Or you can buy it straight from Simon & Schuster (the publisher), slightly more expensive but you can sleep well knowing you don't support more egoistic space travels:
Right. Has anyone here done a reasonable background check on the author, Desmond Shum, to verify this is not just a PR stunt? It is perfectly plausible that everything in the article is true... But if the kidnapping isn't real then I wouldn't trust the book either.
After a quick search I've only found some of the author's history in finance and which suggests he has the background to write this book. If the kidnapping is indeed real, then the book becomes an interesting read indeed.
I _think_ this is a sincere comment speaking to the credibility of npr, so on that basis: I love npr, big fan... but they're just as fallible as other news organisations (or indeed, all organisations). They can be trustworthy, operate in good faith and make mistakes by failing to vet something to the extent required, they're not mutually exclusive.
Weren't they in favor of the Iraq war? This is a legitimate question, I don't know about their reporting from back then
And from an external perspective, why would they be a more reliable source than let's say Voice Of America or Radio Free Asia, both of which ofc are "offensive" (as in vanguard/aggressive/warfaring) media outlets
I don't recall what kind of coverage NPR had over the Iraq war; maybe it was generally favorable. But it would surprise me if the station were "in favor of" it full stop. It's certainly possible to find critical pieces from the era by googling.
> why would they be a more reliable source than let's say Voice Of America or Radio Free Asia
Voice of America and Radio Free Asia are governmental agencies; NPR is a private non-profit organization funded by advertising, donations, grants, etc (but not directly by the federal government).
If I were to spend $100M on producing HBO's Chernobyl, except focused on Tiananmen (assume top talent, compelling story, and good marketing), what sort of blowback could I expect?
Would my life be in danger? Would other businesses cut me off?
Will this become increasingly difficult to pull off in the US/West?
We know Disney and other entertainment companies don't want to touch it. Will that attitude stay the same now that China is beginning to cut off Western movie stars, movies, market access, etc.?
No one would see it. No platform/distributor would touch it, similar to what happened with Bryan Fogel's work the Dissident [1], about the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.
Also 1989 is certainly a horror story reminiscent of Chernobyl, but it's a lot more complex than the cartoonish evil treatment it receives in the west.
"In its first weekend of home release, the film was the third-most rented title at the iTunes Store and eighth on Apple TV."
Are you sure that nobody else is publishing it and if that's the case it's not some kind of usual all American copyright exclusivity deal not political suppression?
Copyright can look a lot like totalitarian control sometimes.
The home Rental market is significantly smaller than home streaming. Icarus has over 700 Million Views [1] where as this one was the third most rented title for a week on Itunes, so yes relatively speaking no one is watching it.
The platforms did not want his content, even though he is an academy award winning documentary director. You can read his interview with Variety below.
"The film struggled to find a distributor for eight months and was not able to run on a large streaming platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. It is widely believed this was due to those platforms' fear of offending the Saudi Arabian government and possibly losing subscribers.
Fogel showed disappointment at The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to acquire UAE e-commerce site Souq.com shortly after he refused to release The Dissident on Amazon Prime Video."
He tried to get it published by other means, but money.
> Also 1989 is certainly a horror story reminiscent of Chernobyl, but it's a lot more complex than the cartoonish evil treatment it receives in the west.
The complexity is what would make such a film compelling. What are the subtleties glossed over in the typical account of the terrible event?
In a completely different context, I recently watched and listened to accounts of 9/11 from a wide variety of perspectives. What made them captivating were aspects of what happened that I wasn’t aware of before.
If you could bankroll it yourself, nothing would stop you --you might have some problem getting big names to sign up. I don't think the CCP would be so petty to come after you abroad for something like this. Big entertainment would not touch it, if they have business in China. So you might be able to get indie houses to play it along with independent domestic distributors. And, oh, don't travel to China after that.
> I don't think the CCP would be so petty to come after you abroad for something like this.
Maybe you don't know about LIHKG posters being attacked in the UK [1]. The CCP has teams of operatives working overseas specifically for this purpose [2]. If they will physically attack you for writing a few posts on a forum, you should certainly expect to be murdered by "car accident" while raising funds for a $100 million film.
Does youtube even care? Aren't there a lot of anti-china documentaries/videos on youtube? Or do you think that those flew under the radar because they're not popular enough?
You're getting downvoted on a SV forum for simply pondering such things, if that tells you anything. No doubt very little of Corporate America would back you, it's quite a shame. The CCP is the greatest evil hellbent on doing the most harm in the name of greed and pure expansionistic dominance on the earth since the Nazi's or Stalin, and we're enabling them.
The comment is not getting downvoted. The anti-China derangement on this "SV forum" is truly stunning.
The average HNer knows as much about China as they learned in their US Government-sanctioned high school history class (they couldn't point to Beijing on a map), yet comment as if they are experts. Remarkable.
Being against the CCP isn't being against China, to the contrary. And what more expertise other than "they murder dissenters" do you need?
Hannah Arendt mentioned this: that people who can't be mobilized by the simplified ground truths of totalitarianism will not become more helpful after having pondered and analyzed the issue more, and that furthermore, a full analysis of totalitarianism is only possible after its defeat.
This is a common misconception by Westerners who know virtually nothing about modern China. The CPC has around 100,000,000 direct members, and a domestic approval rating of around 90%. The CPC is popular because under its leadership China has seen the biggest economic & geopolitical resurgence in human history, while reducing poverty and containing pandemics and other threats. Pretty straightforward.
Easily digestible quotes from Western pundits who have probably never even visited China are not a substitute for having the barest understanding of modern China.
Most westerners who have been paying attention know that the majority of all that wealth comes from stealing western IP...
Not that western nations are blameless, we traded short term profit for long term superiority...
'Barest understanding' yes don't make me laugh, statement from a shill if I ever heard one. Try to claim no one understands you while also being hostile to any sort of press that's not propaganda...wonder why.
CCP is probably the most dangerous oppressive regime to ever exist, and I don't think that's an understatement.
Umm, perhaps it was being downvoted when the person commented? You know how HN works right? You know that votes fluctuate?
Further, please don't stereotype commenters here. It's not a good look. We come from all backgrounds, all with different levels of education and life experience.
HN, like any community, has multiple members, but it also has a very clear and narrow ideological uniformity (SV-style techno-libertarianism). That is why it is generally pleasant, until e.g. someone tries to challenge the common myths. This is obvious to anyone who has been outside the bubble.
what an evil government, instead of the officials “manning up” and admitting that they aren’t perfect, they sweep their dirty laundry under the bed in fear of being found out. not an example of the machoism they are now trying to push in chinese box offices. hearing about this corruption turns my stomach
It's not just Chinese box offices. There is a lot of investment money coming from China to produce Hollywood films. As part of that investment, the scripts are definitely under a lot of scrutiny for how things are portrayed. Keep that in consideration the next time you see the distribution logos at the beginning of the film you're watching.
I just watched Shang-Chi the new Marvel superhero movie and couldn’t shake the feeling that there’s a distinct current in the film of “come back to China all those who were part of the diaspora, we will accept you, you belong with us. You are part of our family”.
Don't need a movie for that, the economics and the dynamic Chinese market is what will slowly but surely suck up Asia's talent.
Just like the US could do in the 20th century with European/Anglo talent.
The Chinese character who makes that offer then immediately threatens to kill the heroes if they don't comply in the same scene (screenwriting note: hilarious that they didn't let that ruse play out for even one more scene).
