You cited various Asian countries, but literally every one of those countries paved the same path as China. Authoritarianism with protectionism (as allowed by the rules of WTO developing nations), followed by economic prosperity and democratization.
Xi Jinping has made it very clear that China is not going to follow the authoritarianism -> democratization part of that pipeline under his watch and other countries are reacting accordingly.
Singapore is known for being an authoritarian nanny state and now we are calling them a "western liberal democracy" and taking credit for their success.
Also, Hong Kong never had democracy under British rule. All 28 Hong Kong governors were British residents who were picked by London and parachuted into their jobs.
China's actions are actually legal under 1. WTO rules which allow developing nations to have some sort of protectionism to foster their own industries, and 2. Their own laws, which companies can choose to abide by.
Google and Facebook were never wholesale banned by China. You can see this with the fact that Google tried to re-enter China with project Dragonfly (a China-law compliant search engine), until it internally became politically unfeasible. Note that Microsoft operates Bing in China, and Yahoo as well.
Google trying to re enter China has no bearing on whether or not they were banned or are banned.
And actually, I was living in China when Facebook stopped working, and I was living in China when google.com stopped working, and when google.cn stopped working. And you are right, they were never officially banned, China would never admit to that, they just used the GFW to make them stop working and commenced a lot of work to make VPNs troublesome to use as well.
Yes, Microsoft operates Bing. But you can’t access gmail through it.
You just ignored what I said and straw-manned the specific nature of being banned.
As I said in my previous post, both can operate in China if they choose to comply with Chinese laws. Hotmail and iCloud do, and both works fine in China.
Google and Facebook being banned is no different than if they'd been banned for not complying with GDPR in EU.
Again, China doesn’t officially ban Facebook or google, they won’t tell them what laws they aren’t following and anyways, China doesn’t really do rule of law. Google can’t go to a judge and say, ”hey, I want to prove I’m doing things right, see this Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of speech!” Nope, China doesn’t work like that, officials make opaque arbitrary decisions on what to allow or not.
Why are you purposely being unfaithful in your argument here? I can easily search up multiple cases where foreign companies have applied the rule of law and won in China. The rules are clear to Google and they simply chose not to follow it. They tried to follow to follow the rules with Project Dragonfly until their own employees scuttled the project, but that’s on Google.
The existence of Bing proves that it’s possible to operate a foreign search engine in China.
Lmao, your posts read like they are straight out of r/sino. You stick out like a sore thumb and need to do better if your trying to influence minds here.
"I can easily search up multiple cases where foreign companies have applied the rule of law and won in China."
I'd love it if you did this. I sincerely hope these references are better than the ones you produced trying to deny the Uighur genocide in Xinjiang in the other thread. Also, you'll need to provide me some proof these companies didn't pay for the results they got.
Hey wumao, weren't you going to show me some evidence of foreign companies winning legal cases in the CCP legal system? It would be really convincing if you found some evidence of foreign companies winning against chinese companies.
At what point is China no longer considered a developing country? I think the argument is since they're now at least the second largest economy in the world, they no longer deserve all the special protections.
On a per capita basis, China is still very much a developing / middle income country. I agree that special amendments should be made because a country of 50,000 people with Chinas gdp per capita faces a very different economic situation than China, though.
> Not to mention they have literal concentration camps where they are harvesting organs, hair, using them as slave labor and stealing their possessions.
If you dig into this deeper, this is literally fake news. The sources for these claims are either the World Uighur Congress, a NED funded organization, or Adrian Zenz, a Christian fundamentalist who believes in the rapture, is Anti-LGBT, and praised the Nazis.
If you are so inclined, you can actually visit Xinjiang yourself and ask Uighurs there about the situation. China has been actively been encouraging foreign inspectors to visit Xinjiang to see the situation.
Given that America was wrong (or blatantly lied) about WMDs, Iraqis stealing incubators, Iraqis murdering babies in Kuwait, and is a geopolitical rival to China, Im doubtful about some of these claims.
> If you are so inclined, you can actually visit Xinjiang yourself and ask Uighurs there about the situation. China has been actively been encouraging foreign inspectors to visit Xinjiang to see the situation.
Oh that sounds news to me. I was under the impression that no foreign media was allowed to freely roam and report in Xinjiang.
Can you please share your sources and any instances of foreign to China (and perhaps non US like say EU/India/Australia/Arabic etc.) media coverage in Xinjiang?
