So are you denying that China is locking up and sterilizing Uyghurs or not. Are you claiming that’s propaganda? How much do you need to know to balance that out? “Well at least the trains ran on time.”
I’m sick to death of American and European business people not giving a damn about what the Chinese Government is doing and deciding that their profits are more important than basic human rights.
It’s clear you feel the need to shout at internet strangers about their beliefs. Have you even read my posts about China before you started your tirade? Ignored.
When basic human rights are being ignored, when a country is carrying out what human rights groups (and the US government) calls a slow genocide, and people don’t seem to have much awareness of it, you do what you can. Sometimes that includes shouting at Internet strangers.
That tends to happen with genocides.
It’s not like China is only being made to look bad by propagandists.
They are committing horrific crimes against humanity, right now. On par with the worst I’ve ever seen any regime commit, including the Nazis.
During the early days of WWII, up until Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration of war, there were still mainstream American publications advocating a neutral stance towards the war, including continued trade with Germany. Admittedly, the full horror of the Third Reich had yet to be brought to light, for Americans at least, but the lure of free trade and wartime profits was more than enough in some areas to get people to turn a blind eye or two. So not that surprising that China, a country that gives the willing observer a lot more room to make up ways to avoid looking too closely and to convince themselves the fig leaf is real than Germany every did, is getting such a pass.
I mean the reality is that the worst abuses of the CCP are inward focused. Its bad, for sure, but the things they are doing are to their own people.
Which makes the calculus on what and how to respond much trickier.
With a Ukraine situation there is a clear and obvious intervention and outcome. Prevent Russian occupation and preserve Ukrainian sovereignty. If you do that you can rather resolve the worst abuses through that alone.
With China its harder. There is no external force to support, there is no obvious off ramp that stops the abuses. The only way to ensure that it stops would be to effectively declare. war on China and permanently occupy the region. But short of militarily conquering and breaking the central government theres no direct action to stop. Xi and co are largely immune to external pressures over internal matters like this. See: Hong Kong.
Yep. I think it’s nearly impossible to change Chinese behavior that is directed internally. And in some ways, we should question the consequences of being able to do so, given that the result would fundamentally destabilize the system of nation state relationships on which for better or worse the world order relies. The trade-off for a system of national sovereignties is the need to accept that within those sovereignties many things will happen that are anathema to outsiders, yet you cannot really change those things without opening up yourself to the same sort of medicine.
Of course, it’s all about power, too; if you’re Iraq, or Panama, or the like, you are screwed. If you have nukes, though, or can make it way too difficult for an intervention to work, you can do as you please (cf: North Korea).
Universalist ideas about human rights, which are in many ways extremely compelling, run afoul of this all the time. Even the UN charters and declarations and all recognize the right of sovereign nations to conduct their own affairs according to their own laws. The line where such rights are subordinated to global absolutes is necessarily fuzzy and hard to pin down, as that would take enforcement.
The positive points about the recent Chinese governments are clear:
If Xi wasn’t a megalomaniac dictator who desires to crush the freedoms of all Chinese people whether on the mainland, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, and eradicate the peoples and cultures he doesn’t personally like, then I think China would be discussed quite positively in general. The extraordinary thing is that the negatives of the present regime are so absolute and immense that the amazing achievements of past leaders are rendered irrelevant (when discussing China, obviously not irrelevant to the Chinese who no longer live permanently hungry).
This is a fallacy spread by the Chinese government. It’s just as easy to argue that it was capitalism (AKA, the reduction of Communist policies) that brought China out of poverty. It is also possible that they could have been brought out of poverty a lot sooner if it wasn’t for the CCP. Also, don’t forget that it was Deng Xiaoping that crushed the Tiananmen Square protests.
Of course, the actual narrative promoted by the CCP is nothing like this at all. They frame themselves as the saviors of modern China from the evil foreigners in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’ve lived in Macau for almost a decade and most people I know here dislike Xi, even the ones who are more accepting of the mainland Chinese government. My in-laws escaped the mainland in the 80s and also do not have any love for the CCP. The new national security laws here and in HK are driving away foreigners (we’re leaving next year) and foreign businesses.
