cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/863209
Archived version: https://archive.ph/5Ok1c
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230731013125/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-66337328
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/863209
Archived version: https://archive.ph/5Ok1c
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230731013125/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-66337328
What is with the China apologists in this thread? Wtf??
I see it all over Lemmy unfortunately. I think it is because Lemmy is still relatively fringe and it is where lots of pro communism communities emerged. Normally, I find it actually pretty refreshing to see more left wing stuff but the pro China (or at least the kneejerk reactions to anything anti China) to be exhausting.
To be fair, I used to see a lot of it on Reddit as well. I think they are just a bigger proportion percentage wise on Lemmy so you see much more of it.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. There are a lot of pro-China comments that are just… Well they either drank the kool-aid or are dishing it out. Especially when it comes to social policies.
On the other hand, China has been making significant technological accomplishments that you just don’t hear about in Western media. They’ve made a lot of advancements in spaceflight and manufacturing processes that humanity as a whole could benefit from if we were more cooperative. And that’s not even mentioning Nuclear Power.
China is WAY ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to new nuclear power. They’re the only ones with Gen 4 reactors, the only ones working on Thorium reactors, and are on track to build over 100 new nuclear plants over the next few years. China is to nuclear power as the US is to weapons; sure other countries might be tinkering with some stuff, but there’s really no comparison when they’re doing more than the rest of the world combined.
I wish there were more unbiased sources. Unfortunately, there’s usually only one of two sides. Either you get news from China which usually boils down to “We’re amazing and nothing we do is ever bad or wrong. Anyone saying otherwise is just lying because they’re jealous/afraid of our wild success!” Or you get news from the US/West that’s basically “China is a totalitarian poo-country that’s on the verge of collapse. They contribute nothing to global advancement and the only thing they’re good for is making cheap, poor quality, crap.”
I guess you would have to sift the scientific literature to get a general idea. It would be the least biased source. Being totalitarian really helps with nuclear. Just look at what Germany has been up to.
China is reforesting desertified land, but at what cost???
I found this to be a decent enough primer: https://medium.com/@bobbyarlan/a-case-study-in-racist-anti-chinese-sentiment-fuelled-by-american-bots-and-western-propaganda-f0a69978d568
A decent TLDR: The article argues that anti-Chinese propaganda spread by the U.S. and Western media is fueling racist sentiment. Claims of mass detention of Uyghurs are based on flawed studies and sources like Adrian Zenz, a far-right Christian fundamentalist. Atrocity propaganda is a common tactic used by the U.S. to justify wars. The U.S. is threatened by China’s economic rise and technological progress, so it is trying to portray China negatively and prepare public opinion for a potential conflict. However, most of the world sees China positively and as an economic opportunity, making a new Cold War against China unlikely to succeed
In short, a lot of information about China that has come out of Western news media has been proven to be based on known biased sources, known anit-China rhetoric, and/or outright lies. It’s difficult to prove/disprove of any information specifically, that takes time and reporting, but a lot of people see the anti-China pattern in BBC reporting, and tend to dismiss it because of known history.
I think this flies a bit too far in the other direction. China is totalitarian. It is not a democracy. It is also increasingly antagonizing nations abroad. I think it is valid to consider it a threat if you are any other nation, period.
Edit: Kinda like Russia
How many seats are in the highest legislative body?
What rights and responsibilities do autonomous regions within China have?
What is the most distributed government legislative committee type and what is their role in the government?
1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn’t matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.
In the end they all answer to the whims of the central government, which can change or remove and rights and responsibilities autonomous regions within China have.
See answer one.
Do you know what a legislative body is? Anglophones are almost all educated on “executive, legislative, judicial” aren’t they? Xi is the leader of the Executive branch in China, not the Legislative or Judicial.
You do know what a dictator is right? You can call yourself the head of this and that and have cronies technically control the rest, but it’s not fooling anyone slightly smarter than the average microwave. It’s inherently evident you do Xi Xinpings bidding no matter where you are placed or you will be replaced. Not a hard concept, even someone like you can understand.
