I must offer another data point. I'm British, and often find myself in these threads criticising criticism of China. Not because I'm being paid by the CCP, but because I believe that mainstream anti-Chinese sentiment tells us more about the West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.
> West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.
oh come on. we criticise China because it’s whole political system, that was set up very recently btw, fights against basic rights we take for granted in the West. not because of what the romans or european empires did hundreds of years ago, but because of what China is doing right now.
Whilst I readily admit that focussing my attention on the West's criticism of China depletes my limited resources to affect positive change in China, I actually believe I am ultimately having a greater impact.
What I'm saying is that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism — its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
I like to think that anybody who has heard about the Vietnam war already knows what the West does in terms like colonialism.
I finally understood that your example related to self-consistency and that Boris' binges are not the definition of colonialism, so my suggestion about influence should be discarded.
you are cherry-picking history in order to further your narrative about exploitation.
in reality, humanity has been at war for millennia. the chinese have been at war with all their neighbours for centuries. slavery has been the status-quo until 200 years ago.
you are also assuming just because some politician is immoral than people will also be immoral. this is false.
does this have anything to do with how the chinese government treats its citizens in the present? not at all
Just for the record, and to be 100% clear. I hereby explicitly denounce the Chinese government's murder of innocent students at Tiananmen Square, and the genocide of the Uighurs.
But I think you are completely missing my point.
I don't believe the West actually wants to improve the world. It wants so much power that it can avoid looking at its own past, and present for that matter.
Those rights are available domestically in the West, yes, at least for the time being. Those same rights have never been extended to the citizens of the countries whose democratic governments were toppled or subverted by what we call the West. But hey, here in the imperial core we are quite comfortable. So this state of being must represent our ideals!
>Those same rights have never been extended to the citizens of the countries whose democratic governments were toppled or subverted by what we call the West.
Well yeah, isn't that precisely what's being criticised?
Also not all the evil in the world was created by the West.
That's very interesting. So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China are due to the West's psychological struggles (?), and not due to actual suffering caused by the Chinese government?
Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.
> So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China
I think that generally western news have a tendency to misrepresent countries that are culturally different.
E.g. as a Russian, reading western news about Russia makes me think that journalist play a broken telephone game, misrepresenting marginal stuff as some kind of insane norm, in a completely unnuanced way, without any context.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same was for China. Probably even worse, as verification is even less accessible.
Dramatic news get clicks and there is no accountability for spicing them up.
I guess, in the age of AI-delivered clickbait media, the old saying "Don't believe everything you read in the papers" was never as true.
I agree, this rhetoric is true for western news about India as well. The BBC for example known to be awful at times, actively misrepresenting and hiding facts to suit their narrative. I guess they have to cater to their population with colonial mentality which can't bear the fact that some ex-colonies are on track to surpass them in the Asian century.
Your argument basically boils down to “you should trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government because I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government.” It’s not very convincing.
> Your argument basically boils down to “you should trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government because I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government.”
What? Why? How? Where does this extreme binary logic come from? When have I said that he should "trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government"? When have I said that "I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government"?
You don't need any "propaganda" to leave the house and live a life. I have all the empirical evidence I need to competently state "well, that's not how it works IRL" when I see some weird journalism full of factual errors and false assumptions.
Why are you acting as there is no personal experience?
I am 100% British. You misunderstand me. I am saying that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism, its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
We can split hairs about Boris Johnson throwing private parties or Joe Biden not wearing a mask or something equally trivial, but at the end of the day, I know of only one major world power which is systematically rounding up its citizens and sending them to reeducation and sterilization camps. It frustrates me when people try to defend China in such roundabout ways when the proof is in the pudding. If anything, humanity would be better off if we were _more_ harsh on China, and willing to call out its grave, grave sins, rather than absurdly shifting the discussion to Western colonialism.
The CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! And lying about it! Why is it even worth discussing the context of Western colonialism when there's a true and honest legal genocide being performed at the hands of the government? This argument is no different than saying that if we just understood the context of Germany's situation in the 1930s better, perhaps we wouldn't criticize the Nazi regime as strongly. There are some acts which transcend cultural context because of how barbaric they are, and in my opinion, what's happening with the Uighur peoples is beyond forgiveness.
This is a misunderstanding of my viewpoint that I often get. I'm not defending China, and I'm not engaging in Whataboutism. Although I certainly understand how it seems like that. My point is that words are more effective when the speaker of those words lives by those words. Of course the metaphors of Boris Johnson's parties and Joe Biden's lack of mask wearing are trivial, it's just an example.
Yes, the CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! But also yes, the entirety of the Americas and Australia are already ethnically cleansed. The West has set the precedent. We simply have no power to, as much as it's the ethically correct thing to do, admonish China.
I believe the psychological process involved is the malignant form of projection[1]. To give a metaphor: when I know myself that I've not been productive enough at work (and I secretly berate myself for it), I mis-perceive perfectly normal gestures of encouragement as personal attacks.
Neville Chamberlain had similar thoughts about Germany.