I was actually kind of surprised to see a such a direct analogy in a big Disney production; I'm going to hazard a bet that it was not at all intentional, but I'm not sure that China's foreign film approval body are going to see it the same way. If it gets released at all in China it's almost certainly going to bomb for that and other reasons.
Who knows what to believe in this case, but the woman under detention was supposedly involved in multibillion dollar corruption with the previous regime of Wen Jiabao and was swept up when the new regime wanted to clean house. Obviously they're doing it without even a semblance of due process, but there's a good chance she's actually guilty.
Guilty in the same sense that the oligarchs that Putin slaps down are guilty- stopping paying fealty to the monarch, not in doing anything else differently than the other cadre members.
As I understand it, Chinese officials can be punished quite harshly by higher-ups to "set an example", which fosters a culture of fear, mistrust, and dishonesty. A child who gets a beating every time they do something wrong will quickly learn to lie.
I read a good article on this some time ago, but I can't seem to find it right now.
This is how hard line communist (or any totalitarian) government works. There must be no criticism, no sign of weakness, no compromise. The leader is all wise, all powerful and untouchable (unless he´s about to be replaced). They are not presenting themselves as men with flaws and conscience. They are the personification of unlimited power and behave accordingly.
This is the case in Russia (you do not criticize Putin), in China with Xi, in North Korea with Kim.
Wonder what the chances are that her voice was deep faked. I don't want to get all conspiracy theory and say it probably was. But considering who's involved, the chances are definitely non-zero. Feel like this is obvious neferious use case for the tech. Impersonate loved ones to manipulate.
What sort of consequences is the CCP anticipating as a result of the book's publication? If they expected none, they wouldn't have made the point of having Shum's ex-wife contact him. Assuming this book is targeting a US market, and most Americans are neutral or negative in their views of China, I don't see the needle moving much. And beyond trade deals, how can we influence them? We may not agree with their policies, we trade with them, we allow anyone here to write publicly about China, and life goes on as usual.
I dont know what to believe anymore. Is this author using his ex to publicize his book? Is this woman even alive? Second hand info is suspect. If the wife were alive, she would have messaged him publicly,no?
The entire history is very suspicious. She seems to have a few secrets that would need to explain.
I wonder for example, how do they know that the woman that is talking by phone is really his spouse and not another woman pretending to be her? We have old actors making films in young roles again. To modify the pitch of a telephonic voice with a computer is standard and well developed technology. Specially when everybody is uploading their videos to internet and they have a wide sample to feed the software.
Hiding people for 4 years is hard. Disappearing if the government wants to find you in a world of cameras deployed and global watching is even harder. They could just put her in jail without taking so many troubles.
Moreover, would be the best option. A trial in a stranger country is very expensive. Involves a lot of people hiring lawyers, going to hotels for months to be close to his familiar, and spending tons of money in the area until the trial ends. Why the government would renounce to all this fresh money? As long as they had a minimum case, just to trow her in jail and shut the mouth would be stupid when they can milk the family for a long time instead.
Right, there's a strong line among all the really publically disappeared people which is that they are all pretty likely to be deeply linked into the entire corrupt machinations of the system.
Like with Zhao Wei. You think you get to be a billionaire from just being a good actor?
But even the worst kind of people deserve due process and like... some notion of rule of law. I think conflating "this person is being treated inhumanely" and "this person is a good person" are often conflated though, making it too easy to derail conversations about these kinds of cases.
I don't know much about this person's case. It could be that there's legitimate reasons for this person's wife to be in jail. But this sort of bargaining of a person's freedom for this kind of thing is really nasty. It's not something unique to China (there are lots of nasty US plea deals that involve essentially trading your freedom for someone else's), but honestly pretty unique when it comes to people that are clearly extremely wealthy.
It will be very interesting if it turns out to be a stunt by the author and publisher. Xi won't care about the publishing of a book of a former vice president, actually, the publish of the book is probably good for him. My speculations anyway. I would love to read the book
It's the difference between iterated and one-time games.
Shum has a decision to Publish or Not Publish (P or NP). CCP has the decision to Retaliate or Not Retaliate (R or NR). In a one-time game, Shun chooses P and CCP chooses NR, because P/NR > P/R for CCP.
A one-time game may be a good model if there's only one thing you wish to keep out of the public eye (e.g. photos of Barbara Streisand's house). But CCP will play this game many times: establishing that they're able and willing to harm their critics, even at cost to themselves, has value. It encourages future critics to never publish in the first place.
Well said. This is the classic, “You can’t negotiate with terrorists” situation. It might seem like a local maxima in one instance to give in to fear and consequence, but it only feeds repeated instances.
China is betting on the reverse and honestly I think they’ll win. The sheer force of will needed to cut them off from the global economy is just not there.
> The sheer force of will needed to cut them off from the global economy
It's already happening. China is no longer the us' #1 trading partner. Europe is deleveraging off of china. Canada is on the verge of boycotting the chinese olympics.
Even if there weren't geopolitical conflict involved, it's going to happen out of sheer economics; labor costs in china are no longer competitive with those in neighboring countries e.g. thailand, vietnam, bangladesh, and, for the US, mexico, and there is going to be a rough demographic transition as due to decades of one child, there are fewer entry-level people to take on entry-level low-skilled jobs in china (and basically no one wants to immigrate to china because the government has stoked chauvinistic nationalism way worse than trump ever did).
I should add that there is a way out for china -- high skilled production, but they are really shooting themeselves in the foot on that one. High skilled production requires input of low-skilled labor, and after several decades of what looked like it could be a rapprochement, since the ascendancy of Xi Jinping, china has increasingly alienated its closest neighbors (phillipines, vietnam, taiwan, japan, south korea, india), some of whom would be ideal sources of low-skill inputs. And a LOT of their tech comes from copying the west. That will get you only so far; to be truly innovative and successful in the high-skill arena you need to have a source of creativity and critical thought which after a short period of flourishing, I hear is being repressed by the state again these days (I don't know for certain, I'm not in china).
China has a vast hinterland of rural Chinese, much larger than the Phillipines or Vietnam could supply, and there's less of a language barrier, where not none. Personally I think they'll do better than many are expecting, the biggest threat to their success being their own governance.
> China has a vast hinterland of rural Chinese, much larger than the Phillipines or Vietnam could supply
Whose fertility has for the last several decades taken a historically massive hit from one child, sex-selective abortion and the policy of taking young rural women to single-sex urban dorms to provide their once cheap labor. A rural region with increasingly middle aged farmers with a rapidly shrinking highly gender imbalanced youth is not a recipe for medium to long term abundant labor supply. Certainly, China’s economy is a profligate debt fueled fever, however, their biggest bill coming due is the demographics.
They're doing okay on the TFR front compared to South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan. And their past birth rate being <2.0 helps a lot to limit the likelihood of revolution and keeps them from consuming all their natural resources. The problems you describe are financial. The misallocation of resources associated with the debt fueled fever is a spent cost. They can deal with the population pyramid by letting the old be poor.
People who speak other Chinese languages are translating to and from written Mandarin. They are not taught to write their spoken language. Nobody would read it if they did.
Spelling with Chinese characters is a tricky business. It is not enough to write the syllables; for each of ~1200 syllables there are several characters to choose from. Which to use in each word is purely a product of history, but the rules people learn are only for Mandarin.
It is funny that Chinese people who only know Mandarin mostly don't know this; it is not safe to talk about in China. So, Cantonese speakers let them continue to believe that Cantonese is "just pronounced differently", rather than being a whole language of its own. (Are French and Spanish just dialects of Latin?)
