But to gp's point, that is a principle. Perhaps not yours, but they outlined their stance and stuck to it despite threats and consequences.
Contrast Sam's OpenAI announcement which was very carefully worded to appear to uphold the same principles, but is currently being rightfully disassembled as retaining various potential outs that would allow violating the signaled principles.
Honest and staunch about clearly stated principles is better than wiggly and dishonest about weasel-worded impressions of a principle.
And all of that is orthogonal to whether you (or anyone) agrees with a given principle or given revealed behavior.
How do they feel about and respond when asked about the Taiwan question?
Do they either clam up or act like it's a mortal insult to suggest that an independent democratic nation should not live in fear of impending violent conquest?
Because that's the kind of reaction that makes the reports of "happy life, all's good" a little harder to digest.
Not saying that's a unanimous opinion / response, of course. But it certainly seems to be the default.
About 50% of Chinese people I meet very much agree with the government that it's part of China and always has been. The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government. But the people I've talked to about this are people with the means to travel, and many of them have been to Taiwan. So it may not be representative of the typical person on the street. I've been to China several times and I don't want to ask it there, but that's less out of fear of the government but more than I don't want to bother locals with politics and present myself as an enlightened foreigner, since nobody likes that shit. Just like nobody would like a Chinese guy going to Alabama and telling the people they need to embrace socialism if they ever want to escape poverty.
> The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government.
Chinese living in a foreign country, or Chinese willing to discuss such issues with you in China is a highly biased sample set. That is high school math you suppose to learn at the age of 17.
The majority of US support for Taiwan and it's current situation is owed entirely to supporting a military junta from the mainland that massacred the local Taiwainese who objected to it and suppressed civil society.
Are you saying you would've been neutral on an invasion of Taiwan before 1985 or so, since it wasn't a democracy?
I applaud your consistency and I await your categorical opposition to the United States and Israel.
Or is there some nuance and you feel, in order to remain consistent, that it would be permissible in principle for China to bomb Taiwan and execute their head of state so long as they kept it to an air war and relied on their local agents on the ground?
Maybe worth asking for anyway? They might just be setting metrics based on the most popular ways of measuring but if they care about the spirit of the offer it would make sense for them to be flexible with the letter of the requirements.
Exactly and that danger grows as the ability to do so in increasingly automated and targeted ways increases. Should be very obvious now looking at the world around us.
Also, failing to consider the legal and rights regime of the attacker is wild to me. Look at what happens to people caught spying for other regimes. Aldrich Ames just died after decades in prison, and that’s one of the most extreme cases — plenty have got away with just a few years. The Soviet assets Ames gave up were all swiftly executed, much like they are in China.
Regimes and rights matter, which is why the democracy / autocracy governance conflict matters so much to the future trajectory of humanity.
When one is this far gone into a nationalist information bubble haze, it ceases to be productive to argue with them. Everything this poster demands to be “shown” is openly available in abundance from the relevant victims, decades of it. But offered such material they will quickly categorically dismiss it all and move goal posts again.
Yes when CCP undertakes an ethnonationalist settler campaign into Tibet and then instructs the settlers to “call for help”, it can be presented as Tibet “asking” for CCP authoritarianism. Same playbook as Russia in eastern Ukraine.
Yes, when the Xinjiang muslim population is terrorized by police state and concentration camps in a country with no free speech, it is hard to find locals publicly complaining and advocating for themselves.
1) I'm not Chinese, but I still have skin in the game for I am an internationlist.
2) Apart from a few google maps pictures, there are no pictures of those extermination camps.
3) Tibet has been part of China for centuries. Only since Mao landreforms that criminalised slavery have we been hearing about Tibet's "independence" movement.
4) If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in? Right now in Palestine, UN workers and journalists are shot on sight. Tourists are non existant. Muslim countries refuse to qualify any of the anti-terrorist measures as genocidal, but denounce the extermination campaign against the Palestinian people.
So as to keep the conversation productive, could you please define "China?" I have no idea what you're talking about when you say, "Tibet has been a part of China for centuries," but it sounds like the sort of ethnonationalism that the CPC likes to play with.
> If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in?
They didn't used to, I should know, I tried to go and was rejected.
