Hull teacher held in Chinese jail for 'not being a friend of the country' | Hacker News Reader

Hull teacher held in Chinese jail for 'not being a friend of the country'

hulldailymail.co.uk

64 pointsneverminder40 comments

> "We got three meals a day, usually boiled cabbage"

> "In the afternoons, they screened really terrible films, usually with Nicholas Cage in them."

Damn, they actually found the quickest way to psychologically break people!

Although this may seem to be a torture strategy to those not from China, I can assure you after living there for a few years, Nick Cage is extremely popular in China.

woah! chinese gov. trying to be 'onion than the onion'

When Chinese police review this matter they might decide it wasn't the best way to minimize unflattering media coverage.

Not a great way to make friends

Surely if the goal is friendship they should force them to watch the Golden girls?

It doesn't sound a lot different from "our moral compass", the U.S. of A. Pretty normal to treat unwanted civilians that way there, he should be happy he got off without being framed/jailed extensively/tortured/killed.

I'm not saying it's civil or good. Just not abnormal.

Note that China has a seat in the United Nations Human Rights Council, along with Saudi Arabia and others like that. It is the ultimate irony. They just don't give a fuck and we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals. Nobody stands up to China because we need the cheap goods. What is described in this article is one of the purest forms of fascism. It makes me sick.

I agree, the Irony is insane, but what can we do? Sometimes makes me wonder.

I hope you aren't American, because then the talk of "our morals" is a bit rich when discussing imprisoning people for bad reasons. Or complaining about a seat for the Saudis that the US got for them while they fund their war crimes in Yemen.

That's very nationalistic and disingenuous of you, to hold an individual citizen accountable for their country's political failings.

Do you mean because I asked if they were American? That was to clarify who they meant by "our". If they meant "Norwegian morals" then the statement is much different than if they meant "American morals".

It is nationalistic to conflate an individual's morality with actions of the state. Especially in the context of a post by said individual condemning actions of their state. That makes your response also disingenuous.

Not to mention that your response is a classic example of the tu quoque fallacy [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

I'm not conflating anyone's morality with actions of their state. I'm challenging the assumption of moral high ground that underlies the premise of the argument.

As in: "Country X has these strong morals but isn't following them" and I reply "Country X doesn't have those strong morals".

Please, please believe me that when I tell you what I'm trying to say, that I'm being truthful.

I believe you, I just think you're misreading, or reading too much into, the GP's statement.

Morals are statements, not actions. The actions of China that GP is opposed to are clearly against (stated) western morals – hence all the outrage in the comments on this article, and in the GP's own comment. You are right that the US state habitually violates those morals. That doesn't change what the morals are, that just makes the state (and individuals who support the state's actions) hypocritical. To rephrase your summary:

GP: "Country X has these strong morals but isn't following them." Your reply: "Country X hasn't followed those morals for a long time."

Which are statements that are not incompatible with one another.

To put it another way – I'm a US citizen. I share morality with many/most in my community. To support China's human rights abuses violates our (my community's) morals. (So does detaining individuals at Guantanamo Bay.) But my/our state is too blinded by greed/capitalism to do anything about these travesties (and has been for a long time, as you point out). That doesn't mean that my community has no morals. It just means our state is hypocritical, and my community is not sufficiently empowered to change that (possibly because of other communities which are hypocritical, or because of longstanding power structures).

Ah! I gotcha.

I'm considering the morals of the state here rather than individuals and either way I disagree that morals are statements, rather than actions. I would term that "stated morals" or "claimed morals", to me actions are what count when trying to determine any actors actual morals.

China, for example, has excellent claimed morals. As does the USA. The voting record and what prompts public outcry from American citizens has shown what stated morals they actually care about, for the Chinese citizens ... well we all wish they had the opportunity to make those same types of statements freely so we could see how they compare.

So it's a subtle difference in ethical philosophy value judgements (totally fair point to disagree on) and a bit of talking past each other regarding who "we" refers to.

As to the "which morals" issue, in this context the imprisoned or killed are/were surely more concerned with morality in practice.

Agreed. But certainly, I wish the US would call out China's abuses in the Human Rights Council, and equally (or more) I wish for China to call out the US's abuses. If we (moral US citizens) can't effect morality of the (immoral) US state, perhaps the (moral) Chinese citizens can do so through the (immoral) Chinese state, and vice-versa.

