Comments like this are especially funny and dishonest because you, like most Westerners, likely have absolutely no idea what's happening to the Uighurs. Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda. And while China is taking some drastic measures in the region, most Uighurs at this point likely welcome the enhanced investment into the region.
The West' "view of China," like the West's view of the HK situation, is just a fantasy. It has nothing to do with actual evidence, facts or serious research. Like Iraq, the entire narrative is being driven by anonymous sources that do nothing but validate the Western hatred of China.
> China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.
Oh, the irony. As we speak American bombs are being dropped on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of children and escalating what the UN has repeatedly called the worst humanitarian situation on planet. But yes it's China that's engaged in human rights atrocities.
> The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.
-- George Orwell
And it's not continued murder and pretending it and Tiananmen etc. never happened, all sorts of flowers can bloom on that:
Bombs dropping every twenty minutes is a heinous evil that most Americans are ill-prepared to confront.
It takes a great deal of courage to learn the truth of the American military endeavours that have plunged the world into chaos and war for decades now. This concept is too scary for most Americans - even, Westerners in general - to deal with, and therefore: it continues.
Yeah, while this story joins the mass of stories that get flagged off the front page. Right now, one opportunity to be moral and show solidarity was given to you, and this is how you used it -- you aren't making a thread to help with what you use to belittle this, you use one atrocity to cover another, and think you're better than "most Westerners".
It's not primarily about who does bad things, it's about the victims, and how to help them. That's what empathy is, and that's why punishing evildoers even matters, not because the evildoers do. And yeah, I said evildoers instead of bending over backwards to say the same thing in more bloated language.
I happen to have a keen interest in the HK situation, and propaganda in general.
> Reports of "millions" being forced into camps are pure propaganda
Might it be possible for you to tell us what the actual number of Uighurs is that are are being forced into camps (and the number that are going there willingly, if some are doing so), as well as how you came to know the truth (actual numbers) of what is going on?
HN has gone completely off the rails. See my comment above. It's been like this for more than a year now. This sort of outright racist hate speech is now completely normal on HN and is eagerly embraced.
why I say it is a cultural issue, is because when there are minority PRC origin students in majority Singaporean classes the PRCs tend to adapt and not try funny tricks. They longer they assimilate, the less they try.
For Singaporeans it's an unholy sin to cheat at exams, (you are barred from exams for the semester, all your grades for the entire semester are invalidated, you parents will be ashamed of you, and everyone you know will unfriend you) but copying homework/assignments/plagiarism is still somewhat tolerated before university level.
> Also, thousands of Chinese ex-pat students have been expelled from US schools.
Very hard to draw any conclusions about this...
From the article: "About 8,000 Chinese students were expelled from American schools in the past year... Most were expelled because of a low grade point average (GPA)"
Another source quoting the same research says:
"A 54-page report released this week says that schools in the United States have expelled 1,657 Chinese since the 2012-2013 school year, mainly for “academic dishonesty or low academic performances,” but a company representative now says the number might be as high as 8,000 students. “A lot of students tend to keep silent or go back to their country,” says Andrew Chen, chief development officer at WholeRen." [1] (also, note that your source is wrong, as this is over the 3 year period from 2012 - 2015, not over the year 2015)
So it's 1657 over 3 years, but "might be as high as as high as 8000" according to a company representative? And over half of that was for poor performance, not cheating. So we can say that between 800 and 4000 students were expelled for academic dishonesty over 3 years.
How does that compare to the general population? Not sure, but according to these statistics, over 100,000 students were expelled in 2006 from public schools in the US. [2] They don't break this down by reason, but that's a pretty big number compared to 200 - 1300 in a year for Chinese students, especially considering the US hosts a quarter million Chinese students each year [1].
1. None of those links provide anything like evidence or support of your accusations.
2. It's absolutely remarkable that Huawei had somehow committed all these crimes and yet nobody has ever managed to prove anything significant in a court of law.
All we get are wild accusations and law suits that get thrown out.