Such fierce condescension and yet you’re the one pushing a children’s story. All these hundreds and thousands of representatives, all the millions of Party members, are just puppets under the Bad Guy’s control. There was no violence to install him, the existing government put him there (since I assume you don’t endorse Chinese elections) and then he played an Uno Reverse and now they are all an extension of him, with all of Chinese politics then becoming merely being a matter of how much people chaff under the collars and fetters he fixes to them. When politicians fight each other? When journalists fire back and forth in the papers? When policy goes one way and then pivots? It’s all just a Potemkin Village with a few hundred million people as the staff.
So no, “someone like me” cannot understand how such a thing could exist outside of a children’s cartoon or a similar sort of story told to an audience that is very much suspending its disbelief.
How in went way is that a children’s story. It’s incredibly easy to understand like a children’s story but is very real, so real you can see it happening in real time. Your idea of China is more like a children’s fairytale rather than the reality it currently is.
I do not support Chinese elections, same way I do not support Russian or North Korean elections. These are also similar to children’s stories.
On your next point, politicians can argue all they want but in the end they will fall in line. Similar to journalists, who may I remind you are often targeted as political prisoners to be sent to reeducation camps. Also, yes, policy changes, people change their minds or gain retrospection on what doesn’t work and pivot, it happens often. For example, China’s Great Leap Forward, which really lead to mass starvation and steel barely useable. Then Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi reversed these policies and ended the great Chinese famine. Then Mao changing his mind again and having both of them thrown into reeducation camps, Shaoqi would die.
So what I’m hearing is it doesn’t matter if you’re ignorant about the way China works because the US media told you Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything and you believed them. Got it.
No, Xi is an evil dictator who controls everything he wants to. It doesn’t matter if you technically control something you will always end up doing the bidding of Xi or you will disappear. From reading your replies, it’s evident you have fallen for Chinese propaganda and now simp for an evil dictator and totalitarian regimes. Got it.
So… No, it’s not like Russia at all. But that nuance is too long for me to explain right now. Short answer is that Russia is capitalist, and China is 50/50 capitalist/socialist, depending on definitions, and yeah a lot of nuance.
But China is run by the people, their authoritarian politics keeps their billionaires and induatry in check. Their local politics is a negotiation with the national politics.
And… How exactly is China antagonizing nations abroad? Because a lot of countries are choosing to work with China because they AREN’T antagonizing them as much as America and Europe. So… The reality is the opposite.
I mean, if you haven’t been there or don’t know anyone from there you could pretend they are a democracy, but they are authoritarian like Russia is authoritarian. Long term they will seek a wider swath to be authoritarian over.
And the argument from ignorance continues.
All I have to say is read more and be online less.
It’s not from ignorance. It’s based on the people I know from China.
Quick tip, arguing with tankies gets you nowhere, let them waddle in their own filth and move on with your life.
the less dronies I have to interact with the better
Taiwan, a nation and country, is antagonized by China regularly.
If Taiwan is its own nation, they should really specify that in their constitution instead of claiming to be the rightful government of all of China and Mongolia.
That still makes it a nation… That claims to be the rightful government. These are not mutually exclusive haha
That claim is mutually exclusive with Taiwan being “its own nation” distinct from China. It is definitionally its own government, but it claims to be a superset of the nation of China (because of also claiming Mongolia and some smaller territories). Nations are a social construct based on historical group identities, so the PRC is the same nation as the ROC was back when the ROC controlled the mainland. The ROC claims to still be that nation (plus Mongolia) which the PRC currently administers.
Or you know, you could just listen to someone who was in an internment camp:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/04/muslim-minority-teacher-50-tells-of-forced-sterilisation-in-xinjiang-china
(Also your summary sounds like ChatGPT)
Or the fact we literally have drone and camera footage of mass arrests. I’m not one to view Vice these days, but one of their reporters went there and saw some rather suggestive situations as well.
