A few years ago I couldn’t tell you the name of a Chinese company off the top of my head, now I can not only rattle of a list, they’re companies I’ve worked with or have significant investments in companies in the US. I also have a roster of WeChat contacts.
I also work with multiple ex-pats that fled fearing for their life due to persecution based on their religion (Falung Gong), and laugh at how freaked people are about an insignificant Trump compared to a truly vicious government.
It’s pretty easy to argue that the CIA is the antithesis of American idealism - unelected bureaucrats doing jobs that the public has no power to hold them accountable for.
> It’s pretty easy to argue that the CIA is the antithesis of American idealism - unelected bureaucrats doing jobs that the public has no power to hold them accountable for.
I think I got that one, Alex: "What is Congressional oversight?"
It's not that it's an antithesis of the ideal; it's just that things get real messy when the idealism meets reality. Elected officials are supposed to represent the public and carefully vet before appointment, and then hold the unelected bureaucrats accountable.
Alternative interpretation: the system is working exactly as designed, and "American Interests" trump any idealism.
> Fixed that for you. Do I need to get the CIA and various wars lists from Wikipedia?
Please, do tell me of the CIA's murderous and oppressive domestic activities since 1950 [1], and how they have been of a comparable magnitude to China's.
[1] The PRC was founded in 1949, so this time period is to make it comparable.
oh FFS, compare that to the cultural revolution, which ended in 1976. the whataboutism here is annoying; while we were debating and agonizing over the impact of the vietnam war, China was busy imprisoning, torturing, and relocating its own citizens over ideology. It created a culture of children informing on their own parents.
I wish people would realize how much they have dodged a bullet by growing up in western nations.
The US has done this to plenty of its own citizens too, typically the non-white ones. And it didn't stop in the 70s when civil rights were supposedly won.
Do I have you right here, what you seen to be saying is that the well-known images of rows of USA police/soldiers protecting citizens from racists is false? That there was no rule of law, and that the USA government was the force behind racially directed violence? And that still, the government ignored the rule of law and exacts widescale violent action against its citizens motivated by politics/race?
Or is China actually different, and you're talking crap?
>what you seen to be saying is that the well-known images of rows of USA police/soldiers protecting citizens from racists is false
China is of course different --apples to oranges--, but the images you mention are cherry picked. The images that were hidden from the front pages were of the secret police agencies subverting, blackmailing, and assassinating leaders of the civil rights movement.
"We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity" -Fred Hampton
A quick look through their reports frames this whole issue in a bit of a different light [0]. Mainly in the context of a Chinese shift from socialism to capitalism and the need for hospitals to fund themselves and run as for profits.
The numbers are big, which looks scary at first glance but ain't really that surprising considering it's the most populated country on the planet. Sadly the report does not seem trying to account for that, by comparing transplants per capita with other countries, instead, it just cites big numbers going "Look how many!".
Without wanting to sound too cynical, this looks more like an example of extreme capitalism, without any regards to ethics, and not for "Communist China being oh so evil", which this often is framed as. Which overall is a rather difficult topic as these are the very same dynamics that make China a world leader in human cloning research and one of the most important manufacturing hubs in the world.
Because as much as people love to hate on the West and its faults, it is also the most tolerant system and allows for the most freedom in every category.
The Chinese do not value things like freedom or tolerance very much, especially if they conflict with order. The value of the individual is also extremely low, whereas the West held the individual as the most valuable thing until just recently when group identities became incredibly important for the sake of skin-deep diversity. It will be interesting to see how that continues to creep into Western culture.
Let me know when they start black-bagging dissidents for speaking up a bit too much.
There are festering problems regarding surveillance in the West, and the prison system is a bit much here in the US, but "freedom on paper" is a load of BS.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
You can only truly believe this if you have never been an open and active supporter of non-conforming (and threatening to status quo) beliefs or are not black/brown. McCarthyism and antiblackness are still very much built into the functioning system of western nation states.
> You can only truly believe this if you have never been an open and active supporter of non-conforming (and threatening to status quo) beliefs or are not black/brown.