Western nations aren't exactly standing on a moral high ground, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Invocation of Whataboutism is an easy cop-out to never have to look one's self in the mirror. It's used by people in glass houses who only want to throw stones at their neighbors.

It's also not applicable here since the grandparent already did a relative comparison of China with the supposedly better "western track record", so this comparison warrants a response.

Haha nothing is as sacred to HN as the enforcement of trendy rhetorical norms. How dare you question the validity of whataboutbobism, sir?

This argument is of the same quality as those made by people explaining how advocates of racial or gender equality are the real racists/misogynists.

No, the argument is more like saying that Germans calling the allies as beasts for what happened to Dresden should also look at what happened to the Jews.

The difference, in case you didn't notice, is that while racists are indeed racist and people against racism aren't, here the two sides are equally bad.

Moral high ground itself is a fallacy.

I'm curious but not sure exactly what you mean?

Practically I think moral high ground is an effective, if difficult to world, way to shut down whataboutism, but philosophically it is weak.

To say X has the moral high ground or X does not have the moral high ground is a variant of "argument from authority" and it's opposite as an ad hominem. It doesn't have any bearing what so ever on the issue at hand.

At least we try.

How? What action is taken or statement made that isn't also done in China, or in every country.

Some examples: https://www.aclu.org/defending-our-rights/court-battles

Countries like China don't tolerate that kind of internal dissent, let alone allow it to win sometimes.

Except in Hong Kong. Obviously liberty for their citizens is the one to pick so the US easily comes out on top.

However if you pick percentage of their population they imprison or civilian death toll in expansionist/imperialist conflicts? Or scope of global assassination programs?

But a point by point comparison is not really the point here is it? Obviously the American system is more capable of checks and balances than the Chinese system. That arguably makes the massive failures to use them worse. We disagree on what the word "trying" means regarding a state's actions I suppose. That seems fair, it's a fuzzy idea in this context.

Hong Kong is not China

>They just don't give a fuck and we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals.

You really have some catching up to do with regards to the modern history of western nations...

From enslaving billions of people in their colonies up to the 60s (and still in tens of still non freed nations) [1], to human zoos [2], to slavery [3], to gasing 6 million people to death [4], to 2 world wars [5], to nuking civilians [6], to killing democracies and supporting dictatorships [7][8][9][10][11], to mass killing people asking for their freedom [10], to off-law prisons [11], to record incarceration rates [12], to record open-season police shootings [13], to seggregation [14][15][16], and so on (and we barely scratched the surface, plus all these are the polished, generally accepted "official" stories: the reality on the ground, and the stories of the actual victims are much bleaker and morbid) -- western nations hardly place anything over greed and capitalism.

> western nations hardly place anything over greed and capitalism

That is... more or less what the GP said:

"we western nations place our greed and capitalism over our morals"

True, I just wanted to point that those supposed "morals" aren't much to write home about either.

How I read the comment: western countries have morals, but they put them aside because of greed and ignore them when China does something bad.

The spirit of my answer: what morals? The western countries have done all that and much worse for centuries (not just ignoring morals when a valuable ally does something bad, but actively doing bad themselves). It's not some momentarily lapse of morals that just applies to this particular case.

Are we arguing with exceptionalists who are angry at our suggestion that there is no high ground to look down from or just people with poor reading comprehension?

I honestly can't tell.

Let's say that we're compounding on our arguments against exceptionalists.

I think it is important to distinguish between morals-as-statements and morals-as-actions. All GP is saying is that the actions of the Chinese state, while against western morals (as stated), are permitted by the (in)action of western states. They're not claiming western moral superiority (which would admit such a tu quoque argument as you present), or claiming that western states act morally (which as you point out is demonstrably false). I think you're reading too much into it.

China, Russia, Turkey, Saudis do horrible things with their own hands, whereas the West has found a cleaner way to employ a middle man for that.

Well, at least it was made public that he was detainend. 9 out of 10 times, a foreigner just disappears tracelessly like that: https://www.reddit.com/r/shenzhen/comments/5vvvdv/father_mis...

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