Here's the really remarkable aspect here: the US government doesn't need to actually force propaganda on its citizens. If there's one thing we can learn very clearly from this entire ridiculous episode it is that American citizens and the American media will happily propagandize themselves. They will eagerly believe the most far fetched claims without a shred of proof, despite all actual evidence to the contrary, and they will spread those claims to each other in a kind of extremely intense decentralized disinformation machine. There's nothing else like this in the planet. You would think after Iraq Americans would learn even the tiniest bit of skepticism... But no.
I won't even bother pointing out any more how HN has devolved into a 24/7 racist anti-China Two Minute Hate system. At this point it's beyond clear that the community has abandoned any kind integrity. I don't think there's anything to be done which is why I'I've left and had to go through the embarrassing exercise if unrecommending the site to people I've previously recommended it to. People will say this is just a phase but I doubt it. When a community abandons any kind of Truth standard and just embraces bullshit I don't think it recovers.
I think it was a very valid thing to post. His comment made me dive into OPs history to discover that he might as well be a paid propaganda spreader. Or at the very least not someone worth engaging or taking seriously. Why is it considered unsubstantive?
It's unsubstantive because it brings up a personal point solely (if implicitly) to cast aspersion on another user.
Internet commenters are a million times too likely to assume that someone they disagree with is posting in bad faith. This is probably the biggest poison we see on HN, and it's growing. When it comes to minorities of any kind (such as nationality), the effect is to gang up on others and hound them. If that sounds odd, imagine how you'd feel if expressing your personal view on something led people to accuse you of being a spy or a paid agent. That's happening commonly now. For an example from a few months ago, see the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19401961.
This comes from a cognitive bias rather than malice—the bias that, because my views are so obviously bright and light to me, anyone disagreeing must be coming from a dark place—but it's no less poisonous for being unintentional.
It's unsubstantive because it's purely conjecture.
Not everyone who has a differing view from the common consensus is a "paid propaganda spreader" and a differing view does not make someone any less worthy of engaging or taking seriously.
I would not classify the OP's post as unsubstantial. He makes an effort to type fully formed opinions and many of his comments are backed by citations. If you want to see an example of objectively unsubstantive posts, please see [1]. You will only find one-liners and unsubstantiated, inflammatory statements.
By the way, your comment also break HN's rules on accusing others of astroturfing:
> Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data.
Definitely a good read, reminds on when I was in Hong Kong and my guide would always say June 4 Incident around tourists from the PRC. The mainlanders would always immediately start defending the government.
Yeah, this kind of blind racism and ignorance of what's actually happening in China is always a bit shocking. A lot of people are going to look back on the US from 2001 to 2030 and ask themselves how people be so totally blind and stupid. It's going to be one of those monumental historical blunders that will never really be lived down.
> In what free market does a government subsidize a company
The idea that the Chinese government subsidizes every Chinese company is nonsense. This is just something that Americans need to believe because they don't want to admit how extraordinarily inefficient their domestic industries were before 2000.
> and force competitors to give their native companies their IP to do business?
This is hilarious. Nobody forces foreign companies to give away their IP. These companies, which are supposedly the best in the world, analyze the trade and make it voluntarily or walk away. It's called the free market. Remember that?
> What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market
The irony here is that all the tariffs do is put America further and further behind. The tariffs don't help America at all eg [1]. This should be obvious to anybody who understands how solar works and knows that the real money is not in panel printing.
> China is unique in that it's been all about oppressing and abusing the population as heavily as possible, without pause, ever since the first emperors gave the country its foreign name.
This is such complete nonsense. I think it's hilarious how totally and completely misguided about China that Westerners, and Americans in particular, actually are. It boggles the belief just how much complete nonsense is spouted here on reddit and in the Western press. This is the very essence of people being disconnected from reality and constructing a new reality in accordance with their ideology.
