141–150 of 242 posts
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I think there is substantial, non-trivial overlap between (a) China's views about dissent in 1989 and (b) China's views about the same subject in 2017, to the point that they're nearly the same in all respects pertinent to Tiananmen. It was carried out by (a), while criticism of it is censored by (b). The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captur…
It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery. From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.
The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question.
Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.
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I’m not Chinese, but I did live there for a bit. If you haven’t already I suggest you take the time to get acquainted with Chinese culture, modern history, and modern Chinese lifestyle. In recent times there have been significant human tragedies there for sure, but given the historical context they feared to relive, and the incredible gains they’ve made in recent years, you can think of their actions as real large sc…
but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted That dichotomy was never made. The answer isn't today's ineffective democracies, but it is much closer to those than it is to governments which kill their own citizens to maintain power. It always reads like w…
And yet, t is always at the forefront of the subtext of any discussion of China- the communist regime that's so unlike our Western democracies because it's communist and we're democratic.
As to governments killing their own citizens- the US, the leader of the free world, is one of the few nations besides China that still regularly uses the death penalty. And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts).
It's impossible to make a comment about the politics of China, without implicitly comparing them to the politics of the West; and vice-versa.
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Good point, whereas in America the Republican and Democratic parties have since been dismantled and replaced... Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.
In a meaningful sense, you can say the Republican party is largely the same today as it was during the Contract With America, and the Democratic Party is largely the party of New Deal programs. Sameness here refers to ideological continuity rather than literal individuals being the same.
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We should forgive. It's not an easy thing to do. The notion of forgiving was a revolutionary idea 2000 years ago, and in spite of lying at the bedrock of western morality, it's still a revolutionary idea today. The regime in China also brought 650 million people out of extreme poverty in span of a generation. Somewhat unprecedented in world history, and definitely not something that gets dredged up time and time agai…
When some effort is made to stop erasing history and start learning lessons from it, we can talk about forgiveness. Until then "forgiveness" is an aloof and silly gesture that serves only to whitewash history and trivialize the concept of forgiveness. Edit (since I can't reply any further): @Fricken: you're right. I feel perfectly comfortable making "overtures" that we not whitewash the massacre of 10,000 civilians.…
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I think you misunderstood my comment. I'm saying the U.S. has a cultural problem preventing it from confronting the very real authoritarian excesses of China. I think your articles are excellent evidence of those excesses and I agree with you about the problems posed by their marketing and propaganda.
I'd say the US's cultural problem is they think it's their business to "confront" other countries on their domestic issues.
think it can't happen here? Waco.
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Exactly - part of America's heritage of a free, unusually aggressive, and intellectually combative free press (on both sides of the political spectrum) is that criticism of our government, history, and society is widely studied and disseminated, both domestically and abroad. Knowledge of American human rights injustices, ranging from slavery to Guantanamo Bay, is promoted, shared, taught in schools.
It should be noted that American schools teach plenty of revisionist history or gloss over the worst excesses. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-texas-teaches... https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-lat... https://jezebel.com/heres-how-new-texas-public-school-textbo...
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Hong Kong is not China under the two systems policy, hence why flights between the mainland and HK are considered international. Until recently, the laws were completely separate with the communists basically not interfering with legal aspects of HK society. Then they started abducting booksellers and prosecuting human rights activists, it’s safe to say that the two system policy is winding down quickly.
> Hong Kong is not China under the two systems policy Isn't the full name of that policy "one country, two systems"?
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China wouldn't become as what it is today if they didn't do it. There could not be economic growth during political instability. Life of a billion+ people is now better and in hindsight i guess it was worth it.
bullshit. or maybe the Chinese communist would have been overthrown, and they would have had a better government. all the progress China's made today is because the communist government took their foot off of the necks of the common citizens, and let the citizens work tears and sweats. Stop using what-ifs to justify monstrocities.
Cases in point: the "Arab Spring" (culminating in the Syrian Easter, if I may be so bold); regime change in Libya; regime change in Afghanistan; regime chnge in Iraq; and so on.
This wonderfully altruistic feeling we have, that we want others to enjoy democracy like we do, is always exploited to invade countries "in need of democratic reform". So often, indeed, that I at least wonder if that's the whole point to cultivate this feeling in the hearts and minds of our people.