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China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

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Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#191

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

stevenjohns wrote: post #20
monocasa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Uighers may be the first population to sign up for satellite subscriptions If they can at all. Uighers can't even buy a knife without it being engraved with a QR code of their national ID number.

I recently traveled to China and went to a fairly remote area dominated by Uyghurs and didn't see anything that would indicate that level of oppression. They seemed quite free to do what they wanted to between themselves (such as buying a knife) although I imagine their political rights wouldn't be very strong.

If you were in a remote area of Xinjiang, are you sure that the locals were Uighurs and not ethnic Kazakhs? To an outsider the populations are easy to confuse, but the Kazakhs are not under the same restrictions that the Uighurs are.

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#192

Post by myopicgoat »

soueuls wrote: post #169

I have personally lived long term both in the US and China (I am French) And I would choose China to raise my kids over the US any days. Yes there are repression in China, it would be a lie to deny it, yes I have been around a girl who smoked weed, she was 28-30 years old and she literally had to hide behind a car because it's completely forbidden, highly punished and another citizen can report you. But China has man…

Right. No offense but where do you live in China? Beijing or Shanghai is not exactly the same as Xinjiang. Also foreigners (still) enjoy a de facto “upper class” status in China so it’s likely you may be unaware (or choose to be) to much of what happens (e.g. situation of migrants in big cities).

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#193

Post by lambdadmitry »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #108
pentae wrote: post #99

So can anyone tell me why we should support what China is doing? Why should any entrepreneur or tech worker go there and support this government? How come China seems to get a free pass on human rights issues like this by western society?

Because keeping a large diverse country stable and safe is very difficult, and a failure causes enormous tragedy. The approach that works to keep the US stable does not always work well in other countries. To keep the billion people who live in China safe from civil war and rampant terrorism is already a great achievement -- even it comes at the expense of some nice things such as human rights. In fact, China manages…

Unfortunately there is a false equivalence in your post: you implicitly equate "prosperity of a family" with "having a huge all-powerful nation state". There is no such link; if anything, life of Russians improved after the collapse of USSR (undoubtedly in a middle term, arguably even in a short term; source: am Russian).

That equivalency is a linchpin of any aspiring fascist state. Please try and question it, you will notice that ir doesn't make much sense.

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#194

Post by Arn_Thor »

yusuke10 wrote: post #136
kashprime wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is not whether China will eventually devolve more political power to the populace——that is almost a given This idea was popular in 2013 when this article was written, but Xi's regime has indeed shown that greater prosperity can be had with increased repression. Turmoil in America only underlines this.

> greater prosperity can be had with increased repression. Fake prosperity between 2012 and now. 300%+ debt ratio. High government debt. High (state) corporate debt. creeping up Household debt. Several provinces disclosed 20-30% fake revenue. Xi's government now stresses stability over GDP growth (sign of weakness). Several high-level Chinese economists warn of an economic crash in China.

Building cities and state infrastructure costs money. China is in practice following pretty standard Keynesian thought. Educated people can and do disagree about whether it will work, but the shift to stability over GDP is not a sign of weakness... It's exactly what western observers and doomsayers for years have been asking for. China's permabears will keep complaining, of course, as is their right, but that doesn't change facts on the ground.

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#195

Post by Arn_Thor »

ghostcluster wrote: post #111
thinkpad20 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xian at least has thousands of years of history. On the bullet train in China you’ll often pass by cities of millions of people which might have been mere hamlets a generation or two ago. The size of China, its economic renaissance and the fact that good jobs in China are almost exclusively found in urban areas has led to a vast migration towards city centers which is pretty much unprecedented in human history.

there are a number of mounting structural dangers though. Due to decades of the one child policy, their population is rapidly aging, without a strong youth base to replace them. China, though nominally a communist state, has no social safety net akin to Social Security for the elderly. Additionally, their economic rise has contributed to higher wages and hence a relatively weaker position in the price sensitive globa…

Hence their concerted focus on upgrading and automating their industry. They're aiming for more production for domestic consumption (enticing their middle class buy Chinese rather than foreign brands) and higher value-added exports.

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#197

Post by lambdadmitry »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #155
librexpr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the families of the 120 000 people in the re-education camp? Or the families of the people who's organs are harvested, or who are imprisoned for being mildly critical of the government? Are they safe? It's easy to excuse horrible acts by saying it's for the greater good, but it's rarely actually the case. Chinese civilization won't collapse if they stop harvesting organs and imprisoning people who are even…

About re-education camps and imprisonment for being critical of the government. Horrible acts are occasionally better than the alternative, if you think of the number of lives lost compared to the number of lives saved. I am not sure that these actions by the Chinese government are perfectly justified by this argument. But I think it's possible . Often, governments fall and civil wars start from a tiny spark of seemi…

What's up with Yugoslavia? Last war (genocide really) was stopped and it's now in one of the most peaceful periods of its history. Also, what's wrong with Georgia? The revolution there made lifes of people immeasurably better and gave the country huge push.

It seems that you are arguing in bad faith. The problem with organ harvesting isn't that they harvest them from those sentenced to death; it's the discrepancy between number of operations and organ availability and number of capital punishments.

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#199

Post by baybal2 »

ghostcluster wrote: post #114
_cs2017_ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because keeping a large diverse country stable and safe is very difficult, and a failure causes enormous tragedy. The approach that works to keep the US stable does not always work well in other countries. To keep the billion people who live in China safe from civil war and rampant terrorism is already a great achievement -- even it comes at the expense of some nice things such as human rights. In fact, China manages…

The ruling ethnic elite (and fully 91.51% of the population as of 2010) are Han Chinese, and you could say they enforce somewhat of an ethnostate. Foreigners cannot become citizens even if they marry a native Chinese and contribute to their economy.

>Foreigners cannot become citizens even if they marry a native Chinese and contribute to their economy.

Well, there are a "whopping" 1500 new naturalised citizens since the passage of 1998 citizenship law :)

Re: China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

#200

Post by mmjaa »

pentae wrote: post #99

So can anyone tell me why we should support what China is doing? Why should any entrepreneur or tech worker go there and support this government? How come China seems to get a free pass on human rights issues like this by western society?

For the same reason the Coalition of the West, currently doing everything it can to perpetuate World War Three in the Middle East, gets away with its heinous activities: out of sight, out of mind.

Nobody cares about oppression until it directly effects them, and these days: by the time you're effected by it, its too late.

I'm less concerned with suppression of human rights in China than I am with the Imperialist destruction of civilisation that the West has been engaged in, all over the Middle East. But! That does not mean I'm not concerned about China, as an individual. Its just that there are worse things to worry about than China.

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