"Dialect" here means mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility is a fuzzy threshold, incidentally. I was in Spain once hanging out with an Italian guy. The Spanish speakers around could make sense of his Italian but he couldn't make sense of their Spanish. I think the essential problem was that they were more interested in understanding him than he was in understanding them, so they put in more effort.
Hypothesis: The Italian guy might have a better chance of picking up Spanish if the Spaniards were to speak a bit slower than usual :) Especially at the fuzzy mutual intelligibility boundary, a lower communication speed helps.
They don't; what do you think it would mean for two different languages to "share a written language"? Everyone is trained to read and write Mandarin; writing other dialects is not encouraged.
But more than that, China is hard at work at ensuring that all Chinese speak Mandarin.
Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. There are simplified and traditional Chinese in written form. Mandarin is close to how Northern Chinese speak and can be written in both form without any difficulty and most of times equivalent
Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal
> Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. […] Source: I’m native Chinese
You are confusing written language with writing system, probably due to domestic and global propaganda efforts that have been going on for 70 years. This really undermines the scientific effort of linguists and just sows confusion, as evidenced by your mislabelling languages as dialects, and forcing the rest of the world to invent new words like "topolect" for existing concepts that the communist party does not like to be true.
My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.
Another writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet. I can write Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian etc. with it.
So the writing system is an orthogonal concept to the written language.
As an analogue, the writing system we are discussing is the Chinese characters. One can write with it for example Cantonese, classical Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, Mandarin, Zhuang, among others.
The distinction between traditional and simplified you mentioned is minor and not a fundamental property of the language written with it. Example: Cantonese can be and is written in both simplified and traditional.
> the written form is universal
That's not true. The languages Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin belong to the same family (Sinitic) but have different grammar, lexicon and word order; these differences are also reflected in writing.
"Latin alphabet" is ambiguous, you understood this to mean "the classical Latin alphabet", I was sloppy and meant "the set of letters in the Latin alphabets that make up the Latin script". Now it's my turn to call you out for a very strained sense because in contrast "Latin script" is well defined and I see you are straying away from the definition for some reason.
ø, ç, ß and ő are definitely part of the Latin script.¹ Any Latin letter was added to the set at some point in time; the definition makes no special distinction for this fact.
> here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
That's not how scripts work. Those are Latin look-alikes (homoglyphs). These are the correct letters: РЕСТОРАН
Just because the letters have a common ancestor, it does not mean they are the same today.
> a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
Russian uses the Cyrillic script (specifically Cyrillic letters from the Russian alphabet), Danish uses the Latin script.² The scripts are distinct sets. It's quite tautological when I write it that way, but I don't know how else I can makeself understood.
¹ In a technical sense, we are constrained here on this Web site by communicating within the confines of Unicode. You could look up the properties of "ø" and see that it is indeed a letter in the Latin script: `\p{General_Category=Letter}` `\p{Script=Latin}` Currently, there are 1335 registered in this set product. The properties don't come from nowhere: Unicode merely codifies what was already linguistically/sociologically agreed upon beforehand. IMO the standard is not quite as expressive as e.g. me sitting next to you with pencil and paper, but good enough for most practical purposes.
² As always, there are exceptions for niche uses and because human language is a messy concept, but we can ignore that and concentrate on the broad strokes. An example for an exception would be that names mentioned in a Latin script embedding are typically transliterated/adapted instead of remaining in Cyrillic, e.g. "Puschkin"/"Puškins"; that's a Russian word, but written in Latin.
I think something is lost in translation since first reaction to normal Chinese is Mandarin == 普通话 whose direct meaning is about spoken form. As I think deeper you are mostly correct although I still think writing language, system and the dialects need a quite formal definition and the difference is subtle. Educated Chinese learns ancient Chinese, read some book written in traditional Chinese, laugh at comedy spoken with “topplect” and watch many Hongkong Movies, there aren’t many gaps in understanding.
Historically many dialects evolves from different races that has invaded China and get absorbed(including CCP). In written form it converges to Chinese system. It makes the topic more confusing - does those count as languages
In China, people refer to written Chinese as 中文, whereas the spoken language as 普通话, 汉语, etc. Colloquially people sometimes say 中文 to mean the spoken language, but that's imprecise.
There's a specific word in Chinese for the written language. The Chinese words for Mandarin are specifically for the spoken "dialect". Your writing system vs language distinction doesn't really apply in this case. Different Chinese languages are mutually intelligible when read by speakers of another "dialect" of Chinese, though another dialect may come across oddly. Ask any Chinese.
Clone legacy tech, leapfrog at the cutting edge. Masterful strategic execution, hats off to China.
One example. Drones have proven to be a strategic gamechanger in the 2020 Azeri-Armenian war. In the same league with the musket, the machine gun, the tank, the airplane, the carrier. Who is the world leader in commercial drones? DJI, a Chinese company. US market share? 76%. It's not even close.
is there anything cutting edge about DJI products aside from volume? TBH I think probably the only thing truly special about DJI is that their software interface actually works, but in the world of "all software" it's still pretty janky (the bar is low in drone-world).
I'm addressing the condescending Western trope, IMHO stemming from denial, that China somehow lacks 'a source of creativity and critical thought' to be 'truly innovative and successful in the high-skill arena'. Commercial drones, mobile computing, 5G, Internet. High skill high growth industries that barely existed 25 years ago where China is at least on par with the West, and with evergrowing market share.
Well I'm an American born asian, and I've worked with 1) Chinese professors, postdocs and grad students and 2) Chinese postdocs who did their undergrad in the US. The difference in creativity levels is night and day.
That's intriguing. My original comment was longer and included https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-.... A plurality of top AI researchers are Chinese. The Chinese undergrad pipeline appears very strong. If China figures a way to keep over half of its most promising undergrads from moving to US for grad school and/or work, chances are there would be a new unquestionable top tech dog (err, dragon) of the XXI century.
haha I mean not just china, but it's not like the worldwide AI pipeline is rife with innovation these days. Do you watch Yannic Kilcher's paper reviews?
I keep waiting for a model that will do something I want (image -> language with a transformer model that doesn't have a fixed token length during training). I have been waiting for about 3 years, haven't seen it yet.
You can't measure innovation by bulk flow of humans through a system. If anything if you force too many humans through a pipeline that needs innovation you risk kneecapping progress because the separation of wheat and chaff becomes quadratically harder, increasingly gamed, and the people who actually have talent and creativity inevitably burn out and fuck off to do something else.
It will never happen. The talk will keep going, but it will never happen. In the case it does, it would be over Taiwan, not over a writer. I know people want to think human rights' are important (to their governments), but the governments would never place too much value on human rights in their calculation. (Taliban being the example)
Cutting business ties is a playable card, but not over this. China knew. If you were the president of a country, you wouldn't either. There is too much on the table already to just give it away.
> In the case it does, it would be over Taiwan, not over a writer.
I don't think the parent post is implying they'll do anything over a writer. But there is significant awareness now regarding the threat CCP poses.
Last week Lithuania recalled their ambassador to China, and they're urging EU to cut dependence on China. Post-Merkel Germany might take a stronger stance against China, going by what their leaders are saying of late.
German here. At the moment, our government is bought out by the automotive industry which has achieved market saturation... the only markets they can grow is China and India.