Yes, Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine, and a far more violent one than the CPC committed against Xinjiang. The PLA did not snipe Uighur Muslim children in the back of head and did not airstrike hospitals in Xinjiang. It still committed a genocide.
Remember the words of Chen Quanguo: "Round up everyone who should be rounded up," immediately before ordering mass arrests.
I'm sorry, but I've had this conversation too many times, I will simply need to give you the challenge I've given everyone else. Please, can you canonically dismiss each of these sources? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin... There are 402 of them. I understand it's a relatively monumental task, but that's the unfortunate reality you find yourself in when you argue against consensus, it's a lot of work. If you can't do that, then, I don't understand why I should believe you instead of the mountain of evidence against you. And no, "it's all CIA" doesn't really work considering the diversity of sources.
By the way, you never addressed imperialist threats against Taiwan. Could you please explain how threatening to invade a sovereign nation isn't imperialist?
As a marxist, I am obsessed about contradictions. I found two regarding the 402 sources that you've shown. I do not pretend to have read and understood all of them. I just scanned a couple titles, recognised a few famous newspapers.
1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?
2) Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement. Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism, wish for the destruction of the Palestinian people, and yet cheer for Uighur independence?
What we are facing here doesn't require spooks forcing journalists to write articles with a gun cocked against their head. This is gramscian cultural hegemony. Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters, and if we follow the rule of "don't bite the hand that feeds you" they would rarely if never contradict them.
Great! Me too. In fact I am a communist. That's why I can't enter the PRC without facing prison. Discussion of class consciousness is currently banned.
> 1) Why is that that are very few if none of the sources you've linked are Islamic sources ? If Muslim people can recognise the plight of the Palestinian people, why can't they recognise the plight of the Uighurs?
I don't understand how something like a newspaper can be "Islamic." As far as I know, all well-regarded news organizations are secular. So, I guess that is why none of the sources I've linked are "Islamic sources": because newspapers are secular.
Also, who is "Muslim people?" Every follower of Islam on planet earth? Why is it their specific responsibility to take notice of something in Xinjiang? Because the people have a religion of the same name? What's that matter?
This is what I meant when I wrote, "smells like ethnonationalism," this seems to me like an ideology that creates Statehood around people, and draws lines around people based on their ethnicity or religion. I prefer to take people as they are, rather than lump them into arbitrarily defined categories. Why aren't men in France doing anything to stop school shootings in America, which are committed almost entirely by men?
> Those sources are, for most of them, from countries that were extremely hostile to the idea of islamic and arabic independence movement.
Which sources? What does it mean to be hostile to "the islamic and arabic independence movement?" Which countries?
> Why is that they wished for the continuation of Colonialism
Who is "they?"
> Bourgeois journalists are reporting on those "facts" because it directly serves the interest of their wealthy Masters
And reports out of the PRC serve the interests of the CPC. The bourgeois journalists have provided substantially more evidence. The CPC restricted entry to Xinjiang, and when it finally acknowledged the existence of the reeducation camps, still never let foreign journalists in. As a Marxist, I choose the side with the most evidence.
By the way, some of the sources include: a PRC based associate professor in Fudan University (Chuchu Zhang), a newspaper famous for exposing corruption in South Africa (AmaBhungane), and other independent or NGO sources that I challenge you to claim are afraid to "bite the hand that feeds them." Did you know that Blackwater had plans to build a training center in Xinjiang? Did you know that it set aside 2.7$ million USD for establishing business in Xinjiang? Did you know that American companies helped build the surveillance system used in Xinjiang? (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Promega) But, it's the journalists that are bourgeois? (https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-xinjiang-genoc...)
You still have not addressed PRC imperialism against Taiwan.
Let’s start with it being hell bent on annexing a peaceful independent island democracy, by force if needed, because of their own political insecurities.
The examples expand from there, but that one alone is sufficient.
In addition to the factors named by sibling comments, which I largely agree with, there is also the rise of short form entertainment on these platforms.
In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram.
The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.
Contrast Sam's OpenAI announcement which was very carefully worded to appear to uphold the same principles, but is currently being rightfully disassembled as retaining various potential outs that would allow violating the signaled principles.
Honest and staunch about clearly stated principles is better than wiggly and dishonest about weasel-worded impressions of a principle.
And all of that is orthogonal to whether you (or anyone) agrees with a given principle or given revealed behavior.
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