Reality check: go to China and actually talk to the Chinese themselves. Radical idea! Social credit is extremely popular in China [1]. The social credit system is also not new. Anybody who understands how Chinese society has always worked would understand that this is the application of new technology to ideas that are nearly three thousand years old.
> "Citizens with access to benefits respond more favorably"
Of course they do. These sorts of systems always offer a sizable portion of the population benefits, that's how they gain popular support. This doesn't mean that they aren't terrible ideas.
You have to consider how a government affects the people who disapprove of the government, who are not part of a majority, who are not conformists.
Many people don't think this is worth doing. But the sentiment that only the conformist majority matters has led to unspeakable atrocities throughout history, and continues to even in the present day across the world.
Your criticism is very valid. But saying only the majority benefits is very different from claiming that the purpose is to oppress everyone, isn't it? That is what the gp was angered by and responding to.
> Social credit is extremely popular in China [1]. The social credit system is also not new.
Slavery was once popular in America, and as a system was not new. It was hugely beneficial to a segment of the population. Would you be pro slavery because of those arguments?
> At the end of the day, you have a company with strong links (down to its founder) to the military
This sort of pure propaganda just undermines your case. The founder of Huawei was never more than a low level engineer in the military, was forbidden from joining the CCP for many years [1].
This isn't really about spying. The reality is that Huawei's equipment is the best in the world for the money. It's not even close. Given a free market (remember that?) there's really no doubt that Huawei will go on to completely dominate this market over the next decade. It's already the largest telecom equipment maker in the world [1] and its size only makes its products and architects more and more competitive with each day. It's a virtuous cycle at work that nobody can deny anymore. The numbers don't lie: what you have here is a technologically sophisticated market where the West cannot compete with China at all. This is supposed to be impossible!
Now there is a legitimate national security concern about having the world's telecom equipment manufactured by a single company. But there's only so much can do under existing trade treaties. It's also really not a good look for the US and the West to be seen actively trying to disrupt the free market at work. And so we get this concocted story about spying. It's concocted because nobody, despite spending millions and millions of dollars investigating Huawei and studying its boxes, has ever shown the company participating in anything like espionage. Most people can see through this blatant protectionist hypocrisy [2]. Ironically all the security research on Huawei has only served to make their products much more secure than the competition.
Huawei is a state-backed organization working from a closed, controlled economy where not even information, let alone products, services and capital flow freely.
So if the cost of having to inspect every single piece of Huawei gear, plus check and load the software still keeps them 'competitive' then it might be worth it to outsiders, but probably not.
Given that it's commodity gear, perhaps someone will come along, say from Taiwan ... and produce the same thing at competitive costs, wherein security is not a factor and then, yes, that entity would be poised to dominate on price.
If you think that demonstrates a legitimate security concern then every telecom manufacturer is a security concern. Spend some time comparing the known security issues with Huawei routers to Cisco's routers for example.
No, there's absolutely no evidence that Huawei equipment is a legitmate security concern. In fact it's just the opposite. Huawei equipment has been extensively and continuously studied by the best security researchers in the world. Britain, alone, spent roughly $25 million dollars going over all Huawei equipment with a fine tooth comb and their "big conclusion" was that they can only offer "limited assurances" of Huawei equipment [1]. USA and France and Germany and Brazil have also extensively analyzed Huawei equipment and come up with nothing. Ironically, as the discussion in India and Japan and the Phillipines now show, the Western obsession with Huawei and has only made the case for Huawei's equipment much, much stronger.
The West' "view of China," like the West's view of the HK situation, is just a fantasy. It has nothing to do with actual evidence, facts or serious research. Like Iraq, the entire narrative is being driven by anonymous sources that do nothing but validate the Western hatred of China.
> China would have the moral high ground to argue the merits of non-democratic political systems if it didn't engage in such human rights atrocities.
Oh, the irony. As we speak American bombs are being dropped on Yemen, slaughtering thousands of children and escalating what the UN has repeatedly called the worst humanitarian situation on planet. But yes it's China that's engaged in human rights atrocities.