After Trump was so nice (dumb) enough to showcase just how clear US satellite photos are these days, one has to question why some here are so quick to cry in China’s defense. Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?
I’m sure some pro-Chinese twit will come rushing in with some whataboutism or a crack on US history, as if that excuses things.
After China followed the diplomatic agreement it had with Britain for decades to handle the transition from Hong Kong being a British colony back to it being under the jurisdiction of its own nation (as a Special Autonomous Region exempted, like other such regions, from a great portion of federal law), now that means China will do ethnic cleansing? Most of Hong Kong supports the mainland, but that falls very much along class lines. The protestors you saw on western news 24/7 for a while were mostly members of wealthier families who don’t represent the majority.
I have mixed feelings about the protest itself in that I think back when it was more fragmented there were surely meaningful segments that weren’t concerned about an extremely normal (but now withdrawn anyway) extradition law, but once it became the Five Demands and begging for their white colonizers to return, the highest credit I can give them is that they still were at least dignified enough to turn away Azov fascists who visited them.
You’re projecting. China exempted ethnic minorities from the one child policy, that is how anti “han supremacist”(which itself is just white supremacist projection) they are.
And the people of Hong Kong are 90 percent Han.
Nah they have a typo (“anit-China”) in their summary I think they’re fine.
Our you could just listen to someone from Kuwait who saw Iraqi invaders remove babies from incubators:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Oh wait, they made that shit up as a pretext for furthering US foreign interests.
I mean the nice thing about the internet is that you can at least find videos documenting what the article claims. I mean sure… it could all just be propaganda. But somehow there is a little much of it from so many different sources.
You say this and yet, what videos? How many have you actually watched vs assumed were there vs read the headline? I’ve seen a bunch of photos and videos and all of them were either hoaxes (calling normal buildings camps), ridiculous misunderstandings (like saying the screeching of brakes was screaming victims), or gross misrepresentations (e.g. normal prison transfers being a slate of new genocide victims). But if you just skim through what just so happens to trend on Reddit, you’ll see atrocity after atrocity and not stick around long enough to see the retraction, or the people in the comments debunking it, and so on.
There’s a reason neoliberal outlets walked their claims back to “cultural genocide” over time, because there was nothing there except the testimony of like three people from a region of 15 million.
I mean I’ve seen a few recordings of Chinese officials calling folks abroad and making „suggestions“. That was more than just reading headlines.
But I guess you are right. It’s likely all propaganda and China is a paradise.
What did they say?
I don’t think that’s important, given that it’s all just propaganda anyways.
It was a neutral way to summarize a long article.
We put a lot of stock in personal stories, but we also pay a lot for incriminating evidence against China.
Do you know about the 1 child policy (That was recently ended?) And how that affects this? Because I actually looked into it. But I bet an online personality won’t change your mind. So I won’t even bother.
Remember America didn’t forcefully sterilize anyone. We just straight up bombed them, raped them, and shot them.
Your biases are showing.
America did forcibly sterilize lots of people
https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/#:~:text=American eugenic laws and practices,stepping stone to the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_American_women?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#%3A~%3Atext%3DThe_most_significant_era_of%2Clegislation_in_the_United_States.?wprov=sfla1
Yikes, I was specifically referring to Muslims, but yeah looks like America isn’t even better than that.
There’s that whataboutism Commies love.
Ah yes, because we aren’t allowed to compare things right? It would be terrible if your country looked worse than the ones you demonize so hard.
Okay for me but not for thee
Apparently there is a PRC smear campaign against Adrian Zenz - https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/pro-prc-information-operations-campaign-haienergy, including by creating what Mandiant describes as what they “suspect to be at least three fabricated letters based on obvious grammatical errors and typos” to smear him - so I’d take anything that is ad hominem attacks against him rather than debating his actual work with a grain of salt.