I've been rail-roaded by vindictive government officials who abused their power. Been arrested for it, even. I know what it means to have my first amendment rights violated at a fundamental level.
> McCarthyism and antiblackness are still very much built into the functioning system of western nation states.
That's, like, your opinion man.
Highlighting select abuses of power doesn't negate the fact that I can openly criticize our government, advocate for change, run for office, and store enough small arms to organize an insurrection without fear of reprisal. We may not have absolute freedom, but no one does and no one ever will. In the context of the conversation, we have a helluva lot of freedom. Much more than the comment I responded to appeared to suggest - that we're no better than China.
Again, if you're white. Any time black people have organised and advocated for change and especially if they tried to "store enough small arms to organize an insurrection" they were murdered or locked up for life. Look up the MOVE bombing, black panthers, and basically any radical black nationalist group.
So it's not really just my opinion, man. It's demonstrable historical fact. It's just swept under the rug and shouted over with jingoism and other propaganda about how much freedom we enjoy.
> they were murdered or locked up for life. Look up the MOVE bombing, black panthers, and basically any radical black nationalist group.
Well, that's what happens when you engage in crime, violently resist, and engage in the actual act of insurrection ;)
As it were, the Blacks are not the only ethnicity that have ethnic separatist movements that have been violently squashed, or did you forget the militia movements and subsequent Federal suppressions of the 90s? I suppose that might hurt your narrative, however.
1. Like many countries, China has long been relevant. Like many countries, China has long been gaining relevance.
2. Because they shouldn't
If instead of treating global economy as a zero-sum game, and if we backed off from the fear mongering and admitted that China's economic growth has largely (and unsurprisingly) been to most people's benefits, then we'd welcome the competition and innovation and productivity that China has and will continue to provide.
Religious persecution doesn’t disappear just because of economic growth. Neither does discrimination against sexual preferences (+). That’s the fear expressed above.
(+) unless you limit your knowledge of sexual preferences to just gay/straight — human sexuality is much more complicated than that.
>Religious persecution doesn’t disappear just because of economic growth. Neither does discrimination against sexual preferences (+). That’s the fear expressed above.
The hypocrisy of a country that props constant wars all around the globe, has bombed/invaded 3-4 countries in the last 20 years alone, and constant meddling and manipulations of other governments for its "interests", that had segregation up to the 70s, the worlds largest prison populations by a huge margin, with routine police shootings in the 10x of any other country, pointing the finger to another country for "religious persecution" and "discrimination against sexual preferences" (which itself until 2000 or so had laws declaring "illegal" in many states, and even now has a good 40% or more of the population considering them immoral and believing in all kinds of Bible crap), never ceases to amaze...
I agree that the United States' run as the world's biggest superpower has been far from perfect. I criticise the US a lot. And I actually consider China to be one of the few countries that is not governed by amateurs. China gets a lot of things right.
The one big problem, though, is that China does not believe in freedom. At all. Censorship, no free press, no freedoms of opinion, expression, religion, etc. And they see nothing wrong with that. Whenever the US hurts these freedoms, they get criticised, even by their own people, and they eventually back down.
The fact that the US promises freedom but constantly breaks that promise makes them hypocrites, but it also always has the option that they will get back to their promise. China does not see the point of freedom at all, and considers it dangerous. And that's terrifying.
If we're going to have a superpower, I would love a China that respects freedom in that role. They would be better at it than the US. But current China is not that China.
As flawed as the US is, they at least have that going for them (pre-Trump US, at least). Though ideally, the EU would step up. They don't seem to want to, though.
>If we're going to have a superpower, I would love a China that respects freedom in that role. They would be better at it than the US. But current China is not that China.
Where I disagree is that as a superpower China has been benign. They might have their territorial issues with their neighbors (like every other country, much more an ancient one in a much changed region), but they don't impose their (internal) non-freedom or whatever on the rest of the world with any kind of crusades.
>The one big problem, though, is that China does not believe in freedom. At all. Censorship, no free press, no freedoms of opinion, expression, religion, etc. And they see nothing wrong with that.
