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 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.
So that is one of the things worth considering, but that hypothesis isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card and needs to be weighed against other factors like the variety of sources and people involved, their history and material interests, etc.
Yes, I am saying things need to be scrutinized instead of just taken at face value if they comport with our prejudices, I apologize if that takes the wind out of your sails, but blind faith won't lead you to good conclusions.
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.
Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?
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.
Especially after the very public take over of Hong Kong, you think an ethnic cleanse is out of the question?
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.
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.
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.
Why would ASPI do credible research into the ethnic minorities in China? Who are ASPI again? Actually, what's ASPI's own track record of being directly responsible for systematic murder of muslims?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
1, Xi Xinping and whatever he says, doesn’t matter how many show ponys you fill the room with.
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.
I understand you think Xi Xinping is very good at kung fu because he's Chinese, so there's nothing anyone can do to stop his Hokuto Shinken, but China actually has over a milliard Chinese people, and they're equally Chinese, so their Kung Fu should be just as strong. Hope this helps =)
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.
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.
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.
It seems to be a much greater conspiracy to claim that there is a genocide going on over a huge population concentrated in the region without producing a massive refugee crisis like we saw with other genocides (e.g. the Holocaust) and with a massive dearth of photo/video evidence despite most young people in China having a VPN on their phones.
What’s with all the conspiracy nutcases here? The fucking Uighur genocide…
... is mostly sourced from a far right German nationalist who's been proven to mistranslate Chinese documents over and over again, and claims that God gave him a mission to destroy China.
... has been debunked by many Muslim countries visiting China to investigate
... is a media narrative connected to the US funding radical Islamic groups to destabilize east turkestan and failing miserably as the Chinese response was mostly improving economic conditions and funding uyghur cultural programs which actually is effective at deradicalization, which is what the US could have done in Iraq in Afghanistan if they were over there for altruistic or mutually beneficial reasons and not just to extract oil and opium while making some defense contractors very rich.
I'd appreciate sources on these points, please. I don't trust western media blindly, but I also recognize that China has its own propaganda machine (as does every state). I'd like to learn more, but would need links for topics about which I'm unfamiliar else I'll only be able to read the western media I mentioned above.
If you are left with any questions while looking at the other comments, I'm sure they'd be happy to explain but if they don't I also would be. I just don't want to fill your inbox with redundant information.
You can look up a bunch of articles on uyghurs and follow the links for claims. They almost always at some point come back to "Zenz says" with a sprinkle of radio free asia, which is a front for the state department charitably, and a front for the CIA uncharitably. This tactic of circuitous citation was also used when the US wanted to make people believe that Iraq had WMDs.
I dont have a source on reducing poverty decreasing radicalization but Im guessing you'd agree people with a secure economic future are less likely to throw their lives away. If you disagree I can go find some sources.
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.
You can visit North Korea and never see their work camps either.
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.
Your comment got removed before I saw it. If you'd like to give it another shot, I guess maybe check the modlog to see what rule you broke and reword it a little.
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)
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??
I'll listen to western leftists when we actually take power and have to learn to use it to defend ourselves, currently we have a big fat 0 in the wins department
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.
I legitimately don't understand why Leninists are so keen on making folk heroes out of tyrants.
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.
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.
Call me buddy all you want but it doesn't change the fact that you are not good at making sense
Why are you jumping to conclusions so weirdly?
Case in point that complete second half is you responding to conclusions you've drawn up in your head. Re-read this thread, nowhere is it ever about ML or socialism. You think its accurate to call me ML because...?
This thread is about US propaganda on reddit, which I characterized by posting a fact that is affected by it (with the goal of fabricating consent for military action against another country).
Your mind is closed AF when you equate my mention of that with being a "LEniNisT tyRanT LoVEr"
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
An obviously completly untruthful rendition of my statement.
I phrased it carefully so if you'd do me the favor and try harder to understand it.
I would appreciate it if you could refrain from purposefully misrepresenting my statements as you have done in every one of your comments so far
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.
"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.
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?