Perhaps when dictators start doing things like rounding up undesirables into camps and pushing ideological uniformity at the point of a gun the reasonable response is to condemn the behavior? It doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboots, it's despicable to appease, condone, or enable the ones stepping on the throats of human beings.
In Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust[1] it is argued that the Holocaust was not merely a tragic aberration of the ideals of modern Western civilisation but rather a logical realisation of it. Hitler himself, in both Mein Kampf, and Zweites Buch, wrote of how he was inspired by British concentration camps in South Africa. Maybe I haven't studied history enough, but I simply do not understand how dismissing the terrors of WW2 as merely a German problem is not also appeasing, condoning and enabling the terrors of the British. The Holocaust lies at the feet of Europeans, not merely the Nazis.
The problem isn't about who did what, the problem is the idea that horrors can only possibly happen outside the borders of the nation to which I belong.
I'm British. I was specifically taught the gruesome details of the Holocaust in school. But I only learnt about the horrors of British colonialism much later in life, and through my own efforts. British genocides are conspicuous by their absence from both our education system and our political discourse.
I don't think this makes it truly an European issue...
In general history as it is taught is almost a total loss for how biased it is, meaning that since we dropped the ball on writing it down we are doomed to repeat it until we do. So far we have only been playing at historical account, because the truth undermines national borders. But this is a global issue.
Most people criticizing China and the CCP in those forums haven't spent time in China either. I suspect many wouldn't even be able to place China on a map.
The series of high resolution pictures of me throughout the streets, hotels, places I was during my time there - these all appeared on the screens used by the guards as I was being scanned to leave the country.
So yes, I have been to China, I can place China on a map, and it is the most terrifying reincarnation of Nazi Germany - being defended by people who will say "we didn't know any better" after the concentration camps are freed.
> So yes, I have been to China, I can place China on a map, and it is the most terrifying reincarnation of Nazi Germany - being defended by people who will say "we didn't know any better" after the concentration camps are freed.
Oh, good to know that. I didn't know prisoners could left Nazi Germany just like that, only getting a scan. I had a completely different idea of that regime.
Prisoners in jail, in my country, or every other country you can imagine, can't leave either. It's called conviction. China invented a lot of things, but surely not this.
Precisely my point - you were making a false (in?)equivalence by trying to say that xinniethepooh's point was invalid because they were able to leave China while prisoners in Nazi Germany could not - while it's pretty clear that they weren't a prisoner in China, just a traveler.
It's curious that you say 'historically unprecedented imperial past' - imperialism typically has to do with having a ruler, and exerting diplomatic or military force to influence other nations.
Why do you say this is historically unprecedented? China has been imperialist since its beginning, and continues its imperialism with Hong Kong, South china sea, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Myanmar ...
What 'historically unprecedented imperial past' are you referring to that isn't preceded by China's?
Just one example: the entirety of the American continents are culturally European. Imagine if North America was North Chinese speaking Mandarin and South America was South Chinese speaking Cantonese. Not to mention the entire concept of a nation state is a European invention. That Europe drew the borders in Africa, the Middle East, India. Then there's Australia and New Zealand. It's unprecedented. Yes China have/are imperial to an extent, but it seems like apples and oranges to me.
BTW, not to dismiss the other countries from your list, but you should really understand the history of Hong Kong, specifically the Opium Wars. The British took it when the Chinese refused to continue buying their opium.
Not being OK with the myriad of human rights abuses the Chinese government commits - sometimes "silently" and sometimes very opening and outright proudly - is just because I struggle with my own regions history? What the actual fuck... I have to call your "theory" what it is: stupid and dangerous - and whataboutism on top.
To give a metaphor, I think it is perfectly reasonable to criticise my project lead when she criticises me for not meeting my targets but turns up hungover and spends the whole day on Facebook.
I am criticising her because I want her to be effective at her job. Not because I disagree with her about our team's laziness.
We are not equating missed targets with atrocity... A terrorist attack does not miss the target of benevolence. It is something that should never, ever happen but this planet is such a soul-crushing clusterfuck that it is like water under a bridge.
Human life has value. It's not effective value or an estimate of value. It is absolute.
My metaphor is not to pointing to project management as an analogy, it's pointing to how criticism of one side does not automatically mean support for the other side. Unless I've misunderstood your point?
I'm suggesting that we do comparison with things conductive to the act of comparison. With the atrocities we are discussing there is nothing to be gained from comparison because things are already maximum bad: The numbers just vary. Comparison can take away the weight of that, which in our fuzzy wetware translates to dissipating motivating energy that could have gone into action.
I do agree with your point and I am not a believer in the law of the excluded middle.
And I criticize the Chinese government because I want the Chinese people to live a life that is free and void of the constant danger of abuse (while at the same time I can as well recognize that we in the West have a big list of problems and abuses we have to tackle).
I would humbly suggest that you don't post personal information just because someone on the internet is making a comment in extremely poor form - you don't have anything to prove to them. Flag their comment (it's a pretty egregious violation of the HN guidelines) and attend to the people who are making good points.
HN may be one of the best places for discussion on the internet, with some of the best moderators, but even here, you get people who aren't interested in having civil discussions.