That's for themselves to fix/decide, as it is a matter of internal politics. Heck, their majority of their people might very well be fine with it, as they have a totally different political tradition than democracy, going back to taoism and on. Are there dissenters? Sure, but the kind of Chinese people westerners tend to fraternize with are exactly those that would adopt various western values or want some regime change, but that doesn't mean they represent anywhere near a majority -- it's a selection bias.
The one big problem, though, is that China does not believe in freedom
I feel it is not that china doesn’t believe in freedom...it is just that they don’t practice freedom for the time being...but their government always promises future freedom to their people — although that promise may never become true...but the good thing about promising without a specific time is that the promise can always appear to be credible even when one is pushing the day of its realization to the infinity...
No government is capable of friendship with a private person, any more than a human can be friends with a single white blood cell. What they are, governments in general and the EU in particular, is a useful ally.
There is indeed a lot wrong with the EU, as there is with the US and China. But of the three, the EU seems to care the most about protecting regular people from abuse and oppression. They're not perfect about it, and there's a lot of different forces at play in the EU, but on the whole, I tend to like their approach more than those of the US and China.
Likewise, although it has only been recently that my opinion of human rights in the USA has declined — America takes its constitutional rights very seriously, or it seemed to until Snowden.
They went wrong way before Snowden. Guantanamo at least. Patriot Act, arguably. And then there's a rather disgusting way the Vietnam War was waged. Or the systemic racism that goes way back, regularly with deadly consequences.
The US has lofty goals and noble promises, but has always fallen far short.
Actually it does - history is full of examples of just that. As the middle class grows in economic terms, it grows in political influence and the overall values of the society changes to accommodate that class. Introduction of democracy and women’s rights in Europe are good examples.
China may be different. Their planned social credit reputation system, coupled with ubiquitous surveillance, may make it impossible for public opinion in China to force the Chinese government to liberalise.
In the past, the West has had a massive advantage because: (1) their econpomic system was better than everyone else's, and (2) in order to modernise, other cultures have had to adopt some of the West's characteristics, including a greater level of freedom of speech/thought than in other societies. The combination meant that the West had few serious ideological competitors.
But if China becomes the world's biggest economy, if it continues to increase its economy so its per capita GDP is the same as in the USA and western Europe, and it does this while still being an autocracy, things will get very very serious.
The future may well be a jackboot stamping on a human face forever.
Maybe. But china’s overall path is towards more democracy and civil liberty. Compare tianamen square 30 years ago with the handling of the Hong Kong protests.
After both Chicago '68 and the Kent State shooting, there was immediate, extensive blowback in the American press and public. Quite the opposite happened in China after Tiananmen Square.
(Of course, all of the above were decades ago, so we need to keep an open mind about the condition today in the respective countries.)
>After both Chicago '68 and the Kent State shooting, there was immediate, extensive blowback in the American press and public. Quite the opposite happened in China after Tiananmen Square.
I'd say after those it was business and usual, and those involved didn't get even a slap on the wrist. If anything, venting through the press merely let people get steam out and forget more easily....
> If anything, venting through the press merely let people get steam out and forget more easily....
But we didn't get a repeat of either episode. That raises the possibility that people learned lessons, albeit imperfectly, from those experiences of others, which is something for which humankind (not uniquely among the species) has at least some talent.
That's a benefit of a free press. It can be aggravating to see some of the shadier so-called journalists go shamelessly whoring after eyeballs. Still, journalists' collective, competitive desire for attention helps to bring "training cases" (in NN terms) to a broader societal audience. That seems to influence at least some people's behavior. Over the long term — and not without exceptions, some catastrophic — that influence, on balance, is usually for the good.
Why? These things are not even remotely on the same scale. How are you going to reconcile an event that caused ~20k some odd deaths (recent foreign consul leaks during the time) that was nearly 100% covered up by the government vs. Kent State? That's a bit ridiculous imo.
Well, one event threatened a whole regime (and the country's stability) the other was some hippie students protesting at their university.
And still, "twenty-eight guardsmen fired approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds" -- killing 4 and injuring many more.
Which begs the question, if there was major potentially elite affecting / government toppling issue instead of a small scale anti-war protest at a local university, what would be the response?