37 countries have also signed a UNHRC letter in support of China's Xinjiang policies, the majority of whom are Muslim countries, and these countries include traditional US allies such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
I don't know how to tell you this, but a lot of Muslim groups don't like other types of Muslims, and China pumps so much money into those states that they likely wouldn't bat any eye anyhow, especially with Qatar and Saudi Arabia having their own slavery problems.
Explain to me why Sunni Muslim (same as Uighur) countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, and the UAE signed the letter in support of China, all of whom obtain more funding, arms, and security from the US than China?
I'll bite. Cite your sources and I'll address them.
> After reading your bio, I'm not surprised that it's full of comments defending the CCP.
Maybe it's because some of us grew up watching the horrors of the Iraq war, and the immense duplicity, chaos, and waste of human potential? Those who opposed the Iraq war were overwhelmingly silenced back then and I refuse to let the same happen now.
This is an alt account for personal safety and privacy reasons. People have tried to dig through my account (as you have done) and interfere with my personal life. In the past, I have received messages that have been a cause for concern while using my personal account.
For future reference, insinuating someone is a shill or a foreign agent is explicitly against HN guidelines, as it degrades the quality of the discussion.
If only we had some sort of system where we could easily search for such information (unless you live in China, where such results are hidden or monitored)
1. Where is the hard evidence? I saw a lot of B-roll footage with he-said-she-said, but no hard evidence of the organ harvesting or hair harvesting you claimed in your original post. We cannot rely on testimonials because as history shows [4], testimonials are easily fabricated.
4. Quotes Adrian Zenz, which as I said in my original reply, cannot be considered a quality source. He doesn't speak, read, or write Chinese, and AFAIK hasn't spent anytime in China. His methodology for calculating the population of imprisoned Quighurs consists of interviewing a dozen people for estimations, and then extrapolating these figures across the entire population of Xinjiang. He produces figures, that on the face of it make no sense (1.8 million people imprisoned, three times the size of San Francisco). Is also NPR, which is US funded and cannot be considered an impartial source, given the geopolitical rivalry between China and the US.
As I said earlier, these claims all originate from the same sources (Adrian Zenz, World Uighur Congress), but if you dig into their methodologies or funding sources, you quickly see how murky the details get.
5. Cites Falun Gong, which is a literal cult, akin to Scientology. Experts at the WHO have called into question these claims [6], and the US embassy staff conducted an investigation in 2006 and found no such occurances [7]
Surely this is a joke right? The white terror in Taiwan on a per capita basis was more brutal than anything in China. People were summarily executed, jailed, and robbed for even the slightest hints of anti-establishment sympathies.
From the numbers I can find from a cursory search, the upper estimates for deaths caused by the White Terror is ~32,000 (28k from the massacre that kicked it off plus 4,000 executed in camps). That's about .35% of Taiwan's then population of ~9 million.
By contrast, the Great Leap Forward alone killed 16 million, and that's at the lower end of estimates. The population of China at the end of this was ~665 million, meaning they killed 2.7% of their population just in the Great Leap Forward.
So even with the numbers most favorable to China and least favorable to Taiwan, Taiwan comes out ahead by an order of magnitude.
It's a little bit disingenuous to compare the White Terror to the Great Leap Forward, no? As per your original post, we are comparing the brutality and political suppression of the respective regimes, not their governing abilities.
I had, in fact, heard of the White Terror, and the suppression of the island's indiginous people. I had not heard of the Gwangju Massacre.
There are two reasons why they aren't mentioned as much as Mao's atrocities. One is that those countries are our allies, and as a result we are more willing to overlook their faults. And I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's part of human nature to overlook the faults and flaws of friends and allies. But the second reason is that, even ignoring those effects, Mao killed far more of his citizens (and far more per capita), making it a much more interesting and disturbing event in history. The atrocities of Taiwan and South Korea come across as "run of the mill authoritarian leaders violently cracking down on dissent" while the atrocities of Mao's China are on a whole different level.
FWIW, as far as dictators and genociders go I think Pol Pot gets the least attention relative to the scale of his atrocities since he wiped out 25% of the population, and in extremely brutal and arbitrary ways.
Their Google status is irrelevant. The nature of their comment is that there's a propensity to emulate big tech when it's not needed. Off the top of my head: Kubernetes, microservices. My citation is news.ycombinator.com.