I think this is just arguing semantics. You could also easily argue that it wasn’t capitalism but the effort of the Chinese people that grew their own economy, or that it wasn’t the Chinese people but the international market hungering for cheap manufactured goods that did it, or that it’s due to mother Earth’s natural environment that enabled anything of much use to happen at all, all are simultaneously true in the same sense.
Typically, when governments make correct decisions given their context you credit them for those decisions. Not trying to say that these governments were overall ‘good’ or ethical or special in any way.
“Are we the baddies?”
That’s true, I guess. I think what bothers me is the messaging here related to it. Like I said above, the CCP portray themselves as the savior of China and claim all responsibility for pulling it out of poverty, even though a great deal of that poverty was created due to policies of the CCP to begin with. It’s like drowning someone then pulling their head out of the water and claiming you saved their life.
I understand what you mean and agree with you. The CCP is good at propaganda (at least that’s my vague impression from the outside) when they do something evil, I can only imagine how much they crow about positive changes in people’s lives that happened under their watch.
It’s not really that CCP is good at propaganda, they just constantly repeat the lines whenever they can to overwhelm the information, and stays slient about all the bad history, avoid the subject and question the questioner’s motives whenever things get brought up. China is just in the zone where a large group of people being OK relying on one channel for their information. In this way, normal citizens mostly just live comfortably in their own bubble, without any reasons to care about other angles. A lot of the citizens also would gladly defend CCP’s positions, because, CCP is in a sense, China mainstream itself. Registered CCP membership numbers are around or just below 100 million. The party is intertwined with everything China does. That being said, one can easily recognize its tone and voice when it broadcast to the western world (in English), because China’s quite new and bad at it. Just like you can easily tell someone only use arguments from their own favorite channel, which probably make some sense in their own country, but won’t convince anyone else.
I have an anecdote from meeting the China delegation at the UN in Vienna. Suffice to say my opinion of their ability at diplomacy hasn’t changed. They were as graceless then in person as they are graceless now (as seen on TV). This is surprising and disappointing to me as I know the Chinese have a deep talent pool but they seem to have the absolute worst for their diplomatic corps. Maybe their best just pack up and leave.
I am no Sinologist, for sure. My experience in Chinese history and political science stuff dates back a long time to my grad school days, and professionally I never really worked in that sphere. My sense nonetheless is that there are a lot of narratives running through Chinese history, including the recent (200 years or so) past, and while many of these narratives contradict each other, they are all valid narratives in their own way.
That is, my sense is that like any complex society, China is characterized by multiple ways that its people understand themselves and communicate their identity to the rest of the world. The Century of Humiliation was real. The corruption of the Nationalists was real. The leadership of Mao was real. The repression and violence of the CCP is real. The ethnic and cultural prejudice (and consequent ethnic cleansing) focused on the Uighurs is real. Etc. No one thread explains it all, and no one thread is without its inconsistencies.
Perhaps all we can do really is look at what is going on right now, in terms of actions. In that sense, Beijing ain’t looking too good. The government is authoritarian, its policies often Draconian, it is prickly, hard to deal with, poor at communication with the outside world in many cases, and somewhat paranoid. In addition, of course, to imposing a vicious sort of cultural conformity on its citizens in ways that are quite appalling to those of us looking in from the outside.
At the same time, China is a vital part of the economy the world has erected, for better or for worse. And they are essentially immune from physical coercion for a variety of reasons. So finding a modus vivendi is necessary, even if doing so makes you want to go take a shower after dealing with the CCP leaders.
The current and recent US policy has been to try to change the first point, on interdependence, as much as possible. I think that’s the right one, even if it will take a decade to achieve (about as long as it took for China to rise from trivial to dominant in some supply chains).
I’m not sure that one, it can be done at this point, not without completely exploding the existing consumer economy and replacing it with something much more austere, and two, whether it should be done even. I’m not decided on that question, but there is an argument to be made that more global interdependence is the way forward, not less. Autarchy and protectionist trade policies seem like a retrograde maneuver in many ways.
US policy is not for autarky - it is for (critical) supply chains primarily integrated with friendly nations, not authoritarian ones. A few billion consumers, workers and innovators is a plenty large market, even if forgoing 1.4 billion in China.