Great discussion we have here, but I only see two people identifying as Chinese in the comments and that dearth of local opinion does not help convince me that we know what we're talking about.
Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
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Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#152In a previous naive world intoxicated by dreams of global citizenry and humanism it would be easy to get sanctimonious and posture about evil. But cultural divides are real and are not going away. And these kind of events and stories simply become opportunities to target other countries weaknesses, reassert a jingoistic sense of superiority and perpetuate existing comfort zones. Or there would be protests daily in we…
Globalization is going to happen thanks to technology. But we get to decide what terms it happens on. Recollecting these sorts of events can be opportunities for asserting jingoistic sense of superiority. Or it can be an opportunity for encouraging and shaming everyone towards a just, humanist moral framework. My family comes from Bangladesh. In the 1970s, Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan, and enshrined…
Tim Cook assures us he is working hard to improve conditions...
this is about as good as it will get. private industry will try to hide and/or paper over the abuses and we will continue to honor them as "progressives"
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'.
As I'm sure we both know, few of those billion people have anything to do with how the government makes decisions about enforcement against dissent. Power is concentrated to a group of people representing a small fraction of the population that is intensely conscious of its own political and historical identity. The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophisticati…
The labor camp comment was in response to someone calling quote 'china' a quote 'psychopath' while being very obviously ignorant about what it's like inside the country. So I'm gonna have to disagree if you're saying they were straw-manning a thoughtful and balanced comment.
There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, so to take just one example, say 50 or so Tiananmens died in the latest US appalling invasion/massacre of Iraq. So that was 50x as horrible and unforgiveable, and should 'forever be held against the USA' in the same essentially horrified way? Something comparable happened every few years of the last century. I get the feeling most people reading this will hold more against me for saying this, than against the US…
I don’t disagree with you, but I think the fundamental difference here is that American invasions are a) acknowledged b) considered fairly negatively by virtually everyone, even by those who initially supported them. It is a publically discussed issue with multiple acceptable opinions which range from “expensive quagmire” to “massive human rights violation.” Tiannamen Square, conversely, was covered up, erased from h…
> It is a publically discussed issue with multiple acceptable opinions which range from “expensive quagmire” to “massive human rights violation.”
It is publicly discussed, but it is also drowned in a flood of other information.
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>> That dichotomy was never made. 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 perfectl…
IMO the death penalty is a disgrace, but it's not comparable to things like Tianamen Square. Not even remotely.
The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process. The implementation is sometimes flawed to the point of absurdity, but the American people largely know this and are free to criticize and debate it without fear of punishment by the state simply for disagreeing. (EDIT: And, more to the point, Americans are increasingly using the power of their vote to abolish the death penalty.)
I hope you can see how the Chinese government's claim to the right to slaughter and imprison its citizens at will and in secret or the crime of expressing dissent is, um... different?
> "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)."
Who's this "they" you speak of? Obama's extra-judicial killing af Anwar Al-Alawki, for example, is one of the great stains on his presidency in the eyes of a large portion of the voting public, and it was hotly contested within the government too. And again, Americans are free to criticize these actions without fear of government reprisal. I remember calling Obama's action cowardly and illegal here on HN a few years back, and the thought of being killed or imprisoned for this never occurred to me. Exactly how does this situation compare to that of China?
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>> That dichotomy was never made. 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 perfectl…
Is it really communist beside the name? I wouldn't say it is and the very important increase in the wealth and salary gap between classes shows that it's far from being a communist regime nowadays
As for Tiananmen, one needs to see the context. China had recently endured the cultural revolution and the leaders had a good understanding of the potential disasters of a revolution. In that context, if they believed that the ends justify the means and that millions would die if a new revolution happened, the leaders could rationalize their decisions.
I'm not saying it's not horrific. It is. But, it's the kind of decision that needs to be understood in it's historical context.