That changing entirely depends on who wins the election in a month. If it will be Red-Green (Social Democrat + Greens) or Red-Red-Green (Socialists + Social Democrat + Greens), it might very well be that we will cutting down the influence of the automotive lobbyists... but if we end up with the free-market liberals (FDP, yellow) or, worse, the endemically corrupt Conservatives (CDU/CSU, black) we will keep on bowing to the whims of everyone who can't grow in the Western markets.
For everyone in Germany: please vote. This election is crucial.
I am as critical of the German car industry as you are. And with their dependence on the Chinese market they are in a really miserable situation.
But as so often, things are not that easy and are more grey than black and white:
The liberals (FDP) are among the biggest supports of closer contacts to Taiwan, while some parts of the Socialists (Die Linke) argue that the Tiananmen Square massacre did not happen.
The FDP will fold in the way that lines their pockets, I don't have an ounce of trust in them - and I didn't forget their "besser nicht regieren als falsch regieren" either.
Regarding the tankies in our leftie rows... you are completely correct and I hope that in an R2G coalition the foreign ministry ends up at someone from the Greens. SPD botched it the last time with Maas and we have too many questionable comrades to fill that job with someone guaranteed sane...
Take it as concrete examples if you want, but the sentence was meant to demonstrate the scale of things and how they might impact governmental decisions, which gives heavy weight to a lot of things, but not as much as you might expect to human rights issues and national values.
We can get everything we currently get from China from India and Vietnam instead. It's just a matter of time.
The focus of the 2020s and 2030s will be decoupling and decentralizing. New trading partners will be comfortably lower down the value chain, and we won't make the mistake of letting suppliers turn into adversaries again.
Oh yes we will, because business chases after the absolute lowest cost, and for manufacturing anything more complex than a T-shirt, the place to be remains China.
Businesses tend to prefer paying through the nose when it makes sense to for the executives to pay themselves and their allies. The absolute lowest number on cost is zero. China's governing organising principle over the last two U. S. presidents sounds rational if you compare the imagery of Jan 6's q-anon-man to 89's tankman.
You are reading a lot on the 'conflicts' between China and the United States because China is potentially challenging US' dominance, and having competing interests in more areas than any would want.
You wouldn't read this thirty years ago, not when the Soviet Union still have its influence. When the US is trying to have China on its side. Shared and competiing interest is, and will always the core of any diplomatic relationship. China isn't any less commie or more worker-friendly back then, but that wasn't the focus of the conversation isn't it.
Vietnam isn't less commie than China is. India doesn't have better working conditions than China is. We aren't reading them because they are not as significant. Vietnam is simply too small, and India is still struggling to find its own way.
China has never been the US' #1 trading partner. That has been Canada, because Canada imports ~300 billion, and exports ~300 billion to the US. China only imports ~100 billion from the US, but exports ~452 billion. Both numbers are growing, year over year.
I would like to see it your way but all of this so-called decoupling from China seems very half-arsed and appears to me to be nothing more than a show for the electorate. None of it seems very concrete, for years we’ve read that country X is going to hold China accountable for Y but China just keeps on steamrolling forwards without much consequence.
Why do you need to cut them off? I mean, isn't the fact that most countries in the world are dictatorship (or failed states, and these are a much bigger problem) a surprise? China is different from other dictatorships only in size.
If anything, maximising interoperation with non-free countries only benefits free countries, making their position more exclusive. Say: Chinese rich are likely to settle in US and Europe once they made it, just because it's too scary to stay in China, but they spend and pay taxes there.
The world will never be "free" in the Western sense of it, because even the very concept of "society" is foreign to the vast majority of people, the concept of "public good" is foreign too, damn it, in the most countries people can't even queue: they fight for their turn to be served and everyone accepts it as fair. Not just democracy, but even freedom or "rights" in the very basic sense are not understood, or actively rejected by people from all walks of life in most of the world.
Just a thought experiment: if you could "fix" those countries, why not start with Saudi Arabia, instead of China or Russia? Extent of human right abuses in the former is bigger than in either of the latter; it's a no-brainer to invade and occupy it - it's a plain desert great for tanks and they have no nukes; and they have oil. Yet this isn't done for the simple reason - no one is going to benefit from it.
> Just a thought experiment: if you could "fix" those countries, why not start with Saudi Arabia, instead of China or Russia?
On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country. China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea and Taliban. And threatening democratic Taiwan almost every other week with invasion.
>On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country.
SA has been directly involved in funding terrorism(1), they're fighting a war in Yemen for their own national interest(2), they are pressuring countries in very concrete ways (e.g. Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri's resignation in 2017 was basically forced by SA)(3), they've been trying to isolate Qatar since 2017(4), they have no qualms about murdering a critic in an embassy overseas(5), they're increasing their influence in places like Bosnia(6).
>On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country.
Lmao what.
Have you followed anything at all they've been doing?
>China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea
You know they've had those relations with north korea since forever. You might remember a bit of a war that split the country.
>and Taliban
Just like every other surrounding country and countries like the US with business interests in the nation.
Saudi Arabia was the second country to recognize their government in the past.
Pakistan was bombing for and aiding the taliban before the invasion because they prefer them over pashtun nationalists and for other reasons.
Iran which was fighting the Taliban has dropped their rhetoric a good bit.
I think it is relevant here because it provides evidence on whether other countries are likely to put their foot down against China over things like this.
The Assange situation is very different than this one on many levels. I can't see much similarity. It came across as a poor attempt to defend the CCP with the old "America is no better" trope
Different situation, same behaviour - the trampling of individuals for political gain.
BTW, even the historical example of Russian "and you lynch blacks" to the US in response to human-right criticism is relevant, as exemplified by the export of BLM as a general civil rights movement. The US/UK should still be able to criticise China, but without pretending to be a laudable moral example.
Ah then this is where our difference of opinion is. I can see now why you think it's relevant. For me, I always viewed the Russian responses to criticism as diversionary in nature, meant to just essentially say "Well you're not perfect either!". To me, that is just a diversionary tactic to disregard the subject at hand
You mean the US and UK disappeared one of Julian Assange's closest relatives, kept them detained for four years, and trotted them out as blackmail to keep him silent? It doesn't seem the same to me.
>> It encourages future critics to never publish in the first place.
No. It is meant to encourage others to never write such things in any context. This then leads to the masses not thinking such things, after which the censorship will be unnecessary as such thought patterns will not exist. This is Orwell manifest.
How many millions of people are you ready to kill in this mission of opposing dictatorships? How many of them your own countrymen, and how many of them foreigners? Just looking for an order of magnitude estimate, here.
I'd like to see the ethical calculus on this, before joining in on this maximum use of force.
Or, did you mean that everyone should talk a big game about opposing dictatorships? We're already doing that. Talk is cheap, as is foreign oil and other goods.
Most dictatorships are paper thin. A few people with guns, tanks, and fighter jets can hold down millions of others without those. Those few people are easily defeated when facing a superior external force though, even if they have millions of supposed troops (these are willing to surrender immediately). Examples include Iraq, Afghanistan, etc in frontal battle with foreign troops.
Even if the fight IS hard and kills many people, it is worth it right? Or do you want your wife to disappear for four years and be kept in a black prison? Or do you want to watch millions of ethnic minorities being murdered in concentration camps?
It's better to fight, risk death, and be free than to cower in fear while your loved ones are tortured and murdered.
Some days it's difficult to tell which organization is truly in charge of the united states. Nominally for example, the state governments are in charge of things like medical care regulation, but increasingly unelected national business men threaten retaliation whenever the legislature passes law they don't like.
