies to defend hypocrisy, fine. I’m just pointing out the fact that most westerners/Europeans have not a leg to stand on when decrying human rights and other types of abuses in other countries (China). You of course have the freedom to do so, but from my point of view this is an ultimate hypocrisy and at times, laughable.

I realize Americans, with an American education, are biased and mostly taught, from childhood, about the positive aspects of their country, historical and otherwise. China is not the only country that indoctrinates their citizens, every country does to a certain extent. As a child I lived and went to school in Canada, in the US, and in Mexico, as well as college in the US. I experienced, first hand, how history “changes” and historical events are “different” depending on which country you are in. In History classes in elementary school in the US, I experienced firsthand how children are taught that the nukes were dropped on Japan out of necessity and to save lives, but in Mexico, Canada , and many other places , history says that the war was already won and that the nukes were dropped to demoralize and make an example - but I digress.

Yes, the Chinese government is very unlike western governments in many aspects, and yes, they often do horrendous things. Yes, it is useful to point out these things, but it is not truthful to paint China as an evil caricature. For example, imagine if the city of New York, like Hong Kong, was faced with massive, disruptive, economy-paralyzing protests . Imagine if these protests lasted for months and often devolved into violence and chaos. How would the US government react? During the Ferguson unrest in 2014, a de-facto martial law was declared, and this was a much smaller scale event than a hypothetical New York scenario.

The Hong Kong police, along with the Chinese government, have handled the Hong Kong crisis very professionally, but (going back to my point about bias and caricaturization), if one reads western media and comments by westerners, these are often tinged by language and words such as “authoritarian”, “fascist”, “dictatorship”, “autocratic”, etc. In reality the situation has been handled not unlike many western governments have handled similar situations (the yellow vest movement in Paris, during which the western media treated the French government much more fairly).

As another example, people in the US often decry Chinese prisons and detention camps. Yes, the Chinese government is no saint. China has had many severe problems (riots) with certain sectors of the Muslim population and the reaction of the CCP has been to “re-educate” these people with questionable methods. One must realize that the CCP officially espouses state atheism and I suppose that it is natural that a government with such a high degree of control would resort to methods such as the Uyghur re-education camps to clamp down on what it considers unreasonable conduct. I certainly wouldn’t enjoy being one of these Muslims, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t enjoy being an African American stuck in the ghetto, with a super high chance of imprisonment, either. The distinction here is that the Chinese government wields a higher degree of control over its (nearly 1.5 billion) populace, and thus imprisons them with a purpose, while on the other hand, the US government, or society, through negligence, doesn’t care enough about their citizenry to educate them enough to prevent them from ending up in prison. The result is very much the same on both sides - large amounts of minorities imprisoned. Few countries have the moral high ground to credibly denounce Chinese prison camps (Norway, with its extremely humane prison system would be one of the few).

Again, I’m not saying the Chinese government is “good” or that the US government is “bad”. In my cynical view, they are all “bad”, and I think most governments are borderline highbrow criminal organizations. What took me by surprise was the extreme bias contained in this thread, and other similar discussions, and the western media in general, when talking about China. It is at times, laughable, how people latch on to these du jour issues and instead of attempting to be objective , they only spout idealistic propaganda .

Even if I lived in North Korea I would be completely correct in pointing out that China has a serious problem with human rights abuses, clamping down on free speech, using concentration camps and torture. A person is not his country.

So, for starters your argument makes zero sense.

But we should also point out that your implied argument is wrong. Nobody in this thread has argued that modern democracies are absolved of their own human rights transgressions.

As for facts. We know that China scores abysmally low on recognized indexes of human rights (linked earlier in thread) and earlier linked reports have also stated that things have gotten worse under the new policies of the party. And even if we ignore that clear and compelling evidence, and we enter the fantasy world where Belgium and China are equally bad at protecting human rights in 2019 - two wrongs would still not make a right.


If you are really so invested and angry about human rights, perhaps take a deep breath and realize that it is fully possible to engage in several discussions about several subjects. And if you are going to discuss human rights abuses - then get your evidence right and make it compelling. Don't make it easy to toss aside. You're doing the subject a disservice.

A person is not their country, but when you judge the country of China by the metrics of western ideals (especially ideals pushed by certain countries), such as "freedom", "freedom of expression", "freedom of speech", "liberty", "western democracy", etc., you are speaking for the countries that represent these ideals. When people push these ideals onto China, they ignore that China has different concepts and worldviews that don't necessarily fit into these ideals, but at the same time aren't necessarily "wrong" per se. As an example, from the perspective of the CCP, China is a "whole process democracy", and perhaps, some people in China would tell you that western governments are really oligarchies or plutocracies, and not democratic at all.

Furthermore, I never meant that people in western countries haven't the freedom to criticize China. My implication was that when the source of the critiques represents a country, organization, governing body, et al., whose creators, citizens, originators, etc., ultimately carry out the exact same types of wrongdoings, these critiques lose their "punch" and credibility, and are at times laughable. Again, I go back to the problem of perspective and cultural divide. Human rights indexes, for example, originate from western liberal ideals. Western countries value individual liberty, for right or wrong. They value liberty at the expense and risk of "allowing" their citizens to stray down unproductive, antisocial, and at times evil paths. Neither the government or the society takes responsibility for these bad apples, because they are free to do what they please, or perhaps because their parents were bad apples and they didn't learn enough to become productive members of society. Countries that follow western liberal ideals, in a sense, liberate themselves from a certain degree of responsibility to their populace. China is the opposite, it is a more collective society, where freedoms are lessened but collective social responsibility is heightened. My point is that these distinctions don't show up in human rights indexes, even though in both western and Chinese societies, large amounts of people end up in jail. In fact, the US is the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world (with nearly 10% of the population in jail, around 20% in the penal system, and minorities disproportionately represented), but I'd suggest that the US is penalized less for this in Human Rights indexes than China is for their "alternative" attitude towards incarcertation, in which they ultimately incarcerate a lower percentage of their population but in a manner more distasteful to someone with western liberal values.

As far being invested and angry about human rights, I am not - I just don't ascribe to the China-bashing that has recently re-emerged in western societies. I have travelled to many places in the world, including China, and spoken to the people there, and as far as I could tell they are happy with their society, their government, and have positive thoughts about their future in this world. I just hope that people can have a bit more objectivity when talking about a country like China - a country whose core values are not and did not originate from western liberal ideals. Many of their values and ways of life are distasteful to people with western liberal ideals, but that doesn't make them wrong.