Something needs to be done, I'm not sure what but inaction will only aggravate the situation.
More on Lu Guang: "Lu is based in New York City, the first Chinese photographer to be invited by the U.S. State Department as a visiting scholar, and Beijing. In early November 2018, whilst travelling in Xinjiang, Lu was taken away by state security agents and has not been heard from since."
All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past [1]. Whatever can be done to prevent that is good in my book, especially since I think it's unlikely that these regimes will be content to limit their influence to their borders.
[1] Nuclear weapons make them impossible to replace militarily, and digital surveillance + secret police may eventually make it impossible for internal change to replace them.
So you're worried they'll use their influence to support authoritarian regimes in other countries? Maybe we should stop doing that ourselves before we start playing with Chinese lives.
I'm not sure why a flimsy assumption of the future for something that can't reliably be quantified would be used as a rationalization to do nothing.
Arguably by making China more prosperous, we are empowering ordinary Chinese economically and eventually this could lead to broad demands for more political and social freedom. So it's quite possible sanctions would make the state more powerful with respect to individual citizens, not less.
I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's plausible. I can see a case for symbolic sanctions though, something that's eye-catching but not necessarily economically impactful, as a way to draw attention to the issue within China.
> I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's plausible. I can see a case for symbolic sanctions though, something that's eye-catching but not necessarily economically impactful, as a way to draw attention to the issue within China.
Except my understanding is that the modern PRC regime has staked its legitimacy on increasing living standards and economic development, since they de facto abandoned Communism. The regime itself fears an economic slowdown could loosen its grip on power.
So, relatively onerous economy-slowing sanctions tied to demands for liberalization [1] may actually work pretty well, forcing the authoritarians to pick their poison.
[1] e.g. make things like opening up the great firewall a condition for lowering tariffs/loosening embargoes.
Arguably the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. If they had been integrated into the Western economic system on favorable terms [1], material conditions there may not have been as bad and may not have fell in the late 80s/early 90s.
[1] Such as being allowed to buy things on credit or buy advanced technology. IIRC, the Soviets were only allowed to trade with hard currency, and they were forbidden from buying most of the things they actually wanted.
If you want to understand why we draw the line at "primarily", I've written a lot about it in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
The loss of a community on the internet where people gather for intellectual curiosity would make the world a little more dystopian too. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart?
I of course also realize that it's you and not me who has to deal with moderating thousands of new comments every day, and that my comments likely make it much more tiresome for you to do your job. I can't stop making these comments, but I can agree to stop using nicknames such as Xitler.
As for today's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19554466), I feel what's happening here is the scariest thing I've read this year, and it deserves much more focus and not to be dismissed as unsubstantial because of guesswork. China does not deserve benefit of the doubt at this point, they've proven over and over again that they have little to no regard for human rights, that they want to censor everything that put them in a bad light, and that they'll take every opportunity to rewrite history for their benefit. This is a fact and only to what degree can be argued.
Right now China can make UC Browser default on all Huawei, Lenovo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and many more devices. They've demonstrated countless times that they'll behave like a spoilt child to get it their way (e.g. fire an employee for liking a tweet thanking their company or we'll kick you out of the country).. they've just demonstrated they'll gladly censor a SSL protected page (before today I didn't even consider it was possible, did you?).. how can you not be scared? How can you not feel extremely confident that they'll end up modifying Google search results and abuse this in so many other ways? If they're willing to do it with a GitHub repo, why wouldn't they do the exact same thing with Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, etc? They're already forcing companies to censor and manipulate content, rewrite history.. if they could do it by themselves on a massive scale then why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they sell devices at a loss if it meant they could control these people to influence foreign policies? Honestly, I'd accuse you of being willfully naive if you saw a less evil outcome.
Integration also doesn’t seem to be working (well, not nearly as fast as those in the Nixon era and since then hypothesized).
My view is that isolation is a worse route, because mostly the poor suffer from economic isolation.
I really like the strategy of targeting the powerful politicians/rich benefactors using tools like the magnitsky act. Those people shouldn’t have the privledge of traveling to western countries.
The lack of physical presence isn't that big a showstopper anymore. Throw in an inability to exercise financial clout anymore though, and things will rapidly change.
There likely isn't much political will for that though, and I'm fairly certain it could only come after a period of weaning the economy off the luxury of cheap as dirt manufacturing/shipping.
I think if you isolated China economically, the US and other markets would be able to build their own competitive versions within a couple years.
What is concerning to me is an increasing movement under a different name that would lead to similar policies in the US over time. At least comparing the rhetoric to communist theory in the early 1900's.
(I included the US because it has the highest incarceration rate of the world which disproportionately affects a racial minority; if prisons were relabeled as re-education camps and what happens in there is hidden from the world they would be on par with what China is doing atm)
The day this economic progress slows down, the masses will turn and hopefully revolt against the system. The only fear is that China is militarily very strong and I believe that Western nations are probably afraid that this may lead to WW-III, but in the absence of that, in the case of China economic sanctions can indeed lead to internal revolt and collapse of the CCP like that happened in former-USSR.
China went through not just minimal growth, but policies that killed tens of millions in the 1950-70s. I think the CCP is going to be very stable, and the current technological surveillance infrastructure has only strengthened it.
The USSR largely collapsed due to its economic isolation. It couldn't keep pace with the wests military industrial machine and because the west predominantly sanctioned the USSR they couldn't grow to compete.
Regimes do not last in total economic isolation for long. They require someone to prop them up. Of course, getting the whole world to ban trade with China would be infeasible if for no other reason than China already has enough influence in nations around the world to override the will of Europe and North America. Most of Southeast Asia and Africa would still do business with China even under UN sanctions because they are under the influential heel of the CCP at this point.
You can look at Russia today as an example of sanctions somewhat working - continued sanctions by the west against Putins governments atrocities have not overthrown him yet but they certainly sow seeds of discontent against him. Its why Russia is spending so much effort to meddle in western elections, they can see the writing on the wall that a strong and hostile west will eventually erode Putin and the Russian mafias ability to hold dictatorship over the country.