However, even if you don’t accept his writings, there are plenty of other people who have done credible research into the plight of the Uyghur people - e.g. resources contributed to https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/, such as articles like this one by Gene A. Bunin: https://livingotherwise.com/2021/01/04/the-elephant-in-the-xuar-ii-brand-new-prisons-expanding-old-prisons-and-hundreds-of-thousands-new-inmates/.
https://www.google.com/search?q=80+percent+iud+uyghur&oq=80+percent+iud+uyghur&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160l2.6658j0j7&
One of those “fabricated” typos you mentioned, which shows the quality of reporting on the situation.
If the media is just eating up fabricated errors meant to smear someone that tells you a lot about the quality of journalism involved with this story.
(Also tbc this isn’t fabricated he published this, anti-china crusaders are just publishing misinfo that he didnt)
Tankies try not to be brain damaged challenge (impossible)
Ah yes, insults, the highest form of conversation. Always indicates you are correct. Good job.
I’d take the study a lot more seriously if the people financing it weren’t literally tied to the US/UK governments…
We’d all take China a lot more seriously if it wasn’t literally interring people in reeducation camps and ruling over people’s lives like it’s 1984.
You need to catch up with the narrative, rheyre claiming the crackdown is over now that tourists are coming in and not noticing anything.
Man it’s almost like the vast majority of tourists stick to coastal cities and big urban areas where the Uighur population isn’t and not the vast desert that these camps and people’s exist in.
Wait, do you think there aren’t people who tour Muslim cultural sites, of which there are many? Do you not think that anyone ever goes to interior spots? In the US, the rocky mountains and the Appalachians are both used a lot for tourism.
Do you think there aren’t uyghurs in the cities in the region?
It sounds like you dont know anything about the situation and are trying to justify already held beliefs by making rhetoric that doesn’t really apply to the reality of the situation.
Buddy, this was incredibly easy to search. The Uyghur population mainly lives in Xinjiang, composed primarily of the Gobi desert. While somewhat popular with domestic travel, it is at the bottom of the list for international travel statistics. This is also something you can very easily hide in the desert. You act like reeducation camps have to be placed next to cities. You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either. I know more about the situation than you, as evident by your many replies that spout nothing and don’t cover your own base. You’ve been overtaken by propaganda, you should educate yourself and the many many problems the Uyghur population is currently facing from China.
Firstly, there is much more restriction on tourist movement in the DPRK for a litany of reasons, mostly pertaining to national security. Tourists in Xinjiang can move pretty freely, though if they are going all over the place they will cumulatively need to pass through many checkpoints.
Secondly, “work camps” here is what people call prison labor in Bad Country. The DPRK has prisons, certainly, and we can have discussions about penal labor, but it’s much less notable than people pretend and much less secretive as well.
Thirdly, “work camps” are not remotely comparable to committing genocide against one tenth of the entire population of the region, which is the claim that was popularly made against Xinjiang before it got walked back to “cultural genocide”.
Incredibly easy to search for this. Prison labour in America through the 13th amendment is certainly wrong but nowhere near what North Korea does. Look up Yeonmi Park and her story. A North Korean defector, she would know what happens when people fail to please Kim Jong Un. Entire generations of families are taken and worked to death, from pretty crimes like burglary to the heinous like not being sad enough when dear leader dies. Attempting to equivocate the two disproves that theory.
Second, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide Like come on there’s so much documented evidence of this atrocity. I don’t trust death rates on either side, but if the estimation of 1mil+ Uyghurs are in detainment camps, that’s still about 10% of the entire people’s being here for political reasons. Whether it’s a human genocide or cultural genocide, its still wrong and immoral being spear headed by an evil totalitarian regime.
This, my friend, is the absense of neocon/neolib censorship and propaganda that you were so used to on corporate social media.
Isn’t it great?
Strange, I never had any trouble on Reddit talking about socialism.
As long as you don’t question that the enemies of US imperialism deserve it you should be mostly fine. The big geopolitical topics are more sensitive.
I was permabanned from multiple subs for sharing this telegraph article for example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230701133656/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
It differs from sub to sub but the bigger and more political the stronger the imperial narrative is enforced.
r/worldnews is one of the worst, and honestly suspect its astroturf and run by assets or a derivative of an imperial institution (council on foreign relation, think tanks, the likes)
There are literally pictures of bloodshed.