As for the actual mowing of bodies and the bulldozer's making a pie. I'm not sure if it's real or not. It does seem like the kind of rumors that circulate because they are particularly gruesome. What would be the point for the Chinese government to do that? I may be mistaken but, in my mind, the Chinese government at that time was nothing if not practical and pragmatic (in a horrifying way for sure), there would be no justifiable reasons for being this gruesome.
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't claim to be an expert on any of this, but it's pretty clear that China is unwilling to deny trade with North Korea, effectively propping up the Kim regime. Kim is engaging in increasingly dangerous provocations (admittedly provoked by the fact that the United States is still fighting the Korean War).
Just that? Chinese here. I could say, if our government proves capitalism can be very well integrated and become more productive in an authoritarianism society, then that is a really bad news for democracy. On the other hand though, after watching many Fox News clips on Youtube, I don't think you guys are doing very well on democracy, especially the people in the US. Democracy is much harder to maintain than authorit…
US national level politics has been stuck in neutral for a while. But local and state level governments have been often doing pretty well. So although it's not visible on the surface, I think US democracy is doing "good enough". I think a key here is that one person / governing body really doesn't have all the power here.
Fox News is populist media; populist media is a "feature" in practically every country. On the other hand, populist media on the "other side" exists without too much conflict here so far. There's also more sober sources of information too, for those that feel that both are pretty junky. Honestly, the fact that polar opposite populist mouthpieces can both exist is probably a better indicator of democracy than the fact that a single populist media outlet exists. If one had to ding our democracy at the moment, it's that high level government officials in the US are trying to discredit media sources more than in previous times. It's not censorship by any means yet, but it is something to watch (and, if one was a US citizen, seriously push back on).
China will be interesting to watch too. Although they've come a long way, they are still a middle income country by PPP. I can't think of any high income country of late (other than petro-dictatorships) that hasn't embraced some form of more democratic, more open model. Xi Jinping is going in the opposite direction.
The interesting question is whether his current concentration of power will satisfy, and truly keep the stability they seek, of all of the 1.4 billion people in China... especially at a time when China's middle class is rising. I also wonder whether the current control tightening of information, and a reluctance (so far) to ease off the heavy handiness of government involvement in business, will harm innovation in China in the long run. We'll see -- not being Chinese, I obviously don't know enough to wonder anything other than some vague "armchair thoughts".
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#158Lest we forget, this is still the same government that mowed down 10,000 innocent lives, that still runs China today. They've gotten better at hiding behind marketing, propaganda, and strong arming other countries, but they're still ruled by a small, powerful group of elders that control every aspects of Chinese people's lives. It's sad that we keep feeding this dangerous psychopath which threatens democracy and free…
The Chinese haven't attacked anyone in a long time. Seriously. I think they are pioneering new forms of social organization that are different than the western system and might even be better on the whole for the average individual who ignores historical events that took place more than 25 years ago. How many times has the economist predicted a economic crisis in China since 1990 and they just keep on growing?
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#159Great discussion we have here, but I only see two people identifying as Chinese in the comments and that dearth of local opinion does not help convince me that we know what we're talking about.
here, let me show you why
- Man in China sentenced to five years' jail for running VPN https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-s...
- France couple in China unreachable after Liu Xiaobo tribute - BBC News http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42454865
- China Continues Hunting Down Liu Xiaobo Commemorators, Rounding Up Dissident Writer https://chinachange.org/2017/12/22/china-continues-hunting-d...
Re: Tiananmen Square 1989 death toll was at least 10,000 according to UK documents
#160In a previous naive world intoxicated by dreams of global citizenry and humanism it would be easy to get sanctimonious and posture about evil. But cultural divides are real and are not going away. And these kind of events and stories simply become opportunities to target other countries weaknesses, reassert a jingoistic sense of superiority and perpetuate existing comfort zones. Or there would be protests daily in we…
There is something especially nefarious about your own government taking the opportunity to murder 10,000 of its protesting citizens because they conveniently pooled together in one location. Is that not worth talking about? Especially when that government is still in power, and covering up that event?