Which is exactly why anyone who treats the CCP or any member or advocate as anything other than an illegitimate, brutally dishonest, murderous, expansionist authoritarian state is a fool, or willing to tolerate such for their own temporary gain.
I would imagine that people are calling these governments illegitimate because they lack a democratic mandate to rule and independent opposition to that rule.
i.e. they weren't voted in; they ceased power by violence.
You can't vote them out.
No one has freedom of association to form an alternative political party that strongly opposes the status quo.
Without those things one party governments can't say they are legitimate, only vanguard dictatorships.
You’re just using two different definitions of “legitimate” which is as common as two people using different boundaries for “blue” vs “green.” You’re talking about legitimacy as having effective control of the country, as the North Korean government does and the Somalian government does not. The person you’re arguing with uses “legitimate” to mean something like “with the just consent of the governed” which a government can have even without de facto control of its territory.
It's not about liking or not liking. Legitimacy in this sense is about whether those governments genuinely represent the people they rule. There exist governments that I strongly disagree with and dislike, but which do legitimately represent their people.
The government is most certainly legitimate if they're able to hold a country together for centuries. Whether or not the claims of being blessed by their god is legitimate is a different matter entirely.
Just saying you don't like a form of government makes it illegitimate is a silly proposition. You get people every election in democratic countries saying the government is illegitimate. Usually they're considered crazy. Should "tyranny of the majority", as they'd say, be considered legitimate? What about tyranny of the minority, since in many countries, most people don't even vote?
You can recognize that a dictator is the legitimate ruler of a country, while also acknowledging that he's not working in favor of the people. If someone has an entire territory's military at their command and they can write and enforce laws, that's usually a sign that they have a legitimate government.
> The government is most certainly legitimate if they're able to hold a country together for centuries.
Legitimacy based on force is not legitimacy. It's just tyranny: if you never ask people how to want to govern themselves how can you meet the criteria of legitimacy, like EVER? Holding the biggest guns does not replace agreement and contractual acceptance of how things are run.
> Should "tyranny of the majority", as they'd say, be considered legitimate
It's a hell lot more legitimate since you can actually expect to change the rulers/people in power at some point through popular action. Under royalty/tyranny, you are forced to accept whoever is at the top and you have no recourse until they die.
That legitimacy is only granted via democracy is a very new concept. Even the coining ancient Greeks had trouble with it, and it definitely did not emerge quickly during the Neolithic revolution when governments were created at all.
It seems that Saudi Arabia or Bahrain’s regimes tend not to get called 'illegitimate', so 'not democratic' would not imply 'illegitimate'.
I think it’s more like this: Governments the US doesn’t like very much are 'illegitimate' because 'not liberal democracies'; regimes the US does like are 'important allies' or otherwise not talked about.
The whole 'not democratic' thing is more like a type of post-hoc justification for what, to many, looks like blatant imperialism. It would appear it is successful at least some of the time.
Legitimacy is more about representing the people and ruling with consent. It's a spectrum, not a binary. The Saudi royal family have a patronage system in place that funnels money down to the regions and the tribes in return for loyalty. The country has no democratic traditions or expectations. For all they're a horrible dynasty of murderous autocrats, it's actually not that simple to argue that they don't rule with consent.
As governments get more oppressive and arbitrary in their exercise of power, it becomes harder for them to make credible claims of legitimacy. I'm not saying the Saudi government is legitimate, but it is possible for it to do things that increase or decrease it's relative legitimacy. Increase consultation and individual freedoms? More legitimate. Crack down on peaceful protests or oppress minorities? Less legitimate.
OK, fine, the CCP is as legitimate as any warlord who came to power by armed conquest and performs some governmental functions.
It stays in power by a combination of active repression, murder of potential opposition (great leap, but not forward), and bread & circuses (we provide economic progress, you keep quiet), and disinformation via controlled media.
To me and many others, legitimacy requires some mechanism for the people to consent to the rule.
The legitimate government of China is in Taipei. If Vichy France had existed for 40 years, rather than 4, it still wouldn't have been the legitimate government of France. Other examples abound.
Legitimate government? A warlord the US liked was over thrown by a warlord the US didn't like. Taiwan was under martial law for almost 40 years! It only recently became a democracy, what is the claim?
Taiwan wasn’t always a democracy, so if that is the standard for “legitimate” then Taiwan fails on that measure too.
Same with South Korea. Both countries started as US-backed dictatorships, and US backed them mainly for its self-interest of halting communism (a threat to American invested political ideals).
Like it or not the majority of Chinese people fought for and aided the communists, and continue to legitimize the communist party government by engaging in orderly civil participation.
Like it or not, anything bad the Chinese government does the Chinese citizenry are culpable because they are not agent-less slaves of the party.
People in China can participate in government. Believe it or not a government which has no finger on the pulse of their constituency or acting outside of their interests can and will be overthrown. You eventually run out of bullets—and people, if you point a gun to their heads.
Taiwan didn’t start as a US backed dictatorship. Truman had pretty much given up n Chiang Kai Shek until China crossed over to side with the North Koreans during the Korean War, making the USA much more interested in supporting the ROC again. One can easily say that China traded Taiwan (which it surely would have been able to take back without USA backing) for North Korea (which probably would have been folded into the ROK without Chinese intervention).
> Taiwan didn’t start as a US backed dictatorship.
Sure because they weren't US backed but they still were a dictatorship...
Truman publicly signaled the US had no intention of defending Taiwan or SK, but public sentiment changed in the US after Kim il-sung invaded.
> One can easily say that China traded Taiwan (which it surely would have been able to take back without USA backing) for North Korea (which probably would have been folded into the ROK without Chinese intervention).
Korea was also the Japanese invasion point into China in WW2, which made it sensitive for the US to mobilize in.
> Sure because they weren't US backed but they still were a dictatorship...
Definitely. A lot of sentiment against mainlanders in Taiwan was created by the KMT’s rule as much as by the communists.
Truman’s hand was called as soon as North Korea invaded South Korea while UN troops were still stationed there. There would have been no way that the USA was going to stay out of that conflict.
they have already brought so much pain to this world and yet we continue to pump up their economy .. make them even more powerful by continuing to make and buy millions of products made in China.
The CCP (not it's people) are scourge to this world and should be dealt with by all countries it has brought pain too!
The Chinese people, even if not all, support their own government, at least more so than a foreign government. Trying to separate the two is misguided. Chinese people shape the CCP, make up its ranks, and for the most part tolerate it and grant it legitimacy by the act of not rebelling.
They fear democracy for the same reason the US used to fear communism: because it is an incompatible system and political party. Are Democrats and Republicans truly that much different besides some differences in policy platforms? They are two separate factions vying for the role of who can govern better, but people these days aren't really looking too closely at results and just voting based on factionalism. China's system is more top-down control, and thus risks failure if the top is corrupted. I think it's probably less tenable long term, but I also don't believe it needs a finger to tip it over the edge.
You've probably been fed propaganda that legitimacy comes from democracy, but it does not. Democracy has long been seen as the least worst of any system for Americans. It is only as legitimate as those of use who fight to defend it, because freedom isn't free, and neither is our system: democracy.