I legitimately don’t understand why Leninists are so keen on making folk heroes out of tyrants. Why exert the energy to defend this shit instead of learning from it and building a better class of socialist??
What a sentence! You’re jumping to conclusions all over the place!
You’re conflating information with a desire to “make folk heroes out of tyrants”, trying to denormalise a desire to understand what was actually happening.
There was bloodshed but not on the Tienanmen square and the conditions are less clear than you believe
It is obvious that most peoples idea of what happened is heavily influenced by propaganda, I know mine was.
If you could stop sabotaging efforts to cut through the disinformation that would be great thanks
Also: “They are tyrants” thanks I’ll defer judgement as long as the evidence you present us with turns out to be propaganda, there are other “tyrannical governments” much more in reach
A big part of my gripe here is precisely the idea that one can engage in critical analysis of statecraft, while hand waving away inconvenient statecraft. Or worse - supporting broad censorship of inconvenient statecraft.
I have no idea what that sentence is supposed to mean.
My gripe here is that nobody can have an informed opinion on foreign policy if they do not acknowledge the tons of pro US propaganda that surround them on EVERY issue in this category and dominate most of it.
It is important to call you out on your power-serving statements.
You tried to push critical thought out of the overton window when you painted it a kind of sacrilege (“make folk heroes out of tyrants”) and everyone engaging in it someone that needs to be shunned by society (a “tankie”).
Mind you all without addressing, let alone contesting, the facts.
With all due respect: As long as your actions are indistinguishable from those of a US intelligence social media asset, don’t expect any good will engagement.
Have an open mind and start to reflect a little more
But I am fine criticizing the US and acknowledging US propaganda. I do it all the time. You are the one dismissing anything which doesn’t align with a very narrow ML head-cannon as indicative of being a US intelligence asset. And you are telling me to have an open mind?
Buddy, there is an entire world of socialist thought and literature which diverges from and challenges ML dogma. Either you are unaware of this, or you are so narrow minded that you see anything outside of that script as some monolithic enemy.
Not in the Square itself, which was the scene of many absurd claims by defectors, like the “tanks crushing people to wash them down the gutters” cartoon bullshit.
Here are interviews with some of the leaders of the protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Isn’t ironic how tankies are entirely fueled by propaganda but they always bitch about propaganda (aka anything they don’t like including facts)
Lol standard halfwit take:
Adopting the “tankie” slur for everyone without substance and obviously no knowledge of what they are talking about - check
Being embedded in propaganda and blaming others who point it out - check
“You’re not including facts” - lol for what? Am I responding to a factual argument? Am I demanding facts from you?
But sure have some facts:
Guardian from 2011 - Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media
Intercept from 2014 - HACKING ONLINE POLLS AND OTHER WAYS BRITISH SPIES SEEK TO CONTROL THE INTERNET
Believe me it has only gotten worse in the >10 years since
Twitter files revealed pentagon bots were whitelisted as well
If you miss your propaganda friends that hard reddit is still there for you
Edit: I realize your missing punctuation threw me off, I read: “(aka anything, they don’t like including facts)” …doesn’t change much though
This post is on lemmy.ml, an instance whose owner decided to continue federating with lemmygrad.ml for… reasons. Go visit lemmygrad.ml and you’ll understand why.
I really wish Lemmy supported defederation of instances by individual users (so I’d auto-block anything that came from lemmygrad or its users for any reason). I have been threatened with death by communists enough and just want to be left alone to my far-left-but-not-communist devices.
Meanwhile, you can use an instance that has them defederated.
I’d love that, but as I said elsewhere I have communities I run and a post history. Are we talking about me just making myself a mod elsewhere and cutting all my post histories? I mean, it’s not the end of the world, but it’d be nice to keep my post histories coherent.
Instrance transfer would be wonderful.
First day on Lemmy? There are quite a few suspiciously active trolls on here, especially on worldnews communities
Edit - ah right on cue
Thanks for providing an example of a self referential comment.