Interesting question. I do think you are trying to take Kent State out of context though - it wasn't a single event. It was the culmination of anti-war protests in the US, and caused massive and very quick social change once it happened.
These what-ifs of history are certainly interesting though!
Many of the rights we consider intrinsic to modern society, due process, etc., didn’t arise in Europe in respond to the rise of a middle class. In the Anglo tradition, they date back 800 years to the Magna Carta.
> Introduction of democracy and women’s rights in Europe are good examples.
Which is why I said “religious” and “sexual preference”.
Jews were widely discriminated against even a few years after WW2; Muslims are a current whipping-boy; I’m not sure if Catholic-vs-Protestant is as big a divide in Northern Ireland as it looks from the outside, but it does look big; In the USA, Atheists are almost as disliked as Muslims.
Then there’s sexual preference. You’re fine if you’re gay (finally!), but not so much if you’re into BDSM or have any fetishes more complicated than underwear. Also, I have a friend whose sexuality was previously legal, but which was outlawed in half of Europe and half of the USA this century. I invite you to guess what that might be.
5-10% of the population are “into” BDSM, although sex surveys are notorious for underestimating things. Atheism is a curious thing to call a “bizarro religion”; likwise for different reasons Islam, given the latter has ~1.8 billion followers worldwide.
I seriously doubt that. 5-10% of what? the _US population_? I'm pretty certain that 5%-10% of the population have more serious and pressing matters than worrying about their sexual preferences.
USA survey, though I would be surprised if it varied by nation.
People have rioted over the legality of their sex lives, and people have gone to prison because consenting to certain acts was deemed to be conspiracy to some form of serious assault (against themselves) — so I’m inclined to think it’s both significant concern and a major part of personal identity.
And as far as "enjoying life" goes, it's an ever sadder view to place it anywhere aside from luxuries on a society were people are homeless, without healthcare, without steady jobs, working 2-3 jobs, and so on. Not to mention the huge loneliness and depression epidemic, with actual tangible effects on mental and physical health, and wether one can openly smack their partner and electrocute their body parts is quite far from a priority.
It's closer to the "right" to enjoy champagne and oysters than anything fundamental...
> Not to mention the huge loneliness and depression epidemic, with actual tangible effects on mental and physical health, and wether one can openly smack their partner and electrocute their body parts is quite far from a priority.
I don’t claim to understand BDSM, but I do know a fulfilling sex life helps with depression, and that being outcast for your sexuality can cause depression and loneliness.
Sex can be one of the few things left for the homeless and the dispossessed, and has been part of human culture since before the invention of medicine and money, never mind health insurance. Dismissing it as a luxury makes you sound like a French aristocrat (ironically, given where the ‘S’ comes from).
There is a world of a difference between spilling out state secrets, a crime in any Western democracy and simply voicing your displeasure with the government. False equivalence much?
Ah yes, a topic about China and the top comment is some American spreading the usual fud about how China is the pure evil, like it has been engrained into their brains from the day they were born. Sad to see hn is no better than reddit these days.
You should actually go to China, go to Taiwan too to compare, and talk to people who had to leave and were granted refuge status in Canada. You might have a more nuanced understanding than “American
fud”.
Especially since throughout the 20th and 21st century, it wasn't China who was a constant global cop/aggressor, invading countries, spreading "democracy", meddling in Latin America, Asia, Middle East AND Europe, and so on...
China did not have the power before. Who knows how it will act when it does? It's treatment of Tibet, invaded in 1948 and still occupied, is not encouraging.
It used to have this power and it turned all the countries in its neighborhood into tributary states. Which, all things considered, was not that bad, since it was overall a peaceful and stable relationship.
Hard to say how Communist China as a superpower will differ from Imperial China, though...
> Especially since throughout the 20th and 21st century, it wasn't China who was a constant global cop/aggressor, invading countries, spreading "democracy", meddling in Latin America, Asia, Middle East AND Europe, and so on...
I also work with multiple ex-pats that fled fearing for their life due to persecution based on their religion (Falung Gong), and laugh at how freaked people are about an insignificant Trump compared to a truly vicious government.