Ultimately legitimacy comes from whether people fight for their government and defend their way of life, regardless of however wrong you may think it is. What is the legitimate government of Vietnam, Afghanistan? Clearly the the US-backed democratic government in Afghanistan is now going the way of illegitimacy (because no one cares enough to support it), despite being fully democratic. It's illegitimate because neither the US aid, weaponry, training, was able to get its democratic supporters to care enough to fight for their way of life. If people had to fight for what government they wanted (democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy), and a foreign nation comes in and props one of these up with advanced weaponry and military force, and still fails, is it still legitimate just because it was a Democratic government?
As long as the details, possibly names or government roles, in the book doesn't get out the government can just call it speculation. If the book remains unpublished, that's probably mission accomplished for them. Remember the reason the NYT got banned from China: an expose on the corporate empire essentially owned by Xi Jinping's family and other top cadres in the CCP. That's the kind of info they are really afraid of, because it could threaten the party's domestic "legitimacy", or mandate to rule.
The CCP does not care one bit what the international community thinks (look at Xinjiang & Hong Kong). So far it has not resulted in any meaningful economic consequences for the CCP...so why worry?
> the reason the NYT got banned from China: an expose on the corporate empire essentially owned by Xi Jinping's family and other top cadres in the CCP
For reference, the New York Times [1] and Bloomberg [2] articles. They hit a nerve because they drive a wedge between the CCP's elite and China's people, something the CCP is sensitive to in a way it's not to international criticism of its actions as a state.
It's astounding how incompetent the US has become at propaganda, compared to the peak of the Cold War with the USSR. The US is an obese fighter that hasn't stepped in the ring for a serious match in 30-40 years. If the US had any idea what it was doing, or what it is really dealing with in China, it'd be applying enormous propaganda effort to that very wedge.
I agree with sibling that TPTB in USA might not actually want what they pretend to want in China. Even if they did, however, in any PR effort it helps to be preaching from a position of perceived authenticity and integrity. USA isn't really in that position anymore, even if we imagine we somehow did occupy it at some point in the past.
Frankly, widespread social instability in China isn't in the US's interest any more than it is in Xi's. We are very dependent on them, and will be for some time.
The fallout from a massive propaganda campaign would be very bad for us if it were to fail to depose the CCP, and not much better for us if it were to succeed.
> it has not resulted in any meaningful economic consequences for the CCP
I would strongly disagree there.
- china law blog https://harrisbricken.com/chinalawblog/chinas-cultural-revol... has mentioned that now their audience is in agreement of opinion that CCP is becoming increasingly authoritarian and less tolerant of foreigners and foreign businesses. as a result, a lot of their business clients are saying "they will never go to China ever again"
- Lehman moments with rescuing hourong, and evergrande about to collapse
- CCP obfuscates any official economy numbers, so you cannot judge their economy based on official numbers. You have to see what actions the CCP is taking. And right now they are making crazy moves.
We can argue about the exact economic significance—my interpretationof the facts you listed is much less severe—but whatever the cost, the CCP seems willing to pay it gladly. If that means running the economy into the ground as the alarmists warn will inevitably happen, then they're still powering on ahead undeterred. The takeaway for critics of China must inevitably be, then, that whatever the cost is it's not high enough to force the CCP to change course.
I wonder also if perhaps avoiding a change of course, despite the costs of not doing so, in the interest of "saving face" might also be playing a role here. As I understand it (and at some risk of overgeneralizing here), this is a big cultural concept that I think might be underestimated by a lot of people in "the West" as a factor here.
It’s hard to measure economic consequences when it involves people not doing things there. It hasn’t resulted in many companies leaving China but it certainly hasn’t made it any more welcoming to foreign capital and workers.
The image of China being a place for international business has really took a nose dive over the last few 5yrs.
That's a fair point! Perhaps it would have been more accurate for me to say that there doesn't appear to be quantifiable economic consequences significant enough for the CCP to change course on the issue.
What private business do matters, of course, but I think the conversation usually veers more into the territory of national action restricting companies or states from doing business with China. There doesn't seem to have been much meaningful action on that front
I don’t get it. The House of Windsor operates a lot of land and businesses through the extended family. Why should we treat the Son of Heaven any different?
Because the CCP bills itself as the opposite of a royal empire. Even Xi Jinping thought claims (at least...) it's following socialism with Chinese characteristics, with "people as the masters of the country" and that the CCP governs using rule of law. If that, heaven forbid, were not in fact the case then it raises questions about the legitimacy of the regime.
After some of these kinds of stunts, I wonder if it is possible that they're more interested in letting people know about their influence in making people submit to their demands, rather than suppressing the actual information.
From personal conversations with some Chinese students, it seems like most of them know what they aren't allowed to talk about, and it's more about submitting to those demands.
Chinese citizen in US. throwaway account for obvious reason. At this point CCP simply does not care about their image, they're in full process of reverting back to Mao-ism and cultural revolution. Cases in point:
- 赵薇 (Zhao wei), a very famous and popular actress in China, was recently scrubbed from the internet. Her work, including movies or tv series she produced, were scrubbed from streaming platform like Tencent. Her follow feature on Weibo was disabled. Pages that used to mention her now have blank space where her name used to be. This is part of a broader crackdown alongside tech, education, effeminate men, celebrities, etc. Some of these efforts have to do with reducing the foreign culture effects that could lead to discussions about western ideals like freedom or democracy.
- English is deemphasized in classrooms, even in Shanghai. What follows is now 'Grandpa xi Jing ping thoughts', for students as young as 6. The thoughts comprises of 14 principles that promote communist ideals.
- An unknown blogger named Li Guangman (李光满) posted claim that revolution is in the air in China, with profound transformation to be felt by all. https://chinamediaproject.org/2021/09/01/profound-transforma.... This post was spread by official party media websites, no doubt in support of the current CCP agendas.
- All this is in the backdrop of xi jing ping attempting to get his 3rd term next year. That will cement his legacy as the most powerful man since Mao, and his dictatorship for life.
“The United States is more aggressively waging a color revolution through the fifth column within China. If this time, we still have to rely on those big capitalists as the main force of anti-imperialism and anti-hegemony,” China will not need enemies to fight. “It will fall first by itself,” just like the Soviet Union back then. That’s why China is reforming the “capital circle” and the “entertainment circle.”
In my own opinion, teaching the Xi Thoughts and communist ideals in school is a good thing, people in a country should learn about their ideology and their government. I don't see it as something negative at all.
Since it is one of the compulsory subjects throughout my secondary school and highschool, I had the opportunity to read all the text books. Of course, the teachers are not great (most good teachers are teaching stem subjects), most students won't pay attention to the texts, there are a lot good information in the text book. I don't remember most of them, but I do remember text made me want to study hard and go to college.
This is not true. 6 year old is year 1 in Chinese primary school. Apparently it is going to be taught at year 3, year 5 in primary school, year 2 in secondary school and year 1 in high school.
I haven't read the text, my assumption is that it would be similar to Mao's, Deng's and Jiang's Thought. Why I consider it is about the government? For example, Deng's thought would set modernization as the priority for country's development. Xi's thought would set new priority. It is just how Chinese government works.
It's a bit suspect, right? I mean, he sacrifices his wife (ok, he didn't know she was alive, and not publishing the book now guarantees nothing) and possible his son... And the CCP comes out looking super bad. Not that I think they are not capabale of this, but everything, combined with the book coming out and this being the perfect PR for it... It sets of some bells.
Then again, CCP may be so blunt intentionally, just to set of some bells or warn other citizens. Maybe they even have some (fabricated) counter evidence ready to go or something.
If it's legit, my comment is really bad and I apologize. What a hero in that case, although, the wife is even more the hero. Or isn't she. What a situation. No one should have to live through this. 4 years, what a nation.