Lemmy was literally a tankie shithole before the Reddit influx, and even then not much changed
They’re paid astroturfers and they don’t belong on Lemmy. Why the server admins refuse to police them, I just don’t know.
Wow, talk about conspiracy theories…
“Every person who doesn’t participate in Sinophobi is paid off by the Chinese government”
Like, really? You actually believe that? Was 911 an inside job? How hot DOES jet fuel get??? Is Q-anon real? Is the earth flat?
If you’ve ever debunked a conspiracy theory, you should reconsider the idea that maybe, just maybe, not everyone hates China. It’s probably more likely than you think…
Edit: And then they edited their comment to be more defensive instead. Perfect.
Me and the boys waiting for the ccp checks liberals said we were getting:
Imagine thinking there are paid astroturfers on a tiny niche platform with a few thousand users. We have some utterly insane people here after reddit migration.
Imagine thinking governments, fascists and PR agencies wouldn’t migrate to wherever people choose to hang out and continue their decades-long campaign to brainwash people into believing whatever is convenient for them.
I see you don’t understand the concept of niches. Governments, fascists, and PR agencies are going to spend their effort where it makes the most impact. Only a brainwashed person couldn’t comprehend that people could legitimately disagree with their world view, and anybody who thinks different from them must therefore be a paid troll.
This you?
And now you’re defending the practice.
How about, you and the rest of the dumbasses pushing your propaganda garbage go find another place to peddle it? Like hell?
The people you wish to dunk on built this platform. Feel free to leave…
How about you go fuck yourself instead? That’s all you can do anyway. We’re not going anywhere and we outnumber you.
Sounds like a threat. Fuck off.
First, I will take the compliment with grace.
Second, this forum deserves a better class of communist. This shit is just intellectually lazy.
Most socialists are people in the global south. Their projects that “tankies” support are actually being done. Most of this “you’re a tankie” shit stems from western chauvinist white man’s burden shit. Call us when you’ve done a successful socialist revolution, until then we’re going to be emulating the ideologies of successful socialist projects.
Edit: because lol “the US did a revolution” , read “the counter revolution of 1776”
Who were you replying too? Lost? Got a bit overzealous with your keyboard warrior persona today?
If you don’t like it here then feel free to go somewhere else. Lemmy was a community of sane people who were capable of having civilized discussion, and then a bunch of reddit chuds flooded here and started acting like you own the place. Get over yourself.
Bahaha look at you. “Everyone who disagrees with me is a bootlicker/troll/westerner.”
Edit for the bootlicking troll below: Ahem A straw man fallacy is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
You don’t understand what a straw man is.
You’re really bad at this. You even tried to copy my comment and failed miserably! Congratulations, you’re stupid in two languages!
Bahaha look at you using straw man to attack me. Thanks for providing a good example of the kind of trolling I’m talking about.
Can you provide even circumstantial evidence of people like myself being paid, or are you resorting to unhinged conspiracy theories to explain people vociferously disagreeing with you?
It literally wouldn’t even matter, you’ll just deny it and refuse to concede even the most minor of points because for you, debate is not a means to find truth, it’s a power play. We’ve all seen it countless times. We know your game, your patterns of behavior, and since you do not want to play fairly because you’ll know you’ll lose, you don’t get to play at all. You don’t get to participate in discussions with us, especially not me. You’re isolated to your cult now. I hope you find happiness in choosing genocide.
Pardon me, I thought you were responding to a different comment (I was replying in my inbox to many different disputes). Seeing the actual context, this is ridiculous. You accuse me of being a paid actor and then say that you have no reason to present evidence of the accusation?
Let us imagine that I was a paid actor and would behave exactly as you expect. Aren’t there other people reading the conversation? Wouldn’t it be worth proving to them that you aren’t just going on paranoid rants because your ideology has no way to deal with the concept of westerners freely disagreeing with you on these issues?
There’s no substance to this, you have no evidence and merely impugn my character.