Or maybe this is a marketing ploy by the author. Terribly convenient timing that his ex-wife allegedly called him the day before his book was released and the day before he would talk to NPR about it. So now he could talk to them a day before about how he would talk to them the next day and generate some buzz and outrage amongst the audience that will translate into sales. Really convenient.
I had the same suspicion. However, he says that his son and his ex's father both talked to her in separate phone calls. When multiple people have to keep their story straight, lies don't hold up. Thus, I believe it. Additionally, the CCP would have heard about the impending book from the surrounding press flurry, so the timing isn't strange.
If it's a marketing ploy, then the CCP can counter it easily --- let his wife leave China and --- when free --- tell the world that that conversation never happened.
The alternatives where Whitney Duan is not in China seem implausible to me.
What's the plausible alternative? That Duan is not in China, and has simply been in hiding for years for unexplained reasons?
Or maybe, she's actually been dead for years and her ex-husband made up the phone calls to get publicity for his book?
The CCP has a long track record of disappearing people without trial. Jack Ma is the most famous/recent example. It's completely plausible that they've done the same to Duan, much more plausible than those alternatives.
Not sure what you imply here.
We're talking about someone who's helped his billionaire wife amass a fortune with the complicity of some high ranking Chinese Officials in the past, such as the forme Prime Minister of China.
The priors here also point towards someone who absolutely knows how to drum up a book release.
> If the CCP wanted to give themselves the worst look possible, they succeeded.
CCP doesn't care about looks any more. Not since they realized they could take Hongkong over and no one in the West would bat an eye, sans granting visas to well-known exilants. For what it's worth, since the US pulling out of Kurdistan and then the clusterfuck that was the Afghanistan retreat, it doesn't even seem like the US will defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion.
That's why it is vital to rein in bullies as long as you can... as soon as they realize no one will stop them, they will only escalate.
By putting the woman in the public eye, they can use that fact to discredit the author's implication that she was captured or ill treated.
After all, if the woman is on TV saying 'It's fine, I'm fine, I love the CCP, I live China, don't publish this book or read it, it's full of lies' ...
... well that's all the CCP needs for their home audience at least.
They also may have calculated that having the woman in public and 'appearing ok' would do enough to at least discredit claims that she was killed or something macabre.
My impression is that the CCP is at a point where it's become an echo chamber that believes its own propaganda. This kind of aggressive move is likely seen as projecting strength internally.
Or, you know, this story was somehow made up to drum up the book release.
I may sound cynical, but I think it’s fair to remain skeptical.
The comment I’m replying to, for example, gives for granted that what this person is saying is true, just because it paints China in the bad light we would expect. Even if it make China's secret services look way stupider and inane than they actually are. That's a risky understatement.
Yet NPR fails to tell us how they verified the source’s claims. Have they listened to recordings of the call? Have they had some sort of proof?
There is no line that says they’ve independently checked the claims. Or did I miss that somehow?
When the topic is China we definitely end up accepting very low journalistic standards of verification that we would never accept for other topics. This is due to the mostly justified bias we might have in the West against China, but there's no why this bias is useful in understanding the geopolitics of the USA vs China scenario properly.
As a journalist is clear to me how the process behind such a piece goes: we haven't verified anything, but we're making the person speak directly, so if they're just making shit up, well, you know, it's just them that said false things on air, not us.
China is hilariously bad at HN and Reddit PR, which they never cared about to begin with. They are tremendously effective at international PR. By providing economic support to smaller EU nations, they've been able to veto efforts to limit their influence.
As of late, default subs are frequently flooded with pro-CCP disinformation when any article painting China in a negative light, or (especially) Taiwan in a positive light, is posted.
I'd say that reddit PR for China is doing quite well, when the top comment in a thread is anti-CCP, often other top comments are pro-CCP (and filled with disinformation)
It's my understanding that there are young English speaking party loyalists from affluent (relatively) families who troll western social media. These guys aren't doing PR so much as kicking up dust and defending/denying all CCP actions.
CCP is hilariously bad at PR, period. Their idea of pacifying unrest in Tibet is to put up a giant middle finger facing the Potala Palace and surround it with posters of Mao and Xi.
Yet Tibet is still part of China, with no signs of that changing in the foreseeable future.
I don't think China is "bad at PR"; they just don't care what you or I think. In international relations it seems a small hindrance at best, and it sends a clear signal to both Chinese people and everyone else: "we just do what we want, just try and stop us".
Caring about PR is a property of democratic systems.
Hard to tell. For example, if COVID came from the Wuhan lab, then I suppose we would say they've been brilliant at PR since they haven't really been seriously hounded over that.
Yes they suppressed any possible investigation by removing any possible proof and silencing every single witness, quite clever from them. But also a big reason why that doesn't went along is because that's not only a Chinese issue, at this point is quite public who hired those labs...
I don't think China wants you to see it as open to criticism. It wants you to see it as effective - particularly in areas where freedom and democracy most hamper Western societies. Infrastructure, the pandemic, the influence of tech giants, the effects of mass culture on youth, etc.
I think sometimes the importance of propaganda is overstated. Those guys are around 70 years in power now, and have shut down every attempt ate rebellion so far, so they must be doing something right.
Yeah, their international image is not the most stellar one. But what will people do about it, besides bitching online?
None of the big power players or even medium power players have exactly stellar image. So does image even matter if you can get away with things anyway... Terrorism by state actor is default policy and nothing is being done about it... So why should China act any different?
Edit: I got this wrong. Very sorry! Original comment below.
All the principles are correct but I applied them in the wrong order. The article's title is misleading in the way gojomo points out below, so the title rewrite was good.
----
The submitted title is heavily editorialized, breaking the site guidelines badly. We take submission privileges away from accounts that do that, so please don't do that. "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cherry-picking a detail, especially a sensational detail, and making that the title is the main way that people break this guideline. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's great, but do so by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Threads are sensitive to initial conditions and titles are the mother of all initial conditions, so this is a big deal.
Normally we'd change the title, but since the thread has been entirely determined by the editorialized title, I don't think it makes sense to do that in this case.
Edit: yikes, this is the third title in a row that you editorialized. I don't want to take submission privileges away from you! so please don't keep doing that!
The title obviously varies from the source, & I have no opinion on any prior cases of editorialized titles from the submitter. But, on this story itself, the submitted title is more honestly representative of the article contents than NPR's own title.
The current HN title is: "Missing businesswoman urges ex-husband not to publish book critical of China"
The NPR title is: "'Red Roulette' Reveals The Inside Of China's Wealth-Making Machine"
Notably, the interview is entirely about the details of the strange & sinister calls the author received. There is only a vaguest blurb of the book's topic in the interviewer's intro/outro. There are no questions or answers about the larger topic of "China's Wealth-Making Machine" or specific material in the book. It's all recounting the circumstances of the surprise calls, happening after the book's contents were written.
This article is truly well-described by "Missing businesswoman urges ex-husband not to publish book critical of China", instead of NPR's anodyne title – except insofar as the author's whole recounting of the calls is clearly part of the book's pre-launch PR.
(In fact, the contrast between the interview contents & NPR title is so large it raises at least 2 more questions:
• Did the author make up these calls as PR?
• Did NPR itself feel pressured to 'hide the lede', genericizing their title, either because of their own doubts about the story credibility, or geopolitical concerns about angering the CCP?)
OK, that's an argument that the original title is misleading, in which case the site guidelines ask the submitter to rewrite it. If that's why ilamont rewrote the title, that's legit and I made the wrong call.
Edit: ok, I read the article (which I hadn't before) and you're right. Sorry! I should have checked for that posting.
The problem is that china's justice system is a farce. Even if the charges were real, you don't know how much of it gets a blind eye (as long as you're in favor with the party) and whether the accused was being singled out for political reasons. Is it typical for people to be charged with corruption, imprisoned, but not acknowledged by the government? How would you like it if something like this happened in the US? eg. AOC (or the republican equivalent) getting sent to ADX Florence because she accepted an unauthorized gift of $60 (according to google the limit is $50), but it turned out that Pelosi/McConnell regularly received gifts of $100+ without any punishment?
That's but just a show. Look at the net worth of Pelosi family during her tenure. No one is going to be hurt by this ridiculous rule. It's just a show piece to hide the corruption happening in the political system.
The difference is just that, in China, it's much easier to actually throw corrupted politicians into jail, but mostly impossible in US.
Not worse, just as bad in a different way, it has nothing to do with geography. It is just that absolute power corrupts absolutely, regardless of the players of this power game.
> Can’t wait for the comment thread here about how the US gov is actually worse than the CCP
> Not worse, just as bad in a different way, it has nothing to do with geography. It is just that absolute power corrupts absolutely, regardless of the players of this power game.
How are either of these "breathless fulminations"? Or this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28439648 ? To give this as the reason is just reading from the teleprompter without even looking at what's in front of you.
Meanwhile, rants about programming paradigms or coworkers, big companies, all of those and more can be rather colorful, it's mostly when stepping on the boots things get painted as rabid rants at the drop of a hat.
Yet, what intellectual who is more than a vulgar stooge of power doesn't have a violent and uncompromising antipathy against those who would murder people for expressing the wrong opinion, or even simply for acknowledging historical facts?
edit: I love how this was downvoted within a minute.
> If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.
In the US, you can prosecute and vote out bad behavior. There are also term limits, investigation boards, and laws whose spirit are to protect the people.
Yes, bad actors can thrive in any climate. But the US is set up with an immune defense against totalitarian authority and exploits.
Given how many systems in US fail and at what scale it seems that those mechanisms that you mention when compared with other civilized countries are very much inadequate.
The US is the one of the more long-term stable democracies in world history. I would challenge you to produce the list of democracies (and yes, of course the US is a democratic Constitutional Republic, not a majority rule democracy), spanning merely the past 100 years, that have been stable the entire time. It's an exceptionally short list. The two party system in the US produces a high degree of stability at the cost of increased rigidity. Compare that to the not infrequent chaos of N party systems across Europe (as in Greece, Italy), or the way eg Australia has turned over its leadership in such a rapid fashion as to make governance nearly impossible.
If you go back a hundred years, Europe was still governing like it was stuck centuries in the past, ruled by monarchies. The rest of the world was even more backwards.
Your chart seems to be drawn according to some very strict and modern definition of democracy.
I don't know history of countries in Europe, but in regards to stability some form of democracy was a form of government in Poland since XV century with pauses for getting raided and split up and ruled by our strong neighbors. We had kings but they were elected by the people (who owned land) since XVI century on average every 19 years [1] and had their power limited by political influence, in quite similar manner that US presidents have. And in nearly all elections our people had wider choice in candidates for kings than Americans had with candidates for presidents ever. We had a written constitution just 4 years later than the USA had it. So yeah, democracy can be stable and evolve without being a two party system.
Recently Poland had a few rough years but it's mostly due to our recent tendency to get polarized towards 2 party system by intentional messaging of one party over last 20 years.
So if your argument is USA must have all the dysfunctions because keeping every last detail of the system that is unable to fix them is the only way to maintain stability, then you are probably not quite right.
Responding to the question "what are the long-lived, stable democracies?" by giving an answer that has "pauses for getting raided and split up and ruled by our strong neighbors" misses the point of the question. Also, your Wikipedia cite has this gem:
> Particularly in the late 17th and 18th centuries, the political instability from the elections led numerous political writers to suggest major changes to the system
I thought you meant stable as not collapsing into authoritarianism.
I called it stable because it was a kind of a democracy for all that time. It wasn't petrified like US democracy is. Changes were suggested and some were implemented for the benefit of the people and the system.
In Europe democracy wasn't our secular religion with founding dogma. It was just a good idea that was allowed to evolve rapidly to become better.
Whatever your response to this is, I concede. I'm way too ignorant about history (of USA and in general) to discuss those subjects. Apologies.
Usually they would explain what they did to corroborate the story. This had none of that. I trust NPR specifically because they usually are transparent about their methods or disclose when they couldn’t meet their usually reporting standards.
The entire piece is based on it! What else should they have to explicitly mention, that they verified he even has a missing wife or that he is from China ?
The entire piece is based on a single source who could have an ulterior motive, i.e. selling his book. In my other comment, I note what they could verify, namely his claim to have received a call. They could look at his phone company’s receipts. They could attempt to contact the father. They could at least make a note that the author’s claims are unverified.
I came to post the same thing. I regularly donate to NPR, but shame on them for not seeking to corroborate his story. They could try to reach the father or ask to see the phone company’s billing record of the call. They could at least preface the story with a caution.
Because Tabibi is intentionally confusing #1 and #2 in the examples in that link.
Fake news isn't a marketplace of ideas, it's the opposite. NPR is calling for roadblocks on fake news and misinformation. Many intellectual people who should better seem to intentionally promote the right to spread fake news and facts as something good for society because it is primarily helping their side politically. Whereas free speech is being able to speak your mind freely. We already have some limited laws restricting free speech like in cases of fraud and libel. Why shouldn't they be extended to news sources making up bullshit that never happened like NPR was suggesting?
Taibbi didn't cite any specific examples, so it's unclear how any examples could have been confused. He just wrote that a particular discussion program should have featured a wider range of opinions.
How are we to differentiate speaking one's mind freely from spreading misinformation? No human possesses perfect information.
Spreading third party misinformation is different from creating said misinformation. You could ask them where they got the misinformation and go up the chain till you find who knowingly made it up and don't have someone else to blame.
Again, you're using the term 'speech' to describe fake news, to frame the discussion. Why is that term not used when people commit fraud or scams?
Also the word 'outlaw'. What if tech companies don't amplify the fake news of both creators and repeaters?
As far as the law is concerned a narrow and carefully crafted law can written, a repeater does not get in trouble unless it can be proven without a doubt that they knew it was fake news yet chose to spread it. As far as who decides it(in the legal system), we already have a system that works fairly decently, the court system. Maybe just civil sanctions, like a $500 fine. The accused will have a chance to explain to the court and the public their rationale behind what they wrote/said.
This law wouldn't affect opinions in the slightest. Saying "x gender should stay home", "y race people are terrible" would still not violate law.
Again, this is something that I just threw together, I am sure there are many smarter people than me who can refine it so we can protect true free speech while restricting fake news.
We seem to have drifted from the seemingly impossible task of determining truth to the definitely impossible task of determining what someone believed at the moment of speech. Authoritarianism is terrible for humans. Pray you never have to answer in court for this thread.
The courts have a hard enough time with important truths like whether somebody killed somebody else. They're already busy; why should we load them up with trivial questions like whether COVID-19 was manufactured in a lab or not, and doubly trivial questions like who believed in particular answers to those already-trivial questions and when?
